On the first Easter morning, Christ’s followers were mourning, and his despairing Apostles hid in a locked room. The broken and bloodied corpse of Jesus had been laid in a tomb, and a heavy stone blocked its entrance. But faithful women had already awoken and had left for the tomb to finish anointing the body of Christ with oil and spices. When they arrived, the stone had been rolled away; they faced an empty tomb.
This moment in the story of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection is profoundly illuminating. Here we look at a fresco of the Resurrection that focuses more on that human experience than on Christ’s glory. Why? Like most of the stunningly beautiful frescoes in the 12th-century Convent of San Marco in Florence, Fra Angelico (with his apprentice Benozzo Gozzoli) created this fresco in a cell belonging to one individual monk in 1440-42. He painted a luminous fresco in every private cell at San Marco as a means for each monk to enter into deeper meditation and prayer. For his entire life, one man lived in his cell with one image – and what depth and mystery were unveiled over those years.
