Word: angelico
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From the Summit. In Fra Angelico the man, the monk and the artist were as one. Sharing both in the final, full flowering of the Middle Ages and the first springlike surge of the Renaissance, Fra Angelico stood at a summit during one of those rare moments of equilibrium between epochs...
...down in the chronicle of the San Domenico convent at Fiesole are the simple facts about Fra Angelico: in 1407 "Fr. Joannes Petri de Mugello iuxta Vichium, optimus pictor, qui multas tabulas et parietes in diversis locis pinxit, accepit habitum clericorum in hoc conventu . . . et in sequenti anno fecit professionem."* To this, Vasari adds only that Fra Giovanni's name was Guido, that he was born in 1387, and entered the Dominican monastery "chiefly for the sake of his soul and for his peace of mind...
...decision of Fra Angelico and his brother, who became Fra Benedetto, to present themselves at the doors of the small Dominican monastery, set in a vineyard at the foot of the hill of Fiesole outside Florence, came at a crucial time. A wave of reform was sweeping the Dominican monasteries of Italy; revived humanism, based on study of recently rediscovered classic manuscripts, was threatening the church with a new kind of paganism. The new convent of San Domenico, then less than two years in existence, was a spearhead of the reformed order of Dominican Observants. Its leader, the eloquent...
Broken Mold. No one knows when Fra Angelico first began to show the unmistakable signs of genius. Only a year after he took his final vows, his convent was thrown into turmoil as a result of the rival claims of three Popes. The Fiesole monks saw their prior arrested, and fled for safety to Foligno, then to Cortona. But from this nine-year period of exile, no record of Fra Angelico's activities has survived. One theory is that, on the Dominicans' return to Fiesole, Fra Angelico worked under Lorenzo Monaco, a Camaldolese monk famed for his manuscript...
...whoever the master, Fra Angelico was an apt pupil. His first Virgin and Child surpasses Monaco's in both draftsmanship and coloring. More important, Fra Angelico broke free from the rigid mold of medieval art; his Virgin is no longer two-dimensional, but a figure that turns in space with a life-giving gesture...