Painter of the Bible

Fra Angelico

Years1395–1455FromItalianWorks37

Life & work

Fra Angelico — born Guido di Pietro in the Mugello north of Florence, sometime in the 1390s, professed as a Dominican friar around 1420 and renamed Fra Giovanni — was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1982. The papal letter named him Patron of Catholic Artists. The works he left behind, made entirely within and for his religious order, justify both the title and the cause.

His life as a painter and his life as a friar were the same life. He began as a manuscript illuminator in Cortona and Fiesole, painted altarpieces for Dominican churches across Tuscany and Umbria, and in 1438 was given an entire convent to fresco. The cells, corridors, chapter house, cloister, and church of San Marco in Florence — rebuilt that decade by Cosimo de' Medici as a Dominican house under Antoninus, the future archbishop and saint — were decorated by Angelico and his workshop over roughly the next decade. Each cell received one fresco, sized to the bed and the window, designed for the friar who would say his hours in front of it. The Annunciation at the head of the dormitory stairs is the most famous; the Mocking of Christ in cell 7, the Transfiguration in cell 6, and the Coronation of the Virgin in cell 9 are not far behind.

Earlier works include the Linaioli Tabernacle (1433, painted for the Florentine flax-workers' guild and now in the Museo di San Marco), the Coronation of the Virgin altarpieces in the Louvre and the Uffizi, the Deposition for Santa Trinita in Florence, and the Armadio degli Argenti panels for the silver chest of Santissima Annunziata. In 1447 Pope Nicholas V called Angelico to Rome to fresco a small chapel in the Vatican Palace; the Cappella Niccolina, with its scenes from the lives of Saints Stephen and Lawrence, is the most polished work of his late career.

He died in Rome in 1455 and is buried in Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the Dominican basilica, where his tomb slab and effigy survive. Vasari, writing a century later, said simply that he had been good and never made a painting in anger.

Notable works in detail

The Annunciation (San Marco)

The Annunciation, painted in fresco around 1442–1443 in the upper corridor of the Convent of San Marco in Florence at the head of the dormitory stairs, is among the most reproduced and most beloved Annunciations in the entire history of Christian art. Fra Angelico stages the moment with a near-perfect bilateral symmetry: the angel Gabriel kneels in profile on the left under a slender Renaissance loggia, the Virgin sits in profile on the right in a tiny enclosed cell, the wall behind them painted in soft chromatic gradations of pale rose and grey. There is no swirling drapery, no gold-ground celestial host, no architectural elaboration beyond the loggia and the cell. The fresco was painted for the Dominican friars who lived in the convent — Fra Angelico was a friar at San Marco himself — and the inscription painted in tempera below the scene exhorts the friars to greet the Virgin every time they passed it on the stairs. The fresco was conserved most recently in 1983 and remains in its original location.

The Annunciation (Cortona)

The Annunciation of Cortona, painted around 1434 for the Dominican church of San Domenico in Cortona — the small Tuscan hill town where Fra Angelico spent several years in his early career — is the principal Annunciation altarpiece of his pre-San-Marco period and the closest he ever came to the older Sienese tradition. The composition shows Gabriel kneeling on the left under a Renaissance loggia, Mary seated on the right in profile, and a small cluster of additional scenes painted into the predella below: the Marriage of the Virgin, the Visitation, the Adoration of the Magi, the Presentation in the Temple, and the Death of the Virgin. The chromatic palette is more saturated than the later San Marco fresco — deep ultramarine, gold, and crimson — and the angel's wings are rendered in jewel-bright peacock colors. The painting was moved from San Domenico to the Diocesan Museum of Cortona in the late nineteenth century and is now the supreme treasure of the museum's small but important collection of Tuscan Quattrocento painting.

The Last Judgement

The Last Judgement, painted in tempera on a horizontal wood panel around 1432 and now in the Museo di San Marco in Florence, is among the great surviving Italian Quattrocento treatments of the eschatological subject. The composition is divided into three roughly equal horizontal zones: at the top, Christ enthroned in glory inside a large mandorla, attended by the apostles seated in two long curving rows; in the middle band, the resurrected dead emerging from open graves arranged in two long rows that converge on the central axis; and below, the elect on Christ's right being led toward heaven by angels in a serene procession of dance-like movement, while the damned on his left tumble into a graphic, multi-tiered hell of devils and torments. The painting was commissioned for the Camaldolese church of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence and remained there until the suppression of the convents in the early nineteenth century, when it entered the new museum at San Marco where Fra Angelico had himself been a friar.

The Coronation of the Virgin

The Coronation of the Virgin, painted around 1434 and now in the Louvre, is one of two major large-format treatments of the subject Fra Angelico produced — the other, smaller and slightly later, hangs in the Uffizi. The composition shows Christ crowning his mother Queen of Heaven on a flight of pale marble steps in an open architectural setting; the celestial court — angels musicians, dancing seraphim, ranked male and female saints — fans out on either side of the central pair in a gradient of jewel-bright rose, ultramarine, and gold. The figure of the Virgin kneels in profile with her hands folded, the figure of Christ stands behind her in a posture combining tenderness and ceremony. The painting was commissioned for the Dominican church of San Domenico in Fiesole, where Fra Angelico had taken his vows; it was removed during the Napoleonic occupation of Italy and entered the Louvre's collection in the early nineteenth century where it remains.

The Deposition from the Cross (Santa Trinita)

The Deposition from the Cross, painted in tempera between roughly 1432 and 1434 for the Strozzi Chapel in the Florentine church of Santa Trinita and now in the Museo di San Marco, is among the supreme Italian Quattrocento treatments of the subject. The composition follows a strict horizontal symmetry: the body of Christ has been lowered from the cross and is being supported in the center by the women, while ladders propped against the cross extend up to the upper register where two attendants are still detaching the nails. The chromatic palette is unusually pale — soft pinks, white, the palest rose — that gives the entire scene the spectral quality of a vision rather than a violent action. Fra Angelico took over the commission after the older painter Lorenzo Monaco died in 1424 leaving the work unfinished; he completed the panel in his early-mature manner, and the painting remains the finest example of his ability to compose a many-figured narrative scene with the calm pictorial restraint that defined his Florentine style.