All the time Fra Angelico was placidly and intelligently studying the new realistic movement launched by Donatello and Masaccio. He adopts what suits him, rejecting heavy shadows which would dull his Gothic coloring, but adding freely realistic details in anatomy, drapery, and architecture. The Coronation of the Virgin in the Louvre, Figure [73], though it may be only a few months later than that of the Uffizi, no longer takes place in a cloudland before lucent gold, but in a quite practicable architecture imitating the niche which Michelozzo designed in 1423 for Donatello’s St. Louis of Toulouse. The forms too are more substantial, more mundane. Soon the architectural accessories become of Renaissance type, and as Mr. Langton Douglas has shown, every new invention of Michelozzo for a space of ten years is promptly reflected in the painting of Fra Angelico. His greatest Madonna, that of the Linen Guild, Figure [74], painted in 1433, is almost plastic, recalling the severe sweetness of Orcagna. The picture is really cumbered by the rich hangings, which with the slender swaying angels in the bevel of the frame are already an anachronism. In the Descent from the Cross, Figure [75], we find Fra Angelico skilfully adopting the new discoveries in anatomy and landscape. The treatment is broad and panoramic in the tradition of the Lorenzetti but all the details are carefully studied from nature and not furnished by formula. A deeply felt scene thus gains verisimilitude, comes out of the realm of legend and becomes an actuality. The panel was finished in 1440, and, now that Masaccio was gone, there was no living painter who could have put into it with equal knowledge so much feeling.
Fig. 75. Fra Angelico. Deposition.—Uffizi.
The building of the great Dominican Convent of San Marco between 1437 and 1444 opened to Fra Angelico his great opportunity. It was the gift of Cosimo de’ Medici, now unofficial ruler of Florence, who had his good reasons for wishing to assure the occasional repose of his busy soul in this world and its permanent repose in the next. He often sought seclusion in the convent and doubtless saw in progress the fifty or more frescoes that Fra Angelico made to adorn it. Fra Angelico was painting for deeply religious men, for scholars who had the Scriptures at their finger tips, and for this reason perhaps he rejects all smaller realisms, reducing his compositions to the mere figures. Thus the San Marco frescoes are more concise even than those of Giotto, and they reach at their best a simple sublimity as yet unattained in Italian art. Highly formal and decorative, they are free from consciously æsthetic taint. Sometimes I think Perugino learned much at San Marco and that we may thus regard Fra Angelico as indirectly a leading influence on Raphael. The sparse, effective method may be illustrated in the fresco set over the door of the guest quarters, the Forestiera. It represents a pilgrim Christ being received by Dominican brothers. Figure [76]. In the stranger we entertain The Lord Himself is the simple lesson. The figures are set against a conventional blue background but are constructed with the authority of the new learning.
Fig. 76. Fra Angelico. Dominicans receive Christ as Pilgrim. Guest house door.—S. Marco.
In the Chapter House nearby Fra Angelico painted, about 1440, a great Crucifixion, Figure [77]. The three laden crosses stand out sharply against a murky sky. The setting is a mere platform, on which the familiar forms of Mary and the beloved Apostles are almost lost in a throng of witnesses of every age. We have the Latin Fathers, and their successors—St. Dominic and St. Francis, among others. The arrangement is highly formal, the mood that of meditation; the sharper tragedy of the theme is not insisted on. The characterization of the saints is precise and fine, the drawing of their forms admirable. Had the composition been set against a Gothic, blue background, the mood would have seemed merely sentimental. What gives it, with all its abstractness, an almost sensational tang of reality is the arching sky, slaty above and an ominous orange behind the figures. The expedient brings an element of definite place and time of day for this rendezvous of saints at a mystically renewed Calvary.
Fig. 77. Fra Angelico. Mystical Crucification. Chapter House.—S. Marco.
In the cells of the convent, Fra Angelico and his helpers painted no less than forty-three frescoes. These were intended for the private devotions of the brother occupying the cell, and the subjects were probably chosen not by Fra Angelico himself, but by his cloister mates. The best are conceived like the frescoes of the lower story. The background is just a veiled sky, there are no accessories, the figures loom in an indefinite space. Majestic is the Transfiguration, Figure [78], very lovely the Coronation of the Virgin. The angelic painter draws the maximum effect from the simplest patterns and briefest means. There is the measured and simple dignity of the early Christian mosaics with a warmer and more personal feeling. Fra Angelico, when he wishes, can be elaborately realistic. He is so in the garden scene where the Risen Christ gently rebuffs the Magdalen, in the crowded Adoration of the Magi, which tradition assigns to Cosimo de’ Medici’s cell, and in the Annunciation, Figure [79], in the corridor with its graceful Renaissance loggia. In this more circumstantial vein, Fra Angelico is delightful, but I think below his best. In all the frescoes at S. Marco, however, Fra Angelico appears as a wholly Florentine figure with an art based at once on the study of nature and on an understanding admiration for the masterpieces of Giotto and Orcagna.