Angelico, Fra

orig. Guido di Pietro

born с 1400, Vicchio, Florence [Italy]

died Feb. 18, 1455, Rome

Italian painter and Dominican friar active in Florence.

He entered the convent of San Domenico at Fiesole sometime between 1417 and 1425 and began his artistic career by painting illuminated manuscripts and altarpieces. He was influenced by Masaccio's use of architectural perspective. Among his earliest masterpieces is a large triptych, the Linaiuoli Altarpiece (1433–36), executed for the linen merchants' guild; it is enclosed in a marble shrine designed by Lorenzo Ghiberti. His most notable works are frescoes at the convent of San Marco, Florence (с 1440–45), and in the chapel of Pope Nicholas V in the Vatican (с 1448–49). One of the outstanding fresco painters of the 15th century, he influenced such masters as Fra Filippo Lippi; Benozzo Gozzoli was among his students.

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▪ Italian painter

Introduction

Italian“Angelic Brother”original name  Guido di Pietro , also called  Fra Giovanni da Fiesole  and  Beato Angelico 

born c. 1400, Vicchio, republic of Florence [Italy]

died Feb. 18, 1455, Rome

      Italian painter, one of the greatest 15th-century painters, whose works within the framework of the early Renaissance style embody a serene religious attitude and reflect a strong Classical influence. A great number of works executed during his career are altarpieces and frescoes created for the church and the priory of San Marco in Florence while he was in residence there.

San Domenico period

      Baptized Guido di Pietro, he appeared in a document of 1417 as a lay painter. Later, between the years 1420 and 1422, he became a Dominican friar and resided in the priory of San Domenico at Fiesole, there taking the name of Fra Giovanni da Fiesole. At Fiesole he was probably influenced by the teachings of Giovanni Dominici, the militant leader of the reformed Dominicans; the writings of Dominici defended traditional spirituality against the onslaught of humanism.

      Angelico was also influenced by his fellow friar St. Antoninus Pierozzi (Antoninus, Saint), who became the archbishop of Florence when Fra Angelico refused the post and who may have consolidated Angelico's faith. It is believed that Antoninus also may have inspired some of Angelico's compositions.

      According to the painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari, Angelico was trained by the greatest painter and miniaturist of the Gothic tradition, Lorenzo Monaco, whose influence may be seen in the clear, painstaking delicacy of execution and the vibrant luminosity that seem to spiritualize the figures in Angelico's paintings. These qualities are notably apparent in two small altarpieces, Madonna of the Star and The Annunciation.

      Angelico's Deposition for Santa Trinità in Florence was once attributed to Monaco, who had begun it before he died in 1425. Monaco had divided it into a triptych and executed the pinnacles. Angelico, however, made it a unified altarpiece with a vast landscape dominated by a varicoloured hill town. It is perhaps an imaginative evocation of Cortona, where Fra Angelico spent some time and where some of his important works are to be found. Against that background are sharply outlined human figures in interconnected groups; their features are so delicately traced that attempts have been made to identify them as portraits. These arrangements of figures attest to Angelico's deep knowledge of the formalism that characterized the art of the early Renaissance.

      Two strands were interwoven in Angelico's life at Fiesole: the pious life of a friar and continuous activity as a painter. Vasari described him as “saintly and excellent,” and, not long after his death, he was called angelico (“angelic”) because of his moral virtues. This subsequently became the name by which he is best known, often preceded by the word beato (“blessed”).

 Angelico knew and followed closely the new artistic trends of his time, above all the representation of space by means of perspective. In works such as the large Last Judgment and The Coronation of the Virgin, for example, the human figures receding toward the rear themselves create a feeling of space similar to that in the paintings of Angelico's great Florentine contemporary Masaccio. The earliest work by Angelico that can be dated with certainty is a triptych of huge dimensions that he painted for the linen merchants' guild (or Arte dei Linaiuoli; hence its name, the Linaiuoli Altarpiece); it is dated July 11, 1433. Enclosed in a marble shrine designed by the Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti (Ghiberti, Lorenzo), this altarpiece represents the Virgin and Son facing forward, monumentally, and, surrounding them in a minor key, charming angels, developing the motif of the “Madonna of the Star.” The group has affinities with the Florentine Maestà (i.e., Madonna and child enthroned in majesty) of the 14th century, but the influence of Masaccio may be seen in the formalism of the construction and in the innovative use of light and colour. Angelico finished the work with a predella, or narrow strip of paintings along the bottom of the altarpiece; this group of paintings includes The Adoration of the Magi and The Martyrdom of St. Mark, which are lucid and compact in their narrative and have a strictly defined perspective, a technique that is even more effective in the small painting depicting the naming of John the Baptist.

      In the early 1430s, Angelico was commissioned to paint the Deposition for the sacristy of the Church of Santa Trinità as a companion piece to Gentile da Fabriano's Adoration of the Magi. As mentioned above, Angelico took over this painting after the death of Lorenzo Monaco in 1425. In Angelico's painting, the dead Christ is gently lowered from the cross and is mourned in silent grief by the Virgin Mary and a group of women on the left of the composition. On the right, a group of men clothed in contemporary Florentine dress stand in mute contemplation. One of these figures might be the portrait of Palla Strozzi, the patron of the chapel and of the altarpiece. Strozzi, who was at the time one of the richest men in Europe and a rival to Cosimo de' Medici, was exiled in 1434. The altarpiece might have been finished after his exile, possibly about 1440. The Deposition is one of the first paintings in the Italian Renaissance to depict figures in a receding landscape rather than in a space set as a foreground stage. In the background, Angelico depicted the city of Jerusalem.

      Also in the 1430s, Angelico painted one of the most inspired works of the Florentine Renaissance, The Annunciation (Annunciation), an altarpiece significantly superior to his two other paintings on the same subject. It shows the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve being driven out by the Angel yet also under the sway of the radiant messenger and pure maiden who are portrayed in the space of a Renaissance-style portico. The predella is skillfully divided into stories of the Virgin Mary, naturalistically portrayed—especially the Visitation, which has a realistic panorama. Angelico always followed reality closely, even when he used a miniaturist technique. Occasionally, he resorted to medieval techniques, such as a gold background, in deference to the taste of those who commissioned the work, but his figures still emerge quite distinctly from the panels, in the Renaissance manner, revealing the painter's increasingly sure and harmonious pictorial idiom. Angelico's Annalena Altarpiece, also of the 1430s, is, so far as is known, the first sacra conversazione (i.e., “sacred conversation,” a representation of the Holy Family) of the Renaissance.

Years at the priory of San Marco

      Angelico remained in the Fiesole priory until 1439, when he entered the priory of San Marco in Florence. There he worked mostly on frescoes. San Marco had been transferred from the Sylvestrine monks to the Dominicans in 1436, and the rebuilding of the church and its spacious priory began about 1438, from designs by the Florentine architect and sculptor Michelozzo. The construction was generously subsidized by the Medici Family. Angelico was commissioned about 1438 by Cosimo de' Medici the Elder to execute the altarpiece, for which he again painted a sacra conversazione. When the church was consecrated at Epiphany in 1443, the altarpiece must have dominated the place of worship. Angelico portrayed the Virgin and child raised high on a throne, with saints on either side receding into space; among them are the two patron saints of the Medici, Cosmas and Damian. This work, one of the most compelling Fra Angelico created, ends in a dense grove of cypresses, palms, and pines against a deep but toneless sky. His figures seem cleansed of any human passion and appear to have supreme serenity of spirit. A predella, showing eight little legends of the two Medicean saints separated by a Pietà (Virgin Mary holding the body of Christ), completed the work. These paintings are now scattered among various museums.

      On the walls of the priory of San Marco in Florence are the paintings that mark the high point of Angelico's career. In the chapter hall, he executed a large Crucifixion that seems akin to the “Moralities” of the 14th century, which urged detachment from worldly vanities and salvation through Christ alone. In addition to the three crucified figures against the sky, Angelico painted groups of ritual figures, rhythmically arranged, with a chorus of martyrs, founders of religious orders, hermits, and defenders of the Dominican order (whose genealogical tree is depicted beneath this striking scene), as well as the two Medicean saints. Thus, in the comprehensiveness of this work, Fra Angelico developed a concept that was barely suggested in his earlier altarpieces.

 He portrayed the exaltation of the Redeemer in many other paintings in the priory's first cloister and in its cells. In one corridor he executed an Annunciation that broadened the pattern of his earlier one in Cortona. In the cells, he proclaimed devotion to Christ crucified in at least 20 examples, all related to monastic life. The pictorial work in these narrow spaces is intricate, probably the work of numerous hands directed by the master, including Benozzo Gozzoli (Gozzoli, Benozzo), the greatest of Fra Angelico's disciples, and Zanobi Strozzi, another pupil better known as a miniaturist, as well as his earliest collaborator, Battista Sanguigni. The hand of Fra Angelico himself is identifiable in the first 10 cells on the eastern side. Three subjects merit particular attention: a Resurrection, a coronation of the Virgin, and, especially, a gentle Annunciation, presented on a bare white gallery, with St. Peter Martyr in prayer, timidly facing the group, his coloured habit contrasting with the delicate two tones of pink in the garments of the Virgin and the Angel. The cells, originally hidden from public view because of monastic vows of reclusion, reveal the secret joy of the painter-friar in creating figures of purity to move his fellow friars to meditation and prayer. The images in these paintings are the lyrical expressions of a painter who was also their prior.

Roman period

 At the end of 1446, Fra Angelico was called to Rome by Pope Eugene IV, and he remained there until about 1450. In the summer of 1447, however, he had undertaken to decorate the chapel of San Brizio in the cathedral of Orvieto. Angelico's assistants, above all Gozzoli, worked closely with him on two canvases, crowded with figures, in this chapel. These canvases, of Christ the Judge amid the hierarchy of angels and the chorus of the prophets, respectively, were only partially executed by Angelico; they were continued more than 50 years later by Luca Signorelli (Signorelli, Luca).

      In Rome the frescoes that Angelico executed in a chapel of St. Peter's (c. 1446–47), in the chapel of the Sacrament in the Vatican (not before 1447), and in the studio of Pope Nicholas V (1449) have all been destroyed. But the Vatican still possesses his decorative painting for the Chapel of Niccolò V. There he painted scenes from the lives of Saints Stephen and Lawrence, along with figures of the Evangelists and saints, repeating some of the patterns of the predella on his altarpiece of San Marco. The consecration scene of St. Stephen and that of St. Lawrence are both set in solemn cathedral interiors, and the almsgiving of St. Lawrence is set against the background of a temple. In this scene particularly, Angelico imbued the poor and afflicted who surround the deacon-saint with a serenity that purifies them and illuminates them with an inner light, rendering them equals of the blessed figures on the altarpieces. At the same time, the organization of these works and the rendering of architecture in them mark the culmination of his development as a Renaissance artist.

      About 1450 Fra Angelico returned to Florence, where, still a friar, he became prior of the priory of San Domenico in Fiesole (1450–c. June 1452). His most notable work of this time was the cycle of 35 paintings of scenes from the life of Christ and other subjects for the doors of a silver chest in the sanctuary of the Church of Santissima Annunziata in Florence. These works, which have been extensively repainted, are probably distant echoes of the destroyed paintings in the Chapel of Niccolò V. Although the authenticity of these works is disputed, the Massacre of the Innocents, Flight into Egypt, and Presentation in the Temple seem to be Angelico's because of the bright spontaneity of the slender figures, as well as the spatiality of the surroundings and the landscape. Such traits derived from the artist's vast experience in mural painting. In most of these little pictures, however, there is a kind of disconnectedness and weariness, indicating the hand of pupils whose art was a far cry from Fra Angelico's ineffable poetry. There is still a certain monumental tone in the late altarpiece he executed in the monastery of Bosco ai Frati in the Mugello. With the completion of this altarpiece and several other minor works, Fra Angelico's fertile artistic labours drew to a close.

      In 1453 or 1454, Fra Angelico again went to Rome, where he died in the Dominican priory in which he had stayed during his first visit to that city. He was buried in the nearby church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, where his tomb remains an object of veneration.

Assessment

      In addition to the influence he had on his followers, Fra Angelico exerted a significant influence in Florence, especially between 1440 and 1450, even on such an accomplished master as Fra Filippo Lippi (Lippi, Fra Filippo). As a friar, Fra Angelico was lauded in writings of the 15th century and later, some of which bestowed a legendary halo on him. As a painter, he was acclaimed as early as 1438 by the contemporary painter Domenico Veneziano. Vasari, in his section on Angelico in Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Painters, Sculptors, & Architects, was largely inaccurate in his biographical data but correctly situated Fra Angelico in the framework of the Renaissance.

Mario Salmi Ed.

Additional Reading

Works concerning Fra Angelico include John Pope-Hennessy, Angelico (1981, reissued 1990); William Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco (1993); and Paolo Morachiello, Fra Angelico: The San Marco Frescoes (1996; originally published in Italian, 1995). Giorgio Bonsanti, Beato Angelico: Catalogo completo (1998), is a complete catalogue raisonné of Angelico's oeuvre.

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