The Theater: The Bearers of Gifts

(See Cover)

For Beauty includes three conditions: wholeness . . . harmony . . . and radiance.

—St. Thomas Aquinas

As the year declines towards its end, man, as far back as history records, has always hungered for imagery, the warm glow of fire, a reassuring star of hope. In the Christian world, the great theme around which this yearning centers is the story of the Nativity. No subject in Western art has had more enduring appeal for the hearts and minds of men. From the West’s earliest known painting of the Madonna and Child (TIME, May 16) through the passionate, attenuated figures of El Greco and Grünewald to such diverse moderns as Gauguin and Matisse, the elemental yet intimate scene of mother and newborn son has filled men with awe and rejoicing. To celebrate this event, artists have enriched the story with regal Byzantine mosaics, the glories of Chartres’ medieval stained glass, with enamels, jewels, oils and frescoes. To the Nativity the greatest artists in Western history have, like the Scriptured Magi, traveled afar to bring their most precious Twelfth Night gifts.

The one painter who more than any other possessed an artist’s radiant vision of the Nativity, as valid in its harmony and joyous quietude for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as it is today, was a Dominican priest who died in Rome just 500 years ago this year. Even in his lifetime, his fellow monks felt the touch of his genius, awarded him the title of “The Angelic”—Fra Angelico.

Within the Cowl. For all his fame and popularity, there are few more elusive personalities in art than Fra Angelico. So completely did the man and artist live within his monastic cowl and robe, effacing himself within the disciplines of monastic life, that his early life, training and personality are only guesswork. He left no written record of his own. His biographer, Painter-Historian Giorgio Vasari, wrote nearly a century after Fra Angelico’s death.

Vasari’s principal sources were a pious Dominican eulogy and the memories of an ancient monk, Fra Eustachio. with whom Vasari often gossiped at Florence’s convent of San Marco. From such accounts, Vasari drew the picture of Fra Angelico as a painter who “never took up his brush without first making a prayer. He never made a crucifix when the tears did not course down his cheeks . . .” Some later historians have doubted this picture of Fra Angelico in a state of religious ecstasy. The evidence in his painting points far more to a man who was the soul of patience and mildness, but calm, even cool, in temperament. Probably English Art Historian John Pope-Hennessy comes closest to the mark: “For all the translucent surface of his paintings, for all his rapturous pleasure in the natural world, there lay concealed, within Angelico’s artistic personality, a Puritan faithful to his own intransigent ideal of reformed religious art.”

From the Summit. In Fra Angelico the man, the monk and the artist were as one. Sharing both in the final, full flowering of the Middle Ages and the first springlike surge of the Renaissance, Fra Angelico stood at a summit during one of those rare moments of equilibrium between epochs.

Set down in the chronicle of the San Domenico convent at Fiesole are the simple facts about Fra Angelico: in 1407 “Fr. Joannes Petri de Mugello iuxta Vichium, optimus pictor, qui multas tabulas et parietes in diversis locis pinxit, accepit habitum clericorum in hoc conventu . . . et in sequenti anno fecit professionem.”* To this, Vasari adds only that Fra Giovanni’s name was Guido, that he was born in 1387, and entered the Dominican monastery “chiefly for the sake of his soul and for his peace of mind.”

The decision of Fra Angelico and his brother, who became Fra Benedetto, to present themselves at the doors of the small Dominican monastery, set in a vineyard at the foot of the hill of Fiesole outside Florence, came at a crucial time. A wave of reform was sweeping the Dominican monasteries of Italy; revived humanism, based on study of recently rediscovered classic manuscripts, was threatening the church with a new kind of paganism. The new convent of San Domenico, then less than two years in existence, was a spearhead of the reformed order of Dominican Observants. Its leader, the eloquent Fra Dominici, raised up against the New Learning the stern teachings of the church fathers: “Christ is our only guide to happiness . . . our father, our leader, our light, our food, our redemption, our way, our truth, our life.” Fra Dominici exhorted the young monks: “As the years of tender youth flow by, the soft wax may take on any form. Stamp on it the impress not of Narcissus, Myrrha, Phaedra or Ganymede, but of the crucified Christ and of the saints.” It was to this effort that Fra Angelico, for whom the goal both of life and art was “the contemplation and realization of Beauty,” devoted the rest of his life.

Broken Mold. No one knows when Fra Angelico first began to show the unmistakable signs of genius. Only a year after he took his final vows, his convent was thrown into turmoil as a result of the rival claims of three Popes. The Fiesole monks saw their prior arrested, and fled for safety to Foligno, then to Cortona. But from this nine-year period of exile, no record of Fra Angelico’s activities has survived. One theory is that, on the Dominicans’ return to Fiesole, Fra Angelico worked under Lorenzo Monaco, a Camaldolese monk famed for his manuscript illuminations. Supporting this theory is the fact that one of Fra Angelico’s earliest surviving paintings, a Virgin and Child (see cover), is based on an earlier Monaco work.

But whoever the master, Fra Angelico was an apt pupil. His first Virgin and Child surpasses Monaco’s in both draftsmanship and coloring. More important, Fra Angelico broke free from the rigid mold of medieval art; his Virgin is no longer two-dimensional, but a figure that turns in space with a life-giving gesture.

In both the Virgin of the Star and the panel combining the Annunciation and Coming of the Magi (see color pages), which Fra Angelico painted for a reliquary for the convent of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, he relied on rich gold, Byzantine in its richness, for a background. Fra Angelico’s own contributions were the new, soft-flowing harmonies of the robes, the fresh coloring which juxtaposed azure against deepest blue, pink against red to create a glowing world of weightless form and radiant, shadowiess color.

“Thy Will Be Done.” Two conflicting traditions of religious painting, almost as old as Christendom, are revealed in Fra Angelico’s early work. The Virgin of the Star, where the Christ child tenderly reassures his mother, is one of the few paintings in which Fra Angelico yielded to the popular taste for the sentimental. The future glory of Fra Angelico’s work is first declared in the Annunciation scene done for the church of San Domenico in Cortona (see p. 54). Here the Virgin sits serenely with hands folded across her breast in a gesture that sums up one of the great credos of monasticism: “Thy will be done.”

This great theme of renunciation Fra Angelico made his own in life and art, raising it to a level rarely if ever surpassed. Its highest expression, and one of the world’s great paintings, is the Cortona Annunciation. Only a trace of the early miniature painter remains in the loving care given the rich golden tapestry of the Virgin’s chair; for the rest, Fra Angelico’s painting has been awakened by the dawning Renaissance. With rows of Brunelleschian columns, he achieves perspective, relegating symbolism to the background, where the distant figures of Adam and Eve state the origin of man’s sin. In the foreground, is a rich, verdant carpet, carefully observed from nature and painted with the same joyful lyricism that St. Francis of Assisi had seen more than two centuries before in the world about him.

Yet in the circumscribed foreground space, there is a cloistral hush that is completely monastic. The half-genuflecting angel, splendid with great, backswept polychrome wings and raised hand, recites the sentence inscribed in gold from St. Luke: “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee.” The Virgin, in a gesture of untroubled acceptance, replies simply: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it done to me according to thy word.”

The small scenes Fra Angelico painted in translucent colors for the predella (base) of the Cortona Annunciation are each in themselves small hymns of praise to the Virgin. A small section in the panel of Mary’s Visit to Elizabeth (see p. 34) made art history. It is the first identifiable landscape in Italian painting, a view of Lake Trasimeno as seen from Cortona.

Contentment with Little. Such paintings as the Annunciation, endlessly copied, made Fra Angelico’s reputation. They established the figure of the angel in the form that still seems most appropriate for religious art, and even today the Annunciation is rated by former Louvre Curator Germain Bazin as “no doubt the most perfect of all Fra Angelico’s works.” Fra Angelico found himself besieged with requests as his style became more widely known and admired. Contemporary accounts describe his reaction—he simply referred his patrons to the prior of his monastery, saying for himself: “True riches consist in being contented with little.” Florence’s prosperous Guild of Flaxworkers took a more businesslike attitude. Their contract specified that their three-paneled painting be done “inside and out with gold, blue and silver of the best and finest.” In payment they offered Fra Angelico “one hundred and ninety gold florins for the whole and for his craftsmanship, or for as much less as his conscience shall deem it right to charge.”

Fra Angelico obviously preferred working for his brothers at San Domenico, but he was given little time to carry out his wishes. The Coronation of the Virgin (see p. 35) was his last work at Fiesole, and even in this the figures of the Virgin and Christ were left to be finished by another hand.

Scholar’s Prince. What called Fra Angelico away from San Domenico was the triumphant return from political exile on Oct. 6, 1434 of Cosimo de’ Medici, the wealthiest banker of his day, munificent benefactor and art patron whose scholarly passions and political adroitness made Florence the foremost city of the Renaissance. Cosimo’s rule created for Florence an interval of peace and poise in which a man could aspire to make a balanced masterpiece of his life. As the outward expression of this, Cosimo set to work on a program to make Florence the wonder of Europe.

To embellish the city, its churches and palaces he drew on the talents of Brunelleschi, Donatello, Fra Lippo Lippi, Uccello, Luca della Robbia. The great monument to his ideal, a marriage between humanism and religion, was the San Marco convent, which Cosimo prevailed upon Pope Eugenius IV to transfer from the Sylvetrines to the Dominican Observants. Cosimo ordered his favorite architect Michelozzo to repair the building, richly endowed it with 400 rare manuscripts and classic statues of Venus and Apollo. To do the frescoes, Cosimo called on the great Dominican painter Fra Angelico.

While the old San Marco buildings were being repaired, the Dominicans lived in huts and damp cells. But as the ground floor was readied, Fra Angelico and his assistants went to work, painting a series of Crucifixions in the cloister, the main refectory and the chapter house. For Cosimo’s cell, largest in the monastery, where the Medici prince liked to retire for contemplation, Fra Angelico repeated once again the Coming of the Magi at Cosimo’s request, “to have this example of Eastern kings laying down their crowns at the manger of Bethlehem always before his eyes as a reminder for his own guidance as a ruler.”

Within the monastery walls of San Marco. Fra Angelico concentrated on the simple devotional images required by his fellow monks for their meditations and prayers. The results, seen in the six cells definitely painted by Fra Angelico, represent Fra Angelico at his strongest and purest. To portray The Mocking of Christ, he painted a regal, blindfolded Christ figure crowned with thorns; the throng of jeering soldiery appear only as a group of disembodied hands and a loutish head, cap raised in sarcasm, spitting upon Christ. By abstracting all but the essential central image, Fra Angelico makes the eye travel through a curve of space to return endlessly to its starting point—the perfect movement theologians ascribe to the contemplative soul.

Road to Rome. In 1443, the Pope visited San Marco to dedicate the finished convent. Two years later, the Pontiff called Fra Angelico to Rome to begin the great work of decorating the Vatican. Decorating the Chapel of the Sacrament and the “studio” of the Pope with frescoes (since destroyed), and painting scenes of the lives of St. Lawrence and St. Stephen in the Pope’s private chapel were to take up Fra Angelico’s time, off and on, for the remaining ten years of his life.

Stories Vasari collected long afterward show Fra Angelico still the self-effacing monk. When Fra Angelico’s old convent at Fiesole elected him to the three-year term as prior, he gladly accepted, but more honor he avoided. When Pope Nicholas V offered to make him Archbishop of Florence, Fra Angelico. who believed that there was “less trouble and error in obeying others,” declined. He urged instead a fellow Dominican, who was later canonized as St. Antoninus.

On March 18, 1455, Fra Angelico died at the age of 68. Until the last he was working on his murals in Rome, but it is clear that Fra Angelico, who had moved through the full cycle from medieval illuminations to the heroic architectural vision of the Renaissance, had done his greatest work for his fellow monks in the monasteries of San Domenico and San Marco and the church at Cortona, where he had lived and worshiped.

Almost 100 years later, the painter Vasari rendered a judgment on Fra Angelico’s works that most succeeding generations have echoed and are likely to repeat: “It is an unspeakable delight to regard them, for it appears that the spirits of the blessed in heaven cannot be otherwise than these . . . The entire coloring appears to be the work of a saint or an angel like themselves. Right well did this holy friar deserve the name by which he was always known, Fra Giovanni Angelico.”

* “Friar John [son] of Peter from Mugello near Vicchio, most excellent painter, who painted many pictures and walls in various places, took the clerical habit in this convent . . . and in the following year made his profession” (i.e., took his vows).