The Linbury Lecture 2026 - Online

The annual Linbury Lecture invites world-renowned speakers working in museums, galleries or academic art history to deliver illustrated lectures exploring themes relating to the Gallery’s history and collections.

This year we welcome Fre Angelico expert Carl Brandon Strehlke who will speak about three magnificent altarpieces by the artist.

The painter Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, known as Fra Angelico, was, from about 1420, a friar at the Dominican Observant convent of San Domenico in Fiesole. When the church was officially consecrated in 1435, he would have been among the friars singing responses to the liturgy at which the three altars on which his paintings stood were sanctified. The altarpieces were also part of the convent’s daily ritual and undoubtedly the painter celebrated Mass in front of them as well as chanted the divine hours in the choir where the high altarpiece was located. The predella to this – his first work for the community – is in the National Gallery whereas the main section is still in Fiesole. The other altarpieces are the ‘Annunciation’ in the Prado, Madrid, and ‘Coronation of the Virgin’ in the Louvre, Paris. This lecture will examine all three works, each a masterpiece, in terms of Angelico’s painterly practice.

The lecture lasts for around an hour and are followed by an audience Q&A and a short drinks reception. You can join us in person or online.

Carl Brandon Strehlke has worked on exhibitions on the Assisi of Saint Francis, Simone Martini, Sienese Renaissance painting, Starnina, Fra Angelico, Jan van Eyck, Bartolomé Bermejo, Botticelli, and Pontormo and Bronzino for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where he was long time curator of the John G. Johnson Collection, as well as for the Galleria Sabauda, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Museum of Art, Musée du Petit Palais, and Museo Nacional del Prado. He was chief curator of the recent exhibition Fra Angelico at the Palazzo Strozzi and Museo di San Marco in Florence. He published a catalogue of Italian paintings at the Philadelphia Museum and, with Machtelt Brüggen Israëls, another on the Bernard and Mary Berenson Collection at the Villa I Tatti at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. He is currently preparing a book about Giotto’s family in 13th-century Florence.

This is a livestream of the lecture taking place in the Pigott Theatre. If you would prefer to attend the event in person, please book tickets here.

The annual Linbury Lecture series is supported by The Linbury Trust.