Fra Angelico – Universal History

Fra Angelico, 15th century Florentine painter. A contemporary of the Renaissance architects Alberti and Brunelleschi, his art still preserves, despite his incorporation of the new perspective, the imprint of the styles still prevailing in the Quattrocentosuch as Gothic and Byzantine. His best works fully show the tension between the stylization and hieraticism of the Gothic and the new emphasis on the human figure that humanism advocated.

Important events in the life of Fra Angelico

• 1400 Guido di Pietro was born in Vicchio, later Giovanni da Fiesole and, a century after his death, Blessed Angelico, as Giorgio Vasari names him in his famous book of biographies.
• 1420 He made the frescoes in the hospital of Santa Maria Novella, with his new name as a Dominican monk.
• 1439-1445 He painted the frescoes in the convent of San Marcos.
• 1447 In Orvieto, together with his disciple Benozzo Gozzoli, he painted two canvases for the city’s cathedral.
• 1455 He dies in Rome.

Vocational monk and mere illustrator of religious feeling, or innovator and bridge towards naturalism within the late Gothic, or genius of the primitivism of the Quattrocento: Rarely in the history of painting have the appreciation and judgments about an artist varied as much as in the case of Fra Angélico.
The painter and biographer of painters Vasari fixed his birth between 1387 and 1388; today it is known that he was born in 1400 in Vicchio, in a town near Florence, and that his name was Guido di Pietro. With this he signed his works until he was almost twenty years old. Between 1420 and 1422, after inscribing that name on a board that is now lost, he accepted a transcendental commission: to create the frescoes for the hospital of Santa Maria Novella. In the records Guido di Pietro has disappeared, and in his place appears what would be his religious name, Giovanni da Fiesole, a monk of the Dominican order. It was Vasari who vulgarized the name of Fra Angelico, contrasting his life with that of his contemporary and also a painter Fra Filippino Lippi, whose affiliation to the order was nothing more than a comfortable insurance that did not prevent him from enjoying the pleasures of the table. and the bed.
On the other hand, Guido da Pietro was chaste and reflective: he participated in the controversies and discussions about the reform of his order, and expressed his frank adherence to the lifestyle linked to medieval spirituality, little permeable to the then emerging humanist currents. It is a frequent paradox: his doctrinaire conservatism did not prevent him from rapidly incorporating the great innovations in the treatment of perspective coming from Brunelleschi’s architecture and the naturalism in the treatment of the figure that Masaccio had already anticipated in painting.
He had learned his trade from Lorenzo Monaco, a miniaturist of the Gothic school: he knew and practiced his technique so completely that the frescoes in the church of Santa Trinita in Florence were, until very recently, attributed to his teacher, when in Actually Fra Angelico was the architect of most of the work.

Painting The Last Judgment

Between 1433 —the year in which he painted his Madonna del Linaioli— and 1436, the Dominican monk experimented with rigorously defined perspectives: the degree to which the search for depth marks his style is very clear in the altar for the brotherhood of Santa Maria della Croce al Tempio, where, in addition, it includes iconographies of the medieval religious tradition together with portraits of his time, in an allegory to the continuity of Christianity from the time of the apostles and the fathers of the Church.
But Vasari’s Blessed was not a contemplative and the legend may believe in his chastity, but not in his withdrawal from the world: 1430 pint the annunciationone of the emblems of romantic criticism, and The Coronation of the Virgin, to later dedicate himself, from 1439 to 1445, to the group of frescoes in the Florentine monastery of San Marcos. These paintings are the basis of the widespread belief in the sanctity of the painter above his aesthetic gifts. It is true that the frescoes, executed by Fra Angelico and his disciples Benozzo Gozzoli, Zanobi Strozzi and Bautista Sanguigni, which occupy the corridors, the cloister and the monks’ cells, had an edifying and not an aesthetic function. But its realization obeys a trade and a vision of painting that goes beyond religious illustration.
At forty-five years old, Pope Eugene IV summoned the monk to Rome and forced him to establish permanent residence in the capital of Christianity. However, between June and September 1447, Fra Angelico traveled to Orvieto, where he painted, together with his student Benozzo Gozzoli, two canvases for the chapel of the city’s cathedral; fifty years later, Lucca Signorelli would complete the work.
Few works survive from his Roman period, such as the beautiful Scenes from the life of Saints Stephen and Lawrence; around 1450 he returned to Florence, probably with great joy, and became abbot of the monastery of San Domenico in Fiesole, a position he held until 1452. In this last stage of his life he produced a multitude of paintings now lost or ruined: a cycle of thirty-five paintings for the church of the Santísima Annunziata in Florence and an endless number of commissions that he passes on to his disciples. Only in the altarpiece by Bosco dei Frati, today in the Museum of San Marcos, is the mastery of his previous productions recognized. He died in Rome, after a journey made for unknown reasons, on February 18, 1455.. He was buried in the church of Santa Maria della Minerva and his tomb became, since the publication of Vasari’s biography, in the 16th century, a place of religious pilgrimage.