You are all alone here: your small room, your narrow bed, a single window and the barest decoration on the wall. Look up, at the angel who has touched down. He is thinner than you might suppose, in a cinched vermilion gown blending into his lanky wings. Even thinner is the round-headed woman kneeling before him, on a modest little bench. In a room as bare as your own, as emptied of luxury, she is receiving the news that she will give birth to the Son of God with the calmest and most untroubled presence.
Look up. Look up and contemplate. Look up, and then look inward.
The year is 1450, or thereabouts. Outside this dormitory, in Florence’s palaces and counting-houses, an economic and intellectual revolution is underway. The city has been getting rich, now that merchant bankers have devised new systems of credits and debits. It’s getting grand, too, with architects rediscovering classic modes of proportion. But in here, night after night in these otherwise undecorated cells, the Dominican friars of the Convent of San Marco each look upon one single picture: a stilled Sermon on the Mount, or a pared-back Agony in the Garden, or the sparest and sweetest of Annunciations. Each has been painted by one of the friars’ fellows — an artist at home in a new age, but with an eye on the one to come.
Transcendent, rapturous, out of this world: Very often, without meaning to, we saddle our secular culture with the chores of the divine. “Fra Angelico,” the momentous and inexpressibly beautiful two-part exhibition running through Jan. 25 in Florence, Italy, is a reminder of what those words can still mean.
Years in gestation, difficult in places, it unites over 140 religious scenes by an artist who brought devotional painting into the here and now. This “true servant of God,” to read the epitaph on his tomb, was also “the glory, the mirror, and the ornament of painters” — and showed us, with an acuity that still pierces the heart, how one perfect picture can compress life, death and life everlasting.
An event? Assembling this many Fra Angelicos is almost a miracle. Among the masterpieces are seven major altarpieces whose various panels were dispersed over time, notably after Napoleon confiscated the art of Italy’s religious orders. Their reassembly here is a one-time-only opportunity, though that isn’t to call this show a natural blockbuster. The American curator Carl Brandon Strehlke, a veteran of the Philadelphia Museum of Art who’s organized this show, has taken an almost archaeological approach to Angelico. The galleries, and a giant catalog, are thickened with technical details. Storytelling is not its way, biography is scant, and the exclusively religious subject matter does not permit many memes.
If I may play doubting Thomas for a moment, I’m not sure if “Fra Angelico” will draw quite the crowds that rushed to Amsterdam for the Rijksmuseum’s Vermeer blockbuster, or to Rome for this year’s Caravaggio blowout. But still here, in the thicket of technical details, are the rooms where revelations happen, rich with pink and saffron, dense with robes and wings.
The show spans two locations in Florence. The bulk of the exhibition is at Palazzo Strozzi, a staggering palace downtown, whose galleries map Angelico’s careful construction of multi-figure religious painting. The bodies of saints, or the face of the Virgin, emerge from flat surfaces with the weight of classical sculpture. A crystalline naturalism animates the hills of the Holy Land, which suddenly looks a lot like central Italy. At Palazzo Strozzi you’ll note especially the contrast between the tranquil central panels of the altarpieces (which mostly depict the Madonna and Child) and the sometimes action-packed smaller scenes beneath (saints embracing, or else burning at the stake).
A second, smaller part is at the Convent of San Marco, which showcases Angelico’s efforts in book illumination and introduces his predecessors and contemporaries. The young Angelico, hardly cloistered away, picked up new techniques from Florence’s revolutionary artists of the early 1400s — like Filippo Brunelleschi, who was figuring out linear perspective at the baptistery, and Masaccio, whose bulked-up Adam and Eve appeared like real suffering humans on the walls of the Brancacci Chapel. Everything culminates in the austere friars’ cells upstairs at San Marco, whose pared-down frescoes of Christ’s death and transfiguration are still seen in the half-light of single windows, stimulants of study, prayer and silence.
In Italian the “angelic friar” is now called Beato Angelico: angelic and blessed, officially, since 1982, when Pope John Paul II put him on the first step to canonization. But he was baptized as simple Guido di Pietro in a river valley north of Florence sometime at the end of the 1300s. He trained, or so it seems from his early work, in the studio of Lorenzo Monaco, another friar-painter and perhaps the last great figure of the International Gothic. The young Guido picked up the refinement and clarity of Lorenzo’s stringent frescoes, and like his master he took religious orders. He memorized 150 psalms. He woke to pray the liturgy in the fourth watch of the night.
That religiosity has led many modern admirers to force Angelico’s painterly achievement back into the Gothic era, and as early as the 16th century, the image of Fra Angelico as a believer outside art history had taken stubborn hold. Part of it was the stateliness of his multi-figure compositions. Mourners celestially sad, halos as perfect circles: For many visitors to Florence over the last seven centuries, his paintings were just too beautiful, and too serene, to ascribe to our fallen world. John Ruskin, the excitable Victorian critic, thought Fra Angelico was not a painter at all: “not an artist, properly so-called, but an inspired saint.”
That canonization — a friar must be a recluse, and novelty is incompatible with eternity — is the easy way out. What the double show in Florence is trying to do is reestablish Fra Angelico as an artist of his time, working at the fulcrum of European history in the Medici boomtown of the 15th century.
In the San Marco Altarpiece (1438-42) — one of those landmarks where the Renaissance comes into view — the Virgin and Child sit enthroned behind a splendid golden drape. Yet the angels and saints to either side aren’t looking at us, not as they would have a few years previously, when Angelico’s predecessors arrayed groups of figures with hieratic rigidity. Now they’re chatting, praying, milling about, looking this way and that. They’re standing in multiple planes, closer and farther from us, or so the newfangled perspective makes us believe.
This is called a sacra conversazione, or holy conversation, and in the Florence of the early Renaissance it was the painterly equivalent of a regime change. Before Angelico, the way to make something appear sacred was to make it appear strict. Now, instead of stylized perfection, the sacred is something natural. Something emotional. The expression of the human mind and heart. And down in the predella — the bonus paintings beneath the main image, spectacularly reassembled for this show from as far as Munich and Minneapolis — the stillness of the Madonna gives way to almost riotous performance: stones flying through the air at a crucifixion, saints shoved into the sea.
One of the surprises of the exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi is that Angelico’s most progressive compositions, applying innovations in one-point perspective with unrivaled skill, coexist with more traditional, not to say Gothic, ways of painting. Even after giving the Virgin and Child such exhilarating three-dimensionality, he could also paint them in a retro style, as flatter icons against gold grounds. The Uffizi has lent its altarpiece of the Coronation of the Virgin, from around 1435, and up close you can see how Angelico incised the gilded panel with hundreds of little slashes, to suggest the divine brilliance of Mary’s crowning. (Sometimes new money prefers the old school.)
But then you have, heart-stoppingly, a totally different altarpiece from the same years, depicting the Annunciation with such limpid naturalism that it seems to radiate Angelico’s personal devotion. It comes from a little church in a town called San Giovanni Valdarno, and the scene spans two panels, with one for Gabriel touching down and another for the soft-faced Virgin. Mary is sitting beneath a portico with simple, round arches — arches that echo, so perfectly, so beautifully, the rounded shape of the panels on which Angelico painted them. Together the picture and the frame seem to constitute a real room: a room in Nazareth, a room in Florence, that we can peer into and see the fulfillment of a prophecy, right here and now.
What makes Angelico angelic, what makes painters see paradise and aficionados cross oceans, is how he brought absolute faith in line with personal perception: how he could believe something with all his heart, and then make it manifest. Specially visible in this exhibition, that belief endures in perpetuity at the Convent of San Marco, constructed for the Dominicans from 1437 with the support of Cosimo de’ Medici. For six years, along with his work on the San Marco Altarpiece, Angelico devoted himself to the wondrous frescoes, in a narrow color scheme of salmon and lavender and peacock blues, that would decorate the cells of the convent’s friars and novices.
In the hallway of the dormitory is an Annunciation pared back to the basics, translating Renaissance perspective into a saintly geometry. In the novices’ cells, the painter (and some helpers, we assume) repeated St. Dominic at the foot of the cross. And in the principal cells, one at a time, we see Christ’s baptism, his mocking and his transfiguration. We see him warning his mother, post-resurrection in a field of flowers, to touch me not. It wasn’t the done thing, before Angelico, to decorate dormitories with such important paintings, and these spectacular frescoes must have come as a shock to such a humble and severe order. But it was a shock for them alone: Unseen by outsiders until the 19th century, each fresco is a summons to attention, to total engagement with faith and art.
Do you know what’s lacking in Fra Angelico? There is no evil — only the sublime promise that things will get better, between this day and eternity, and human works will make it so. In years past, that never seemed enough for me, and when I’d come to Florence I would skip past San Marco, too seduced by the drama and decadence of Florence’s later centuries, the corkscrewed bodies, the sex and war. No points for guessing why, but this year I perceived a new utility to Angelico’s better world, made visible in forms and fashions that affirm that no fall is permanent. Such is the promise of an art you make with your whole self, your body and soul, rich with feeling, full of grace.
Fra Angelico
Through Jan. 25 at Palazzo Strozzi and Museo di San Marco in Florence, Italy; palazzostrozzi.org.
Jason Farago, a critic at large for The Times, writes about art and culture in the U.S. and abroad.
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