Home	Fra Angelico: The Life of Fra Giovanni of Fiesole [Fra Angelico] of the Order of Preaching Friars, Painter [c. 1387-1455]
	Fra Angelico was born in 1387 and at twenty entered the religious state as a Dominican at Fiesole. How soon Fra Giovanni, not yet nicknamed Angelico, became a painter we hardly know. But four little pictures designed to inclose in their frames relics of the saints may represent his beginnings. Three are at San Marco, Florence, one in Mrs. John L. Gardner's collection at Boston. The Little Annunciation with an Adoration of the Magi, may represent the work. It is refined, tender, of jewel-like freshness of color, graceful in linear arrangement, at first sight wholly Sienese in inspiration, and directly dependent on Lorenzo Monaco. A kind of veracity under the richness of the expression marks the work as after all straightforward and Florentine. The date may be about 1425, Fra Angelico, being in his middle thirties, and in his art about a century behind the times. In his early Gothic manner he conceived some of his masterpieces, such as the Coronation of the Virgin, with its glimpse of a celestial cloud land; and the whimsically beautiful Last Judgment. Both are at the Museum of San Marco. One can believe the report of Vasari that each day Fra Angelico prayed before touching brush to such masterpieces. Such pictures have the hush and charm of a celestial dreamland, a meditative beauty quite un-Florentine. All the time Fra Angelico was placidly and intelligently studying the new realistic movement launched by Donatello and Masaccio. He adopts what suits him, rejecting heavy shadows which would dull his Gothic coloring, but adding freely realistic details in anatomy, drapery, and architecture. The Coronation of the Virgin in the Louvre, though it may be only a few months later than that of the Uffizi, no longer takes place in a cloudland before lucent gold, but in a quite practicable architecture imitating the niche which Michelozzo designed in 1423 for Donatello's St. Louis of Toulouse. The forms too are more substantial, more mundane. Soon the architectural accessories become of Renaissance type, and as Mr. Langton Douglas has shown, every new invention of Michelozzo for a space of ten years is promptly reflected in the painting of Fra Angelico. His greatest Madonna, that of the Linen Guild, painted in 1433, is almost plastic, recalling the severe sweetness of Orcagna. The picture is really cumbered by the rich hangings, which with the slender swaying angels in the bevel of the frame are already an anachronism. In the Descent from the Cross, we find Fra Angelico skilfully adopting the new discoveries in anatomy and landscape. The treatment is broad and panoramic in the tradition of the Lorenzetti but all the details are carefully studied from nature and not furnished by formula. A deeply-felt scene thus gains verisimilitude, comes out of the realm of legend and becomes an actuality. The panel was finished in 1440, and, now that Masaccio was gone, there was no living painter who could have put into it with equal knowledge so much feeling. The building of the great Dominican Convent of San Marco between 1437 and 1444 opened to Fra Angelico his great opportunity. It was the gift of Cosimo de' Medici, now unofficial ruler of Florence, who had his good reasons for wishing to assure the occasional repose of his busy soul in this world and its permanent repose in the next. He often sought seclusion in the convent and doubtless saw in progress the fifty or more frescoes that Fra Angelico made to adorn it. Fra Angelico was painting for deeply religious men, for scholars who had the Scriptures at their finger tips, and for this reason perhaps he rejects all smaller realisms, reducing his compositions to the mere figures. Thus the San Marco frescoes are more concise even than those of Giotto, and they reach at their best a simple sublimity as yet unattained in Italian' art. Highly formal and decorative, they are free from consciously aesthetic taint. Sometimes I think Perugino learned much at San Marco and that we may thus regard Fra Angelico as indirectly a leading influence on Raphael. The sparse, effective method may be illustrated in the fresco set over the door of the guest quarters, the Forestiera. It represents a pilgrim Christ being received by Dominican brothers. In the stranger we entertain The Lord Himself is the simple lesson. The figures are set against a conventional blue background but are constructed with the authority of the new learning. In the Chapter House nearby Fra Angelico painted, about 1440, a great Crucifixion. The three laden crosses stand out sharply against a murky sky. The setting is a mere platform, on which the familiar forms of Mary and the beloved Apostles are almost lost in a throng of witnesses of every age. We have the Latin Fathers, and their successors -- St. Dominic and St. Francis among others. The arrangement is highly formal, the mood that of meditation; the sharper tragedy of the theme is not insisted on. The characterization of the saints is precise and fine, the drawing of their forms admirable. Had the composition been set against a Gothic, blue background, the mood would have seemed merely sentimental. What gives it, with all its abstractness, an almost sensational tang of reality is the arching sky, slaty above and an ominous orange behind the figures. The expedient brings an element of definite place and time of day for this rendezvous of saints at a mystically renewed Calvary. In the cells of the convent, Fra Angelico and his helpers painted no less than forty-three frescoes. These were intended for the private devotions of the brother occupying the cell, and the subjects were probably chosen not by Fra Angelico himself, but by his cloister mates. The best are conceived like the frescoes of the lower story. The background is just a veiled sky, there are no accessories, the figures loom in an indefinite space. Majestic is the Transfiguration, very lovely the Coronation of the Virgin. The angelic painter draws the maximum effect from the simplest patterns and briefest means. There is the measured and simple dignity of the early Christian mosaics with a warmer and more personal feeling. Fra Angelico, when he wishes, can be elaborately realistic. He is so in the garden scene where the Risen Christ gently rebuffs the Magdalen, in the crowded Adoration of the Magi, which tradition assigns to Cosimo de' Medici's cell, and in the Annunciation, in the corridor with its graceful Renaissance loggia. In this more circumstantial vein, Fra Angelico is delightful, but I think below his best. In all the frescoes at S. Marco, however, Fra Angelico appears as a wholly Florentine figure with an art based at once on the study of nature and on an understanding admiration for the masterpieces of Giotto and Orcagna. Fra Giovanni da Fiesole (Fra Angelico, the "angelic friar") was early ( 1407) admitted into the Dominican order at S. Domenico, a hamlet at the foot of the hill leading to Fiesole, near Florence. For a few years he shared the troubles of his convent, whose inmates, siding with Gregory XII in his claims against Alexander V, were driven from their home and took refuge at Foligno, and then at Cortona. Here at Cortona the young painter left some of the most precious evidences of his genius, but in 1418 the monks returned from their banishment, to S. Domenico. In 1436 they were established in the Convent of San Marco in Florence itself--a building made famous two generations later ( 1491-1498) by its great Prior, Savonarola. Here the already famous brother began to decorate halls and cells with devotional pictures. All that we know of Fra Angelico's character is charming--his sweetness of disposition, his devotion to the daily task, his unspoiled sense of his mission in painting. His life was that of the absorbed craftsman and mystic in one. His early training may have been that of a miniaturist--the exquisite character of his craftsmanship suggests it--and at some time Lorenzo Monaco, from internal evidence, may have taught him. His work was in demand far outside the limits of his convent, and toward the end of his life commissions drew him away from Florence. Before he was sixty he was called to Rome to decorate a chapel of the Pope in the Vatican, and in 1447 he was not only working there, but also in a newly erected chapel in the Cathedral of Orvieto. 1 And in these later works he showed himself awake to the study of nature and form, to the new architecture, and scientific perspective of the time. He died in Rome in 1455, just three years after the birth of Leonardo da Vinci. Fra Angelico represents more than any Florentine master the idealism of mediæval religious painting, as in the wonderfully imaginative Uffizi Altarpiece ( 1433) of his middle period, with its gold background and mediæval arrangements. At the same time Renaissance influence is seen even in his earliest known work (the Cortona Predelle) in the naturalistic landscape, and it becomes quite prominent in his latest pictures, as the frescoes of the Nicholas V. Chapel in the Vatican. He is also very individual. Perhaps the most remarkable quality in his art is the degree to which the knowledge which characterises Masaccio and his other contemporaries is employed by Fra Angelico to express without dominating his vision; witness the garden of the Annunciation in S. Marco, and the flowers of paradise--true flowers growing in an unearthly world--and the solidity of bodies resting on nothing. The tendency indeed already exists in Florence, in Orcagna and Lorenzo Monaco and others, a tendency toward the abstract idealism of the Sienese. But the personal genius of Fra Angelico marks him as the culmination. This is seen in the early work at Cortona, which only differs from the work of Lorenzo Monaco in the refinement of form, and in its wonderful repose and sweet solemnity, together with certain Renaissance forms which contrast with Lorenzo's persistently mediæval character. Its sense for naturalism proceeded, it would seem, directly out of the artist's human temperament as a young novice as much as from an adaptation to the taste of the age. The picture was never equalled by the artist again. Fra Angelico's maturer work indicates more complete subjection to the religious mood. In the great picture of 1433 ( Uffizi), when he was forty-six, he reached an achievement of pure imagination. It is an amazing art, universal in appeal, whose value we moderns are likely to underestimate. Fra Angelico's imagery is often passionless enough. The S. Marco frescoes are almost commonplace. Even these, however, with all their repetition and asceticism, are a valid expression of beauty. It is psychologically interesting that in his later frescoes, at Orvieto and especially in Rome, Fra Angelico emerges into a rather naturalistic manner, but the tendency is unnatural for the great idealist, and a weakening of his pure vision. It was to his credit that he recognised the Masaccio ideal, and that he could turn with such success from the abstractions of S. Marco to satisfy the new taste of his Roman patrons, but he was not a true convert. The apathy of the renunciation of his true gift is over his latest work. It is to Fra Filippo that we must turn as a pioneer of true realism.