Fra Angelico

1395 – 1455

Fra Angelico was a Dominican friar who painted as a form of prayer, and whose work became one of the purest visual expressions of Christian contemplation in the Western tradition. He was born Guido di Pietro around 1395 in the Mugello valley north of Florence. Trained as a painter and illuminator, he entered the Dominican convent at Fiesole in the early 1420s, taking the religious name Fra Giovanni. The name by which history knows him, "the angelic brother," was given after his death by those who saw in his paintings something of the heaven they depicted. His greatest work was done at the Convent of San Marco in Florence, which Cosimo de' Medici rebuilt for the Dominicans in the late 1430s. There, between about 1440 and 1445, Fra Angelico and his workshop painted frescoes in the chapter house, the corridors, and each of the friars' cells. These were not decorations for visitors. They were aids to meditation for the men who lived and prayed beneath them, each scene from the life of Christ painted with a stillness meant to draw the viewer from looking into praying. The Transfiguration in Cell 6, the Annunciation at the head of the dormitory stairs, and the Noli me tangere are among the most beloved images of the early Renaissance. Fra Angelico united the new Florentine mastery of light, space, and perspective with an older devotional clarity. His colors are luminous and his figures are serene, but nothing in his work is merely pretty: every gesture is ordered toward the mystery being contemplated. Vasari reported that he never took up his brush without first praying, and that he could not paint a crucifixion without weeping. Called to Rome by Pope Eugene IV and later Nicholas V, he painted the Niccoline Chapel in the Vatican. He died in Rome in 1455 and is buried in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. In 1982 Pope John Paul II beatified him, and in 1984 named him patron of artists.