Fra Angelico's use of gold and bright, intense colours give his religious paintings a wonderfully sunny, upbeat quality, writes Aidan Dunne
With Yale University Press, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art has produced a lavish volume on one of the most popular Italian painters of the early Renaissance, Fra Angelico, to accompany its current major exhibition of his work. There are obvious problems associated with organising a museum exhibition of a Renaissance artist. Apart altogether from the logistical issues of the irreplacability and fragility of the work, much of what Fra Angelico and his contemporaries made is by its nature fixed in place, incorporated in monasteries and churches. Portable works, even large, composite ones such as elaborate altarpieces, have generally been broken up and dispersed, so gathering the pieces together is more than worthwhile, but the fact remains that Fra Angelico is in the end best encountered at first hand, in Italy.
That said, the book is a beautiful and exhaustive publication that aims to present the most accurate and complete account of the Angelic Friar to date. Chiefly, it consolidates the emergent view of the painter as a different, though by no means lesser individual than the pious cleric of popular imagination. If the sentimental version of his life sees him as an unworldly friar who lived a life of saintly asceticism and took up his brushes to glorify the lord, the art- historical account has it that he was, first and foremost, an artistically literal and informed painter, one who embraced the monastic life without forsaking his place in the highly developed and competitive cultural world of the early Florentine Renaissance.
This isn't to say that he was, like his contemporary, Fra Filippo Lippi, who was expelled from his order for reputedly kidnapping a nun, in some way morally dubious. Fra Angelico was a devout Christian, who used his skills in the service of the church, but he was also a worldly figure well able to manage his workshop and his career.
He was born around 1395 (though that figure has been speculatively pushed back as late as 1400) and christened Guido di Pietro, later taking the name Giovanni - the Fra Angelico was posthumously bestowed. He already had a great deal of highly accomplished work to his credit by the time he joined the Observant Dominicans at Fiesole, close to Florence, some time between 1418 and 1421.
The point about the sequence is that early accounts of his life tended to emphasise his artistic conservatism, pulling back toward the Gothic and away from the humanist values of the Renaissance. But he was also clearly well-versed in the artistic developments of his time. That said, the Observant Dominicans believed in a plain, direct mode of preaching, with an emphasis on the virtue of love and the beauty of the natural world. Fra Angelico's paintings embody these qualities brilliantly.
He was an elegant, clear draughtsman with a graceful touch that carried over into his painting. His use of gold and bright, intense colours give his work a wonderful radiance. His compositions marry brilliantly described figures with serene geometry and charming accounts of the Tuscan landscape. Certainly, for him, form follows function, and the function of art was to promulgate doctrine. Although he was capable of conveying a mood of austerity, there is almost always a sunny, upbeat quality to his paintings, a quality that extends even to tragic and grisly subject matter, such as that in The Decapitation of Saints Cosmas and Damian. Apart from the endless felicities of his images, there is about him, as there is with all the early Renaissance artists, an incomparable excitement of discovery, an awareness that they are on the threshold of a brave new world, ripe for exploration.
Fra Angelico, by Laurence Kanter and Pia Palladino, is published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, £40. The exhibition continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art , New York, until Jan 29