Fra Angelico is well-known as an artist, but he never handled a brush without fervent prayer. He was beatified by Pope John Paul in 1982 and declared patron of Catholic artists in 1984. John Murray tells his story.
Some saints moved mountains by their prayer; others healed the sick and even raised the dead. Some were founders of great religious orders; others even gave their lives for the Lord.
Many are remembered in the calendar of the year, and many more are among the countless millions whom the Church remembers on the Feast of All Saints. Numerous also are the patrons of countries and occupations and trades. Such is the saint we remember this month, for he gave glory to God by painting.
Dominicans
Guido di Pietro was born in Tuscany, near Fiesole and Florence, about 1387. While still a young boy, he asked for admittance at the convent of San Domenico in Florence, where Dominican friars were known for their strict rules. He completed his novitiate in Cortona in 1408, and became a full Dominican friar in Florence about 1418 with the name of Fra Giovanni da Fiesole. Angelico, ‘The Angelic’, is a term which was assigned to him at an early date, and which we find in common use within thirty years of his death.
Before becoming a friar, he and his brother were trained as manuscript makers. Guido originally received training as an illuminator. Among his early works were the Annunciation, at Cortona, the Coronation of the Virgin, in the convent of Fiesole, and the Deposition of Christ, which was executed for the Church of the Holy Trinity in Florence. A later Renaissance painter, named Vasari, said of these that they ‘were painted by a saint or an angel’.
Cortona
His earliest works, which are in considerable number, are at Cortona, to which he was sent during his novitiate. Here he spent all the early years of his religious life. His first works, executed in fresco, were probably those, now destroyed, which he painted in the convent of San Domenico in this city.
From 1418 to 1436 he was back at Fiesole; in 1436 he was transferred to the Dominican friary of San Marco in Florence. Here he decorated many of the rooms, including many of the individual cells, as well as the chapter hall and the church altarpiece.
Rome and Orvieto
In 1445, after the success of these works, he was invited to Rome by Pope Eugenius IV, who reigned from 1431 to 1447. He appointed another Dominican friar, a colleague of Fra Angelico, to be archbishop of Florence in 1445.
The story, first told by Vasari, may be true that this appointment was made at the suggestion of Fra Angelico only after the archbishopric had been offered to him and declined by him on the grounds of his unworthiness for so responsible a position.
In June 1447, he proceeded to Orvieto, to paint in the Cappella Nuova of the cathedral, with the co-operation of his pupil Benozzo Gozzoli. He afterwards returned to Rome to paint the chapel of Nicholas V. He died there in 1455, where he lies buried in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva.
Brother to the poor
According to all the accounts which have come down to us, few men on whom the distinction of beatification has been conferred have deserved it more than Fra Angelico. He led a holy and self-denying life, shunning all advancement, and was a brother to the many poor who often came to the monastery doors looking for food or shelter. No one, it seems, ever saw him angry.
He painted with unceasing diligence, treating none but sacred subjects, never retouching or altering his work. He believed that if divine providence allowed the inspiration to come, such it should remain. It is said that he never handled a brush without fervent prayer, and that he wept when he painted the Crucifixion.
Divine image
Throughout the ages, the Church has always been the great patron of the arts, and particularly of painting. Yet, at different times, it has also struggled with those who reject the very notion of trying to paint or image the divine. The Iconoclasts of the eighth century and the Reformers of the sixteenth rejected out of hand anything that attempted to put a face on God. Some would even quote Scripture in defence of their stance.
Yet, the artist who paints an icon or chisels shapes from a marble slab is trying in some small way to unlock the divine. We humans are made of flesh and blood; we are creatures of mind and spirit and body. The image of Christ portrays, not just his body, but also something of his spirit and even of his divinity. The icon reveals something of the mystery beyond the physical dimensions of the paint.
Today, in the modern world, image is all. ‘The medium is the message,’ as Marshall McLuhan famously put it. Television is particularly good at this, as it presents to us those iconic moments of the age. We all remember Armstrong’s ‘one small step for mankind’ on the moon, Nelson Mandela’s first steps of freedom from Robben Island, the funeral of Pope John Paul II and the planes crashing into New York’s Twin Towers.
Yet we know also that there is so much dross among the pearls, countless hours of utter banality and, indeed, profanity amid the gems of visual wisdom. The images of television are constantly changing, flashing quickly before our eyes, as if afraid that we will change the channel if we become bored.
The contribution of Fra Angelico – and many other Christian artists – is that they have frozen in time a moment in the story of salvation, asking us to pause and reflect, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Pope John Paul II beatified Fra Angelico on 3 October 1982, and declared him Patron of Catholic artists in 1984. He was taking this step, the Pope said, ‘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’. On that occasion, the Pope quoted Fra Angelico himself: ‘Anyone who does Christ’s work must stay with Christ always’.
This article first appeared in The Messenger (September 2006), a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
