Word: fra
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Vasari's principal sources were a pious Dominican eulogy and the memories of an ancient monk, Fra Eustachio. with whom Vasari often gossiped at Florence's convent of San Marco. From such accounts, Vasari drew the picture of Fra Angelico as a painter who "never took up his brush without first making a prayer. He never made a crucifix when the tears did not course down his cheeks . . ." Some later historians have doubted this picture of Fra Angelico in a state of religious ecstasy. The evidence in his painting points far more...
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 Fra...
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...