Following the death of his mother, the artist Mark Rothko set off on a five-month trip across Europe in 1950, visiting the continent’s great museums. It wasn’t until he visited a former Dominican convent in Florence, Italy, that he found what he was looking for. Each “cell” — where the convent’s friars lived — was adorned with a fresco painted by the 15th-century friar Fra Angelico that captured, Rothko said, what no other art he’d seen could.
“I traveled all over Europe and looked at hundreds of Madonnas,” Rothko wrote to a friend, “but all I saw was the symbol, never the concrete expression of motherhood.” With Angelico, though, Rothko recognized an artist of the highest order: Angelico’s paintings transcended representation to transmit deep emotional, spiritual experience.
A major influence on Abstract Expressionists like Rothko, wherein emotional evocation trumped figuration, Angelico’s great gift was his ability to convey a sense of the divine. Centuries later, his work invites a skeptic to belief. Angelico’s art has pushed me to find within myself a desire for belief I’d thought had been extinguished long ago.
So strong is Angelico’s own vision, so capable is he of showing it that while his foreign, 15th-century world of asceticism, magic and unconditional faith is at first discombobulating, it is a testament to his artistic ability that even more than half a millennium later, I find myself transported into his way of seeing the world, as though I were a friar in one of his cells.
Angelico began as an illustrator of illuminated manuscripts and had sold a few paintings by the time he joined the convent of San Domenico near Florence, where he took the name Fra Giovanni. (He posthumously gained the “angelic” moniker.) He was a man of deep faith, said to have wept every time he painted Jesus on the cross.
The Dominican friars of Angelico’s order were a particularly disciplined breed, following a 13th-century credo that encouraged extreme austerity. There was no search for meaning in that convent; it was a given. When Cosimo de’ Medici commissioned him to paint many of the frescoes in Angelico’s new convent of San Marco, it’s very likely Angelico didn’t even consider what he was doing to be “art.” His painting was, more than anything, an act of devotion — “visions,” as the art critic John Ruskin would later write.
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