At the Met today, in the Fra Angelico exhibit, what fascinated me, what moved me, more than anything else was to experience the relationships between three small panels from the series that made up the predella of the High Altarpiece at San Marco, telling the story of the brothers Saints Cosmas and Damian. Each panel is a wonder of narrative and pictorial design, but to move among them is to see a different beauty, even in the absence of the whole. The greater beauty is not in one or another wooden panel but in the relations among them, and therefore in the imagination of the viewer as s/he is forced simultaneously to look and to remember.
Beauty inseparable from our awareness of time, and of mortality.