Word: painter
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...elusive personalities in art than Fra Angelico. So completely did the man and artist live within his monastic cowl and robe, effacing himself within the disciplines of monastic life, that his early life, training and personality are only guesswork. He left no written record of his own. His biographer, Painter-Historian Giorgio Vasari, wrote nearly a century after Fra Angelico's death...
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...
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...
...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...
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...