III
FRA ANGELICO 1387 - 1455
"VIRGIN AND CHILD"
(UFFIZI)
Here we see the gentle friar's simple faith treated with childlike simplicity ; and it will be noticed that the Child if still treated as a manikin, not as an infant.

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CHAPTER VII

OF THE TALE OF THE SAINTLY DOMINICAN

FRA ANGELICO
1387 - 1455

THE saintly Dominican, Fra Angelico of Fiesole, born in 1387, and dying in 1455, covered by his working life the first half century of the fourteen-hundreds. Dominican though he was, the gentle and pious art of Fra Angelico was superbly fitted to guide painting into the utterance of the gentle Christianity preached by St. Francis of Assisi. The simple joys of belief, the very sense of happiness there is in the suffering for one's faith, the exquisite comfort of being of the chosen, these emotions and sensations found their artist in Fra Angelico. His was a cloistral soul, rapt in the mystic beatitude of reverent and undisturbed faith in his creed. He accounted it sin to paint from the nude ; and whilst the whole artistry of his age was bent on realism, Angelico sought only to express the soul of man. 'Tis true that his genius is not without insipidity, his sweetness tends to cloy ; his soul remains the soul of a child, and is not above puerility ; and his eyes ranged ever within the narrow parish of the sheltered cloister. But Fra Angelico must not be judged solely by the simple little figures of angels and the like, who sing to fragile lutes, winging their simple flight across a peaceful background of gold. He painted demure virgins and angels incapable of sin, until we grow weary of their very goodness ; but he painted also [74] the superb frescoes with which he is far too little associated- his Flight into Egypt is one of the masterpieces of his age ; his exquisite Annunciation in the Church of Cortona set the style for many a masterpiece of the years to follow ; indeed, The Flight into Egypt proves the good monk a painter of such considerable gifts as are all too often overlooked, both as to the treatment of the human form and of landscape, in both of which he pushed beyond the achievement of Giotto, even if he lacked the power of the greater man.

Fra Angelico is therefore not a painter lightly to be disposed of as the mere saintly person of the Italian chronicler Vasari. To understand the early dawning of the Renaissance in Italy, it is well to study the significance of the saintly Dominican.

Fra Angelico is held by some to be the connecting link between the Gothic or Giottesque period of Italian painting and the dawn of the Renaissance. As a matter of fact, the first low light of dawn had flashed across Italian skies over Florence with the coming of Giotto; a century later, 1400, saw Fra Angelico at work in the ever-growing light of that dawn. And his achievement is an epitome of that dawn. That Fra Angelico could rise to the dramatic from his exquisite choirs of angels, he proved in his sublime Transfiguration in San Marco.

Born in 1387 at Vicchio, and baptized as Guido, he changed his name to Giovanni (John) on entering the convent at Fiesole as a Dominican in 1407, in his twentieth year. But neither his parents nor he himself were to give him the name by which he was to come to fame. Men called him Fra Angelico-as Vasari's gossip pages hand down to us-in that " he gave his whole life to God's service, and to the doing of good works for mankind and for his neighbour " ; and, adds Vasari, " he was entirely free [75] from guile, and holy in his acts." He " never took a brush in his hand until he had first offered a prayer ; nor painted a Crucifixion without tears streaming down his cheeks."

Young as he was, on joining the Dominican order, Fra Angelico had clearly begun his career as painter, probably under the Giottesque painter and miniaturist Lorenzo Monaco. In that pupilage is a large significance. LORENZO MONACO (1370?-1425) was a Sienese; and to such must largely be attributed the Sienese tendency of Fra Angelico's art. It accounts for much in the art of Angelico that created a side stream in the achievement of Florence, as we shall see ; not only his early work as miniaturist and painter, but his simplicity of colouring and handling of the brush, reveal the style of the illuminators. It was soon after joining the monastery that he painted the frescoes at Cortona and Foligno, going back to Fiesole in his thirty-first year (1418).

It was on the edge of his fiftieth year that Fra Angelico went to Florence to the convent of S. Marco, which, at the desire of Cosimo de' Medici, had been given by the Church to the Dominicans; and here it was, on the walls of the cloisters and cells and chapter-house, that Fra Angelico painted his masterpieces in the great series of frescoes which are a part of the glory of that wonderful city. Ever deeply interested in the art activity of his age, he had now come under the influence of Donatello and Masaccio, and a larger, broader style had entered into his craftsmanship, though he had not the vigour nor strength to develop his art to their greater range. Just as he had in his heart a hunger for the older miniaturists, so also his sensitive soul made him more akin to the Sienese masters in his tenderness and his eagerness to catch purity and beauty of form. To spiritual exaltation of an almost feminine intensity he [76] devoted all his subtle gifts, so that his name is interwoven with the phrases, " angelic choirs " and " beatific visions." The more robust passions and more compelling emotions knew him not-so that when he dares to state a martyrdom, the dramatic sense hangs back and refuses to answer his call. But a vast gulf divides his early from his later work ; and his eager interest in the sculpture of Ghiberti and Donatello, and in the paintings of the Brancacci Chapel by Masaccio, which were about to take Italian art forward in a giant stride, had their effect upon his later years, wherein we see the saintly Dominican step into the light of the increasing dawn of the Renaissance and leave Giottism behind him.

We shall see Fra Angelico's most famous pupil, BENOZZO GOZZOLI (born in 1420, and dying near the end of the century, in 1496), prove himself by his frescoes in the Palazzo Riccardi at Florence, and at San Gimignano and at Montefalco in Umbria, one of the most exquisite storytellers of the Renaissance ; but his naivety could yield only the golden dreams of childhood, and his limits made the boundaries of too slender a world for the adventure of a great artist.

Indeed, Giottism threatened to end the art of Florence in charming and delicate decadence, as the art of her rival Siena evaporated in mere pietistic illustrations, had it not been for the rise of two Florentine sculptors, Ghiberti and Donatello, and the great genius of the youthful painter Masaccio, steeped in naturalism-going to the vigorous school of nature herself for inspiration, and giving themselves up to the impressions of nature.