A painting haunts me since my childhood. I first saw it during family meals at a cousin’s house. A very good reproduction on the wall facing the table presided at our meetings. It was many, many years ago. But, if I close my eyes, I still can see it. Some can argue that I was just a small boy and that it was the first great art work I’ve met. But there was, even if then I didn’t know anything about painting or painters, a kind of aura. Something so peaceful and beautiful that I kept looking and looking at it, even when the desserts came! Somehow, it was like taking a glimpse at a hidden paradise, an inner and unknown reality.
Only much later I discovered that I had fallen in love with, perhaps, the most sublime depiction of the Annunciation. During the last decades, I kept looking at it, trying to decipher the secret of such a powerful spell, but I couldn’t. I have just a few clues. Of course, as a Catholic, I realize that it represents the greatest moment in the history of Christianity. Suddenly, an angel sent by God enters a young virgin’s home and tells her that she is going to give birth to the Savior of all humankind. She is, of course, incredulous, amazed, concerned, maybe even frightened. But, in a leap of the most blind and enlightened faith, she answers: “Be it done unto me according to Thy Word.”
The scene is so fundamental to Christianity that has been represented uncountable times in sacred art along the centuries. However, it is this particular Annunciation that still moves me the most. I will mention some clues. I don’t know if they will explain anything. I will just try to translate, in my own words, its deep power. Just to be brief: the time is the transition from the late Gothic to the Renaissance, so the setting is a typical Renaissance church, but bare of any kind of ornament; the plain white building, however, represents a home, with a small grilled window at the back. The angel seems to be the main protagonist, since those who look are attracted by the wings, painted with all the colors of the rainbow and is at the foreground. However, even if they share the same respectful salute, the eyes are led to the center where a smaller figure stands (even the mysterious black iron railing above that creates perspective, contributes to fix the viewer’s attention). While the profile of the angel has no expression, there’s an indescribable mix of emotions expressed on the maiden’s face. Outside, there is a fenced garden, filled with grass and wild flowers; beyond the common wood fence, a dense mass of cypresses does not distract onlookers.
The cypresses, so typical of Tuscany (Italy) landscape, are a sort of signature. It was there, more exactly in the province of Mugello, where Guido di Pietro was born, in 1387. This name, however, was unknown. When Guido became a Dominican friar at Fiesole, he changed his name to Giovanni and was named, thereafter, Fra Giovanni da Fiesole. Italians called him Beato (“Blessed One”). But the name by which we know him now was given him as a tribute fourteen years after his death. In 1450, Fra Giovanni da Fiesole became Fra Angelico, “angelic brother.” Unlike many friars, he took his vows seriously. Purity of form and space characterize his art; purity of soul, his life.
SIMPLICITY AND SERENITY
Vasari, the great source for Italian artists of this period, wrote of Fra Angelico: “But it is impossible to bestow too much praise on this holy father, who was so humble and modest in all that he did and said and whose pictures were painted with such facility and piety.” Facility is a feeble term. What seems simple is no easy at all. In fact, simplicity is quite hard to achieve, in art as in life. Even for Fra Angelico. Some years earlier, he had painted another Annunciation, quite similar but miles away from this masterpiece of balance and denouement. The second is a fresco in a corridor of the San Marco in Florence. He spent most of his life in the convent. He and his assistants decorated the walls between 1438 and 1450. For the frescoes in the monks’ cells, they used less expressive colors as pigments were quite expensive at the time, especially those reserved for the most holy figures.
To someone lucky enough to have seen illuminated manuscripts, one of the highest forms of art during the middle ages, it is quite easy to trace the lineage. The attention to detail, the purity of forms, the richness of color, the thin but expressive coat of paint, the lack of shadows or other dramatic effects are a mark of the great illuminators. And we know that, when Fra Giovanni, together with his younger brother, Fra Benedetto, joined the Order of Preachers in 1407, the brothers began their art careers as illustrators. Fra Benedetto, who had considerable talent as an illuminator and miniaturist, was supposed to have assisted his more celebrated brother in his famous frescoes in the convent of San Marco in Florence; he was superior at San Domenico at Fiesole for some years before his death in 1448. The Pope, it is said, wanted to make Angelico archbishop of Florence, but the unworldly priest declined the offer. According to an account which may be apocryphal, he was elected prior of Fiesole in 1449 and served three years, after which he returned to Rome to paint more pictures.
Even if illuminators are the true “reporters” of medieval costumes, court and popular scenes and also the first naturalists – they decorate the manuscripts with animals, butterflies and beautiful flowers they see around them – there is a great jump from a small format to the depiction of a big scene. Fra Angelico had the opportunity to watch the great frescoes that Giotto had painted in the St. Francis Basilica in Assisi. But, if Giotto is justly considered the first in a line of great artists who contributed to the Italian Renaissance, what a deep contrast! We just have to look at a big scene, like the Crucifixion, to realize that it portrays a sort of cosmic drama, where even the angels in the sky are contorted and tormented. If afterwards we look at Fra Angelico’s, the Maestà (Madonna enthroned), we see, in a quite earthly setting, Mary presenting the smiling Child Jesus to a group composed of Saints Cosmas and Damian, Saint Mark and Saint John, Saint Lawrence and three Dominicans: Saint Dominic, Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Peter Martyr. All of them are serene, as they just had met in the street, and they seem to be in a conversational mood. This kind of “normality” would be copied in the future by many other artists.
TO STAY WITH CHRIST
What really distinguishes the art of Fra Angelico is a kind of mystic insight that cannot be copied or repeated. In this case, this is not an interpretation, but a reality that transcends genius and artistic skills. In fact, there were attempts to rediscover the “formula.” In the 19th century, the Pre-Raphaelite tried to return to this source of purity. The renowned art critic, William Michael Rossetti, brother of the group’s greatest painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, wrote: “He led the devout and ascetic life of a Dominican friar, and never rose above that rank; he followed the dictates of the Order in caring for the poor; he was always good-humored. All of his many paintings were of divine subjects, and it seems that he never altered or retouched them, perhaps from a religious conviction that, because his paintings were divinely inspired, they should retain their original form. 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 the Crucifixion.” Even if other painters admired him, they could not compete with him. Their paintings are more marked by a decorative sentimentality.
His piety was fully recognized during his life. But only on October 3, 1982, was he beatified by John Paul II. As if that was not enough, in 1984, the Pope declared him patron of Catholic artists. In his homage, he said: “Angelico was reported to say: ‘He who does Christ’s work must stay with Christ always.'” This motto earned him 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.” He stayed with Christ all his life. He worked relentlessly. Wherever he resided – Cortona, Fiesole, San Marco – he left frescoes and paintings. When the decayed monastery at San Marco in Florence was restored by the Dominicans, he and his pupils painted fifty frescoes in its rooms as aids to contemplation. His most famous works are there.
He died in Rome on March 18, 1455, where he lies in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. The epitaph engraved on his tomb tells all: “When singing my praise, don’t liken my talents to those of Apelles (the renowned painter of ancient Greece). Say, rather, that, in the name of Christ, I gave all I had to the poor. The deeds that count on Earth are not the ones that count in Heaven. I, Giovanni, am the flower of Tuscany.”
