Angelico, Blessed (Fra Angelico)

ANGELICO, "BLESSED.". - Guido or Guidolino di Pietro, b. at Vicchio di Mugello in 1387 or 1388, d. at Rome on 17 February 1455, entered in 1407 the Dominican convent of Fiesole together with his elder brother (who became Fra Benedetto), with whom, the following year, he pronounced his vows in S. Domenico at Cortona, taking the name Fra Giovanni. The Dominicans of Fiesole, caught up in the events of the Church's schism, had to take refuge (1409) at Foligno, were then probably at Cortona and finally regained possession of their seat (1418). Fra Giovanni, who is presumed to have followed the community, after its return to Fiesole remained constantly in his own convent, apart from absences for work. But his presence in Rome in 1447 is certain, whither he was called to paint the chapel of the Sacrament in the Vatican, apparently until 1449, in which year he had already begun, from the previous year, the pictorial decoration of the Pope's "study," that is, the chapel of Nicholas V. In 1447 (11 June) the painter also undertook to adorn the chapel of S. Brizio in the cathedral of Orvieto, a labour in which he was helped by three disciples, among them Gozzoli, who appears in that city two years later (12 June 1449); then the work was interrupted. From 1450 to 1453 the friar was prior of the convent of Fiesole and meanwhile (1452) began negotiations to paint the high chapel of the cathedral of Prato, a work then entrusted to Fra Filippo Lippi. Immediately afterwards it is presumable that the master stayed again in Rome in the convent of S. Maria della Minerva, where he died and has a venerated burial in the church of the same name. The tombstone is still preserved there, and as for the epitaph it seems it should be attributed to Lorenzo Valla (cf. M. Armellini, Le chiese di Roma dal sec. IV al XIX, ed. C. Cecchelli, Rome 1942, pp. 1361-62).

A light of legend surrounds the figure of Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, popularly known as the "Blessed A." although the Church does not number him among its blessed; a legend echoed by Vasari, who presents the artist in prayer before setting himself to paint, or indeed in tears when he traces the features of the Saviour. Supposed by some to be always a participant in the Gothic world, he is seen by others, agnostically, as an artist of transition; and he was unhappily compared during his own century to Giotto and Cimabue (Fra Domenico da Corella) or contrasted, for his manner "vezoso et divoto et ornato molto," with Masaccio (Landino). Nor are those in the right who in the 19th century, extolling on Vasari's lines the mysticism of A., wish to make him the continuer of the "empirical Giottesque method" in chiaroscuro (Aleardi) or who compare his poetic figurative creations to the sublime visions of Dante in the Paradiso (Father Marchese). The fertile pictorial work proves how the painter belongs entirely to his time, how, that is, starting from the late Gothic, availing himself of a living and up-to-date experience, he is fully aware of the novelties of the Renaissance, from the science of perspective to luminous and formal unity, an experience that is for A. the means to give life to an elevated figurative world that does not conflict, in its spirituality, with the novus ordo. And by now modern criticism places the great master within the sphere of the Renaissance.

A. has his own closely knit development that moves from miniaturistic modes reflected in his own pictorial manner, smooth, limpid, vibrant in colour, luminous and fine, which he does not abandon even when he paints on walls, preferring the dry technique, in place of fresco, or the mixed one. And it is likely that the young Dominican frequented, at the Camaldolese of the monastery of the Angeli, Lorenzo Monaco, that is, the greatest painter Florence had at the beginning of the Quattrocento on the path of the Gothic; which is confirmed by the resonances of the latter in our artist. A certain contact is offered us by the Sunday diurnal no. 3 of the Laurentian library, written in 1409, in which, opposite the gaudy initials due to the school of the Angeli and certain impassioned and thorny prophets that reveal Lorenzo Monaco and a disciple of his, some compositions with the Resurrection and other subjects, among them the Dance of David, have an idealized and serene sense of beauty close to that of Ghiberti of the second door, within the flowing linear harmonies derived from the Camaldolese monk, joined to fascinating archaisms and to a clear, luminous and precious range, characteristic of A. If the latter left the convent of Fiesole precisely in 1409, he could also attend to such a labour in his cell at Foligno. But in the years spent far from Florence — entirely obscure for knowledge of his art — he could not orient himself toward the Renaissance, which was making its first figurative attempts with Donatello. Thus a panel admired in the Museum of S. Marco — the Museum of A. — referable to ca. 1418, with the Madonna of the somewhat wooden profile, still bears the mark, despite its static three-dimensional posing, in the sinuous and calligraphic contours of the mantle, of the Gothic modes of Lorenzo Monaco, as the bending of the Child's body confirms, although the fervent asceticism of the Camaldolese has disappeared in the calm candour of the melancholy Virgin and in the virile type of the little Jesus of an always Ghibertian idealization. The passage through Florence of Gentile da Fabriano turns A. for a moment toward decorative sumptuousness proper to the northern world (Madonna of the Stroganoff Collection in Leningrad), followed by light forms of extreme delicacy (Madonna Van Beuningen in Rotterdam), the which prepare us to appreciate the abstract idealism of works such as the Virgin among Saints of the Vatican Pinacoteca, the Madonna della Stella and the small tabernacle with the Annunciation and the Adoration of the Magi in the Museum of S. Marco, of exterior splendor and of crisp forms placed with sure order in the space that makes one think of the teaching of Masaccio. The A. thus inserts himself into the Renaissance, and his subsequent overabundant activity shows compositional textures subordinated to the perspectival vision that enhances the static quality of the images, from the triptych of S. Domenico of Fiesole (transformed into an altarpiece by Lorenzo di Credi and partly repainted) and from the small altarpiece with the Madonna, the Child and Angels in the Staedel Museum of Frankfurt, down to the Coronation and the Last Judgment of the Museum of S. Marco, where even in two memorable predella pieces, the Marriage and the Death of the Virgin, there appear structural echoes of the new order that the A. bends to his aspirations as a religious painter. Following the various stages of his development, in the gigantic Madonna dei Linaioli (1433) he monumentally exalts the solemn austerity of the Mother of God and the dominion of the Son, standing, like a small archaic idol in a revival of the Tuscan "maestà" of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. And, while the saints of the side panels too plainly reveal, in the enlarging of the forms, the effort toward the search for the monumental, the three scenes of the predella give substance to figures of broader breath in the defined space of the Renaissance. In them emerges the collaboration of the assistants who rarely, in the copious activity of the master, reveal their personal accents, remaining almost always reabsorbed into the pictorial language of Fra Giovanni; of whom a pure product referable to this moment is the Imposition of the Name on the Baptist (earlier than 1435) in the Museum of San Marco, which arranges solid and noble figures within the enclosure of a suburban villa, dominated by a beautiful Renaissance door. This powerful squaring is observed in the Deposition formerly in S. Trinita, devoid of all pathetic excess and with a unified luminosity that gives a glassy sheen even to the mountainous landscape where a city on a slope - a fantastical evocation of Cortona - varies with multicolored houses, worthy of the fabled Paolo Uccello. Even if in this work there is the portrait of Michelozzo, as Milanesi suggests, the man as well as the setting are interpreted through a poetic vision that turns everything to abstraction. The same happens in the enchanting altarpiece of the Gesù at Cortona with the Annunciation within the sure perspective of a Renaissance portico on a meadow studded with flowers, a painting famous also for the predella where the episode of the Visitation has as its background a view from life with a strip of Lake Trasimeno and Castiglion del Lago, of an exceptionally tonal chromatism for A., which suggests a possible intervention by the young Piero della Francesca. In the polyptychs of S. Domenico at Cortona and in the Pinacoteca of Perugia the figures constrained within precise limits against the golden background take on a more restrained and less volumetric appearance. But the damaged altarpiece (c. 1438-40) of S. Marco in Florence, in presenting to us the Sacra conversazione typical of the Renaissance, sets up constructive groups receding in space, at the sides of the impeccable and precious throne that has become an altar to the gentle central group. The landscape like an Eden, thick with cypresses, pines, palm trees with a placid bluish lake, mirror of the sky, and the deep horizon without atmosphere idealizes the real and adapts it to those silent or subdued saints, who in the geometric rigor of the new science find likewise an abstractness that becomes a surpassing of human passion, supreme quiet of the spirit. Among the predellas, a piece that belonged to this altarpiece (two others are in the Museo di S. Marco, three in that of Munich, one in the Louvre and one in the Keller collection in New York): the Martyrdom of Sts. Cosmas and Damian in the Dublin Gallery bears creatures who know nothing of evil, even if disguised as executioners, and are sublimated by the nobility of color that plays clear and joyful, a reflection of the soul of the artist who in the regular embedding of a Florentine square and in the figures constructed chromatically he appears, above all, as an enlightened forerunner. But in the convent of S. Marco, already belonging to the Salvestrini monks, renovated (from 1437 to about 1443), and adorned through the patronage of Cosimo the Elder de' Medici on a design by Michelozzo and granted to the Dominicans, amid the simple Renaissance architectures, A. unfolds an entire pictorial poem (from 1438 to 1445 and beyond). The paintings of the cloister with Christ on the sarcophagus, Jesus the Pilgrim, Dominican Saints, the gentle Crucifix, a subject particularly dear to the painter, turned toward St. Dominic kneeling at the foot of the cross, are all devout images, always nobly idealized. The great Crucifix of the chapter hall presents, together with the figures of Golgotha, a host of martyrs and Fathers of the Church all softly imploring for men, according to a concept insisted upon by Fra Giovanni Dominici in his "Book of the Love of Charity"; and below are half-figures of saints and blesseds of the Order. The fresco is above all a bold but composed and cold attempt on the part of A., not without the help of his disciples, to engage himself on a vast wall (the red preparation of the background, from which the ultramarine blue has fallen away, has led a hasty and superficial illustrator to dramatize the unusual color of that sky!) in the service of Dominican culture. We find A., on the other hand, more intimate and more true on the narrow walls of the cells which, originally hidden from the gaze of the public, reveal the painter's pious joy in giving life — in an iconography often renewed by him — to the chaste images of his empyrean, solely to move his brethren to religious thoughts. It is enough to linger among the many compositions, among which the Transfiguration, the Resurrection and the Coronation stand out, before the Annunciation in the cell of St. Peter Martyr, certainly the highest of the others, more famous, that issued after the one at Cortona from A.'s workshop, among them the one in the same corridor of the convent of S. Marco. In the bare, whitewashed setting the Angel, unusually static, and the maiden Virgin are identified in the two most delicate chromatic notes of the former's pink-violet tunic and the latter's soft light pink, flooded with diffused light rationally coming from the left, where the timid habit of a monk's robe, whose whiteness blends with that of the walls, almost vanishes from our sight. In the cells of S. Marco the search for pure forms accompanies every fresco, even if at times the rhythm there becomes more complicated and if beside A.'s light hand there sometimes appears the heavy one of the pupils, such as Strozzi and Gozzoli, who translate his drawings. Mention should now be made, because it is slightly later than this pictorial decoration, of an altarpiece coming from the chapel of the Compagnia del Tempio, with the Lamentation of Christ, of a rhythm so much more compact and concluded than that of the well-known panel by Giottino in the Uffizi, from which it derives, that, turning the composition from vertical to horizontal, it finds a place in a landscape broadly realized, in broad outlines, livid and leaden, perhaps reminiscent of Rome, whose depth and whose silence are heightened by the boundless walls of that uninhabited Jerusalem. Not even here does movement seethe and drama explode: the whole has a sense of stasis and of concentrated contemplation. The later doors of the cupboards (1448 and beyond) of the Santissima Annunziata with 35 stories, now in the Museum of S. Marco, with more articulated and freer figures, owing to the presence of various collaborators among whom Baldovinetti, Strozzi and Gozzoli are recognizable, appear somewhat discontinuous but of a clear and swift narrative and of a lively tone, even if at times discordant in their luminous colors. For A. is now the head of a school that turns his art, always nourished by poetry, toward the prosaic, even in drawings such as the David of the British Museum in London, of so subtle and delicate a linearism. Despite the collaboration, the two vault webs of the cathedral of Orvieto with Christ the Judge among angels and the choir of the prophets preserve in their entirety his high tone. And it is to the master's credit that he led from the glory of the altarpieces and from the enclosure of the monastic cells and cloisters his creatures into the Niccoline Chapel in the Vatican, gathering them, in narrating the deeds of St. Lawrence and St. Stephen, into visions of full monumental power, which assume the solemn value of "history," at least in some compositions, such as the one where Lawrence is consecrated deacon, despite certain details of inferior quality, of a nobility certainly noted by Melozzo da Forlì for his fresco with Sixtus IV and Platina; and the other with the Almsgiving of the Saint, in which every illustrative and realistic aspect is surpassed in those beggars as though touched by divine grace, which purifies them and illuminates them with inner light. One of the Blessed's points of arrival thus coincides with the aim of infusing into men, cleansed of sin, the serenity of the Madonnas and the Saints, caressed by a brush guided by a spirit that dreams of a beautiful and pure otherworldly world. And that research is sterile which seeks to explain A.'s art through literary sources (Rio, Kraus, Broussolle) or more particularly through Fra Giovanni Dominici (Maione). Pious readings, and also the writings of the inflamed Dominican orator, may have deepened the great faith and religious culture of our artist and even inspired, as we have seen, some of his compositions. However, A. had the gift of too high an artistic personality for the intimate essence of his spiritual poetic language to be able to depend on others; in particular his serene and contemplative temperament would not allow comparisons with the exuberant and militant one of Dominici. The Christian humility that makes A. a friend of the poor, the purity that keeps him from thinking of and seeing evil, are the moral precondition of his pictorial work. Which was not indifferent, as has been observed (Rothes), to the earthly world that, as we have seen, A. investigated by turning his keen gaze outside the cloister; while, on the other hand, one should not insist too much, as an attentive monographer does (Langton Douglas), on the influence of antiquity and of nature, since his art reveals, as has been well said, the immanence of God. By re-creating the sensible in an abstract world created for men of faith, A. personifies better than anyone else in painting the religious aspect of that spiritual unity which is the Renaissance. Yet his historical importance is also great. Besides the collaborators, disciples and followers whom we encounter along his long path (Battista Sanguigni, Zanobi Strozzi, Domenico di Michelino, Andrea di Giusto, Giovanni di Consalvo, Pesellino, Benozzo Gozzoli, the Umbrians, etc.), we can say that the Florentine painters between 1440 and 1450 in particular, and those who came to Florence at that time, felt the fascination of his art, as Jean Fouquet felt it in Rome; an art which towers most high like the moral figure of the man. - Vedi Tavy. CVII-CX.

95; G. Pacchioni, Gli ultimi anni del B. A., ibid., 12 (1909), pp. 1-14; id., Gli inizi artist. di B. Gozzoli, ibid., 12 (1910), pp. 423-42; A. M. Ciaranfi, Lorenzo Monaco miniatore, ibid., 25 [nuova serie, 3] (1932), pp. 285-317 e 379-90; R. Longhi, Un dipinto dell'A. a Livorno, in Pinacotheca, 1928, pp. 155-159; id., Fatti di Masolino e di Masaccio, in La Critica d'Arte, fasc. 25-26, parte 2ª (1940), pp. 145-91; G. C. Argan, La tradizione critica intorno all'A., in Saggi e sezioni sull'arte socca dell'Istituto B. A. di Studi per l'arte socca, Roma 1944, pp. 65-77. - Per l'A. disegnatore: B. Berenson, The drawings of Florentine Painters, amplif. ed., Chicago, Ill., 1938.

Mario Salmi