The painting is now in the Louvre at Paris, having been taken from Fiesole during the French invasion of 1812.
Under a rich canopy with inlaid columns and brocade hangings the Redeemer seated on the throne, places the crown on the head of his Mother, who kneels before him, with hands crossed on her bosom. Around them angels are making the air resound with the voice of song, and the music of many instruments. Saints, male and female circle round, some standing, others kneeling, their fixed eyes and ecstatic features denoting their joy in such divine splendour. Among the saints are the great personages of the religious orders, together with bishops and emperors. On the right, among the kneeling female saints are seen St. Agnes tenderly pressing the lamb to her breast, St. Catherine holding her wheel of torture and a palm, St. Ursula clasps the arrow which united her in death to her divine Spouse, St. Cecilia's pretty head is garlanded with flowers, while St. Mary Magdalene turns her back showing the rich locks of hair flowing over her shoulder as she holds the vase of ointment in her left hand. On the opposite side are St. Dominic with the lily and open book, St. Augustine, St. Benedict, St. Anthony and St. Francis. On a higher level St. Louis, with his crown of fiordalise, talks with St. Thomas; while St. Nicholas supports himself with both hands on his pastoral staff.
"It is a clever composition, wonderfully balanced, and the solemnity of style does not at all exclude exuberance of life or infinite variety of ideas.
"The bodies are almost diaphanous, the heads ethereal, the atmosphere and light have a touch of the supernatural. Up to this point the subject is subdued, but the colours lively and pure—among which blue and carmine predominate—gleam with particular splendour."[26]
The predella contains in some small compositions the chief episodes in the life of St. Dominic, excepting the central compartment where Christ is drawn, issuing from the sepulchre between the Virgin and St. John. The compositions are all executed with that love and delicacy which are the glory of the artist, but even these little stories, like the larger panel, have been more or less injured by repeated restorations.
A similar subject now in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence and which Fra Angelico painted for the church of Santa Maria Novella, is still more aerial and celestial, a perfect masterpiece of sentiment and mystic expression.
Here also Fra Angelico clings to that traditional characteristic, peculiarly his own—the art of sacred vision, but with what new life he animates it, and what poetical witchery he throws into this creation of his ascetic fantasy!