This lecture by Dr. Allie Terry-Fritsch (Bowling Green State University) examines the art of the Florentine Dominican painter Fra Angelico in connection with the development of the richly endowed library of the convent of San Marco in fifteenth-century Florence. In particular, the lecture will address the role of the library as a meeting place of the city's lay intellectuals. Dr. Allie Terry-Fritsch, an expert of the art and culture of fifteenth-century Florence, was a co-curator of the 2025-2026 exhibition "Fra Angelico" in Palazzo Strozzi and San Marco in Florence.
Dr. Allie Terry-Fritsch is an expert of the art and culture of fifteenth-century Florence. Author of Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence: Renaissance Art and Political Persuasion, 1459-1580 (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) and Editor of Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Ashgate, 2012; Routledge; 2016), Terry-Fritsch has published widely on the performative experience and political implications of Renaissance visual encounters. Her next book, entitled Angelico and the Library of San Marco: Sacred Art and Secular Viewers in Cosimo de' Medici's Florence, is currently being prepared for submission and has been supported by awards from the J. William Fulbright Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, University of Chicago, Universität Salzburg, and BGSU, among others.
For the 2025-2026 exhibition, Fra Angelico, organized by Chief Curator, Carl Brandon Strehlke, Terry-Fritsch was responsible for curating a selection of the original manuscripts that once formed the collection of the public library of San Marco.
Sponsored by Art Department and McClellan Fund of the History Department
