Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum has raised £4.48 million to prevent Renaissance painting The Crucifixion by Fra Angelico from being sold to an overseas buyer, narrowly meeting its 29th October deadline.
The Ashmolean had nine months to meet the deadline after the then-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport placed an export licence deferral on the work in January, delaying its leaving the country.
The artwork has been owned by a private British collection for the last 200 years. Director of the Ashmolean Xa Sturgis said the Italian work “essentially belongs to the [UK]”.
The Ashmolean bought the painting in a private treaty sale. The sum was raised owing to the museum’s Chairman Lord Lupton CBE, grants from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund, the Headley Trust, and various other donations.
Sturgis called the acquisition of the painting a “really exciting moment” for the museum, which already displays drawings by the Italian Renaissance artists Raphael and Michelangelo.
Angelico’s Crucifixion will be on public display in the Ashmolean from December. The painting is intended to be used as a teaching resource for those studying Art, History of Art, and Theology at Oxford University. It will also be freely accessible to the public and will belong in the collection shown to around 40,000 schoolchildren every year.
Fully titled The Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John the Evangelist and the Magdalen, the painting was created in the 1420s, and is believed to be Angelico’s earliest surviving work. Angelico, known in Italy as the “Blessed Angelic One”, remains among the most celebrated painters in the Italian Renaissance.
Sturgis said that the sixteenth-century art historian Giorgio Vasari “famously wrote that Fra Angelico couldn’t paint the crucifixion without tears streaming down his cheeks… He was very much concerned with the emotional response to a picture.” Head of the Ashmolean’s Department of Western Art Jennifer Sliwka concurred that the piece will be the “showstopper” of the gallery.
