Fra Angelico and the Masters of Light

Fra Angelico (1395–1455), Il Beato (‘the Blessed One’) to his contemporaries as well as to John Paul II, who beatified him in 1982, is probably best known today for his frescoes in Florence’s San Marco, the Dominican convent where he lived as a monk. Perhaps fearing that some art-lovers will question the wisdom of mounting a Fra Angelico exhibition without the San Marco frescoes, the show’s curators have included a video of them. They need not have worried. Even without the frescoes, the 25 Fra Angelicos at the Musée Jacquemart-André, together with a well-chosen assortment of pictures by the friar’s colleagues working in the same religious vein, are more than enough to make this a rich exhibition.

The art created in the Florence of Fra Angelico was a bridge between the International Gothic as practised by Fra Angelico’s master and fellow monk, Lorenzo Monaco (c.1370–1424), and the dawning Renaissance exemplified by painters such as Masaccio and Masolino, whose ‘Saint Julian’ (1423–5) and ‘The Story of Saint Julian the Hospitaller’ (1427–30) appear in this exhibition. The daring young Florentine painters of the first half of the early Renaissance were picking up where Giotto had left off a century earlier, depicting the human body in a much more realistic fashion and paying detailed attention to nature and to the rules of perspective. The way Fra Angelico absorbed these new ideas while still maintaining much of the stylised elegance of the International Gothic showed nothing less than genius.

The exhibition allows us to grasp this by making comparisons between Fra Angelico’s work and one of the show’s highlights, Lorenzo Monaco’s c.1424 ‘Saint Nicholas Saving the Sailors’. Here we see the beleaguered sailors being rescued by the saint in a sea that looks like a greenish wig, its curls symbolising the water’s waves.