FRA ANGELICO
On the threshold of the Renaissance stands Fra Angelico (1387–1455), who was trained in the school of miniaturists and influenced by Lorenzo Monaco and Masaccio. His life was devoted to “the service of God, the benefit of the world, and his duty towards his neighbour,” as Vasari says. He regarded painting as one of the duties of the monastic life, and never began to paint without first kneeling in prayer. His pictures are aspirations towards heaven, while the figures with which he peoples his saintly compositions have faces which show peace, joy, hope, and communion with God. They are clothed in draperies of the purest colours, crowned with glories of burnished gold, but are never dramatic in their action. One of his best easel paintings outside Florence, where alone his art can be adequately studied, is his early Coronation of the Virgin (No. 1290). This imposing, if overcrowded, composition is painted to the glory of God and in honour of the Dominican Order, to which the painter belonged. In the right bottom corner we see St. Agnes with her lamb, next to her St. Catherine with her wheel, above is St. Lawrence with his gridiron, and to the latter’s right St. Peter Martyr in Dominican robes and with wounded head. In the foreground kneels St. Mary Magdalene in red, her box of ointment in her left hand. St. Nicholas with the three golden balls at his feet, St. Thomas Aquinas in Dominican robes and holding the theological book from which rays of golden light issue, St. Louis (Louis ix., King of France), and St. Dominic himself—all help to swell the heavenly company. In the predella, or lower part, of this panel picture are depicted Scenes from the Life of St. Dominic, the founder of Fra Angelico’s own Order: (a) Pope Innocent iii. in his vision sees St. Dominic supporting the falling Church; (b) the Pope receives, through the agency of St. Peter and St. Paul who hand him a staff and the Gospel, Divine authority to found the Dominican Order; (c) the Saint brings back to life a young noble named Napoleon who had been trampled under foot by a horse; (d) Christ in the tomb, the Virgin and St. John; (e) St. Dominic challenges heretics whose books are consumed in the fire, while his own book of the true Gospel issues forth unhurt by the action of fire; (f) angels descend from heaven to feed the starving monastery of St. Sabina at Rome immediately after St. Dominic has asked a blessing; these two blue-clad figures are among the loveliest of all Fra Angelico’s angelic beings, and perhaps the most inspiring figures in the whole of the Louvre collection; (g) the death of the Saint at Bologna and the passing of his soul up to heaven in accordance with the vision of the monk at Brescia. This early Cinquecento panel picture, which was formerly in the Church of S. Domenico at Fiesole, near Florence, was painted before the Beato went to beautify the cells of S. Marco with frescoes. It is one of the best of the primitive pictures in the Louvre.
From the hand of the same saintly painter are the Adoring Angel (no No.), which until 1909 was in the Victor Gay collection, the Martyrdom of St. Cosmo and St. Damian (No. 1293), part of the predella of a dismembered altarpiece, and the large fresco painting of the Crucifixion (No. 1294) which hangs on the Escalier Daru. The latter was purchased, together with Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Bottle-nosed Man (No. 1322, [Plate III.]), in 1879 for £1960. The Beheading of St. John the Baptist (No. 1291) and the Resurrection (No. 1294a) are unauthentic.
In Benozzo Gozzoli (1420–1498) we have an assistant and follower of Fra Angelico. He worked at different towns in Italy, notably at Montefalco, Orvieto, Florence, San Gimignano, Rome, and Pisa, where he died. Although his earlier work reminds us of Fra Angelico, than whom he is much more dramatic and much less spiritual, in later life he depicts the costumes and life of his time in a more realistic and objective manner. His Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas (No. 1319), which originally hung in the Cathedral at Pisa, deals with a subject often met with in the art of the period. The great Dominican teacher, whom the heathen philosophers, Aristotle on the left, and Plato on the right, recognise as their master in philosophy, is enthroned, his books of theological learning on his knees. At his feet, subdued, is Guillaume de St. Amour, the author of a book entitled De Periculis Novissimorum Temporum, in which he exposed the various abuses then prevalent among the mendicants. The dramatic action seen in the lower part of the panel embraces Pope Alexander iv. presiding over the religious council of Agnani, and the envoys of St. Louis (Louis ix. of France) who took steps to end the religious conflicts of 1256. A large altarpiece (No. 1320) representing the Madonna and Child Enthroned, St. Cosmo, St. Damian, St. Jerome, St. John the Baptist, St. Francis d’Assisi, and St. Lawrence in the central panel is also assigned to Benozzo. The frame also contains seven predella pictures, and at either end is the coat of arms of the Medici family.
The great French Museum, which is weaker than the National Gallery, the Berlin Gallery, and certain other national collections in Italian primitives, affords us no example of the art of Andrea del Castagno (fl. 1410–1457), whose compositions are characterised by harsh colour, hard lines, and crude forms. Nor do we find here any painting by that very rare artist, Domenico Veneziano (1400?–1461), who, it has been said, was the first Tuscan artist to work in an oil medium.