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Il Beato Fra Giovanni Angelico da Fiesole ("the
Beatified Friar John the Angelic of Fiesole")
(Vicchio di Mugello (Florence) 1395 – Rome
1455), better known in the English-speaking world
as Fra Angelico ("the Angelic Friar"), or in
Continental Europe as Beato Angelico ("the Blessed
Angelic One") was a famous painter of the
Florentine state in the 15th century, the most
famous representative of pietistic painting. He is
often, but not accurately, termed simply
"Fiesole," which is merely the name of the town
where he first took the vows. His life was
described in Giorgio Vasari's Vite.



== Biography ==
He was born Guido di Pietro, at Vicchio, in the
Tuscany|Tuscan province of Mugello, near Florence
towards the end of the 14th century, of unknown
but seemingly well-to-do parentage, and was
baptized Guido or Guidolino (friars use to change
their name when entering the orders). Still a
young boy he asked for admittance at the convent
of San Domenico in Fiesole, where Dominican
Order|Dominican friars were known for their rigid
rules (and were called "the Observers"). He
completed his novitiate in Cortona in 1408 and
became a real Dominican monk in Fiesole about 1418
with the name of "Fra Giovanni da Fiesole"; "The
Angelic" is a laudatory term which was assigned to
him at an early date and which we find in use
within thirty years after his death, but was not
properly beatification|beatified until 1984.

Whether he had previously been a painter by
profession is not certain, but appears probable.
The painter Lorenzo Monaco may have contributed to
his art training, and the influence of the Sienese
school is discernible in his work. He had several
important charges in the convents he lived in, but
this did not limit his art, that very soon became
famous. He had the patronage of Cosimo de' Medici.
According to Vasari, the first paintings of this
artist were in the Certosa of Florence; none such
exist there now.

== Early Works ==
Among his early works are the Annunciation of
Cortona, the Coronation of the Virgin in the
convent of Fiesole, and the Deposition of Christ
executed for the Church of the Holy Trinity in
Florence, paintings that Vasari indicated as
"painted by a saint or an angel".

His earliest extant performances, in considerable
number, are at Cortona, to which he was sent
during his novitiate, and here apparently he spent
all the opening years of his monastic life. His
first works executed in fresco were probably
those, now destroyed, which he painted in the
convent of S. Domenico in this city; as a
fresco-painter, he may have worked under, or as a
follower of, Gherardo Starnina. From 1418 to 1436
he was back at Fiesole; in 1436 he was transferred
to the Dominican convent of S. Marco in Florence.

In the convent of San Marco, in the years 1438 to
1445, Fra Giovanni lived with St. Antoninus
Pierozzi. Here he decorated the cells, the hall of
the Chapter, the corridors, the colonnade, the
church altarpiece; he may have studied about this
time the renowned frescoes in the Brancacci chapel
in the Florentine church of the Carmine and also
the paintings of Orcagna.

== Rome ==
In 1445, after the success of these works he was
invited by the pope to Rome. The pope who reigned
from 1431 to 1447 was Eugenius IV, and he
appointed another Dominican friar, a colleague of
Angelico, to be archbishop of Florence in 1445. If
the story (first told by Vasari) is true—that
this appointment was made at the suggestion of
Angelico only after the archbishopric had been
offered to him, and declined by him on the grounds
of his inaptitude for so elevated and responsible
a station.

Eugenius, and not (as stated by Vasari) his
successor Pope Nicholas V, must have been the pope
who sent the invitation and made the offer to Fra
Giovanni, for Nicholas only succeeded in 1447. The
whole statement lacks authentication, though in
itself credible enough. It is certain that
Angelico was staying in Rome in the first half of
1447; and he painted in the Vatican City|Vatican
the Cappella del Sacramento, which was afterwards
demolished by Paul III. In June 1447 he proceeded
to Orvieto, to paint in the Cappella Nuova of the
cathedral, with the cooperation of his pupil
Benozzo Gozzoli. In 1450, Fra Angelico became
Prior of the convent of San Marco and later
Archbishop of Florence. He afterwards returned to
Rome to paint the chapel of Nicholas V, and died
in Rome in 1455, where he lies buried in the
church of S. Maria sopra Minerva. He decorated
many of the rooms of the Dominican convent of San
Marco in Florence, including many of the
individual cells.  

He used to say "He who does Christ's work must
stay with Christ always". This motto granted the
epithet "Blessed Angelico", "because of the
perfect integrity of his life and the almost
divine beauty of the images he painted, to a
superlative extent those of the Blessed Virgin
Mary (Pope John Paul II, 1982)".



== Cause for Beatification ==
According to all the accounts which have reached
us, few men on whom the distinction of
beatification has been conferred could have
deserved it more nobly than Fra Giovanni. He led a
holy and self-denying life, shunning all
advancement, and was a brother to the poor; no man
ever saw him angered. He painted with unceasing
diligence, treating none but sacred subjects; he
never retouched or altered his work, probably with
a religious feeling that such as divine providence
allowed the thing to come, such it should remain.
He was wont to say that he who illustrates the
acts of Christ should be with Christ. It is
averred that he never handled a brush without
fervent prayer and he wept when he painted a
Crucifixion. The Last Judgment and the
Annunciation were two of the subjects he most
frequently treated.

Bearing in mind the details already given as to
the dates of Fra Giovanni's sojournings in various
localities, the reader will be able to trace
approximately the sequence of the works which we
now proceed to name as among his most important
productions. In Florence, in the convent of S.
Marco (now converted into a national museum), a
series of frescoes, beginning towards 1443; in the
first cloister is the Crucifixion with St. Dominic
kneeling; and the same treatment recurs on a wall
near the dormitory; in the chapterhouse is a third
Crucifixion, with the Virgin swooning, a
composition of twenty life-sized figures —
the red background, which has a strange and harsh
effect, is the misdoing of some restorer; an
Annunciation, the figures of about three-quarters
life-size, in a dormitory; in the adjoining
passage, the Virgin enthroned, with four saints;
on the wall of a cell, the Coronation of the
Virgin, with Saint Paul, Thomas Aquinas, Saint
Benedict, Dominic, Saint Francis, and Saint Peter
Martyr; two Dominicans welcoming Jesus, dressed as
a pilgrim; an Adoration of the Magi; and the Marys
at the Sepulchre. All these works are later than
the altarpiece which Angelico painted (as before
mentioned) for the choir connected with this
convent, and which is now in the academy of
Florence; it represents the Virgin with Saint
Cosmas and Saint Damian (the patrons of the Medici
family), Dominic, Peter, Francis, Mark, John
Evangelist and Stephen; the pediment illustrated
the lives of Cosmas and Damian, but it has long
been severed from the main subject. In the Uffizi
Gallery, an altarpiece, the Virgin (life-sized)
enthroned, with the Child Jesus|Infant and twelve
angels. In S. Domenico, Fiesole, a few frescoes,
less fine than those in S. Marco; also an
altarpiece in tempura of the Virgin and Child
between Saints Peter, Thomas Aquinas, Dominic and
Peter Martyr, now much destroyed. The subject
which originally formed the predella of this
picture has, since 1860, been in the National
Gallery, London, and worthily represents there the
hand of the saintly painter. The subject is a
Glory, Christ with the banner of the Resurrection,
and a multitude of saints, including, at the
extremities, the saints or beati of the Dominican
order; here are no fewer than 266 figures or
portions of figures, many of them having names
inscribed. This predella was highly lauded by
Vasari; still more highly another picture which
used to form an altarpiece in Fiesole, and which
now obtains world-wide celebrity in the
Louvre—the Coronation of the Virgin, with eight
predella subjects of the miracles of St. Dominic. 

For the church of the Santa TrinitĂ  in Florence,
Angelico executed a Deposition from the Cross, and
for the church of the Angeli, a Last Judgment,
both now in the Florentine Academy; for S. Maria
Novella, a Coronation of the Virgin, with a
predella in three sections, now in the Uffizi:
this is one of his masterpieces. In Orvieto
cathedral he painted three triangular divisions of
the ceiling, portraying respectively Christ in a
glory of angels, sixteen saints and prophets, and
the Virgin and Apostles: all these are now much
repainted and damaged. In Rome, in the Chapel of
Nicholas V, the acts of Saints Stephen and
Lawrence; also various figures of saints, and on
the ceiling the four evangelists. These works of
the painter's advanced age, which have suffered
somewhat from restorations, show vigour superior
to that of his youth, along with a more adequate
treatment of the architectural perspectives.
Naturally, there are a number of works currently
attributed to Angelico, but not really his; for
instance, a St Thomas with the Madonna's girdle,
in the Lateran museum, and a Virgin enthroned, in
the church of S. Girolamo, Fiesole. It has often
been said that he commenced and frequently
practised as an illuminator; this is dubious and a
presumption arises that illuminations executed by
Giovanni's brother, Benedetto, also a Dominican,
who died in 1448, have been ascribed to the more
famous artist. Benedetto may perhaps have assisted
Giovanni in the frescoes at S. Marco, but nothing
of the kind is distinctly traceable. A folio
series of engravings from these paintings was
published in Florence, in 1852. Along with Gozzoli
already mentioned, Zanobi Strozzi and Gentile da
Fabriano are named as pupils of Angelico.

We have spoken of Angelico's art as "pietistic";
this is in fact its predominant character. His
visages have an air of rapt suavity, devotional
fervency and beaming esoteric consciousness, which
is intensely attractive to some minds and realizes
beyond rivalry a particular ideal—that of
ecclesiastical saintliness and detachment from
secular fret and turmoil. It should not be denied
that he did not always escape the pitfalls of such
a method of treatment, the faces becoming sleek
and prim, with a smirk of sexless religiosity
which hardly eludes the artificial or even the
hypocritical; on other minds, therefore, and these
some of the most masculine and resolute, he
produces little genuine impression. After allowing
for this, Angelico should nevertheless be accepted
beyond cavil as an exalted typical painter
according to his own range of conceptions,
consonant with his monastic calling, unsullied
purity of life and exceeding devoutness. Exquisite
as he is in his special mode of execution, he
undoubtedly falls far short, not only of his great
naturalist contemporaries such as Masaccio and
Lippo Lippi, but even of so distant a precursor as
Giotto di Bondone|Giotto, in all that pertains to
bold or life-like invention of a subject or the
realization of ordinary appearances, expressions
and actions—the facts of nature, as
distinguished from the aspirations or
contemplations of the spirit. Technically
speaking, he had much finish and harmony of
composition (visual arts)|composition and color,
without corresponding mastery of light and shade,
and his knowledge of the human frame was
restricted. The brilliancy and fair light scale of
his tint (visual arts)|tints is constantly
remarkable, combined with a free use of gilding;
this conduces materially to that celestial
character which so pre-eminently distinguishes his
pictured visions of the divine persons, the
hierarchy of heaven and the glory of the redeemed.


==See also==
* List of painters
* List of Italian painters
* List of famous Italians
* Early Renaissance painting

==References==
* William Michael Rossetti|Rossetti, William
Michael. Angelico, Fra. 1911 Encyclopædia
Britannica.

==External links==
Commons|Fra Angelico
* http://www.beatoangelico.org/ Fondazione Beato
Angelico
*
http://www.abcgallery.com/A/angelico/angelico.html
Fra Angelico at Olga's Gallery

	Web Quotableonline.com Frasescelebres.org Greatbookscollection.org

Il Beato Fra Giovanni Angelico da Fiesole ("the
Beatified Friar John the Angelic of Fiesole")
(Vicchio di Mugello (Florence) 1395 – Rome
1455), better known in the English-speaking world
as Fra Angelico ("the Angelic Friar"), or in
Continental Europe as Beato Angelico ("the Blessed
Angelic One") was a famous painter of the
Florentine state in the 15th century, the most
famous representative of pietistic painting. He is
often, but not accurately, termed simply
"Fiesole," which is merely the name of the town
where he first took the vows. His life was
described in Giorgio Vasari's Vite.



== Biography ==
He was born Guido di Pietro, at Vicchio, in the
Tuscany|Tuscan province of Mugello, near Florence
towards the end of the 14th century, of unknown
but seemingly well-to-do parentage, and was
baptized Guido or Guidolino (friars use to change
their name when entering the orders). Still a
young boy he asked for admittance at the convent
of San Domenico in Fiesole, where Dominican
Order|Dominican friars were known for their rigid
rules (and were called "the Observers"). He
completed his novitiate in Cortona in 1408 and
became a real Dominican monk in Fiesole about 1418
with the name of "Fra Giovanni da Fiesole"; "The
Angelic" is a laudatory term which was assigned to
him at an early date and which we find in use
within thirty years after his death, but was not
properly beatification|beatified until 1984.

Whether he had previously been a painter by
profession is not certain, but appears probable.
The painter Lorenzo Monaco may have contributed to
his art training, and the influence of the Sienese
school is discernible in his work. He had several
important charges in the convents he lived in, but
this did not limit his art, that very soon became
famous. He had the patronage of Cosimo de' Medici.
According to Vasari, the first paintings of this
artist were in the Certosa of Florence; none such
exist there now.

== Early Works ==
Among his early works are the Annunciation of
Cortona, the Coronation of the Virgin in the
convent of Fiesole, and the Deposition of Christ
executed for the Church of the Holy Trinity in
Florence, paintings that Vasari indicated as
"painted by a saint or an angel".

His earliest extant performances, in considerable
number, are at Cortona, to which he was sent
during his novitiate, and here apparently he spent
all the opening years of his monastic life. His
first works executed in fresco were probably
those, now destroyed, which he painted in the
convent of S. Domenico in this city; as a
fresco-painter, he may have worked under, or as a
follower of, Gherardo Starnina. From 1418 to 1436
he was back at Fiesole; in 1436 he was transferred
to the Dominican convent of S. Marco in Florence.

In the convent of San Marco, in the years 1438 to
1445, Fra Giovanni lived with St. Antoninus
Pierozzi. Here he decorated the cells, the hall of
the Chapter, the corridors, the colonnade, the
church altarpiece; he may have studied about this
time the renowned frescoes in the Brancacci chapel
in the Florentine church of the Carmine and also
the paintings of Orcagna.

== Rome ==
In 1445, after the success of these works he was
invited by the pope to Rome. The pope who reigned
from 1431 to 1447 was Eugenius IV, and he
appointed another Dominican friar, a colleague of
Angelico, to be archbishop of Florence in 1445. If
the story (first told by Vasari) is true—that
this appointment was made at the suggestion of
Angelico only after the archbishopric had been
offered to him, and declined by him on the grounds
of his inaptitude for so elevated and responsible
a station.

Eugenius, and not (as stated by Vasari) his
successor Pope Nicholas V, must have been the pope
who sent the invitation and made the offer to Fra
Giovanni, for Nicholas only succeeded in 1447. The
whole statement lacks authentication, though in
itself credible enough. It is certain that
Angelico was staying in Rome in the first half of
1447; and he painted in the Vatican City|Vatican
the Cappella del Sacramento, which was afterwards
demolished by Paul III. In June 1447 he proceeded
to Orvieto, to paint in the Cappella Nuova of the
cathedral, with the cooperation of his pupil
Benozzo Gozzoli. In 1450, Fra Angelico became
Prior of the convent of San Marco and later
Archbishop of Florence. He afterwards returned to
Rome to paint the chapel of Nicholas V, and died
in Rome in 1455, where he lies buried in the
church of S. Maria sopra Minerva. He decorated
many of the rooms of the Dominican convent of San
Marco in Florence, including many of the
individual cells.  

He used to say "He who does Christ's work must
stay with Christ always". This motto granted the
epithet "Blessed Angelico", "because of the
perfect integrity of his life and the almost
divine beauty of the images he painted, to a
superlative extent those of the Blessed Virgin
Mary (Pope John Paul II, 1982)".



== Cause for Beatification ==
According to all the accounts which have reached
us, few men on whom the distinction of
beatification has been conferred could have
deserved it more nobly than Fra Giovanni. He led a
holy and self-denying life, shunning all
advancement, and was a brother to the poor; no man
ever saw him angered. He painted with unceasing
diligence, treating none but sacred subjects; he
never retouched or altered his work, probably with
a religious feeling that such as divine providence
allowed the thing to come, such it should remain.
He was wont to say that he who illustrates the
acts of Christ should be with Christ. It is
averred that he never handled a brush without
fervent prayer and he wept when he painted a
Crucifixion. The Last Judgment and the
Annunciation were two of the subjects he most
frequently treated.

Bearing in mind the details already given as to
the dates of Fra Giovanni's sojournings in various
localities, the reader will be able to trace
approximately the sequence of the works which we
now proceed to name as among his most important
productions. In Florence, in the convent of S.
Marco (now converted into a national museum), a
series of frescoes, beginning towards 1443; in the
first cloister is the Crucifixion with St. Dominic
kneeling; and the same treatment recurs on a wall
near the dormitory; in the chapterhouse is a third
Crucifixion, with the Virgin swooning, a
composition of twenty life-sized figures —
the red background, which has a strange and harsh
effect, is the misdoing of some restorer; an
Annunciation, the figures of about three-quarters
life-size, in a dormitory; in the adjoining
passage, the Virgin enthroned, with four saints;
on the wall of a cell, the Coronation of the
Virgin, with Saint Paul, Thomas Aquinas, Saint
Benedict, Dominic, Saint Francis, and Saint Peter
Martyr; two Dominicans welcoming Jesus, dressed as
a pilgrim; an Adoration of the Magi; and the Marys
at the Sepulchre. All these works are later than
the altarpiece which Angelico painted (as before
mentioned) for the choir connected with this
convent, and which is now in the academy of
Florence; it represents the Virgin with Saint
Cosmas and Saint Damian (the patrons of the Medici
family), Dominic, Peter, Francis, Mark, John
Evangelist and Stephen; the pediment illustrated
the lives of Cosmas and Damian, but it has long
been severed from the main subject. In the Uffizi
Gallery, an altarpiece, the Virgin (life-sized)
enthroned, with the Child Jesus|Infant and twelve
angels. In S. Domenico, Fiesole, a few frescoes,
less fine than those in S. Marco; also an
altarpiece in tempura of the Virgin and Child
between Saints Peter, Thomas Aquinas, Dominic and
Peter Martyr, now much destroyed. The subject
which originally formed the predella of this
picture has, since 1860, been in the National
Gallery, London, and worthily represents there the
hand of the saintly painter. The subject is a
Glory, Christ with the banner of the Resurrection,
and a multitude of saints, including, at the
extremities, the saints or beati of the Dominican
order; here are no fewer than 266 figures or
portions of figures, many of them having names
inscribed. This predella was highly lauded by
Vasari; still more highly another picture which
used to form an altarpiece in Fiesole, and which
now obtains world-wide celebrity in the
Louvre—the Coronation of the Virgin, with eight
predella subjects of the miracles of St. Dominic. 

For the church of the Santa TrinitĂ  in Florence,
Angelico executed a Deposition from the Cross, and
for the church of the Angeli, a Last Judgment,
both now in the Florentine Academy; for S. Maria
Novella, a Coronation of the Virgin, with a
predella in three sections, now in the Uffizi:
this is one of his masterpieces. In Orvieto
cathedral he painted three triangular divisions of
the ceiling, portraying respectively Christ in a
glory of angels, sixteen saints and prophets, and
the Virgin and Apostles: all these are now much
repainted and damaged. In Rome, in the Chapel of
Nicholas V, the acts of Saints Stephen and
Lawrence; also various figures of saints, and on
the ceiling the four evangelists. These works of
the painter's advanced age, which have suffered
somewhat from restorations, show vigour superior
to that of his youth, along with a more adequate
treatment of the architectural perspectives.
Naturally, there are a number of works currently
attributed to Angelico, but not really his; for
instance, a St Thomas with the Madonna's girdle,
in the Lateran museum, and a Virgin enthroned, in
the church of S. Girolamo, Fiesole. It has often
been said that he commenced and frequently
practised as an illuminator; this is dubious and a
presumption arises that illuminations executed by
Giovanni's brother, Benedetto, also a Dominican,
who died in 1448, have been ascribed to the more
famous artist. Benedetto may perhaps have assisted
Giovanni in the frescoes at S. Marco, but nothing
of the kind is distinctly traceable. A folio
series of engravings from these paintings was
published in Florence, in 1852. Along with Gozzoli
already mentioned, Zanobi Strozzi and Gentile da
Fabriano are named as pupils of Angelico.

We have spoken of Angelico's art as "pietistic";
this is in fact its predominant character. His
visages have an air of rapt suavity, devotional
fervency and beaming esoteric consciousness, which
is intensely attractive to some minds and realizes
beyond rivalry a particular ideal—that of
ecclesiastical saintliness and detachment from
secular fret and turmoil. It should not be denied
that he did not always escape the pitfalls of such
a method of treatment, the faces becoming sleek
and prim, with a smirk of sexless religiosity
which hardly eludes the artificial or even the
hypocritical; on other minds, therefore, and these
some of the most masculine and resolute, he
produces little genuine impression. After allowing
for this, Angelico should nevertheless be accepted
beyond cavil as an exalted typical painter
according to his own range of conceptions,
consonant with his monastic calling, unsullied
purity of life and exceeding devoutness. Exquisite
as he is in his special mode of execution, he
undoubtedly falls far short, not only of his great
naturalist contemporaries such as Masaccio and
Lippo Lippi, but even of so distant a precursor as
Giotto di Bondone|Giotto, in all that pertains to
bold or life-like invention of a subject or the
realization of ordinary appearances, expressions
and actions—the facts of nature, as
distinguished from the aspirations or
contemplations of the spirit. Technically
speaking, he had much finish and harmony of
composition (visual arts)|composition and color,
without corresponding mastery of light and shade,
and his knowledge of the human frame was
restricted. The brilliancy and fair light scale of
his tint (visual arts)|tints is constantly
remarkable, combined with a free use of gilding;
this conduces materially to that celestial
character which so pre-eminently distinguishes his
pictured visions of the divine persons, the
hierarchy of heaven and the glory of the redeemed.


==See also==
* List of painters
* List of Italian painters
* List of famous Italians
* Early Renaissance painting

==References==
* William Michael Rossetti|Rossetti, William
Michael. Angelico, Fra. 1911 Encyclopædia
Britannica.

==External links==
Commons|Fra Angelico
* http://www.beatoangelico.org/ Fondazione Beato
Angelico
*
http://www.abcgallery.com/A/angelico/angelico.html
Fra Angelico at Olga's Gallery