Fra Angelico

Italian (Florentine), c. 1395–1455

Birth placeVicchio de Mugello, Italy

Death placeRome, Italy

SchoolFlorentine

BiographyItalian (Florentine), born c. 1395, Vicchio di Mugello, died 1455, Rome

One of the first and most important exponents of the Early Renaissance style in Florence, Fra Angelico is also universally esteemed as among the most deeply spiritual painters of all time. His original name was Guido di Pietro; he was long believed to have been born in 1387 or 1388 and to have joined the convent of San Domenico of Fiesole in 1407. These ideas were based, respectively, on Vasari's statement of the friar's age at death and on misinterpretation of the convent's chronicle. Documentary studies produced by Cohn and Orlandi during the 1950s and further interpreted by Gilbert in 1984, however, have helped to clarify the circumstances of the artist's early life. He is designated as a painter, by his original name, in the two earliest documents that may be associated with him: a record of his membership in the confraternity of San Niccolo al Carmine in Florence in 1417, and a record of payment for an altarpiece in Santo Stefano dai Capitani d'Orsanmichele early in the following year. It thus appears that he was already established in his profession when, probably toward the end of 1418, he joined the strict Observant Dominican convent at Fiesole and began a second course of training as a monk. Thereafter the painter's name appears in documents as Fra Giovanni "de Mugello" and, successively, "de fesulis" and "de florentia." The nickname "Angelicus" is recorded in 1469. The unofficial designation "Beato" (blessed) became attached at a later point as is still widely used.
The circumstances of Fra Angelico's early instruction are not known. He was presumably trained, as both a panel painter and miniaturist, in the advanced phase of the Florentine late Gothic style and influenced by Starnina, Lorenzo Monaco, and Gentile da Fabriano, who was in Florence by 1420. During the 1420s, similarities between Fra Angelico's work and that of Masolino and the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti are apparent. The climactic influence of Masaccio's frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel determined, from the 1430s forward, Fra Angelico's profound explorations in the arrangement of plastic forms in a uniformly illuminated three-dimensional space. Reciprocal influence between Ghiberti and Fra Angelico during the 1430s has also been argued, as has the latter's observation of Netherlandish painting. Analogies with Domenico Veneziano's work are evident during the next decade in Fra Angelico's use of color, light, and composition; certain works from this period appear also to reflect some contact with the work of the Sienese painters Giovanni di Paolo and Sano di Pietro. In sympathy with the direction of Piero della Francesco's oeuvre and the theoretical writings of Alberti, Fra Angelico's latest productions are characterized by increased plasticity of form and concern with light and space.
Devoted largely to the creation of altarpieces and other works of art for Dominican churches, Fra Angelico's career was remarkably productive. His reputation was considerable. In 1438 he was cited by Domenico Veneziano in a letter to Piero de'Medici as one of the two leading masters in Florence, the other being Fra Filippo Lippi. Signal works from the 1420s and early 1430s include the triptych executed for the high altar of San Domenico, Fiesole of c. 1425 (reworked by by Lorenzo di Credi in 1501), the triptych completed in 1429 for the convent of Saint Peter Martyr in Florence and now in the Museo di San Marco, the Last Judgement of c. 1431 for Santa Maria degli Angeli, and the tabernacle comissioned for the linen guild (Arte dei Linaouoli) in 1433, the last two also now at San Marco. Dated variously in the 1430s are two major altarpieces painted for San Domenico, Cortona: a Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints and an Annunciation. The monumental Deposition from the Cross, an altarpiece commissioned for the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Trinita and now in the Museo di San Marco, is widely held to have been executed in the early years of the decade and has recently been associated with a document of 1432. Panels now in the museum in Perugia and in the Vatican constitute the components of an altarpiece recorded as having been painted by the artist in 1437 for the altar of Saint Nicholas in the church of San Domenico, Perugia. By the early 1430s Fra Angelico is assumed to have had an active staff of assistants and pupils.
In 1436 the Domenican brothers at Fiesole obtained papal authorization to transfer their community to the convent of San Marco in Florence. In 1438 Michelozzo began the rebuilding of the structure under the patronage of Cosimo de' Medici, and by c. 1439 Fra Angelico and his staff had undertaken the production of the extraordinarily moving and inventive series of frescoes that decorate the common rooms, corridors, and individual cells. For the new conventual church, Fra Angelico painted the magnificent high altarpiece - a landmark of Medici patronage and of fifteenth century art - showing the Madonna and Child enthroned and accompanied by angels and saints in a unified composition (now Museo di San Marco). In 1446 Fra Angelico was called to Rome by Pope Eugene IV to decorate a chapel, taken over from Nicholas V, with scenes in the fresco from the lives of Saints Lawrence and Stephen. The master was assisted by Benozzo Gozzoli, who also worked with him during 1447 on scenes in the vault of the chapel of San Brixio in the cathedral of Orvieto; other fresco cycles in the Vatican are known to have been executed but are no longer preserved. Fra Angelico had returned to Florence by 1450, but was again called to Rome c. 1453 and died there in February 1455. 1

1. The literature on Fra Angelico is vast; instuctive summaries are found in Giovanni Urbani's encyclopedia entry of 1959 (as in Literature), and subsequently in those of Creighton Gilbert in Theologische Realenzyklopadie, II:5 (Berlin and New York, 1978), pp. 710-13, and Cristina Frulli in Quattocento 1987, II, p. 576. The several important studies that have appeared since Frulli's most recent reference (1984) are included in the bibliography found in William Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco (New Haven, 1993). See also now Carl Brandon Strehlke, "Fra Angelico Studies," in Painting and Illumination in Early Renaissance Florence: 1300-1450, by Laurence B. Kanter et al., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1994-95, pp. 25-42, and further, pp. 322-45.

Transcribed from: Wilson, Carolyn C., "Italian Paintings: XIV-XVI Centuries in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston," The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in association with Rice University Press and Merrell Holberton Publishers, London, 1996. pp. 128-129 with corresponding footnote on p. 142.

dkp, 1 Dec 2009

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