Fra Angelico’s Theology & Aesthetics in 3 Extraordinary Paintings

The 15th-century Tuscan painter Fra Angelico and his assistants created over 50 works for the new friary of San Marco that was patronized by Cosimo de’ Medici who recommended to Angelico the decoration of the complex. The result was a melange of a largely public and richly conceived San Marco Altarpiece, an innovative treatment of the Annunciation theme, and a resplendent private Transfiguration. This painter-friar is a pivotal figure for understanding the subsequent evolution of Renaissance Italian painting.

In 1436, at the friary of the Observant Dominican Order in Florence, the painter and Dominican known to posterity as Fra Angelico (1395-1455) began work on a commission that was to seal his reputation for visionary painterly prowess, a devout vocation that was to color all subsequent biographies of this mysterious man.

Writing a century after Angelico’s death, the art historian and painter Giorgio Vasari placed him as “a rare and perfect talent…whose pictures were painted with such facility and piety.” These two aspects pervade the art historian’s evaluation of the painter throughout his short narrative. Vasari even writes: “Whenever he painted a Crucifixion the tears would stream down his face, and it is no wonder that the faces and attitudes of his figures express the depth and sincerity of his Christian piety.”

The variety of richness and complexity had nothing to do with the peaks and troughs of a huge creative endeavor but everything to do with situational appositeness. The Friary of San Marco could be described as being divided into spheres of access. For instance, the majestic and opulent San Marco Altarpiece that Angelico painted here was for a semi-public area in which patrons, friars, and lay people could admire it.

Slightly more occluded and placed over the stairs on the way to the dormitories in the friary was the simpler Annunciation of c.1440-5, and still simpler and intended for solitary devotion were the frescoes that Fra Angelico painted in the monk’s cells, like the Transfiguration. The painter adjusted his aesthetic, his materials, and his compositions according to a decorum of place that signals an unwavering devotion as much as a willingness to compromise on artistic choices.

Given that Vasari’s account of the work and life of Fra Angelico has become orthodoxy, it is perhaps unsurprising that this most pious of men was canonized in 1982 by Pope John Paul II who used the epithet “Blessed” to describe him.

What we do know of “Beato Fra Angelico” is that he was born Guido da Pietro in Mugello near Fiesole in Tuscany in about 1395. Early on, he trained, possibly with his brother Benedetto, in the medium of illumination. It is perhaps this that partially accounts for Angelico’s later subtlety and his decorous treatment of color in evidence at San Marco.

Until 1418, Angelico was living at the Dominican friary at Cortona where he is attested to have painted several frescoes, which have been destroyed. Shortly after the large enterprise of painting the works for San Marco, Vasari avers that the friar’s reputation for piety was such that the pope himself, Nicholas V—for whom Angelico was to paint at the Vatican—offered the Archbishopric of Florence to him. Angelico, Vasari writes, declined the invitation, recommending a colleague instead.

The provenance of this story is uncertain, as is its verity but Vasari uses it to hold the painter-friar up as an example of the devout rejection of worldly status in a narrative that laid the ground for his canonization more than four centuries later.

However, Giorgio Vasari was writing at a temporal distance from his subject. Even so, those writers who did refer to Fra Angelico later in the 15th century shared Vasari’s admiration. In 1469, Domenico da Corella called Angelico “Angelicus Pictor,” and twelve years later the epithet was already becoming the name with Cristoforo Landino addressing “Fra Giovanni Angelico,” saying that he painted with “the greatest of ease.”

Historical distance and the iteration through time of the same characterization of Fra Angelico make it nigh impossible to separate the man from the myth. Some, however, disavow the need for such a separation. John Pope-Hennessy, for example, maintains that in Angelico’s case “the artist and the man are one.” Hennessy sees in his work no profane interests: “For all the translucent surface of his paintings, for all his pleasure in the natural world, there lay concealed within him a Puritan faithful to his own intransigent ideal of reformed religious art.”

Angelico’s paintings at San Marco certainly exhibit a translucent quality but Pope-Hennessy’s opposition of naturalism and devotion proves false when the theological underpinnings of Fra Angelico’s work are examined.

Contrary to dualist conceptualizations within the sphere of theology, Fra Angelico’s vision is holistic. Dualism has two main strands: that of seeing the material objects and life on Earth as fallen, evil, and opposed to the true spiritual essence of the heavens, on the one hand; and, on the other, that of seeing the material world as the site of a struggle between the forces of good and evil and, as such, at least compromised.

There were three prime influences on the theology of the Observant Dominicans in Fra Angelico’s time. These were Peter Lombard, John Dominici, and Thomas Aquinas, the latter of whom became the pre-eminent influence on Angelico’s painting at San Marco. Aquinas was a monist in the sense that he saw the connection between the earthly and the heavenly—far from the earthly being evil or deceptive, Aquinas wrote of God the benefactor investing humanity with reason, faith, and the senses in order, admittedly dimly, that humanity could come to understand providence. In a criticism of the dualists, Aquinas wrote that to derogate any aspect of creation is to derogate God as the creator.

As Anthony Fisher writes, in the Thomist worldview, God is “immanent in and knowable through nature.” Fisher sees in the paintings of Fra Angelico an illusionism that was “used analogically…to signify things at once familiar and yet transcendent.” This type of concept is in keeping with the Thomist connection of the terrestrial and the divine and is also related to earlier Platonism which propounded that appearances in the world partake in their true “forms” which are timeless, essential, and pure.

Angelico’s concern to present the holy through the recognizable did not stop at the representation of nature, as Fisher notes. The painter sought to recognize God within the bounds of the experience of the world in general, and to prompt his audience “to bring their own religious and cultural baggage with them to prayer and contemplation and see it echoed in the Florentine architecture, scenery or costume.” This is especially true of the settings of the San Marco Altarpiece and the Annunciation.

With a thorough sense of balance, this assortment of figures is aligned in an overtly theatricalized environment of a luminous and richly colored foreground. The withdrawn curtains of the upper reaches of the image; along with the impossibly counterpoised positions of the saints and friars, angels and Madonna and Child, and the two kneeling figures all speak of the theater. The painter is drawing attention to the artificiality of his practice and especially to the insufficiency of the means and objects of the visible world when compared with the pure spiritual being that he depicts and to which the souls of the faithful are to aspire.

The hierarchical arrangement of the saints of the middle ground shows (from left to right), Laurence (the namesake patron of Cosimo de Medici’s dead brother Lorenzo), John the Evangelist (patron of Giovanni de Medici), and Saint Mark—all on the left side. From left to right on the right side are Saints Dominic, Francis, and Peter of Verona, who bleeds from the head as a Dominican martyr.

In the foreground is the kneeling figure of Saint Cosmas (patron of Cosimo himself) looking out at us and Saint Damian looking into the picture space. Cosmas shows dual attention here with his gesture, pointing simultaneously to the viewer and to the Christ-child who sits with the Virgin Mary enthroned to the rear. The enthroned pair is flanked by two groupings of angels who, like the saints, engage in conversation that groups the picture as part of the sacra conversazione genre of religious painting in Quattrocento Italy.

The image has regularity, and readability, and is an illusionistic space. On the surface, all appears in accord with the theory of Renaissance thinker and architect Leon Battista Alberti whose idea of the picture plane as analogous to an open window onto the world had much influence. However, Fra Angelico’s illusionism does not extend as far as the Albertian concept of the continuity of the space of the world with the space of the image.

The San Marco Altarpiece is less an illusionistic end in itself (the representation in an image meant to be continuous with the actual world of the viewer) and more an illusionistic mediation between the congregants of San Marco and the state of bliss of these sacred personages. The spaces, rather than being continuous, are disjunctive. The visual image here becomes the fulcrum for a dynamic of a bi-directional prism when seen through the lens of the Thomist theology that characterized the worldview of the Observant Dominicans of the 15th century.

The image itself is the prism and fulcrum for a conceptual movement in two directions. The first and prime of these is the “refraction” of the unity of the godhead into the multifarious beings, objects, plants, and fruit of the terrestrial world. The second movement is the synthesis of the beings and objects of the world, most importantly in Dominican Catholicism, the souls of humanity into union with God in a beatific vision.

The concept of the “prism” has a firm theological grounding in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, who asserted that the natural world was a means to God who created it for our faith and reason to divine God immanent within it.

As a window, the image facilitates a view of Fra Angelico’s aesthetics of devotion—his compositional choices, the gentleness of the expressions and gestures, and the rich coloring. The exquisitely nuanced but tender faces of Cosmas, Dominic, and the Madonna and Child are such that Vasari asserted of Angelico’s faces that they could only be painted by a person of the highest personal piety. The colors—most importantly and expensively, vermilion red and the ultramarine of the Virgin’s cloak—were generally demanded of such large and largely public works at the time.

The picture is the locale and operation of the transformation of the mundane into the divine that created the mundane. Another transformation entailed is the hoped-for lifting of the human soul towards the beatific vision of bliss in the heavenly afterlife, which can only be indexed—not embodied or pictorialized—by the image. The altarpiece also ensures, especially through the outward gazes of Dominic and Cosmas, that the actual congregation of San Marco is involved in the sacred conversation.

Rona Goffen has remarked of the Trinity by Masaccio—the earliest extant exercise in rigorous perspectival painting from c.1426—that the viewer and scene are both separated and united. Goffen argues that the perspective guarantees that the space “behind the window” is sacrosanct and that the sacred personages are “accessible to humankind, not in any physical sense, only through pious devotion.”

In relation to Angelico’s altarpiece, this is informative, as the perfect scene of the garden and sea beyond is an illusory as well as an illusionistic world. The representation of the assemblage of the Virgin, Child, and saints is a worldly and theological impossibility but a feat of the devout imagination. Equally the setting of rose garlands, intricate carpet, trees, fruit, and the richest of colors—from vermilion red to ultramarine—together speak of an opulence that is preternatural.

The pax, or the painted tablet containing a scene of the Crucifixion at the lower reach of the image also creates a border between the scene and the faithful. It stands as an intermediate phase of visuality, as well as being the end of Christ’s incarnate life. The learning of the way for the soul through meditation of Christ’s ultimate sacrifice on earth is posited by Angelico. As such, the pax is a fluid border, granting access not to salvation but to the means to it: faith and worship.

The image itself is not rigidly divided from the viewer. Cosmas looks back to us with a collegial expression of pity that elicits empathy. Also, he is kneeling which is the pose of the literal congregation of the Eucharist under the altarpiece, and, in this, there is an egalitarian relation.

We are granted visual access to the sacra conversazione by Fra Angelico, as the recession of the carpet draws the eye in. But the dividing screen to the rear of the throne and before the trees and sea tells us perhaps that we have access to the painter’s pictorialization of a holy apparition and no more. Although the picture states rounded physical presences, it, through the deployment of the screen, is the product of a painter with a belief in the limits of his artistic means and the human faculties regarding the portrayal and imagining of the beatific vision which only the saved behold after death.

Beyond the screen is only a mystery that foils conceptualization and understanding. The mystery culminates at the top of the picture in the sea, also a symbol of the Virgin as Stella Maris (“Star of the Sea”). When juxtaposed with the Virgin, it is clear that her person provides a site for the viewer’s veneration but the sea signals both her and God’s boundless love. Just as Angelico uses light in the Transfiguration, he uses the sea here to stand for infinity and eternal mystery.

There is a formal convergence of perspectival recession when we look at the heads of the Dominicans on the right that recedes toward the head of the infant Christ. This is a note of propaganda on the part of the friar-painter, a “direct line” between the example of Christ and its pursuit by the Observant Dominican Order.

The titular Saint Dominic, in an attitude of prayer, looks out at us. He is a portrait of veneration and contemplation in his expression but also, by virtue of his outward gaze, he is worldly and preaching the scene to us. Indeed, not without justification, Anthony Fisher has called the entire image a “homily” itself. The fact that Fra Angelico paints Saint Mark holding open the passage of his gospel which invokes the apostles to spread Christianity, is a further bolster to the idea of this being an image not only of the reverence for divinity but a reference to the Dominican Order as part of the apostolic mission.

“When you come before an image of the Ever-Virgin take care that you do not neglect to say an Ave.” 

So runs the inscription at the foot of this Annunciation by Fra Angelico. It seems that these are the words of the angel Gabriel in greeting Mary at this moment. The glistering of the angel’s wings—and they literally do glister, as the painter included silica as part of the intonaco base of the painting of Gabriel’s wings—seems to emphasize that he has just alighted on the ground to greet the awestruck maid.

Inasmuch as the San Marco Altarpiece can be seen as a prism, Fra Angelico’s Annunciation (c.1440-5) can be seen as a closer approximation to the “window” of Alberti’s artistic theory. Painted for the top of the dormitory stairs on the way to the friars’ cells, the picture is midway between the partially public San Marco Altarpiece and the cell-bound privacy of the Transfiguration. The decreasing publicity marks a journey from the display of the suggestive plenitude of the altarpiece towards the awe and quietude engendered by the Transfiguration.

At midway, the exquisite Annunciation stands, the tidings of the divine mystery of the incarnation of Christ brought to the Virgin Mary by the angel Gabriel. Fra Angelico is the earliest known painter to portray this scene in an outdoor setting, and this rendition has been perceived by art historian William Hood as achieving “heights of singular eloquence.”

With a minimum of pictorial devices, Angelico has painted an image that is coherent, medievalized, and premonitory of later Renaissance developments. Indeed, this picture’s iconography is revolutionary, as Angelico’s treatment was to become a template for the depiction of the story of the Annunciation for most later Italian painters.

The image, with its paucity of elements and the poses of the angel and Mary, has a Medieval iconic quality that chimes with the pervading yellows and gold of the palette that also gives us the light of dawn. However, the picture’s rationalized perspective, grounding of the figures, and the sense of the relay of a narrative, look forward to the pictures of the istoria genre of history or “story painting.” The gestures of the two protagonists are archetypal and of a ritualistic Medieval flavor, while the expressions of the Virgin and the angel are subtle and of a more incipient naturalism than in previous paintings in Italy.

Wiliam Hood has written of the huge scale of the two figures when compared to the architectural surroundings. Mary’s scale in particular furnishes us with an impression of both reality and unreality. Her physical size gives her a bodily ontological reality that points to a literal historical existence. At the same time, her outsized relation to her surroundings makes her mythic, as the mother of God, and as a symbol and allegorical figure for nurturing maternity.

However, as Fisher writes, the Thomist Dominicans were “far from Mariolatrous.” The theory of the Immaculate Conception was denied by them and had not at the time become Church dogma. The Dominicans rather revered Mary because of her role in the incarnation of Christ, with Thomas Aquinas addressing her as Theotokos (“God-bearer”).

The story that Fra Angelico depicts is detailed in the Gospel of Luke (1:26-38). Angelico’s Virgin Mary adopts several of the De Modo Orandi (the Dominican handbook of prayer) poses, which makes this a composite image in terms of the portrayal of several moments during the narrative. Mary’s hands are crossed over her stomach and refer to both the manual’s “acceptance” pose and her womb that will carry the incarnate Christ. This acceptance is based on verse 38 of Luke: “And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.”

The pose can also indicate the meditation from which the Virgin is roused by the appearance of Gabriel, who greets her in genuflection. This original moment of the narrative, the greeting, is corroborated by the expression of shock or awe on Mary’s face. As Luke wrote in verse 29: “And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.” The angel Gabriel’s pose is a combination of reverence (the bow) to the future mother of God and serenity (he is standing with his hands crossing his chest). This latter gesture mirrors Mary’s crossed hands and implies the concord of the conversation and her fateful acceptance of the tidings.

The scene is in a liminal space—between the outdoors and the indoors. Mary’s location here in a “border space” speaks both of her simplicity and closeted chastity on the one hand, and of the worldly significance of her assent to Gabriel’s message to her.

We look through the Albertian window to see a world familiar to the contemporary Quattrocento Florentine as well as to the friars of San Marco. The classical architecture and courtyard garden could be situated in any of the grand palazzi of the time but are a stylized re-imagining of the environs of the friary. Beyond this, we see the bible story depicted, a scriptural story that John R. Spencer has described as the most eminently subject to dramatization in visual art. Although Angelico’s setting is recognizably Florentine, it is perfected especially in the painting of the floral garden floor. He elevates the contemporary world by drawing down to it a vision of paradise. The scene seems suspended between heaven and earth, making grace a living plausibility and the world redeemable through the bearing of the incarnated Jesus.

The beautiful, sealed garden without, a hortus conclusus, is a sign of the virginity of Mary, but also, it is an imaginary shared environment between the mythic locale of scripture and the contemporary Dominican cloister, bringing both the object of veneration and veneration itself into close proximity.

The transfiguration of Jesus is noted in three of the gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The moment in Fra Angelico’s cell fresco, the Transfiguration seems to be described in Matthew 17:2: “and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light.” Angelico’s Christ is centralized and monumental, encircled in an aureole that is egg-shaped and perhaps thereby suggestive of Christ as the source of redeemed life.

His pose prefigures that of the Crucifixion, as does the cruciform halo. In a quotation from Luke, the apostles Peter, James, and John are rising from their slumber to behold the light of Christ’s glory. The apostle on the left turns from the blinding light with an expression of awe and in a pose redolent of the Dominican handbook of prayer De Modo Orandi’s poses of ecstasy (the hands are over his head) and the imploring of divine power (the arms are outstretched). The fact that this apostle faces out to us is an invitation to behold the miracle, one of the so-called Luminous Mysteries.

The central apostle shields his eyes from Christ’s radiance, while the right-hand apostle watches on in an attitude of meditative prayer, the ideal state for the Observant Dominicans. If we read the dispositions of the apostles from left to right, there is perhaps a commentary on the progress or increasing ennoblement of the soul by Christ’s example. From being blinded by his glory and incomprehension, to reticence to the ultimate seeing of and submission to God.

In this case, of course, Angelico’s placement of the Dominican friar on the right is telling of his own Christian sect’s legitimate relation to scripture and divine revelation. The friar here is physically and, by implication, spiritually more elevated than the other standing witnesses in the fresco and is replete with a star in his halo, a witness who must surely be Dominic. Dominic looks upward at the miracle in a state of meditation that reveals the temporal distance between the biblical event and his own time of the late 12th and early 13th centuries.

Of course, a further temporal removal is in the location of this work in a monk’s cell in San Marco where a friar would meditate not only on the transfiguration but on Dominic’s attitude to it as the patron of the Order. The ecstatic apostle on the left is a sign of a twofold legitimacy. His communicative gaze outward at the actual contemplative friar in the cell invites a similar response of being awestruck—firstly at the event unfolding, but also at the painter’s vision and skill in the rendering of it. Thus, both miracle and depiction are sacralized, the latter of course derivative of the former.

The image is faithful to the Bible, showing the prophets Moses (on the left) and Elijah (on the right) as the traditional figures for Law and prophecy, respectively. The two prophets, according to Luke’s gospel, address Christ and “spake of his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem.”

This detail neatly reflects the visual forerunners of the Passion of Christ in the cruciform halo and the posture of Jesus. De Modo Orandi also states that this pose of arms outstretched signals the adjuring of divine power. This combines with the fact of Christ’s incarnation as man and the fact of his divinity to produce the idea of Christ as a mediator or bridge between humanity and God, between earth and heaven. In the bible text, this is corroborated by Christ’s seeking out of the summit of the mountain.

Moses and Elijah are only painted from the neck upwards, perhaps an allusion to their transcendence of the merely physical. Or, in neglecting to paint their bodies, Fra Angelico could have sought to portray them as more apparitional figures because it is they who converse with Christ during the event—the merely human onlookers are as yet unsaved.

The haloed female figure on the left could only be the Virgin Mary, who shares both a stance and an expression of calm with Dominic, which situates both in the realm of blissful devotion and at a remove from the transfiguration.

With the observation that the concept of the mirror in art implies an ontologically inferior reflection of an object, Barnaby Nygren adds that Renaissance Neoplatonism conceived of “the world as an inferior reflection of an ideal reality.” In the case of this Transfiguration (as well as that of the San Marco Altarpiece), this applies.

In Fra Angelico’s Transfiguration, there is a visual “disintegration” of the physical which points to the utility of the idea of the Neoplatonic mirror, which itself maps onto Christian ontology. This disintegration or dissolution of the physical has grounds both in the textual source and in the painter’s artistic volition.

In terms of the gospel, the disciples are woken from sleep, an analog for the dissolving of the waking physical world, by the vision of Christ’s miracle on the summit—as if both their sleep and the newly wakeful moment are denominated as unearthly. In the painter’s treatment, he prioritizes the light, whose object is not so much an object but is self-referential as immaterial divinity; the true essence and nature of Christ.

The concentration on the light serves two purposes: that of textual fidelity and as a comment on art. The first component of Angelico’s “comment” is in the confident painting of a scene pervaded by the light and, therefore, unpromising of a treatment at all. This is a self-conscious statement and evidence of his own artistic prowess. However, in the prevalence of the light itself, an insufficiency of the visual forms of the world is implied. The sleep of the apostles becomes, then, a symbol of the spiritual need to awake from the world in order to attain the higher truth of being of the fresco’s upper reaches. In this context, art itself is placed as necessarily tied to the physical world it depicts, and can only suggest “the way” through pointing beyond itself and the world.