Comparative Civilizations 12

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Comparative Civilizations 12 K.J. Benoy
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Fra Angelico

• He was kind to other people and moderate, lived
  chastely and far from the temptations of this
  world. He would often say that anyone practising
  the art of painting needed a quiet and untroubled
  life, and that the man who portrayed the words of
  Christ should live with Christ. In short, this
  monk cannot be praised highly enough, for he was
  humble and modest in every word and deed, and
  skillful and reverent in his paintings. The
  saints which he portrayed resembled true saints
  more closely than those done by any other
  artist.
• Giorgio Vasari, 1568

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Fra Angelico

• Fra Angelico was born Guidolino di Pietro, around
  1395 in Vicchio di Mugello.
• He died in Rome in 1455.
• He became a Dominican monk and remained one for
  most of his life. He took the name Giovanni da
  Fiesole, but is now known to all as Fra Angelico
  Brother Angel.
• He was a contemporary of Brunelleschi, Donatello
  and Masaccio.

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Fra Angelico

• His work was a product of his life as a monk.
• Painting was his vocation and his works were
  created to adorn churches and monasteries.

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Fra Angelico

• His earliest paintings were probably manuscript
  illumination.
• Fra Angelicos brother, who entered monastic life
  with him, was a scribe.

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Fra Angelico

• At Fiesoli he produced his first known works.
• An altarpiece for the high altar.
• The Annunciateion (now in the Prado).
• The Coronation of the Virgin (Now in the Louvre).
• and numerous frescoes in the chapter room and
  convent.

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Fra Angelico

• Fra Angelico is a Renaissance painter, but he
  continued to employ more traditional techniques.
• His use of perspective is still in the Byzantine
  tradition of inverse perspective, placing the
  viewer as the point of view of the figures in
  the icon - instead of the other way around. The
  intent is to place the viewer in divine, not
  human, space.

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Fra Angelico

• In another work, his Deposition, we see a
  painting that owes much to Masaccio in terms of
  its presentation of subjects and space.

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Fra Angelico

• H.W. Janson describes Fra Angelicos art as
  something of a paradox. The deeply reverential
  attitude presents an admixture of traditional
  Gothic piety and Renaissance grandeur bestilled
  by contemplative calm.

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Fra Angelico

• His St. Nicholas of Bari depicts two miracles of
  the saint, who appears twice as a saint in the
  sky above and thanking a merchant in the bottom
  left of the painting.

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Fra Angelico

• Fra Angelico uses perspective in places in this
  painting, while ignoring it elsewhere. See the
  bowsprit of the ship. Also note how light, which
  gives spatial depth, strikes the figures from the
  front left, and the mountains from the rear left.
• Figures are shown in tremendous detail, while the
  landscape is given in simplified form.
• Curiously, the painting works, regardless of
  these oddities.

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Fra Angelico

• In 1436 he and his Dominican brothers moved to
  San Marco, in Florence.
• Here, some of his most famous works adorn the
  monks cells.
• These were intended to assist in prayer.

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Fra Angelico

• Other hugely important works adorn the altarpiece.

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Fra Angelico

• His fame brought him commissions from two popes.
  Eugenius and Nicholas.

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Fra Angelico

• Other important works were commissioned for the
  cathedral of Orvieto, in Italy.

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Fra Angelico

• Above all, Fra Angelico is known for the quiet
  serenity of his works.
• This quiet, good man, was beatified by Pope John
  Paul II in 1984.
• The Roman Catholic Church celebrates February 18
  as his feast day commemorating his death in
  1455.

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