BOSTON — The most beautiful Italian Renaissance painting in the United States, “The Dormition and Assumption of the Virgin” by Fra Angelico, is on full-time view but hard to find. Since 1903, the small picture has been in the same spot in the Early Italian Room of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum here, though invisible when you enter the room. Unless you happened to wander over to a nearby window and glance to your left, you’d miss it. Isabella Gardner (1840-1924), who positioned every item in her house-museum just so, and forbade rearrangement, placed the painting deliberately to give it plenty of gilt-enhancing natural light. In the chapel-like space, you can be alone with the painting, at least until someone else comes upon it and stops, wonder-struck.

Source: New York Times May 16, 2018 20:03 UTC