Art Eyewitness Book Review: Fra Angelico and the Rise of the Florentine Renaissance

Fra Angelico and the Rise of the Florentine Renaissance

By Carl Brandon Strehlke and Ana Gonzales Mozo

Thames & Hudson-Prado Museum/255 pages/$40

Reviewed by Ed Voves

For art scholars, conscientious about assigning correct dates to works of art, the Renaissance presents a problem. When did this "rebirth" of Western art begin? When did painting and sculpture in Europe cease being International Gothic in style and start exhibiting the hallmarks of Renaissance theory and practice?

Most histories of the Renaissance focus on 1401 as the "takeoff" of the Renaissance in Italy. That year marked the momentous competition between Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi to design the bronze doors of the Baptistery for the city of Florence. If one requires timeline accuracy, then Ghiberti vs. Brunelleschi provides a serviceable date.

The year 1425 is also a contender as the alternative birthday for the Renaissance. A brilliant new book, Fra Angelico and the Rise of the Florentine Renaissance, investigates the events of that decisive moment in art history. Published by Thames & Hudson, this thoughtful and lavishly illustrated book documents a major exhibition at the Prado during the summer of 2019 to help celebrate the 200th anniversary of Spain's greatest museum. 

A quarter of a century after the Ghiberti- Brunelleschi competition, a Dominican monk named Fra Giovanni da Fiesole painted a puzzling work entitled Annunciation and Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise. In many ways, his work looks notably medieval. Yet closer inspection reveals that this egg tempora painting on wood panel exhibits Brunelleschi's revolutionary art theories. 

The implications of shifting the start of the Renaissance to this 1425 painting are unsettling. The key player in this scenario now becomes a monk who was proficient in manuscript illumination and application of gold leaf, hardly the skill set of a "Renaissance Man."

Fra Angelico, The Virgin with the Pomegranate, ca. 1424-25

Fra Giovanni da Fiesole is better known today as Fra Angelico. Born Guido di Pietro, around the year 1395, he was a native Tuscan from the town of Vicchio, near to Florence. Trained as an artist, he joined the Dominican Order, along with his brother, who was also a noted illustrator of manuscripts.

Not only did Fra Angelico paint some of the most ethereal, indeed celestial, beings imaginable, but his own personality was close to being angelic. He was held in high esteem during his lifetime, as an artist of exceptional talent and as a devout Christian. In 1982, Fra Angelico was beatified by Pope John Paul II, an important step on the road to sainthood.

Fra Angelico excelled in more than traditional medieval artistic conventions. Both Carl Brandon Strehlke, the primary author of the Thames & Hudson book, and Ana Gonzales Mozo, who contributed a perceptive essay on Fra Angelico's painting technique, affirm that he incorporated advanced ideas from Brunelleschi, solidly based on mathematics, in the Annunciation and Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise.

Fra Angelico, Annunciation and Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, 1425-1426

Strehlke, Curator Emeritus of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, notes that Fra Angelico took the bold step to accurately position his protagonists, the Angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary within an architectural setting in the picture. They are not floating in space but occupy a set position, a "you are here" point established by mathematical calculation. Strehlke writes:

The architecture of the Virgin's house shows how open Angelico was to Brunelleschi's ideas about drawing buildings in spatial recession. It is the earliest surviving painted example of architecture in perspective. The manipulation of the orthogonals, horizon line, and vanishing point suggests careful consideration of what Brunelleschi's biographer Antonio Manetti noted 'painters today term perspective.'

Fra Angelico's painting depicts the interface - we might also say the intrusion - of the realm of the sacred into human reality. Although the Virgin Mary's house has a theater-set ambiance, Fra Angelico revealed that he was adept at utilizing Brunelleschi's methodology in the depiction of the small side room which has a "homey" feel to it. Look through that door and you see a small patch of the real world shown in perspective.

Fra Angelico, as a Dominican monk, had also to be faithful to the theological precepts of his Order's great theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). Aquinas believed that reason, if founded upon faith, will lead to understanding and union with God.

Fra Angelico, Annunciation and Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise (detail)

The painting of the Annunciation is a visualization of this process. The streams of golden light proceeding from the hands of God represent the Incarnation, the act of divine inspiration by which Mary, a virgin, will give birth to Jesus the Son of God. 

Fra Angelico, Annunciation and Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise (detail)

Mary is mystified by the Angel Gabriel's entreaty but accepts that she has been chosen to be mother of the Messiah. This act of faith engenders an awareness, a deeper form of knowledge, that God is intervening in the lives of human beings.

"Human salvation," Aquinas wrote, "demands the divine disclosure of truths surpassing reason."

Hard to believe?  Aquinas, the "Angelic Doctor," is famous for his voluminous, densely argued philosophical treatises, but he "cuts to the quick" on the point of faith.  

"To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible."

The faith-acceptance-awareness process is what we see depicted in the major incident of Annunciation and Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise. But what about the  Paradise Lost "sidebar"?  Why was this seemingly-unrelated episode from Genesis placed in juxtaposition with the Annunciation?

The answer reveals more of the "medieval" roots of the Renaissance. 

Fra Angelico painted Annunciation and Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise for the Dominican Order's church, San Domenico in Fiesole. The Thames & Hudson book has an intriguing drawing showing how this painting was displayed. It was positioned on a large frame which straddled the width of the church. Called the Rood Screen, this framework separated the nave of the church where the congregation stood or knelt from the sanctuary and choir. In this most sacred area stood the altar where the priest and monks gathered. Here the priest conducted the sacrifice of the Mass, turning bread and wine into Christ's body and blood.

The positioning of the Rood Screen prevented direct observation of the sacred ceremony by the lay people in the church. By way of compensation, paintings and statues were placed on the Rood Screen for them to contemplate as they listened to the clergy conduct the Mass. 

One of the paintings hung on San Domenico's Rood Screen was Annunciation and Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise. 

Fra Angelico

            Annunciation and Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise (detail)

An important hymn/prayer of the Roman Catholic liturgy during the Renaissance was Salve Regina, in honor of Mary, mother of Jesus. It was included in the evening prayer service known as Compline. The opening words of the prayer reveal why Fra Angelico painted Adam and Eve's banishment from Paradise on the same poplar board with the Angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary. 

Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Mercy,
Hail our life, our sweetness and our hope.
To thee do we cry,
Poor banished children of Eve; 
To thee do we send up our sighs,
Mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.

The words of the hymn would have been powerfully reinforced by the imagery of the painting. Humanity's suffering, caused by the disobedience of Adam and Eve, would be redeemed through the agency of Mary's faith and the life and death of her son, Jesus.

Fra Angelico created Annunciation and Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise in 1425. Another version of the banishment of Adam and Eve was being painted at the same time in Florence: Masaccio's Expulsion of Adam and Eve in the Brancacci Chapel of the Santa Maria del Carmine Church. Fra Angelico almost certainly was aware of Masaccio's handling of this episode from Genesis. While Masaccio portrayed the existential grief of Adam and Eve, Fra Angelico chose to show the pair as less grief-stricken and ultimately redeemable.

Masaccio's Expulsion may appeal more to modern interpretations and ideas. Yet, Fra Angelico was an artist capable of great psychological insight. One of the supporting works in the Prado exhibition reveals the profound extent of his ability to probe human character and emotions.

In 1909, acting on the advice of Bernard Berenson, the Philadelphia collector, John G. Johnson, bought what was believed to be a portrait of St. Francis of Assisi. Johnson bequeathed his collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, including this work attributed to Fra Angelico.

Fra Angelico

                          Head and Torso of Saint Francis of Assisi, ca. 1427-30  

Berenson was correct in his assessment but only years later was it discovered that this image of St. Francis had been a part of an ensemble of two saints praying at the foot of the Cross. The figures of St. Francis, his companion on the other side of the Cross, St. Nicholas of Bari and of the martyred Jesus were all painted to appear as if they were statues, thus enhancing the realism of the scene.

Close inspection of the St. Francis "portrait," which survived the centuries since 1430 in much better condition than St. Nicholas, reveals the degree of Fra Angelico's close study of human physiognomy. The sagging "bags" beneath the eyes, the pinched features of the face, the straining neck muscles, all testify to the physical toll and privation of St. Francis'  austere devotion to God.

It is vital to remember that there is no portrait of St. Francis, drawn or painted from life. An imagined likeness was created about three years after his death in 1226. Fra Angelico's depiction of the beloved saint from Assisi is thus a psychological portrait and all the more convincing for being so. Fra Angelico, as a monk, well knew the personal cost of a life of sanctity. It is obvious - at least to me - that Fra Angelico painted the figures in this devotional work while in a state of meditative awareness of Christ, St. Francis and St. Nicholas.

This sense of communion between artist and subject is a key facet of Icon painting in the Greek and Russian Orthodox traditions. Fra Angelico, working according to the Western, Latin canon of Christianity, brought intense levels of spirituality to his work. Regardless of the form of interpretation, whether it was the medieval-looking Annunciation and Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise or the visceral realism of his St. Francis, Fra Angelico painted in "communion" with the divine.

Fra Angelico was later to combine his skill in narrative painting with the profound feel for character and emotion which we see in his St. Francis of Assisi. 

In 1436, Cosimo de Medici funded the rebuilding of the Dominican church and monastery of San Marco in Florence.  Fra Angelico was tasked with painting in fresco a contemplative scene from the life of Christ in each of the monk's cells and larger devotional works in the public spaces of the building. The series was brought to a high state of perfection, as can be seen in the version of the Annunciation which Fra Angelico painted in one of the corridors of San Marco.
     

Fra Angelico

            Annunciation fresco, corridor of the dormitory of San Marco, ca. 1438                                      
Observing Fra Angelico's work decades after his death in 1455, Michelangelo delivered a heartfelt testimonial.

"One has to believe that this good monk has visited paradise and been allowed to choose his models there."

***

Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved 

Images of Fra Angelico paintings from the collection of the Prado in Madrid, Spain, are  courtesy of the Prado web pages:

https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-virgin-with-the-pomegranate/61b654df-1de2-483f-88bb-4

https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-annunciation/9b02b6c9-3618-4a92-a6b7-26f9076fcb67

Introductory Image:
Fra Angelico and the Rise of the Florentine Renaissance, 2020 (book cover) courtesy Thames & Hudson

Fra Angelico (Italian, ca. 1395-1455) The Virgin with the Pomegranate, ca.1424. Egg tempera and tooled gold on poplar panel: Height: 87 cm. (height) X 59 cm. (width).  Museo Nacional del Prado, # P8233. Image © the Museo Nacional del Prado. 

Fra Angelico (Italian, ca. 1395-1455) Annunciation and Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, 1425-1426. Tempera on poplar panel: Height: 190.3 cm. (height) X 191.5 cm (width).  Museo Nacional del Prado, # P0015. Image © the Museo Nacional del Prado.

Fra Angelico (Italian, ca. 1395-1455) Head and Torso of Saint Francis of Assisi, ca. 1427-30. Egg tempera and tooled gold on poplar panel: Height: 61 cm. (height) X 35.2 cm. (width). Philadelphia Museum of Art. John G. Johnson collection. 1917. cat. 14.

Fra Angelico (Italian, ca. 1395-1455) Annunciation fresco, corridor of the dormitory of San Marco, ca. 1438.  Fresco: 230 cm. x 321 cm.  Museo di San Marco, Florence.

Art Eyewitness Review: The New Art of the Fifteenth Century by Shirley Neilsen Blum

The New Art of the Fifteenth Century:Faith and Art in Florence and the Netherlands

By Shirley Neilsen Blum 

Abbeville Press/314 pages/$85

Reviewed by Ed Voves

The fifteen century was a revolutionary age, matching the many changes and discoveries of the twentieth.  From Gutenberg's invention of the printing press  to the "discovery" of the Americas, the 1400's reshaped the world into a form we can now recognize.

In an authoritative new book, The New Art of the Fifteenth Century. Shirley Neilsen Blum, explores the art of Europe during the 1400's. This momentous era witnessed the introduction of oil painting, the invention of linear perspective and a revival of life-like portraiture - after an intermission of nearly one thousand years.

Blum builds a case that these new techniques originated in two small, but dynamic, cultural centers: the Republic of Florence and in Flanders, ruled by the dukes of Burgundy.

There was one major difference in the art revolution of the 1400's from the one the took place during the early 1900's. People in Western Europe embraced and applauded the innovations of great artists like Donatello, van Eyck and Masaccio without the consternation that greeted the early works of Matisse, Braque and Picasso. 

There was no "shock of the new" during the Quattrocento, as Italians call the 1400's.

Robert Campin, Mérode Altarpiece, c. 1427–1432 

As Blum cogently shows, paintings like Robert Campin's Mérode Altarpiece depicted hallowed Christian themes while introducing Europe to a new naturalism in the visual arts. Both the Florentine and Netherlandish schools aimed to make "seeing into believing."

Art in the fifteenth century was notable for great painting, especially for the way that the rules of perspective were applied to create the appearance of  three dimensions in a two-dimensional format. Blum however begins her study with works of sculpture.

Blum contrasts the sculptural group of Old Testament prophets called the Well of Moses with statues of New Testament saints by Donatello. The Well of Moses, located in a monastery in Dijon, France, was created by Claus Sluter for the dukes of Burgundy. Sluter carved six incredibly lifelike (and life-sized) statues of biblical prophets including Moses, Jeremiah and King David. These surrounded a monumental crucifixion scene which was smashed by French revolutionaries in 1791.

Sluter's Well of Moses was made to inspire monastic rather than public devotion. Given the urban orientation of religion during the 1400's, it may be questioned if this is indeed a Renaissance art work. 

Such a question could never be asked about the sculptures of Donatello (c.1386-1466). Along with Lorenzo Ghiberti's "Doors of Paradise" on the Baptistry of Florence, Donatello's marble saints and apostles are the signature works of the birth of the Renaissance in Italy.

I had the opportunity recently to see several  of these inspiring works in the Sculpture in the Age of Donatello exhibit at the Museum of Biblical History (MOBIA) in New York City. This rare display of Renaissance art in the United States was a perfect complement to Blum's book. Sadly, MOBIA closed its doors in in June, reducing the venues for such outstanding exhibits in the future.

Donatello, St. John the Evangelist, 1408–15

Even in the MOBIA exhibit setting, Donatello's first great statue, Saint John the Evangelist (1409-1411), exerted a powerful, almost living,  presence.  When it is remembered that Saint John the Evangelist once filled a niche on the facade of Florence' s Duomo, you realize that Donatello  was not creating a symbolical work for a monastery cloister or aristocratic patrons. Rather, his sculptures made a bold statement of public virtue. 

Donatello's statues were paid for by the guilds of Florence. The Wool Guild (the Arte della Lana) oversaw fund-raising for the completion of the Duomo. A select group, guild officials and clergy ,called the Opera del Duomo, hired Donatello and others to sculpt statues for the facade of the cathedral and its bell tower. It was on this latter building that Donatello's masterpiece, Prophet Habbakuk, called "Zuccone" or"Pumpkinhead," was displayed.

Saint John the Evangelist is an imposing, almost regal, portrait of saintliness while Habbakuk is a masterpiece of introspective soul-searing. Both were created to be constant examples of righteous living for the citizens of Florence. In this way, the mystical, devotional element of Medieval art was preserved and channeled into the urban life of the Renaissance.

Strange as this sounds, the acute naturalism of Donatello's sculptures aimed to draw viewers away from "this" world, into a union with God. The great French scholar of the early Renaissance, Jean Gerson (1363-1429) wrote, "We ought to learn to transcend with our minds from these visible things to the invisible, from the corporeal to the spiritual. For this is the purpose of the image."

While Donatello was creating sculptures to achieve this delicate balance of private piety with public expression of faith, Jan van Eyck in Flanders was preoccupied with the same task through painting with oils.

Jan van Eyck's Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, better known as the Ghent Altarpiece, was painted in collaboration with his brother, Hubert, and completed in 1432. It ranks among the  greatest and most complex paintings in the whole of Christian art. 

Jan van Eyck & Hubert van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece - Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, 1432

The exact meaning of the Ghent Altarpiece now eludes us in the twenty-first century. Blum is very perceptive in pointing out that nobody in the fifteenth century complained that it was enigmatic or indecipherable. It was intended for the instruction of the Christian faithful. Its now arcane symbolism, such as the central panel which shows a bleeding lamb representing Christ's sacrificial death, was readily comprehensible to all who crowded into St. Bavo's Cathedral, Ghent, to see it.

The Ghent Altarpiece was commissioned by a wealthy civic leader of Ghent, Joos Vijd. He and his wife appear as worshipers on facing panels on the altarpiece. 

Jan van Eyck, Rolin Madonna, 1436

So too, did Nicolas Rolin commission a devotional work by van Eyck. Rolin was a self-made man who became chancellor to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. Rolin, rather arrogantly, had van Eyck place him in the same room as the infant Jesus and the radiantly beautiful Virgin Mary. Yet, with Jesus blessing the kneeling Rolin the message could not be clearer: even the most powerful men in Christendom must bend their knees to God.

Van Eyck and other Netherlandish artists who painted with oils made a huge and almost immediately-felt impact on European art. Their work was highly esteemed in Italy, though few Florentine artists utilized oil paints, at least during this early stage of the Renaissance.

A highly influential Flemish work showing rugged, weather-beaten shepherds worshiping the new-born Jesus was brought to Florence by banker Tommaso Portinari in 1483. Painted by Hugo van der Goes, the Portinari Altarpiece directly influenced a similar work by Domenico del Ghirlandaio (1449-1494) for Francesco Sassetti, director of the Medici Bank.

One of the student assistants in Ghirlandaio's studio was the young Michelangelo. He evidently was more impressed with the work of an earlier Florentine painter, Masaccio. Michelangelo is known to have spent long periods in Florence's Brancacci Chapel. There he studied the cycle of paintings of the life of St.Peter left unfinished by Masaccio when he died, aged 27 in 1428. The frescoes were completed by Masaccio's colleague, Masolino.

    

Masaccio, Tribute Money (detail), c. 1425

Masaccio painted biblical themes, like the story of the Tribute Money from Matthew 17:23-26, with amazing vigor. In his tragically short life, Masaccio created "new and dynamic" versions of age-old Christian images "much more closely related to the world of the viewer."

Of Masaccio, Blum writes: 

Masaccio's people, saints and sinners alike, are rooted in the earth.Their forms are solid, often ungainly, revealed rather than flattered by light... Masaccio's figures are separated from the viewer only by their historical relation to Christ. Very like Donatello's saints, they dwell in a world possible of imitation and thereby humanly attainable. The promise has been given not just by an unknowable God, but through his human agents.The highest of which man is  capable may indeed win him a place next to the disciples, now so very much like him.  

Masaccio, Tribute Money (detail), c. 1425

Masaccio, of course, was in good company, with Sluter, Donatello and van Eyck. He found a kindred spirit in Robert Campin (c.1375–1444), as well. 

Robert Campin, Mérode Altarpiece (detail), c. 1427–1432

Campin's Mérode Altarpiece has a side panel showing a devout couple looking on the central scene of the Annunciation. They are neither aristocrats nor clergy - nor directors of the Medici bank. Campin's onlookers are simply God-fearing townsfolk, people of deep and abiding faith.  

In her concluding remarks, Blum writes movingly of the way that the artists of the 1400's in Flanders and Florence drew beholders of all social strata "ever closer to the divine object of their devotion," in short to God.

"Christian art," Blum affirms, "had never dared so much nor rendered earth more sacred."

***

Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved 

Images Courtesy of Abbeville Press, the Metropolitan  Museum of Art, www.christusrex.org and and the Museum of Biblical History (MOBIA) in conjunction with the Sculpture in the Age of Donatello exhibit

Introductory Image: 
Cover Image Courtesy of Abbeville Press

Robert Campin (ca. 1375–1444) and Workshop, Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece), ca. 1427–1432 Oil paint on oak; Central panel 25 1/4 x 24 7/8 in. (64.1 x 63.2 cm); each wing 25 3/8 x 10 3/4 in. (64.5 x 27.3 cm)The Cloisters Collection, 1956 (56.70) © Metropolitan Museum of Art


Donatello (c.1386-1466), St. John the Evangelist, 1408–15, Marble, 212 × 91 × 62 cm (83½ × 35¾ × 24½ in.) Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, inv. no 2005/113 © Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore / Antonio Quattrone -  in conjunction with the Sculpture in the Age of Donatello exhibit at the Museum of Biblical History

Hubert van Eyck (c.1370-1426) and Jan van Eyck (c.1390-1441) Ghent Altarpiece, 1426 - 1432) Oil on panel: 11 ft x 15 ft (3.35 x 4.6 m) open. Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (Central panel, bottom ) 95.39 inches wide x 54.21 inch high. Cathedral of Saint Bavo, Ghent, Belgium


Jan van Eyck (c.1390-95-1441)  Rolin Madonna, 1436 Oil on panel: 25 7/8  x  34 3/8 inches H. 0.66 m; W. 0.62 m Removed from Notre-Dame-du Châtel in Autun and sent to the Louvre, 1800, INV. 1271, Musee du Louvre

Masaccio  (1401-1428) The Trubute Money, 1425 Fresco 247 cm × 597 cm (97.2 in × 235 in) Santa Maria del Carmine - Brancacci Chapel 

http://www.christusrex.org/www2/art/tributo.htm

http://www.christusrex.org/www2/art/images/masacc01a.jpg   http://www.christusrex.org/www2/art/images/masacc23.jpg

Robert Campin Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece), ca. 1427–1432 (Detail - Left Panell) The Cloisters Collection, 1956 (56.70) © Metropolitan Museum of Art