Word: fra
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...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...
...Will Be Done." Two conflicting traditions of religious painting, almost as old as Christendom, are revealed in Fra Angelico's early work. The Virgin of the Star, where the Christ child tenderly reassures his mother, is one of the few paintings in which Fra Angelico yielded to the popular taste for the sentimental. The future glory of Fra Angelico's work is first declared in the Annunciation scene done for the church of San Domenico in Cortona (see p. 54). Here the Virgin sits serenely with hands folded across her breast in a gesture that sums...
This great theme of renunciation Fra Angelico made his own in life and art, raising it to a level rarely if ever surpassed. Its highest expression, and one of the world's great paintings, is the Cortona Annunciation. Only a trace of the early miniature painter remains in the loving care given the rich golden tapestry of the Virgin's chair; for the rest, Fra Angelico's painting has been awakened by the dawning Renaissance. With rows of Brunelleschian columns, he achieves perspective, relegating symbolism to the background, where the distant figures of Adam and Eve state...
...small scenes Fra Angelico painted in translucent colors for the predella (base) of the Cortona Annunciation are each in themselves small hymns of praise to the Virgin. A small section in the panel of Mary's Visit to Elizabeth (see p. 34) made art history. It is the first identifiable landscape in Italian painting, a view of Lake Trasimeno as seen from Cortona...