Chapter 1 of 6
Two Gardens, One Morning
Fra Angelico paints this around 1426, a Dominican friar who is said to have prayed before he lifted a brush. Look at how he splits the panel in two. On the left, an angel drives Adam and Eve from a flowering Eden; on the right, beneath a rose-columned loggia, another angel kneels to greet the Virgin.
One garden is lost, the other — Mary herself — about to redeem it. Gold rays cross the portico like a drawn breath. Everything here is built on that rhyme: the old fall answered, in the very same picture, by a new beginning.
