Angelico

Angelico, (1400?-1455) was born in Vicchio, Tuscany and named Guido di Piero. He became a friar before 1423 and took the name Fra Giovanni da Fiesole as a member of the community of San Dominico at Fiesole, where he was prior, subprior and syndic. He was known as Angelico since at least 1469 when Corella called him 'angelic painter, once called Johannes, in name no less than Giotto or Cimabue', and he was popularly know as 'Beato' long before the title was officially given by John Paul II in 1984. The inscription on his tomb in Rome stresses that he saw his work as a part of his religious duty: non mihi sit laudi quod eram velut alter Apelles, sed quod lucra tuis omnia Christe dabam' (I should not be praised because I was like another Apelles, but because I gave all my work to yours, Christ).

Fra Angelico worked for Dominican churches and convents, particularly in the Dominican Friary of San Marco in Florence sponsored by Cosimo de' Medici, but his reputation was such that he was commissioned to undertake major fresco cycles in the Vatican and the cathedral at Orvieto.

Nineteenth-century accounts of Angelico tend to be patronising, partly because he did not fit the neat account of the development of Florentine painting from Giotto to Michelangelo, and partly because it was assumed, in the words of Pope-Hennesey's summary of Angelico that there is an equation between 'devotion and simple-mindedness'. So, Kugler's account of Angelico in 1842 is grudging in its praise. Ruskin challenges the disparagement of Angelico (see Ruskin on Angelico).

More recently, Pope-Hennessy, Fra Angelico, Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco, and Didi-Huberman, translated Todd, Fra Angelico Dissemblance and Figuration, all stress the intellectual and artistic rigour of Angelico's work within a Dominican tradition. He drew on the work of the Sienese painters Duccio (active 1278 - 1318?), Simone Martini (known to Ruskin as Memmi), and Lorenzo Monaco, and also the International Gothic of Gentile da Fabriano, who worked in Venice and Siena as well as Florence and Rome. However he used those traditions in his own ways to serve his own purposes.

See Ruskin and the Italian School.

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