fra angelico: monastic versions of renaissance art **

Fra Angelico, Monastic Culture, and the Spread of the Early Renaissance Style in Florence

[written in the mid to late 1990s; revised for greater clarity in Feb 2013]

Robert BaldwinAssociate Professor of Art HistoryConnecticut CollegeNew London, CT 06320

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Fra Angelico was a prior who ran the Dominican monastery of San Marco in Florence. Along with the more worldly Fra Filippo Lippi, he was also one of the leading painters in Florence in the thirties and forties after the early death of Masaccio in c. 1428. The arrival of Early Renaissance naturalism in Masaccio’s painting and Donatello’s sculpture did not instantly transform Florentine art. Many artists continued working in the prevailing style of late Gothic naturalism marked by cluttered description, decorative colors, extensive gilding, flattened and elongated forms, vertical perspective (rising rather than receding), and symbolic scale (figure size determined by relative importance, not position in space). As with any large shift, the spread of the Early Renaissance style was gradual with more rapid change taking place among younger artists and in more competitive, urban centers.

At a time of artistic transition, many painters forged a hybrid style, combing traditional and modern elements. One of these was Fra Angelico who adopted one point perspective while retaining many late Gothic qualities. More interestingly, Fra Angelico modulated his style depending on the location and the function of his images. His case shows how Renaissance artists were becoming self-conscious about stylistic choices and could create distinct styles for different settings. In his earlier years (1422-1440), Fra Angelico worked in three different modes simultaneously. In his later years working for pope Nicholas V, he developed a fourth style more closely tied to Masaccio. Although this course focuses on Angelico’s “monastic” style developed in frescoes for the cells of monks at San Marco, the visual qualities of that style emerge more clearly if we review his other style modes.

In small, precious liturgical works for the church spaces such as Madonna della Stella (Madonna of the Star) or the Annunciation-Adoration of the Magi, two of the four, heavily gilded, reliquary tabernacles he painted at San Marco in the 1420s, Angelico worked in a more late Gothic manner not so different from Gentile da Fabriano. In contrast, most of his large altarpieces combined the ornate surface qualities and material splendor of late Gothic art - rich colors, crowded compositions, and sumptuous detail – with the perspective spaces and classical architecture of Renaissance art. In his frescoes for the individual cells of monks at San Marco (1440-43), Angelo developed a third style of great austerity, simplicity, and abstraction geared to monastic withdrawal, meditation, and visionary prayer. In his late frescoes, executed for a papal chapel in Rome, Fra Angelico forged a more grand “Roman” version of the Early Renaissance style drawing on Masaccio without using his dramatic figures.

Fra Angelico as a Late Medieval Painter

Annunciation-Adoration of the Magi, 1420s, church of San Marco, reliquary tabernacle for a relic of the Virgin / not required but useful as a comparison

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Angelico’s Annunciation-Adoration of the Magi was one of four reliquary tabernacles painted for the church of San Marco in the 1420s. These works show his art at its most ornate and Late Gothic. The Annunciation-Adoration of the Magi combined these two subjects in a single composition. At the top of the image, Christ directs the incarnation from a blue celestial zone. Below, the angel Gabriel and the Virgin float against an ornate background of gold leaf decorated with red and blue lines. Though the red gilding in the lower register hints at a receding ground plane for Gabriel and Mary, the dominant patterning of the gold background overwhelms any hint of three-dimensionality and affirms a celestial, eternal space beyond the viewer’s world.

In the Adoration of the Magi below, the same gilding reappears, now used as a backdrop for a shallow stage space where the actions unfolds with minimal detail. On the left, under an abbreviated stable doorway, Joseph, Mary, and the Christ child receive the eldest magus while the younger kings approach. At the far right, Angelico packed in an abbreviated version of the kings’ retinue, here shown discussing the miraculous event while a groom restrains a rearing horse. There was no room in this small painting, either compositionally or conceptually, to elaborate the grand, processional space and elaborate detail seen in Gentile da Fabriano’s late Gothic Adoration of the Magi (1423) or in an Early Renaissance Adoration such as Gozzoli’s frescoes painted in 1459 for the private chapel in the Medici Palace.

Madonna della Stella, 1420s, church of San Marco, reliquary tabernacle for a relic of the Virgin

In the Madonna della Stella (Madonna of the Star), Angelico developed a similar, precious, ornate, and otherworldly style for the second of the four reliquary tabernacles he painted for the church of San Marco. Surrounded by eight angels who pray, swing liturgical incense, and play musical instruments, Mary holds the Christ Child tenderly against her face in a formula of the “tender Madonna” derived from Byzantine art. Placed beneath a celestial Christ who sends down a golden crown, Mary is at once the human mother of Christ and the crowned Queen of Heaven,

The radiating lines incised on the gold leaf surrounding Mary suggests her solar garment while the sixteen stars flanking and protecting her and the star on her head refer to one of her more popular titles. The star comes ultimately from ancient Roman imperial imagery where divinely favored rulers appeared with a star over their heads to show their celestial status and divine providence. Adopted along with dozens of other pagan motifs in early Christian art, the star on the head of Mary showed her divine role as the mother of God. With the rise of the cult of Mary after 1150 in the Western church, Mary was frequently praised in art, literature, and hymns as the Star of the Sea (Stella Maris) or the Morning Star.

Like the upper zone of his Annunciation-Adoration of the Magi, Angelico’s Madonna della Stella makes no attempt to bring the sacred figures down into a natural world. As the decoration of a small, precious reliquary, the composition used decorative, flat, golden bands moving inward from the carved, golden frame to the band of angels to the line of stars to the solar gold surrounding the Virgin to the figure of Mary herself. While a tender, human Madonna stands at the center of this celestial splendor, giving it a certain emotional vitality typical of the fourteenth century, the overall effect is one of a elaborately crafted Late Gothic materiality at the service of an immaterial luminosity and splendor. Indeed, the compositional integration of decorative craftsmanship with painted figures avoids what would soon become an Early Renaissance artistic distinction between artistic mind as a liberal art and fine medieval craftsmanship. Here is Fra Angelico at his most “medieval”.

Fra Angelico as an Early Renaissance Painter

Descent from the Cross (S. Trinita Altar), ca. 1430 / / not required but useful as a comparison


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In striking contrast to these two reliquary tabernacles, Fra Angelico’s Descent from the Cross developed a more Renaissance style while preserving important elements of a Late Gothic aesthetic. The Descent was commissioned around 1430 by the Florentine banker, Palla Strozzi, for the sacristy of S. Trinita. The sacristy itself was built by Strozzi to serve as his funeral chapel and was already decorated with Gentile da Fabriano’s lavish Adoration of the Magi which Strozzi commissioned in 1423. Despite its ornate colors and Gothic frame, Angelico’s Descent offered a critique of Gentile’s late Gothic altarpiece by setting his figures within a deep, perspective landscape and by greatly simplifying Gentile’s cluttered composition.

While the deep landscape showed Angelico’s interest in the new spaces of Renaissance art, it also served important symbolic purposes. Instead of the conventional Biblical setting for the Crucifixion – a skull-strewn hill – Angelico painted a green, Paradisiacal meadow filled with flowers, with an ancestor of Strozzi kneeling in the foreground to suggest Strozzi’s own piety and salvation. By surrounding the crucifixion with a green meadow like the one used in the Magi scene from the Annunciation-Adoration of the Magi, Angelico suggested in visionary terms the mystical redemption of the sinful earth achieved by Christ’s death and his Eucharistic body. His blood trickles down the cross into the barren desert (seen at upper right), transforming it into a green meadow of eternal life. Recalling God’s promise to transform the wilderness of Zion into a garden of Eden (Isaiah 51:3), i the garden blossoming in the wilderness continued in later Florentine Christian art, notably two paintings of the Mystical Nativity by Filippo Lippi and Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks. The symbolic handling of landscape space continues in the background where Angelico placed a barren, desert landscape on Christ’s left with an image of Jerusalem rising toward the heavens on Christ’s right. Arranged thus, Angelico’s earthly Jerusalem doubled as a symbolic image of the Heavenly Jerusalem, a conventional Christian metaphor for Paradise taken from Revelations 21.

One might see Fra Angelico’s landscape imagery in the Descent as evidence of a conservative, “late medieval” handling of new Renaissance forms tied to the artist’s monastic outlook. After all, he used Renaissance landscape to heighten a higher, visionary world of Christian miracles beyond the earthly sphere. At the same time, we should recognize the Renaissance innovations in Fra Angelico’s art which used natural forms to describe symbolic themes and miraculous events. Despite the traditional aesthetic qualities seen in Angelico’s Descent, the painting also takes up important elements of the new Early Renaissance manner pioneered by Masaccio and grounded in the deeper cultural shift effected by Renaissance humanism. In Italian art after 1425, even the most miraculous Christian events would increasingly be described in a Renaissance language of natural forms.

Angelico’s Descent also offers an interesting expression of traditional gender dichotomies by contrasting the weeping women on Christ’s right with the more intellectual group of fifteenth-century men on Christ’s left who discuss the meaning of the Passion and its relics. Although Strozzi’s ancestor appears on the male side, his compositional placement, kneeling posture, devotional gesture, and red clothing echo the penitential Magdalen on the female side and remind us that gender dichotomies were relative, not absolute.

Fra Angelico at San Marco (1440-43): A Monastic Version of the Early Renaissance Style

Background and PatronageIn 1436, Pope Eugenius IV granted the Dominicans a large, dilapidated convent in Florence to serve as the order’s monastery and power base in the largest, richest city in Italy outside Venice. Prior to this, the Dominican monks had been living in a much smaller monastery in Fiesole, a hilltop town overlooking Florence. The Dominicans were eager to relocate to central Florence for economic, spiritual, and political reasons, especially as their main rivals, the Franciscans, were already well-established with a large monastic compound at San Croce. (Brunelleschi’s Pazzi Chapel went up on the grounds of that monastery in the 1440s.)

In 1438, Cosimo de’ Medici, the richest, most powerful man in Florence, undertook the financing of major renovations at San Marco including a new cloister arcade, church, and library, all designed by Michelozzo. The cloister and church were completed by 1443, the library, endowed with four hundred manuscripts by Cosimo de’ Medici, by 1444. As part of the extensive renovations and rebuilding, Fra Angelico painted nearly fifty frescoes in various sections of the monastery between 1440 and 1443. Most of the frescoes dealt with the life of Christ with a focus on the three most important episodes: Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection. (Twenty-one frescoes alone

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depicted the Crucifixion.) Painted in the small cells in the monk’s dormitory on the second and third stories, the frescoes were mostly off limits to the general public. Only the north corridor of the second floor of the dormitory was open to outsiders as they passed to and from the new library. The cells on this corridor were reserved for affiliate members of the Dominican order. These lay brothers, known as conversi, were generally wealthy, lay Christians cultivated by monastic institutions for their patronage and lucrative bequests. With private cells at San Marco, they could visit for periodic episodes of solitude and prayer before returning to their secular lives outside the monastery.

The most important lay brother at San Marco was Cosimo de’ Medici himself. As the chief patron for the new monastery church, the dormitories, the many frescoes, the large library and collection of books (at this time, a large library had 200 volumes), Cosimo enjoyed the extraordinary privilege of a double cell at San Marco. Fra Angelico frescoed one of its walls with a large Adoration of the Magi. Compared to Angelico’s golden Adoration of the Magi on the reliquary tabernacle, Gentile da Fabriano’s Adoration of the Magi for the Strozzi family (1423), or Gozzoli’s Adoration of the Magi painted in Cosimo’s private chapel in the Medici Palace (1459), Angelico’s Adoration at San Marco was spare and austere, eliminating the bejeweled robes, splendid horses, exotic pets, contemporary portraits, huge retinues, and lavishly described landscape spaces. Compared to the other frescoes in the cells at San Marco, the Adoration is Angelico’s most regal and worldly painting. It shows how Cosimo de’ Medici managed to preserve a relative splendor and regality even amidst his own “monastic” retreat, simplicity, and prayer. When Pope Eugenius IV arrived in 1443 to see the new monastery and to dedicate Michelozzo’s new monastery church, he stayed overnight in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s double cell.

Annunciation with Garden of Eden, Dominican Convent Church in Fiesole (outside Florence), 1433-4 (Prado)

Annunciation with Enclosed Garden, Monastery of San Marco, northern hall, semi-public space, 1440-1443

Annunciation with St. Dominic, Monastery of San Marco, monk’s private cell, 1440-43 (Required Work, AHI 122)

Compared to Fra Angelico’s ornate, colorful altarpieces, his frescoes at San Marco showed a very different style which deserves to be called “monastic”. In these tiny cells where individual Dominican monks slept and prayed in solitude, Angelico developed a more austere, inward, bodiless Early Renaissance naturalism consistent with monastic meditation and withdrawal from the “sinful” world. Particularly interesting was the way Fra Angelico modified the same subject in three depictions of the Annunciation, each painted for different spaces.

The most naturalistic Annunciation was painted around 1434-5 as an altarpiece in the nearby Dominican convent church at Fiesole. (The painting is now in the Prado Museum.).


Here, the Annunciation takes place in a Renaissance portico, modeled on Brunelleschi’s cloisters at San Lorenzo and San Croce. Outside the portico, we see Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden. In pairing the Fall with the Annunciation, Angelico played on the conventional idea of Mary and Christ as the new Eve and the new Adam while showing how the Incarnation reversed the Fall and restored Paradise.

On the more public Northern hallway of the monk’s dormitory where lay brothers had their cells at San Marco, Fra Angelico invented a somewhat more austere Annunciation.


As with the Fiesole altarpiece, he set the event in a deep portico just off an enclosed garden which referred even more closely to the real portico and cloister garden down one flight of stairs and visible from the monks’ small windows. The rough forest landscape seen in the distance, outside the enclosed garden, underscores the garden as a

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conventional symbol of Mary’s purity derived from a passage in the Old Testament Song of Songs (“a garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse”). The garden also refers to the restored Paradise shown in the Fiesole Annunciation and, more generally, to monastic withdrawal and spiritual purity. Although the Virgin was the object of special devotion in Dominican spirituality, her cult was widely developed in other religious orders as well as in popular devotions and lay spirituality. It was the fifteenth century which saw tens of thousands of small Madonnas painted for private homes throughout Europe.

In Angelico’s hallway Annunciation, Fra Angelico set his figures within a deep architectural space painted according to the new rules of one point perspective. Here Angelico’s Brunelleschian architecture carved out real depth in striking contrast to the flat, Renaissance arcade used in his 1420 Madonna with Four Saints. At the same time, Angelico used the same architecture to emphasize a clear, two-dimensional compositional pattern anchoring both figures to the surface. In this new compositional clarity, he also worked within the Early Renaissance aesthetic invented by Brunelleschi and Masaccio.

The required work in this course is the Annunciation with St. Dominic painted inside one of the private cells on the third floor of the monastery. Here we see a much greater abstraction and disembodiment fusing Renaissance qualities with late medieval visual forms.


In the Annunciation with St. Dominic, Angelico eliminated the angel’s forward stride, thereby replacing outward drama with inward devotion. Instead of narrating a dramatic story, Gabriel stands motionless in a much simpler architectural space. Here one should cite Angelico’s Mocking of Christ in another cell where he abstracted all outward drama into devotional hieroglyphs of disembodied heads and hands tormenting Christ and where inward spectators look away, lost in their own private visions.

If the Gabriel in the third Annunciation lacks movement and physical presence, Mary is even more flattened, weightless, and lacking in any bodily definition beneath her clothes. Ostensibly kneeling on a footstool as the humble “handmaid of the Lord”, she appears in a realm largely stripped of bodily values. As with the Angel Gabriel, her hands move in, toward her body as if flinching from anything outward.

In this Annunciation, drama and story-telling give way to monastic meditation tied to the solitary prayer of individual monks in tiny cells. To heighten the sense of withdrawal while fusing the inward space of the real cell with the “mystical” space of the monk’s prayers, Angelico simplified the space of the portico, eliminating the secondary room in the distance seen in the other two Annunciations. The small, unadorned architectural space in the Annunciation with St. Dominic closely resembled the bare, whitewashed cell where the fresco appears. So too, the figure of St. Dominic repeated the presence of the monk as an exemplary, introspective beholder caught in perpetual prayer.


By cleverly mimicking the monk’s real cell and his daily devotions, Angelico’s visionary image seems to emerge as much from the monk’s prayer as if the cell were mystically transformed into the place where the Annunciation took place. If the other two Annunciations cleverly relocated the Biblical story to the modern Florentine cloister, the third Annunciation took the Annunciation still further into the interior spaces of monastic spirituality.

Fra Angelico achieved a similar effect in many of the other cells at San Marco, especially in the many frescoes of the Crucifixion where all landscape space and detail were eliminated in favor of the simple, unadorned fresco plaster. Since this plaster was identical with the bare plaster walls of the real cell, the sacred figures seem to materialize as visionary presences conjured forth from a white infinity. With visions carefully tied to the surrounding spaces of the cells, the intimacy of the small, white rooms doubled as a mystical space, an enclosed

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inner world where monastic souls could withdraw to see with the special clarity and focus gained by abandoning worldly concerns.

Since description was kept to a minimum in these frescoes, it is easy to see them as expressions of a traditional monastic spirituality encouraging monks and nuns to move without distraction from outward paintings to inner images, from material to immaterial things. Such a progression was commonly stated in monastic discussions of prayer and in more mainstream discussions of Christian images used in public worship. In their unprecedented austerity, simplicity, and visionary qualities tied to the real space of the cell, these frescoes were surely indebted to late medieval monastic values.

At the same time, we need to look at the ground-breaking project of decorating each cell with a large fresco. It was one thing to decorate more public spaces with images, something done by Christians throughout the Middle Ages except for a few intervals of iconoclasm (rejection of images) in the eastern, Byzantine church. It was quite another to decorate the innermost spaces of monk’s private living quarters with “worldly” images, especially the quarters of Dominican monks sworn to poverty and hostile to all “ornament” and “decoration”. Also sworn to a more radical poverty, the Franciscans avoided “worldly” religious images in their churches, except in the immediate area of the altar, for the first sixty years (1240-1300). The growing importance of images in early fifteenth-century monastic piety, not just in church space but also in private monastic spaces devoted to solitude and prayer, suggests changes in Renaissance monastic culture as a whole and especially in the preaching/begging orders initially espousing a radical new poverty (Franciscans and Dominicans). Over the course of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, these orders became increasingly worldly in accepting lavish bequests, acquiring significant real estate, land-holdings, and wealth, and building monasteries not outside city walls where early Franciscans and Dominicans preserved a relative monastic isolation, but in the heart of the biggest, richest cities.

As of now, I don’t have the background to say whether the new willingness to accommodate images in private monastic spaces was true for all of the monastic orders or more for the urban preaching orders tied to worldly pastoral care, vernacular language, and the folksy “visual” examples used repeatedly in their sermons. For now, the following generalization will have to suffice. Despite the continuation in Renaissance culture of a medieval monastic rhetoric extolling the soul’s inward, mystical ascent from visibles to invisibles, from worldly images to celestial matters, the frescoes of Fra Angelico in the cells at San Marco show the growing importance of visual images and culture within all religious culture, even the most private, solitary spaces of monasticism.

One might also see in Angelico’s monastic frescoes a new Renaissance aesthetic self-consciousness and sophistication in the handling of monastic imagery and late medieval stylistic qualities.

Multiple Naturalisms and the Myth of Artistic Progress

The variation of style modes seen in the art of Fra Angelico remind us that Early Renaissance naturalism was no simple, single, inevitable thing. Instead it was a complex and tentative set of different, flexible, improvised "solutions" worked out in different ways by different artists under a variety of conditions, for different patrons and settings.

An artist such as Fra Angelico also calls into question the Renaissance myth of artistic progress which was introduced in the early fifteenth century to praise the new style adopted by Brunelleschi, Alberti, Donatello, and Masaccio. Artistic progress, or originality, emerged as a new Renaissance idea along with an equally novel aesthetic self-consciousness. It also appeared in other field such as literature and science as innovators put a premium on new ideas at the expense of traditional thinking. In a modern world where artistic originality has taken on even greater importance and where artists are expected to have “new ideas” every few years, modern viewers tend to prefer the most original Renaissance artists such as Giotto, Masaccio, Piero, and Leonardo. Skewed by

i “For the LORD shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the LORD; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody.”

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modern ideas of originality, this view of Renaissance and Baroque artists risks devaluing the remarkable and unique styles developed by more traditional painters such as Fra Angelico, the late Botticelli, Rogier van der Weyden, the late Hugo, and even the late Michelangelo.

A more historically informed view would see the new Renaissance rhetoric of progress and originality as a promotional strategy serving the careers of a few artists and the civic pride of a few aesthetically "progressive" cities just as it later served the careers of ambitious critics, dealers, collectors, and curators eager to claim a privileged awareness of the cutting edge of modern art. As historians, we should be interested in all theories of art but we should avoid making any of them our own measure. This is especially true for the myth of artistic progress since it ignores most of the art ever produced. It also reduces the history of art to a triumph of bourgeois individualism, of great, invariably male, white figures towering over their ages, painting for "all mankind" in a world beyond history. And it ignores the fact that this thinking is historically imbedded and has its own finite existence tied to larger cultural and social values. It emerged for a few hundred years in classical antiquity before disappearing for 1200 years. It reemerged in Italy in the Early Renaissance and spread to Northern Europe after 1500. It climaxed in the first half of the twentieth-century with the idea of an artistic avant-garde. And it suffered a severe reversal in the post-modernist thinking of the 1980s and 1990s.

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fra angelico: monastic versions of renaissance art **

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