To the Editor:
Re “Can a Painting Make a Skeptic Believe?,” by Cody Delistraty (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Nov. 2):
I appreciate how Fra Angelico’s painting of Mary being visited by the Archangel Gabriel is so immediate and immense that it can shift the mind of a nonbeliever into a kind of reverential awe.
As a musician, I experience this sense most intensely when listening to works like “Miserere,” by Gregorio Allegri, and the ecstatic songs of Hildegard of Bingen, both of which reliably impart stunning moments of light in this depressing moment of history.
Meditations on Fra Angelico’s masterpiece invite the questions that are the highest compliments to any artist: Is the painter truly the creator of the work? Or is he a conduit to the divine?
Mark Keller Portland, Ore.
To the Editor:
Cody Delistraty’s essay falls prey to anachronistic ideas of artistic creation and public reception. Spirituality in early 15th-century Italy meant a very different thing than it does in 2025. Claiming that one could be “transported into his way of seeing the world, as though I were a friar in one of his cells” is simply a vivid imagination at work — or perhaps a reflection of a yearning for escape from the present chaos, anarchy and materialism in the world. All those things were also present in 15th-century Florence.
A more accurate reading of the art at the San Marco monastery would reflect on how, soon after Fra Angelico’s death in 1455, Florence would be in decline.
Twenty-seven years later the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola was assigned to San Marco, which became the headquarters for his profoundly disruptive and destructive theocracy. He was eventually excommunicated, and was hanged and burned in 1498.
Fra Angelico’s paintings are indeed a kind of sacred refuge, but history reminds us that spirituality is a double-edged sword, potentially offering both beauty and violence at one stroke.
Peter Beal Boulder, Colo.
To the Editor:
The answer to the question of whether a painting can make a skeptic believe in a divinity depends entirely upon the skeptic in question. Beauty naturally evokes powerful feelings, and sometimes it can convey a profound sense of transcendence.
Nature, paintings, music or poetry can certainly foster a sense that there’s more to life than just the physical realm. Thus, a particular skeptic might waver in the face of such beautiful things, especially if that skeptic genuinely wants to believe.
A more resolute skeptic, however, might experience those same feelings and consider them entirely irrelevant to the question of whether or not a God exists.
I might, like Mark Rothko, the Abstract Expressionist painter invoked by Cody Delistraty, be moved by Fra Angelico’s paintings. But it would never turn me into a religious believer. Others may come to believe. I get it, but I consider them skeptics of a different kind.
Anthony Cunningham Woodbury, Conn.
To the Editor:
I was struck by Cody Delistraty’s comment that “Angelico’s art has pushed me to find within myself a desire for belief I’d thought had been extinguished long ago.”
This resonates with my own on-again-off-again relationship with religious belief. Fra Angelico’s “Annunciation” is a masterpiece that truly triggers a spiritual desire in me.
Where does this desire come from? It isn’t always an inspired work of art that summons it. Or the beauty of a tree or my child’s laugh. Sometimes I’m peeling a potato and it appears. I am a nonbeliever who believes that the desire itself is plenty of reason to consider adopting belief. Some works of art confirm it.
Suzanne Bradley Vestavia Hills, Ala.
To the Editor:
I visited the convent at San Marco years ago and was entranced by the paintings there. I looked, upon leaving, at the postcard copies, but none of them did what the originals did.
In Fra Angelico’s work there is something more. His profound faith is in the paint on those walls. Did the angel of the Annunciation guide his hand?
Thomas E. Winkler La Crosse, Wis.
Down Times at the Movies
To the Editor:
Re “25 Movies, 0 Hits. What’s Happening?” (Business, Nov. 15):
Has anyone considered that at a time of increasing austerity for the bottom 60 percent of Americans, movie tickets have become something of a luxury?
Brian Kelly Rockville Centre, N.Y.
The post In an Italian Masterpiece, Art and Faith Meet appeared first on New York Times.
