Fra Angelico

Fra Angelico, born Guido di Pietro in the Mugello region of Tuscany in the late fourteenth century, was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance and a Dominican friar. The exact year of his birth is not recorded in surviving documents; later tradition associated him with Vicchio. He entered the Dominican convent of San Domenico at Fiesole, taking the religious name Fra Giovanni. His brother Benedetto also joined the order and worked as a miniaturist. Already trained as a painter around the time of his profession, Fra Giovanni combined a monastic vocation with a busy workshop that served Dominican houses and lay patrons in Tuscany and beyond. Contemporaries and later writers called him Angelico, the angelic one, in recognition of the devout character of his life and the spiritual quality of his art. He was ordained a priest and remained a member of the Order of Preachers until his death.

His painting belongs to the first half of the fifteenth century in Florence, when artists were developing linear perspective, naturalistic light, and a more monumental treatment of the human figure. Fra Angelico absorbed these innovations while retaining a Gothic sense of decorative color, gold, and tender expression. Early independent works include panel altarpieces and contributions to manuscript illumination. He produced altarpieces for Dominican churches in Fiesole, Cortona, Perugia, and Florence, often showing the Virgin and Child with Dominican saints such as Dominic, Peter Martyr, and Thomas Aquinas. His figures are typically calm, the spaces lucid, and the color clear, qualities that suited both public altarpieces and the private devotion of religious communities.

The most extensive surviving cycle of his work is the decoration of the convent of San Marco in Florence, rebuilt and frescoed in the late 1430s and 1440s with the support of Cosimo de' Medici. Fra Angelico and his assistants painted a Crucifixion in the chapter house, an Annunciation and other scenes in the corridors, and a separate fresco in each friar's cell, usually a scene from the life of Christ intended for meditation. These frescoes, executed in a restrained palette on the white walls of the cells, are among the most distinctive religious paintings of the Italian fifteenth century. In the same years he painted the high altarpiece for San Marco, a sacra conversazione that was later dismembered.

In the later 1440s Fra Angelico worked outside Florence. He began frescoes in the Cappella di San Brizio in Orvieto Cathedral, a project left incomplete, and was called to Rome by Pope Eugene IV and then Pope Nicholas V. In the Vatican he decorated the private chapel of Nicholas V with scenes from the lives of Saint Stephen and Saint Lawrence, combining narrative clarity with an interest in classical architecture. He died in Rome on 18 February 1455 and was buried in the Dominican church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Giorgio Vasari's sixteenth-century biography already presented him as a saintly artist. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1982; his liturgical feast is 18 February, and he is invoked as a patron of artists.