Word: conventioning
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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...
...both the Virgin of the Star and the panel combining the Annunciation and Coming of the Magi (see color pages), which Fra Angelico painted for a reliquary for the convent of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, he relied on rich gold, Byzantine in its richness, for a background. Fra Angelico's own contributions were the new, soft-flowing harmonies of the robes, the fresh coloring which juxtaposed azure against deepest blue, pink against red to create a glowing world of weightless form and radiant, shadowiess color...
...embellish the city, its churches and palaces he drew on the talents of Brunelleschi, Donatello, Fra Lippo Lippi, Uccello, Luca della Robbia. The great monument to his ideal, a marriage between humanism and religion, was the San Marco convent, which Cosimo prevailed upon Pope Eugenius IV to transfer from the Sylvetrines to the Dominican Observants. Cosimo ordered his favorite architect Michelozzo to repair the building, richly endowed it with 400 rare manuscripts and classic statues of Venus and Apollo. To do the frescoes, Cosimo called on the great Dominican painter Fra Angelico...
Road to Rome. In 1443, the Pope visited San Marco to dedicate the finished convent. Two years later, the Pontiff called Fra Angelico to Rome to begin the great work of decorating the Vatican. Decorating the Chapel of the Sacrament and the "studio" of the Pope with frescoes (since destroyed), and painting scenes of the lives of St. Lawrence and St. Stephen in the Pope's private chapel were to take up Fra Angelico's time, off and on, for the remaining ten years of his life...
Stories Vasari collected long afterward show Fra Angelico still the self-effacing monk. When Fra Angelico's old convent at Fiesole elected him to the three-year term as prior, he gladly accepted, but more honor he avoided. When Pope Nicholas V offered to make him Archbishop of Florence, Fra Angelico. who believed that there was "less trouble and error in obeying others," declined. He urged instead a fellow Dominican, who was later canonized as St. Antoninus...