Word: fra
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Within the monastery walls of San Marco. Fra Angelico concentrated on the simple devotional images required by his fellow monks for their meditations and prayers. The results, seen in the six cells definitely painted by Fra Angelico, represent Fra Angelico at his strongest and purest. To portray The Mocking of Christ, he painted a regal, blindfolded Christ figure crowned with thorns; the throng of jeering soldiery appear only as a group of disembodied hands and a loutish head, cap raised in sarcasm, spitting upon Christ. By abstracting all but the essential central image, Fra Angelico makes the eye travel through...
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...
...March 18, 1455, Fra Angelico died at the age of 68. Until the last he was working on his murals in Rome, but it is clear that Fra Angelico, who had moved through the full cycle from medieval illuminations to the heroic architectural vision of the Renaissance, had done his greatest work for his fellow monks in the monasteries of San Domenico and San Marco and the church at Cortona, where he had lived and worshiped...
Almost 100 years later, the painter Vasari rendered a judgment on Fra Angelico's works that most succeeding generations have echoed and are likely to repeat: "It is an unspeakable delight to regard them, for it appears that the spirits of the blessed in heaven cannot be otherwise than these . . . The entire coloring appears to be the work of a saint or an angel like themselves. Right well did this holy friar deserve the name by which he was always known, Fra Giovanni Angelico...