“Masterpieces in Colour” Series

Others in Preparation.

Fra ANGELICO

[vii]

CONTENTS

[ix]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[11]

I
INTRODUCTION

ROUND the peaceful life and delicately
imaginative work of Guido da Vicchio,
the Florentine artist who is known to the
world at large as Fra Angelico, critics and
laymen continue to wage a fierce controversy.[12]
While few are heard to deny the
merit of the artist’s exquisite achievement, it
is hard to find, even among those who are interested
in early Florentine religion and art,
men who can agree about Fra Angelico’s
positions between the monastery and the
studio. “He was a man with a beautiful
mind,” says one; “a light of the Church, a
saint by temperament, and he chanced to be
a painter.” “You are entirely wrong,” says
the supporter of the opposing theory; “he
was a Heaven-sent artist who chanced to
take the vows.”

So the schools of art and theology rage
furiously together, after the fashion of the
two men who approached a statue from
opposite sides and quarrelled because one
said that the shield carried by the bronze
figure was made of gold, and the other said
it was made of silver. Incensed by each[14]
other’s obstinacy they drew swords and
fought until they both fell helpless to the
ground, only to be assured by a third
traveller, who chanced to pass by, that the
shield had gold on one side and silver on
the other.

Standing well apart from the enthusiasts
of both sides, the average man sees that Fra
Angelico was an artist of remarkable attainments
and at the same time a devout, God-fearing
friar, who seems to have deserved
a great part at least of the praise he received
from the honeyed pen of Giorgio Vasari.
Naturally enough the modern artist finds
in Fra Angelico, or “Beato” Angelico as
he is sometimes called, one of the most
interesting painters of the fifteenth century,
and he does not bother about the fact that
his hero chanced to be a Dominican brother.
Very devout Catholics, on the other hand,[16]
will approach Fra Angelico’s work on the
literary side, and will be profoundly conscious
of the fact that he was the first great artist
of Italy who, realising the maternity of the
Madonna, represented her as a mother full
of human affection, and the Holy Child as
a beautiful baby boy. It is the painter’s
abiding claim to our regard that he brought
life to his walls and panels, that they present
the living, palpitating sentiment of men and
women and children, that he painted for us
the flowers that blossomed round him and
the countryside through which he wandered
in his hours of ease. The technical achievement,
the gradual but steady improvement
in dealing with composition and masses
of colour, the extraordinary change from
the stiff early figures to the supple ones of
the later years, the splendid growth of the
artistic sense, from all these things the[17]
devotee turns aside. He is not unconscious
of the change, for the results achieved by
the painter account for the spectator’s
riper and fuller appreciation, but he cannot
analyse it. Of far more moment to him is
the thought that all Fra Angelico’s life and
art were given to the service of the Church,
that he laboured without ceasing to present
the Gospel stories in the most attractive
form, despising the material rewards that
awaited such achievements as his. Ease,
luxury and the praise of the world at large
the Dominican dismissed with fine indifference,
believing that his reward would come
when his task was ended, and the work of
his hands should praise him in the gates.
“Here,” his orthodox latter-day admirers
say, “is the man of noble convictions and
pure life, who stood for all that was best
in religion. As he chanced to have the[18]
gifts of a painter, he used those gifts to
develop his mission. Painting with him
was no more than a means to an end,
and that end was the glorification of God.”
The dispute must needs be endless; for
we cannot see through the four centuries
that separate us from the artist, and every
man takes from a picture some echo of
what he brought to it.

In sober truth the matter is of far less
importance than the makers of controversy
imagine. It should suffice both parties to
agree that Fra Angelico was a great painter
and a great man, that his association with
the Church afforded him the opportunity of
leaving behind him work that has a spiritual
as well as artistic quality. His altar-pieces
and frescoes seem to breathe the serene
atmosphere of an age of faith; they tell of
a quiet retired life amid surroundings that[19]
remain unrivalled to-day, even though our
horizon is widened and we know the New
World as well as the Old.

There are examples of the painter’s art
in the National Gallery and in the Louvre,
in Rome and in Perugia; but Florence holds
by far the greatest number. In Florence
we find the series painted to decorate the
“Silver Press” of the Annunziata, and more
than a dozen other works of importance.
The Uffizi guards the famous “Madonna
dei Linajuoli” and the “Coronation of the
Virgin” from Santa Maria Nuova. The
Convent of San Marco, to which the Brotherhood
of San Dominico went in 1346 from
Fiesole, holds the famous frescoes in cloister,
chapter-house, and cells, and offers an illuminating
guide to the painter’s ideals and
intentions, in work that is the ripe product
of middle age. So it is to Florence that one[20]
must go to study the painter, though there
are one or two works from his hands in
Fiesole across the valley, while the collection
in Perugia is not to be overlooked, and Rome
holds some of the best work of the artist’s
hand, painted in the closing years. For
all the surging waves of tourists that break
upon Florence, month in, month out, filling
streets and galleries with discordant noises,
and giving them an air of unrest strangely
out of keeping with their traditional aspect,
the city preserves sufficient of its old-time
character to enable the student to study Fra
Angelico’s pictures in an atmosphere that
would not have been altogether repugnant
to the artist himself. Save in seasons when
the city is full to overflowing the Convent
of San Marco receives few visitors, while in
the Academy and at the Uffizi there are so
many expressions of a more flamboyant art[21]
that there is seldom any lack of space round
the panels Angelico painted.

There are some days when San Marco
is altogether free from visitors, and then the
frescoed cells, through which the great white
glare of the day steals softly and subdued,
seem to be waiting for the devotees who
will return no more, and one looks anxiously
to cloisters, and garden and chapter-house
for some signs of the life that rose so far
above the varied emptiness of our own.

II
THE PAINTER’S EARLY DAYS

When Guido da Vicchio was born in
the little fortified town from which he takes
his name, the town that looks out upon
the Apennines on the North and West, and
towards Monte Giovo on the South, the[22]
Medici family was just beginning to raise its
head in Florence. Salvestro di Medici had
originated the “Tumult of the Ciompi”; the
era of democratic government in the city
was drawing to a close. Beyond the boundaries
of Florence the various states into
which Italy was divided were quarrelling
violently among themselves. The throne
of St. Peter was rent by schism, Pope
and anti-Pope were striving one against the
other in fashion that was amazing and
calculated to bring the Papal power into
permanent disrepute. It was a period of
uncertainty and unrest, prolific in saints
and sinners, voluptuaries and ascetics. No
student of history will need to be reminded
that it is to periods such as this that the
world has learned to look for its remarkable
men.

Doubtless some echo of the surrounding[24]
strife penetrated beyond the walls of Vicchio
when Guido was a little boy, for he lived
in a fortified town built for purposes of
war. It is not unreasonable to suppose
that he may have seen enough of the stress
and strife peculiar to the age to have turned
his thoughts to other things. If a lad, born
with a peaceable and affectionate disposition,
be brought into contact with violence
at an early age, his peaceful tendencies will
be strengthened, he will avoid all sources
and scenes of strife. We know nothing of
the painter’s boyhood, but, looking round
at the conditions prevailing in Florence, it
seems more than likely that the years were
not quite restful.

In the absence of authentic information
one may do no more than suggest that,
when the lad was newly in his teens, he
served in the studio of some local painter[26]
and discovered his own talent. Attempts
have been made to give the teacher a name
and a history, but these efforts, for all that
they are interesting, lack authenticity. Far
away in Florence the first faint light of the
Revival of Learning was shining upon the
more intelligent partisans of all the jarring
factions. The claims of the religious life
were being put forward with extraordinary
fervour and ability by a great teacher and
preacher, John the Dominican, who appears
to have reformed the somewhat lax rules of
his order. We are told that he travelled on
foot from town to town after the fashion of
his time, calling upon sinners to repent, and
summoning to join the brotherhood all those
who regarded life as a dangerous and uncertain
road to a greater and nobler future.
Clerics looked askance at the signs of the
times, for although art and literature were[27]
coming into favour, although Florence was
becoming the centre of a great humanist
movement, the change was associated with
a recrudescence of pagan luxury and vices
that boded ill for the maintenance of moral
law.

Perhaps John the Dominican preached
in Vicchio, perhaps Guido and his younger
brother Benedetto heard him elsewhere, but
wherever the message was delivered it
went home, for it is recorded that in the
year 1407, when Fra Angelico would have
been just twenty years old, he and Benedetto
travelled to the Dominican Convent
on the hillside at Fiesole and applied for
admission to the order. The brothers were
welcomed and sent to serve their novitiate
at Cortona, where some of Fra Angelico’s
earliest known work was painted. They
returned to Fiesole in the following year,[28]
but the Dominican establishment there was
soon broken up because the Florentines had
acknowledged Alexander V. as Pope, and
the Dominican Brotherhood supported his
opponent, Gregory XI. Foligno and Cortona
were visited in turn. In the former city the
Church of the Dominicans remains to-day;
and so the brethren sought peace beyond
Fiesole, until in 1418 the Council of Constance
healed the wounds of Mother Church. Then
Pope Martin V. came to live in Florence,
where John XXIII. paid him obeisance, and
the Dominican friars returned to their hillside
home beyond the city, that was then,
according to the historian Bisticci, “in a
most blissful state, abounding in excellent
men in every faculty, and full of admirable
citizens.”

And now Fra Angelico, as he must be
called in future, settled down to his first[29]
important work. He had learned as much
as his associates could teach him, and had
gathered sufficient strength of purpose, intelligence
and judgment, to enable him to
deal with the problems of his art as he
thought best. It may be said that Fra
Angelico built the bridge by which mediæval
art travelled into the country of the Renaissance.
Indeed, he did more than this, for
having built the bridge, he boldly passed over
it in the last years of his life. We can see
in his work the unmistakable marks of the
years of his labour. He started out equipped
with the heavy burden of all the conventions
of mediævalism. Against that drawback he
could set independence of thought, and a
goodly measure of that Florentine restlessness
that led men to express themselves
in every art-form known to the world. No
Florentine artist of the Quattrocento held[30]
that painting was enough if he could add
sculpture to it, or that sculpture would serve
if architecture could be added to that. Had
there been any other form of art-expression
to their hands, the Florentines would have
used it, because they were as men who seek
to speak in many languages. This restlessness,
this prodigality of effort, was to find
its final expression in Leonardo da Vinci,
who entered the world as the Dominican
friar was leaving it.

In the early days Fra Angelico must have
been a miniaturist. Vasari speaks of him
as being pre-eminent as painter, miniaturist,
and religious man, and the painting of miniatures
cramped the painter’s style in fashion
that detracts from the merits of the earlier
pictures, but of course Fra Angelico is by
no means the only artist to whom miniature
painting has been a pitfall.

[31]
Professor Langton Douglas has pointed
out, in his admirable and exhaustive work
on Fra Angelico, that the artist was profoundly
influenced by the great painters and
architects of his time, and has even used
this undisputed fact as an aid to ascertain
the approximate date of certain pictures.
We can hardly wonder that the influence
should be felt by a sensitive artist, who responded
readily to outside forces, when we
consider the quality of the work that sculpture
and architecture were giving to the
world in those early days of the Quattrocento.
Men of genius dominated every path
in life and Florence held far more than a
fair share of them.

Among the works belonging to the years
before Fra Angelico went to San Marco,
and painted the frescoes that stand for his
middle period at its best, are the Altar-piece[32]
at Cortona, “The Annunciation” and “The
Last Judgment,” in the Academy of Florence,
and the famous “Madonna da Linajuoli,”
with its twelve angels playing divers
musical instruments on the frame round
the central panel. These angels have made
the Madonna of the Flax-workers the best
known of all the painter’s works. So long
the delight of the public eye they are very
harshly criticised to-day, and not without
reason, for doubtless they are flat and stiff
productions enough. But they have a certain
naïve beauty of their own, and because
they have done more than work of
far greater merit to spread the fame of Fra
Angelico, because they have been the source
of great delight to countless people despised
and rejected of art critics, it has seemed
reasonable to present some of them in this
little volume, side by side with those more[34]
important works of the master to which
so many artists of the Renaissance are indebted.
We may rest assured that to the
painter the angels were very real angels
indeed, the best that his art and devotion
could express.

Other important works of this first period,
which may be taken to range from 1407 to
1435, are the altar-pieces known as the
Madonna of Cortona, the Madonna of
Perugia, and the Madonna of the Annelena,
the last-named being in the Academy at
Florence. Critics and artists can divide the
painter’s life into four or more divisions
expressed to them by changes in his style;
but a simpler division suffices here.

Looking at Fra Angelico with eyes that
the nineteenth century has trained, we speak
of this early work as of less importance
than what followed, but in so doing it is[36]
quite easy to speak or write as several of
his critics have done in very unreasonable
fashion. Certainly the artist, who in the last
years of his life painted the picture of St.
Lorenzo distributing alms, and the scenes
in the life of St. Stephen, has travelled
very far from the painter of the “Last
Judgment” that may be seen in Florence;
but, even in the early days of Cortona, Fra
Angelico was a modern of the moderns.
He was a man who worked and thought far
in advance of his times, who had the wide
outlook that we have learned to associate
with all the Florentine artists of the Quattrocento,
and he left the boundaries of the
painter’s art far wider than he found them.
Doubtless many of his contemporaries found
his work daring and even immoral in so far
as it departed from the traditions that had
satisfied his predecessors. He had an[37] individuality
that expressed itself in fashion
unmistakable before he was thirty years
of age, and developed steadily down to the
last year of his life. Divorced by his calling
from the cares and joys of other men, he
responded with delight to the larger and
more general aspects of life. Fra Angelico
had a keen and eager eye for natural beauty;
he seems to have gone to the countryside
for all the inspiration that remained to seek
when the sacred writings were laid aside.
The maternal aspect with which he endowed
the Madonna, who had hitherto been as stiff
and formless as though carved out of wood,
testifies to the artist’s recognition of maternity
as he saw it among the simple peasants
his order served. He restored humanity to
Mother and Child. The child-like Christ,
no longer a doll but a real bambino, tells
us how deeply the painter entered into the[38]
spirit of a life that the rules of his order
forbade him to share. Just as some women
who do not marry seem to keep for the
world at large the measure of loving sympathy
that would have been concentrated
upon their children; so this painter monk,
who had paid his vows to poverty, chastity,
and obedience, could express upon his canvas
the affection and the sentiment that would
have been bestowed under other circumstances
upon a chosen helpmate. Lacking
the joys of healthy domesticity he turned to
Nature with a loving eye and an intelligence
that cannot be over-estimated and, if he
knew hours wherein, manlike, he mourned
for the life forbidden, the consolation was
at hand. The Earth Mother consoled him.
In his earliest canvases he expresses his
love of flowers, the love of a child for the
sights that make the earliest appeal to our[40]
sense of beauty. His angels are set in
flowering fields, they carry blossoms that
bloom in the fields beyond Cortona, and upon
the hillside of Fiesole. Clearly the painter
saw Paradise around him. Roses and pinks
seem to be his favourite flowers, he paints
them with a loving care, knowing them
in bud and in full leaf and, just as he went
to Nature for the decorative side of his art,
so in a way he may be said to have gone
to Nature in her brightest and most joyous
moods for his colours. His palette seems
to have borrowed its glory from the rainbow—the
gold, the green, the blue, and the
red are surely as bright and clear in his
pictures as they are in the great and gleaming
arch that Easterns call in their own
picturesque fashion “The Bride of the Rain.”

In all his work Fra Angelico showed
himself an innovator, a man who, in thinking[42]
for himself, would not allow his own clear
vision to be obscured by the conventions
that bound men of smaller mentality and
less significant achievement. At the same
time he was very observant of the progress
of his peers, particularly in architecture,
and students of this branch of art cannot
fail to notice his response to the developments
brought about by Michelozzo and
Brunelleschi. Even in the first period of
his art he would have seemed a daring
innovator to his contemporaries for, all
unconsciously he was taking his share in
shaping the great Renaissance movement
that left so many timid souls outside the
radius of its illumination.

In the early days he approached the
human body with some diffidence, and
though a greater courage in this regard is
the keynote of Renaissance painting, the[43]
earlier timidity is hardly to be wondered
at when we consider the attitude of the
religious houses towards humanity in its
physical aspect, and how necessary it was
to avoid anything approaching sensuous
imagery throughout that anxious period of
transition. As he grew older and more
confident of his powers, Fra Angelico seems
to have freed himself from some of the
restrictions that beset an artist who is
also a religious. He, too, learned to glorify
the human form.

His love for Nature remained constant
throughout all the years of his life; he was
sufficiently daring to introduce real landscape
into his pictures, and by so doing,
to become one of the fathers of landscape
painting. His angels have a setting in the
Italy he knew best, the flowers that strew
their paths are those he may have gathered[44]
in the convent garden; for even his vivid
and exalted imagination could not create
aught more beautiful than those that grew
so freely and wild by the wayside, or were
tended by his brethren in San Marco.

We find throughout the pictures a suggestion
that the life of the artist was a serene
and tranquil one that, while he was actively
concerned with things of art throughout
the district he knew best, he was sheltered
by the house of the brotherhood from the
tumult and turmoil that beset Fiesole,
Cortona, and Foligno in the days of his
youth. When he went to San Marco in
Florence, where his most enduring memorial
remains to this day, Fra Angelico was a
man of experience and an independence so
far in advance of his time, that some of
the work he had accomplished comes to
us to-day with a suggestion of absolute[45]
modernity in thought if not in treatment.
No beauty that our more sophisticated age
can reveal to us had passed him by, he
paints Nature as Milton painted it when
he wrote the “Masque of Comus” and
“l’Allegro.” And this manner of painting, so
different from that of men who mix themselves
with the world and surrender to its
fascinations, is the painting that endures.

III
IN SAN MARCO

It was in 1435, and Fra Angelico was
approaching his fiftieth year, when the
brotherhood of San Dominico quitted their
convent in Fiesole and went to find a new
home in Florence. With the turn of the
year they left a temporary resting-place in
San Giorgio Oltr’ Arno and went into the[46]
ruined monastery of San Marco. This house
appears to have belonged to the brotherhood
of San Silvestro whose behaviour had
been quite fitted to the fifteenth century in
Florence, but was not altogether creditable
to a religious house. Pope Eugenius IV.,
anxious to purify all the religious houses,
gave San Marco to the Dominicans with
the consent of Cosimo di Medici, and a
very poor gift it was at the time, for the
dormitory had been destroyed by fire, and
hastily-made wooden cabins could not keep
out the rain and cold wind. There was a
great mortality among the brethren. Once
again the Pope Eugenius interceded with
the powerful ruler of Florence, and Cosimo
sent for his well-beloved architect Michelozzo
and commissioned him to rebuild the monastery.
Naturally enough Fra Angelico, whose
feeling for architecture was finely developed,[47]
came under the influence of the architect,
and when the building was complete he
was commissioned to adorn the walls with
frescoes that should keep before the brethren
the actualities of the religious life, and enable
them to feel that the Spiritual Presence was
in their midst.

Cosimo’s munificence had not stopped
with the presentation of the building to the
brotherhood. He equipped the monastery
with a famous library, provided all the
service books that were necessary, and
gave the brethren for librarian a man who
was destined to ascend the Fisherman’s
Throne and keep the keys of Heaven.
The books were illuminated by Fra
Angelico’s brother Benedetto, who had
taken the vows with him, indeed some
critics are of opinion that Fra Angelico
himself assisted in the work, but for[48]
this belief there appears to be but a very
small foundation.

The Pope Eugenius, compelled by the
quarrels of the great houses in Rome to
leave the Eternal City, came to Florence
and saw Fra Angelico’s work there, and
this visit paved the way for the painter’s
sojourn in Rome in the last years of his
life. Like so many of his contemporaries,
Eugenius could find time amid the distractions
of a stormy and difficult existence to
keep a well-trained eye upon the artistic
developments going on around him, and he
did but wait for peace and opportunity to
show himself as keen a patron of art as
that “terrible pontiff,” Julius della Rovere,
for whom Michelangelo was to work in the
Sistine Chapel.

To realise the life that the painter saw
around him in the days when the Dominican[50]
brotherhood first went to San Marco, it
is necessary to turn to some historian of
Florence in an endeavour to recall the
splendour and stateliness of the city’s life.
The limits of space forbid any attempt, however
modest, to picture Florence in detail
as it was in those days, though the subject
could scarcely be more tempting to the
pen. The pomp and circumstance of life
were not passed over by the painter, whose
extraordinary receptivity found so much
more in Florence than in Fiesole for its
exercise. Some echo, however, subdued to
convent walls, lingers in the city to-day
where San Marco preserves its great
painter’s reputation, and tells us that he
was not indifferent to the sights and sounds
beyond its gates.

A few of the frescoes have lost a little
of their pristine beauty and yet, for all the[52]
ravages of time, the most faded among
them can suggest much of the charm they
possessed when they were painted. It is
in the open cloisters, of course, that the
greatest damage has been done, and the
great “Crucifixion” in the chapter-house
has not escaped lightly; but in the cells
where the work is more protected, time has
dealt lightly with the frescoes and the two
or three little panels that help to make the
friar’s lasting monument. Good judges have
pointed out that the great “Crucifixion” in
the chapter-house, the largest work of the
painter, was never completed, and that the
red background was intended to serve as
a bed for the blue that was never put on.
Nobody can say why this fine work was
abandoned, and reproduction in colour is
impossible. Even a detail would be unsatisfactory,
but one of the lunettes from the[53]
cloister is given here. It represents Christ
as a pilgrim meeting two Dominican brothers,
and gives an excellent suggestion of Fra
Angelico at his best, revealing the deep feeling
of the religious man, and the skill of the
artist blended together in happiest and most
inspired union. To have seen the picture
in his mind, the artist must have been a
deeply religious man; to have expressed the
vision as he has expressed it in terms of line
and colour, the devotee must have been a
great artist.

From one of the cells in San Marco the
chief part of another picture has been reproduced
in these pages. It represents the
“Coronation of the Virgin.” Christ seated
upon a white cloud is placing a crown upon
the Virgin’s head; there is a rainbow border
with six saints. In order that the beauty
of the central figures may be seen, no more[54]
than a part of the picture is given here. It
is the more important part, for the saints
are conventional figures, each with the hands
uplifted in adoration, each with a halo round
his head. The beauty of the stories that
Fra Angelico sets before us was as true to
him as the beauty of the flowers he painted,
and the landscape that met his eyes whenever
he walked abroad. The modern world,
whether it doubt or believe, cannot but
recognise that the artist of San Marco has
succeeded as much by his faith as by his
art. The other frescoes of the Dominican
House must be left for the fortunate minority
who can visit them, but these two will be
found to represent well and truthfully both
the religious idea and the artistic achievement.
To realise their merits to the full
one must not fail to bear in mind the development
of painting at the time when[55]
they were painted. For the men who came
after Angelico the task was easier; he had
paved the way for them. In the days when
San Marco was decorated, the painter had
very little to add to his technical knowledge,
and nothing at all to his feeling for the
beauty of the Gospel stories, and few artists
of the fifteenth century have been so fortunate
as to collect their best work in one
place where it could remain undisturbed
throughout the ages.

Naturally enough it must pass—cloisters
and chapter-house show signs of the times
all too clearly. “The Crucifixion” is faded
not so badly as Leonardo’s “Last Supper” in
the Santa Maria della Grazie of Milan, but
still seriously, nor can all the lire of faithful
but hurried tourists restore its charm. It is
in the cells that the work of Fra Angelico
will linger longest, and it is pleasant to speculate[56]
upon the debt that devout monks must
have owed to their artist brother, who could
give them such exquisite embodiments of the
truth as he saw it to brighten their hard
lives and assure them, even in hours of
doubt and mental trouble, of the joys that
would be associated with the latter end.

San Marco, then, may be regarded as
an exquisite and enduring memorial of the
middle period of Fra Angelico’s life. The
saint that was in him dreamed dreams and
saw visions, the artist that was in him
expressed them in fashion that calls for
admiration even in these days when the
work done is nearly four hundred years old,
and the thought that gave it birth is no
longer held in such universal esteem. The
devotion that inspired the themes, the
simplicity of his handling, the beauty of
his colour, the love of Nature that was[57]
expressed as often as the picture would
permit, the reverential feeling in treatment
that was bound to communicate itself to
the spectator, all these qualities make the
work remarkable, and help us to see how
strong was the faith that inspired and kept
the artist happy in the cloisters when, had
he wished to turn his talent to other
purposes, he might have had riches and
honour. Leading rulers of men were building
palaces in every great city, conquerors
and statesmen were seeking to excel one
another in tasteful and costly display. Of
those who could have commanded wealth,
honour, and comfort, the Dominican friar
was among the first. But it sufficed Fra
Angelico to serve neither kings nor princes,
but to choose for his worship the King
of kings “Who made the heavens and
the earth and all that is therein.”

[58]

IV
LATER YEARS

There is a great temptation to linger
awhile in San Marco with the friar, for
even to-day the place has not lost its
appeal, and there are sufficient landmarks
in the surrounding city to enable us to
trace the influence of men who were at
once the contemporaries and inspirers of his
genius. Only the limits of space intervene
to forbid too long a stay in Florence, and
as the painter’s later years were spent in
Rome we must follow him there. For those
who wish to linger in the monastery there
are books in plenty, some dealing with the
Quattrocento, others dealing with the Popes,
others with Fra Angelico himself. This
outline of a painter’s life seeks to do no
more than introduce him to those who may[60]
be interested; it is not intended for those
who wish to follow him beyond the limits of
a modest appreciation. Vasari, Crowe, and
Cavalcaselle, Professor Langton Douglas,
Bernhard Berenson and others will supply
the more complete and detailed accounts
of the painter’s life and works, and the
careful reader will find sufficient references
to other writers to direct him to every side
issue.

Pope Eugenius IV., who visited Florence
when he was exiled from Rome, had
settled for a while in Bologna until the
anti-Pope Felix V. fell from power, and
had then hastened back to Rome, and
settled down to beautify the Vatican. Like
all the great men of his generation he felt
the spirit of the Renaissance in the air, and
desired no more than leisure in order to
respond to it. He remembered the clever[62]
artist, whose work had charmed him in the
days of his Florentine exile, and sent an
invitation to Fra Angelico to come to
Rome and decorate one of the chapels in
the Vatican. In those days one travelled in
Italy, even more slowly than one does to-day
by the Italian express trains—strange
as the statement may seem to moderns who
know the country well—and by the time that
the friar had received the summons and
had responded to it, Eugenius IV. would
appear to have relinquished the keys to
his successor. Happily the new Pope
Nicholas V. was a scholar, a gentleman,
and a statesman, as responsive to the new
ideas as his predecessor in office. He
gathered the best men of his time to the
Vatican, which he proposed to rebuild, and
he entered upon a programme that could
scarcely have been carried out had he[63]
enjoyed a much longer lease of life than
Providence granted. Unfortunately he had
no more than eight years to rule at St.
Peter’s, and that did not serve for much
more than a beginning of his great scheme.
He was succeeded by Tomaso Parentucelli,
that ardent scholar whom Cosimo di Medici
had appointed custodian of the collection
of MSS. that he gave to San Marco in
Florence when the Dominicans took possession.
As it happened Parentucelli himself
was in the last year of his life when he
ascended the throne of St. Peter, and his
schemes, whether for the aid and development
of scholarship or art, saw no fruition.
But for all that Nicholas V. ruled for no
more than eight years in Rome, he did
much for Fra Angelico, who painted the
frescoes in the Pope’s private studio, and
decorated a chapel in St. Peter’s that was[64]
afterwards destroyed. This loss is of course
a very serious one, and suggests that those
who ruled in the Vatican were not always
as careful as they might have been of
works that would have outlived them so
long had they been fairly treated. It is
very unfortunate that art should suffer from
the caprices of the unintelligent. When
Savonarola, also a Dominican monk, roused
the Florentines to a sense of their lapses
from grace a few years after Fra Angelico’s
death, they made a bonfire in the streets
of Florence of art work that was considered
immoral. To sacrifice great work in the
name of morality is bad enough, to destroy
it for the sake of building operations is
quite unpardonable.

In Rome the summer heat is well-nigh
unbearable. Even to-day the voluntary prisoner
of the Vatican retires to a villa in the[65]
far end of his gardens towards the end
of June, and none who can leave the city
cares to remain in it when May has gone,
and the Tiber becomes a thread, and fever
haunts its banks. Fra Angelico felt the
burden of the summer and wished to suspend
his work for a while. It so happened
that he received an invitation from Orvieto
to decorate the Duomo there during the
months of June, July, and August. The
first arrangement was that he should go
there every summer to escape the dog-days
in Rome, but for reasons not known
to us the visit did not extend beyond one
year, and the frescoes that he had painted
were seriously injured by rain, and were not
completed until Luca Signorelli took them
in hand half a century later. The little
work that is attributed to the painter’s brush
to-day in Orvieto need not detain us here.

[66]
The frescoes in Rome represent the summit
of Fra Angelico’s achievement, but they
have not escaped the somewhat destructive
hand of nineteenth-century German criticism;
one eminent authority having declared
that they are not by Fra Angelico at all,
but have been painted by pupils, Benozzo
Gozzoli receiving special mention in this
connection. It is not necessary to take
this criticism too seriously. The hands
may be the hands of Esau, but “the voice
is Jacob’s voice.” The artist may have
received some assistance from pupils, the
backgrounds may owe something to another
hand; there was no feeling, ethical or artistic,
to keep assistants from coming to the aid
of their master, but the whole composition
and the whole feeling of the frescoes proclaim
the friar. The subjects are incidents
in the life of St. Stephen and St. Lorenzo,[67]
ending, of course, after the inevitable fashion
of the time, with a representation of the
martyrdom. For once these martyrdoms
have a suggestion of reality. In the early
days of Fra Angelico’s work his representations
of martyrdoms and suffering were so
naïve that they could hardly do more than
provoke a smile. His idea of hell was very
simple, and when he wished to be very
bitter indeed—to express his anger at its
fullest—he peopled the nether world with
brothers of the great rival order of St.
Francis. For the founder of that order,
Angelico had the greatest love and admiration;
who indeed could refuse to pay such
tribute even to-day? But all the brethren did
not live up to the rule of their founder, and
the Dominican painter’s rebuke seems very
quaint in our eyes, though doubtless it made
a great sensation when it was administered.

[68]

In Rome the painter’s feeling for natural
beauty reaches the height of its expression,
indeed one feels that every department of
his work is at its best and highest there.
After his departure from the Eternal City,
the frescoes finished, and himself on the
shady side of his sixtieth year, the intervening
centuries descend like a cloud, blotting
out the greater part of the record. The
cloud lifts for a moment to show us “Beato”
Angelico, Prior of the Dominican Monastery
at Fiesole, to which more than forty years
ago he had claimed admission as a novice,
and then he is back again in Rome in the
chief convent of his order, Santa Maria
Sopra Minerva. There the light that had
burned so brilliantly for nearly half a century,
illuminating the most alluring aspects
of the Christian faith, paled and went out.
The body was laid to rest in the convent[70]
Church, near the tomb of St. Catherine, and
it is said that the epitaph was composed
by the Pope. Thereafter the order of St.
Dominic produced no great personality
until it gave to the world a man of very
different stamp in Fra Girolamo Savonarola.

V
A RETROSPECT

In art as in music and literature the
path of the innovator is beset by difficulties,
and if, among all the movements
that claim our attention to-day, that of the
Renaissance in fifteenth-century Italy is the
most fascinating, it is because the difficulties
were conquered so brilliantly. The century
seemed to breed a race of men that enjoyed
the inestimable advantage of knowing what
they wanted, and were determined to succeed.[72]
It did not matter that the paths they
trod were new. Each man had mapped out
a line of development for himself and went
strenuously along his chosen road, quite
certain that he would find the goal of his
ambition at the journey’s end. Curiously
enough when the paths were those of conquest
there was always a road leading from
them to patronage of the arts. This may
be because art in those days was largely
devoted to the service of the Church, and
when a man had acquired all that theft or
conquest could give him, and realised that
he could not hope to wage successful war
upon time, he began to think of his latter
days. Few men of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries could approach death
with confidence, and they sought to put
something to their credit against the Day
of Judgment. To beautify religious houses,[73]
to build houses for Holy Brotherhoods, these
were the simplest and most obvious ways
of placating the Recording Angel, and to
the uneasiness of rich and unscrupulous
men the Church owes not a few of her
most remarkable monuments. Moreover,
even the tyrants wished to have some enduring
memorial. Cosimo di Medici, who
gave San Lorenzo and San Marco to
Florence, remarked to his historian Bisticci,
“Fifty years will not pass before we are
driven out of Florence, but these buildings
will remain.” After all we can forget and
forgive the superstition and self-glorification
that gave so much enduring wealth to the
great cities of Italy.

Doubtless there were many failures
among the Renaissance artists; it is hardly
an exaggeration to say that in painting
alone there are scores of men belonging to[74]
the Quattrocento who have left us nothing
but their names. Victory was to the fittest;
they alone survived and left the impress of
their genius upon their own and succeeding
generations. If we look for a moment
to Fra Angelico’s contemporaries we see
at once that it was an age of great men.
Filippo Brunelleschi was born ten years
before Angelico, and lived until the year 1446.
He designed the dome of the Cathedral of
Florence, the Cloisters of San Lorenzo, the
Sagrestia Vecchia, the Church of St. Lawrence,
and other works too numerous to mention.
Donatello, whose work to this hour is
“all a wonder and a great desire;” Ghiberti,
to whom Florence owes the gates of the
Baptistery; Michelozzo, who built the Medici
Palace and the Convent of San Marco, and
was associated with Luca della Robbia in
making the bronze gates of the Sacristy[75]
of the Duomo, belong to the same period,
and were intimately associated with Brunelleschi
in much of the work that makes
Florence one of the show-places of the
world to-day. Luca della Robbia was born
when Fra Angelico was no more than
twelve years old. Masolino, Masaccio, and
Fra Filippo Lippi were among the painters
of Fra Angelico’s own time, while, when he
was approaching middle age, Gian Bellini
and Andrea Mantegna were growing up,
and when Fra Angelico died, Florence was
full of great artists who were destined to
carry on his work. Of course, the literary
activity was as great as the activity of the
artists; one recalls with a thrill of emotion
that Petrarch and Boccaccio were only just
numbered among the dead—their work held
all its earliest freshness. If at first sight
these matters seem to be outside the scope[76]
of a brief consideration of Fra Angelico’s life
and work, second thought will justify the
inclusion even in these narrow limits.

Every artist is in a sense an echo of
his environment and, although Fra Angelico
must have passed the greater part of
his life within monastery walls, yet the
evidence of his pictures must convince all
who look with discerning eyes, that he
was profoundly influenced by the life that
went on around him. The artistic and
literary movements of the time affected
him deeply and, in his own modest way
he was constantly striving to enlarge the
boundaries of his art, to develop its
achievements in a manner that must have
made even his early pictures appear as
dangerous as the works of artists like
Manet and Degas seemed to their contemporaries.
Had he lived in other times,[77]
had his lines been cast in some quiet city
to which no echo of the new movement in
art and letters could penetrate, Fra Angelico
might still have painted interesting pictures;
but he would not have got beyond his
earliest manner, indeed he might not have
attained to what is best in that. It would
have been so very easy for a narrow-minded
superior to say that the innovations were
wrong, that the human figure in all its
beauty must not be expressed by a painter
when presenting Virgin and Child, that the
old formal way was the right one. There
could have been no appeal against such
a judgment. Doubtless many a budding
genius has been nipped in this fashion by
short-sighted authority. How happy then
was the friar with time and place united
in his service.

[78]

VI
CONCLUSION

Fra Angelico has placed artists and
laymen in his debt, and as far as the latter
are concerned the cause is obvious enough.
A certain conviction of the truth of every
story he had to tell shines like a bright
light through all his pictures; they are a
force for the development and strengthening
of belief. Even to-day one finds among
the crowd of tourists that “does” San
Marco in half-an-hour or more, a few
visitors whose interest is of another kind,
while there is no lack of admirers for the
work to be seen in the Uffizi, though much
of it belongs to the earliest part of the
artist’s life. So it happens that the pictures
have a well-defined literary and spiritual[79]
value, and it is not surprising to think
that the Church has granted posthumous
honours to the man whose work
has brought so much honour in its train.
Artists acknowledge a great debt to the
friar, but a debt of another kind. As Professor
Langton Douglas has pointed out in
his admirable and exhaustive work upon
Fra Angelico, the friar, with his contemporaries,
Hubert and Jan Van Eyck, are
the fathers of modern landscape. The new
movement was continued and developed
by Verrocchio and Da Vinci on the one
side, and by Perugino and Raphael on the
other. Then again Fra Angelico made a
definite movement towards portrait painting,
by giving the likeness of some of his friends
and patrons to saints and martyrs. This
was yet another of the daring innovations
that marked the opening of the Quattrocento[80]
and, to realise how much it stood for
we must consider for a moment the comparative
barrenness of modern art, which in
the hands of its most popular artists has
little or nothing that is new to say to us.
Indeed it may be remarked with regret
that great praise often attaches to the
man who goes back to the fifteenth and
sixteenth century, although a little reflection
would enable every thoughtful person
to see that an art, forced to fall back upon
traditions of the past, is far from being in
a flourishing condition.

The plates are printed by Bemrose & Sons, Ltd., Derby and London
The text at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh