The Great Masters—Fra Angelico: God, Nature and Art

In July 1445, when the monks from the monasteries of San Marco and Fiesole, which for nine years had been governed by the same prior, Antonio Perozzi, signed the document sanctioning their separation, Fra Angelico wrote his name as Johannes de Florencia, thus describing himself as a Florentine, much as people from the Mugello, an Apennine outpost of among strangers or far from home. Fra, or Beato Angelico, was in fact born in the Mugello district, but not in Vicchio as Vasari thought, and through him most historians until recently, but in its vicinity, Juxta Vicium, as the contemporary chronicle from the Fiesole monastery inequivocally records. Today it seems probable that his birthplace was amongst the handful of houses known as Moriano, a locality that was part of the Popolo, or parish, of San Michele in Rupecanina. The white church, seen right at the top of his first known work, the triptych of Saint Peter the Martyr, is inspired by his place of birth, and is both a reminder of his childhood faith and a memory full of peaceful emotion. The Mugello district produces painters. Not far from Vicchio at Vespignano, 130 years earlier, Giotto was born, and it was his achievement with the full naturalness of his figures and their need for space, like the domestic Annunciation of Sant'Anna, and his imposing Madonnas, as opposed to the decorative taste displayed in late Gothic art, that was the starting point of the great tradition of Tuscan painting. Fra Angelico is nowadays considered to have been born around 1400, long after the dates 1387 and 1388, which Vasari gives respectively in the two editions of his book. As so often happens with important figures in the Middle Ages, the date of his birth, as there was no state register of births, was entrusted to the affairs of his natal parish. The first years of his life, perhaps partly spent in Vicchio, are completely unknown to us, as are the first signs of his artistic calling. The painter we know as Fra, or Beato Angelico, as a layman was called Guido di Pietro, or sometimes Guidolino, on account of his small stature. His present name comes from the definition of Pittore Angelico, given him in 1468, 13 years after his death, by his fellow monk and poet Domenico di Giovanni da Corella, not so much for the seraphic grace of his works, but because, being a Dominican, he was compared to St. Thomas Aquinas, the Doctor Angelicus who inspired the order. Vasari, who wrote his Lives at the time of the Counter-Reformation, endorses the mystical and ecstatic legend of Fra Angelico's art, and writes, amongst other things, it was his custom never to retouch or correct his paintings, leaving them just as he had first painted them, because that, he believed, was the will of God. Today, however, his painting, with its use of the novel geometrical conception of space, typical of the early Renaissance, clearly indicates lucid rationality. The unofficial title of Beato, Blessed, dates from the 19th century, and was only officially sanctioned in 1982, when Pope John Paul II approved the liturgical cult of Fra Giovanni from Fiesole. The following year, the Pope celebrated the first Mass in his honour, in the Roman Church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, where the painter was buried, in 1455, and where his marble tombstone is still to be found. But to get back to his life, the first news we have of him is contained in a document dating from the end of October 1417, when Guido, aged perhaps 17 and still a layman, entered the company of San Nicolò in Florence as a painter. The following year, the captains of Orsanmichele commissioned his first important work, a now lost painting, for the Garadini Chapel in the Church of St Stephen, beside the Ponte Vecchio. Some years later, perhaps in 1421, Guido took monastic vows, and there is a document dated June 1423, registering a payment to Brother Giovanni of the San Domenico Friars in Fiesole, for the painting of a crucifix in the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital. It was destiny that Fra Angelico entered the monastery just as the spiritual father of the launched a fierce attack on the return to antiquity, and hence, in his opinion, to paganism, which was represented by the humanistic taste for classical mythology. The austere Dominican perhaps had in mind works like The Adoration of the Magi, by Gentile da Fabriano, today in the Uffizi. This was painted, at about that time, for the domestic chapel of Palla Strozzi, the richest man in Florence, and contains not only the ostentation shown in the sumptuous clothing and trappings, but also other extravagant artistic inventions, such as the appearance of monkeys and dogs. Or maybe he was referring to the frescoes in the Carmine Church, painted by Masaccio, that had occasioned both popular amazement and scandal at the evident nakedness of Adam and Eve. These, like the other works of Masaccio, were crucial to the development of Renaissance art. Or perhaps Fra Domenici was thinking of the beautiful Fonte Gaia in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, by Jacopo della Quercia, which contained a naked nymph, Acca Laurentia, who, according to legend, looked after Romulus and Remus after they had been taken away from the she-wolf. The work, now restored and in the Civic Museum, could appear to be a pagan and unintentionally obscene version of the Madonna and Child. Fra Angelico, ever intent on representing the serene simplicity of Christianity, must have seemed a personification of the idea of religious art to the pious Dominican father. In his first work, the Tiptic of St. Peter the Martyr, within the late Gothic framework, there is already something new in the spatial deployment of the figures in the picture. In fact, although Fra Angelico for many centuries has been considered a sort of naïve mystic, he was perfectly aware of contemporary artistic trends, which, amongst other things, concerned the use of spatial depth to express the relationship between truth and reality. From the moment when, together with his brother Benedetto, he took his monastic vows and entered the new monastery in Fiesole, founded as recently as September 1404, Fra Angelico's artistic development becomes easier to follow. In his Lives, Vasari lays stress on the fact that, following monastic tradition, the two brothers worked on the illumination of manuscripts, writing that, in Fra Angelico's monastery there are several choir books with breathtaking illuminations from his hand, like some others in San Domenico in Fiesole, on which he worked with incredible diligence. In about 1430, in Fiesole, Fra Angelico painted a triptych, which Lorenzo di Credi converted into an altarpiece in 1501 by adding a balderkin and two wide arches opening onto a landscape. The late Gothic style has mellowed, especially in the posture of the Madonna. Beside her, to the left, are St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Barnabas, and to the right, St. Dominic and St. Peter the Martyr. The figures of the saints are imposing in a totally new way, an effect created through the careful draping of their robes, whilst the angels who surround the Madonna, in typical Angelico style, are not merely abstract figures, but reveal a mystic and poetic humanity. Fra Angelico's personality also made itself felt in the day-to-day life of the monastery. He was often a leading figure in chapter meetings, and in January 1433 he deputized for the absent prior. However, he continued to paint with great vigor. It was during this period that he painted for the choir of the Camaldolese Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence, A Last Judgment, which is now in the San Marco Museum. The form is that of a naive story illustrated for the congregation. Above the open tombs sits the Redeemer, surrounded by cherubim and a double row of angels kneeling in prayer. On either side of him, led on the left by the Madonna and on the right by St. John the Baptist, sits the more important saints, each with the symbol of his or her mission. Below are the saved, who in dance-like fashion approach the City of God, which is presented as pure light. To the right, black demons drive a desperate crowd of the damned towards an infernal mountain, which reveals a cutaway view of the physical torments which, according to popular beliefs of the time, they could expect. In the first 30 years of the 15th century, Florence went through a period of intensive artistic activity. Filippo Brunelleschi, in his work as an architect, created a new concept of space, following the geometrical intuitions inherited from the ancients, and now at last readmitted to the artistic scene and put into practice. This new atmosphere, which was destined to change the medieval aspect of the city, encouraged contemporary artists to develop a new and more natural mode of expression. Donatello, in the field of sculpture, and Masaccio, in painting, put to good purpose the fruits of Brunelleschi's ideals and prepared the way for the Renaissance proper. Towards the end of this period, Fra Angelico came to terms with the artistic theories emerging from the humanist movement, which in the 1440s would be fully worked out and codified in the works and writings of Leon Battista Alberti. He did this in two famous annunciations. At the beginning of the 1430s, Fra Angelico painted an annunciation for the Church of San Domenico, which in 1611 was sold to the Farnese family and subsequently, through the Bourbons, found its way from Naples to Spain. A star-studded sky, which represents the universe, painted on the ceiling of a lodge supported by slender columns, provides the setting in which the artist places his figures. The Virgin, who is sitting on a simple throne backed by some material hanging on the wall, lowers her eyes in bewilderment. The announcing angel seems to be noting the effect produced by his announcement on the young woman's face. A dove in the ray of divine light is a symbol of the Holy Spirit. To the left are Adam and Eve being driven from the Garden of Eden, with the tree and the apple which gave rise to the sin that, through his own sacrifice, Christ is coming to claim. Almost on the axis of the Italian peninsula stands the town of Cortona, built as a fort, perhaps by the ancient Umbrians, on the southern slopes of Mount Sant'Egidio. With its massive walls pierced by the classical arches of the gateways, it is one of the Italian towns that most conspicuously bring to mind its domination by the Etruscans, who conquered it between the 8th and the 7th centuries BC. The narrow streets, through which enemy armies were dangerously compelled to pass, seem still to protect the heart of the town, where ancient patrician palaces and severe war-like towers overshadow mysterious courtyards and steep flights of stairs. From above the town, the massive Medician fortress keeps watch over the rooftops. In the Diocesan Museum, there is an Annunciation painted by Fra Angelico in 1434 for the local church of San Domenico. The episode of the original sin is here relegated to a position on a bare outcrop of rock in a partially seen garden. Mary's house, seen from an angle that highlights the perspective of the colonnade, occupies almost the whole picture. The meeting between the two holy figures is serene. The angel is seen in the act of making the Annunciation, and his golden words literally float towards an attentive but by no means frightened virgin. Other spaces appear in the openings bordered by the arches, as if in a series of mirrors. But everything in the episode of faith portrayed is real and intimately human. This is not an evangelical fable, but a historical event. The five scenes of the splendid predella depict important events in the Virgin's life. Observing the visitation to Saint Elizabeth, and in particular the umbrian landscape of Castiglione del Lago, some critics have supposed that the very young Piero della Francesca might have been one of Fra Angelico's collaborators. Fra Angelico's fame was now such that it obtained him an important commission from one of the richest guilds in Florence, the Linaioli, or flax workers' guild. The Linaioni tabernacle, which was painted in 1433, the year the Florentine oligarchs exiled Cosimo de' Medici to Venice, benefited from the collaboration of Lorenzo Ghiberti, who designed the elegant marble frame. In the center of the picture, the round halos and the spherical heads of the mother and child reiterate the form of the transparent sphere which Jesus holds in his left hand, geometry symbolizing divine perfection. The predella contains a sermon by Saint Peter the Martyr in the presence of Saint Mark in the first picture, the Magi's procession in the second, and the martyrdom of Saint Mark in the third. The huge altarpiece that Fra Angelico painted in the mid-1430s on the church of San Domenico in Fiesole looks like an exercise in perspective. This work, amongst his best known, partly due to its being in the Louvre, represents a fundamental stage in Fra Angelico's attempts at creating a solid three-dimensional effect, here obtained through the relationship of space to light. In spite of its style, still both late Gothic and magical, with Christ and Mary isolated from the rest of the picture to give a sense of sublime otherworldliness, the work displays a meticulous quest for realism. The faces of the saints are in no way abstract, but employing a stylistic feature that was to become common throughout the Renaissance, they are portraits of rich and notable members of the devout merchant classes and of fellow monks. The Anna Lena altarpiece, so-called because Anna Lena Malatesta had founded the Florentine convent of San Vincenzo, is dated by critics at around 1435. Its central ancona contains an enthroned virgin and child surrounded by six saints, Peter the Martyr, Cosmas, Damien, John the Baptist, Lawrence and Francis. The presence of Saints Cosmas and Damien, patron saints of the Medici, indicates that the painting was intended for a private family chapel. Already in 1434, Cosimo de' Medici had triumphantly returned to Florence, after only a year in exile in Venice, and in practice retaken control of the city, installing his henchmen in key positions of the comune or city government. He had however provoked the reaction of the great rival families of the Florentine oligarchy. Other merchants had become bankers and lived in houses that rivaled the splendor of Medici power. Both in temperament and culture, Cosimo, who relied on popular support, showed himself to be close in spirit to the Dominicans. In the meantime, in 1437, Fra Angelico painted a large altarpiece for the church of San Domenico in Perugia. Against the somewhat archaic luminosity of its gold background, this altarpiece includes elements of great expressive innovation. In the perfection shown in details, such as Saint Dominic's book, Saint Nicholas's coat, the flowers held by the angels around the Madonna, Saint John the Baptist's wild head and the gothic style bordered his cloak, and in the sober elegance of Saint Catherine of Alexandra's clothes and in her crown, Fra Angelico demonstrates that he is one of the first painters to show an interest, although at a conceptual rather than an artistic level, in the Flemish manner of painting. The exceptionally beautiful but dismembered predella, the originals of the first two scenes are in the Vatican Museum, illustrates episodes from the life of Saint Nicholas, from his birth to his calling, from the liberation of three condemned innocent men to his death, from the meeting with the imperial messenger to the windswept scene of the saving of a ship at sea in a storm. The infinite tempestuous expanse of the sea and the minute detail of the grains of corn, macrocosm and microcosm, are found side by side in Fra Angelico's art, just as in real life. The monastery of San Marco, assigned to the Dominicans by Pope Eugene IV, played an important part not only in the religious formation of the dominant classes, but also in the political life of the city as a whole, and when it was restructured, the ideas of Michelozzo, an exponent of Brunelleschi's genius, and those of Fra Angelico were mutually complementary on the subject of light. The cloister portico captures the maximum amount of daylight through the harmony of its austere regularly spaced pillars. The same natural quality of light invades the library and is reflected in the deposition, the first of Fra Angelico's works that one encounters in the part of the monastery occupied by the museum. It was begun by Fra Angelico's teacher, Lorenzo Monaco, shortly before his death. On taking over its completion, Fra Angelico decided to give up the triptych structure, but in a sense accepted its spatial hierarchy, placing the cross centrally at the highest point and clearly distinguishing this from the two lateral backgrounds. A white castle with an idealized Jerusalem on the left, and a barren mountain landscape on the right. Bernard Berenson sees in the latter, one of those landscapes with geometrical masses and volumes, an affinity between the old master and Cézanne, the founder of modern painting. On either side of the cross, two different ways of experiencing faith are portrayed. To the left, emotional faith, represented by the women, and to the right, rational faith, represented by a group of men discussing the symbols of the crown of thorns and the nails. In this same prolific period, Fra Angelico also painted the small masaccio-like panel of the naming of Saint John the Baptist, which uses several different planes of perspective, the garden, the glimpsed interior, and the lodger. This is a perfect work, filled with elegant female figures who surround Saint John's father, Saint Zacharias, in front of a spacious architectural background. Still on the ground floor, in the chapter house where the monks held their meetings, Fra Angelico painted a dramatic crucifixion. There is another annunciation in the corridor on the first floor. Compared with earlier versions, it is simpler, with the virgin and the angel under a lodger which opens out onto a garden dense with trees. The dimension of the lodger seems to charge these sacred figures with a light of their own. The fresco is in a simple and symbolic style, because it was intended only for the resident monks. Every cell has its own scene from the Gospel, of the edification of the monk who lived there. An irrepeatable series of splendid paintings, until not so long ago, known only to the inmates of the monastery. Fra Angelico himself certainly painted the frescoes of the first ten cells on the left of the corridor. The sixth cell contains the Transfiguration, one of the masterpieces of Renaissance art, due to the poetic intensity of the apparition. On Mount Tabor, the Redeemer appears to the group of disciples dressed in a dazzling white robe against an almond-shaped emanation of pure light. The next cell houses another unforgettable work, the Mocking of Christ. Christ, pathetically seated on a stool which serves as a throne, with the risible emblems of power imposed on him by his tormentors in his hands, is mocked and beaten by rods, hands and a spitting face, all without bodies. Anonymous signs of sin, apparently painted on a green panel. At the foot of the dais, the Virgin, deep in thought, and Saint Dominic intent on his book, reveal through their indifference the symbolic value of the scene, where Christ is at one and the same time part of the picture and part of reality. The two adjoining cells at the end of the corridor were those used by the powerful Cosimo de' Medici when he periodically came to the monastery in retreat, to pray and to share the life of the monks. Of Etruscan origin, the town of Orvieto was plagued by aristocratic power struggles throughout the Middle Ages, until it fell under papal domination in the mid-15th century. Nevertheless, its imposing buildings bear witness to its turbulent communal period. By Lake Bolsena, not far from the town, stands the little church where, in the middle of the 13th century, the miracle of Bolsena took place. During a mass, drops of Christ's blood oozed from the sacred host and fell onto the corpora of the priest who had doubts about his Christian faith. To celebrate this event, Pope Urban IV, who was in Orvieto that day, instituted the feast of Corpus Domini for the whole of Europe and started the building of the town's cathedral. In 1447, Fra Angelico was summoned to the magnificent church to fresco the ceiling vaults of the San Blizzo chapel. He painted the choir of the 16 prophets and the vault with Christ in majesty surrounded by angels, but did not complete the work. More than 50 years later, they were finished by Luca Signorelli from Cortona, who had been engaged to paint the powerful frescoes of the Last Judgment. And almost out of respect, he painted himself as a contemporary of Fra Angelico in The Legend of the Antichrist, part of the main work, as if to say that art is timeless. In 1448, Fra Angelico returned to Rome. He had been there on previous occasions to paint works which have not come down to us, such as the frescoes in the papal chapel of the sacrament and those in the private study of Nicholas V, which was subsequently covered over by exuberant high renaissance paintings. The immense city was undergoing transformation into the capital of the church, the heir of the laws, bureaucracy and greatness of ancient Rome. The classical monuments and remains were no longer considered as only ruins of the empire, but were inspiring new works which were clearing away medieval nooks and crannies. Churches of the God announced by Christ were finding breathing space amongst the despoiled but still splendid ruins of the temple dedicated to the ancient gods. Fra Angelico rediscovered classicism through Brunelleschi, and this time left a work that appears substantial and modern, even when compared with the work of artists dating from a hundred years after his death. In the Vatican chapel of Nicholas V, he painted the series of frescoes containing the parallel lives of Saints Stephen and Lawrence. Above the door, against an urban background, a crowd of standing men and of attentive squatting women are listening to a sermon delivered by Saint Stephen. Beside this, Saint Stephen is seen addressing the Sanhedrin council in a room that appears quite small in relation to the imposing figures. To the left of the entrance, against an architectural background of a grandiose colonnade, is Saint Sixtus the Pope ordaining Saint Lawrence as a deacon. The figure of the Pope is in actual fact a portrait of Nicholas V himself, and he and the other prelates are wearing the blue vestments used in the old liturgy. Immediately below and to the right, with a nave terminating in an apse behind him, a luminescent Saint Lawrence distributes alms to a group of suffering unfortunate people, who are however at the same time dignified and orderly. Fra Angelico seems to be reminding us that even in the splendor of the papal residence, the church's mission announces that the last will be first. Towards the end of 1449, Fra Angelico returned to Florence and set to work on the great masterpiece that consists of the 13 small panels painted with episodes from the gospel of the silver chest in the church of the Santissima Annunciata. This meek pictorial catechism presenting the principal episodes of the Redeemer's life is a sort of illustrative and deeply felt artistic and religious review of his own life, a sign that in spite of the prestige gained by his art and the admiration of the powerful, nothing had changed in the depths of his childlike heart. In 1450 he became prior of the San Domenico monastery in Fiesole, but towards the end of 1453 he was recalled to Rome and was never again to return to Florence. With Fra Angelico's death, the world lost an artist and an authoritative but moderate Dominican. The Order of Saint Dominic, which was founded in the 13th century, a tragic period for the church to crush all forms of heresy, now began, especially in Tuscany, to oppose with ever-increasing zeal the changing times and their customs, including those worldly customs in some way really leaning towards paganism, typical of the Renaissance. During the last 10 years of the century, the ascetic and popular political course steered by the San Marco monastery, which was initially backed by the Medici, reached its sad conclusion. Girolamo Savonarola, a friar from Ferrara, became prior in 1491, and day by day he turned both the monastery and the people against the Roman church, not only in the name of a supposed defense of the faith and an abstract sense of morality, but also in the name of Florentine virtue. Tired of popular moral intransigence and the increasing rigors of penitential practices, his own supporters abandoned him. Excommunicated by the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, and isolated from the people, after a full-blown siege of the San Marco monastery, he was taken prisoner by his fellow monks. On the 22nd of May, 1498, Savonarola and his two faithful companions were condemned, and the next day they were defrocked, hung, and publicly burnt at the stake. The 16th century was dawning, a century that was to be full of conflict, religious reformation, and harsh counter-reformation. The gentle determination of the old friar of San Domenico, with his faith and his sincere essential art, were already a part of history.