1. Early career, to 1433.

Fra Angelico’s baptismal name was Guido di Piero. At an unknown date he and his brother Benedetto (d 1448) moved to Florence, where they were trained in the manuscript industry then flourishing in the parish of S. Michele Visdomini. The identity of their master has never been established, but it is clear that Benedetto was trained as a scribe and Guido as an illuminator. By 1417 Guido had begun to receive commissions for small panel paintings, and by 1425 he was sufficiently well known to be indicated as the author of an altarpiece, apparently never executed, for the Medici family’s parish church of S. Lorenzo, Florence. The document refers to the artist as a friar of St. Dominic, which means that at some date between 1417 and 1425 he had entered the Order of Preachers at the recently founded reformed, or Observant, convent of S. Domenico, Fiesole, where he took the name Fra Giovanni. The name Angelico is first documented fourteen years after the artist’s death.

The 16th-century chronicle of S. Domenico, Fiesole, states that three altarpieces were in place when the church was consecrated in 1435, but scholars disagree as to both the reliability of this account and the relative chronology of the altarpieces and other works from these years. Similarly, considerable disagreement makes it impossible to establish a firm canon for Fra Angelico’s early period, although his authorship of the three altarpieces for S. Domenico is now generally accepted. The triptych depicting the Virgin and Child Enthroned, with Eight Angels, SS. Barnabas, Dominic, Peter Martyr, and Thomas Aquinas (Fiesole, S. Domenico) was probably painted around 1426 (but greatly modified in 1500). The Annunciation (Madrid, Prado) is probably datable to shortly before 1430 and the Coronation of the Virgin (Paris, Louvre) to soon thereafter.

The S. Domenico Triptych executed for the high altar follows the conventional Tuscan format showing the Virgin and Child surrounded by angels and flanked in the wings by pairs of saints appropriate to the Order and to the convent’s benefactor, Barnaba degli Agli (d 1418). The predella (London, N.G.) depicts the Risen Christ Adored by Angels, Saints, and Blessed Persons of the Dominican Order. The figures in the main panels testify to Fra Angelico’s close study of both Masolino and, more importantly, Gentile da Fabriano, whose Virgin and Child with Angels and Four Saints (the Quaratesi Altarpiece; 1425) was then in S. Niccolò sopr’Arno, Florence (now dispersed). The two later altarpieces for Fiesole reflect Fra Angelico’s knowledge of Masaccio’s painting, particularly the Virgin and Child Enthroned (1426; London, N.G.) from the polyptych (now largely destr.) for S. Maria del Carmine, Pisa, and the collaborative work with Masolino, the Virgin and Child with St. Anne (1423–1425; Florence, Uffizi), while acknowledging a continuing debt to Gentile, whose sophisticated handling of light and color seems to have held even more attraction for Fra Angelico than the chiaroscuro of Masolino and Masaccio. The two later altarpieces for Fiesole required a descriptive ambience for the action, and Fra Angelico may have derived the setting for the Annunciation from Masaccio’s untraced painting of the same subject for S. Niccolò sopr’Arno, Florence. The perspectival space of the Coronation is an elaboration of the system of geometric perspective based on the vanishing-point construction invented by Brunelleschi c. 1413 but employed with consistent success before Fra Angelico’s attempts only by Masaccio. In the latter’s work the space is controlled by a single point rather than by the complex of superimposed projections that Fra Angelico designed for the Coronation.

The scriptorium at S. Domenico was headed by Fra Angelico’s brother, the scribe Fra Benedetto, who had also joined the Order and who, like the painter, continued to practice his trade. Illuminations by Fra Angelico and assistants in a Missal (Florence, Mus. S Marco, MS. 558) produced in the early 1430s at the scriptorium display the narrative liveliness and vivid coloration characteristic of Florentine illumination of the period, features that the artist extended with great effect to predella panels. Taken as a group, these early works show that Fra Angelico entered the mainstream of Florentine painting far more skilled as an illuminator than as a panel painter.

Apart from the Missal and the three altarpieces for S. Domenico, Fiesole, the most important surviving works from Fra Angelico’s early period are the altarpiece depicting the Virgin and Child with SS. Dominic, John the Baptist, Peter Martyr, and Thomas Aquinas executed for the Dominican nuns at the Florentine convent church of S. Pietro Martire and the Annunciation for S. Domenico, Cortona (c. 1432; Cortona, Mus. Dioc.). The S. Pietro Martire Altarpiece was installed by March 1429. Of main interest is its curved pediment with scenes in the spandrels depicting the Preaching and Death of St. Peter Martyr. The close relationship between Fra Angelico’s evident pleasure in designing historiated predellas or, as here, filling the spandrels and his early training as an illuminator is most evident in a comparison of these spandrel scenes with the historiated initial depicting the Death of St. Peter Martyr in the Missal (fol. 41v). They share the robust action, chromatic brilliance, and sure but suggestive brushwork associated with late medieval manuscript illumination. The altarpiece’s curved pediment does not derive from Florentine tradition but is a prominent feature in contemporary works by the Sienese painters Sassetta and the Master of the Osservanza. The nuns at S. Pietro Martire were closely associated with the Observant reform promulgated by Sienese friars, and the unusual altarpiece type possibly reflects the regional loyalties of particular Dominican communities. At any rate, Fra Angelico’s interest in Sienese painting steadily increased over the next four or five years.

Fra Angelico’s skill in working on a small scale is fully evident in a group of four reliquaries (Florence, Mus. S Marco) painted in the early 1430s for Fra Giovanni Masi (d 1434), sacristan of S. Maria Novella, the major Dominican house in Florence. The reliquaries and a Coronation of the Virgin painted for the nuns of S. Maria Nuova (c. 1431–1435; Florence, Uffizi) confirm the painter’s determination to expand the preciosity of manuscript illumination on to larger formats. Two predella panels from an untraced altarpiece datable to c. 1431 depicting the Naming of St. John the Baptist (Florence, Mus. S Marco) and St. James the Great Freeing Hermogenes (Fort Worth, TX, Kimbell A. Mus.)—an episode from Voragine’s Golden Legend—epitomize Fra Angelico’s achievements in the period. The planimetric composition of the St. James panel and the sheets of light falling behind the figures in the second rank reveal Fra Angelico’s scrutiny of Masaccio’s Adoration of the Magi (1426; Berlin, Gemäldegal.) from the predella of the Pisa Polyptych.

2.c. 1433–1439.

The sumptuous winged triptych depicting the Virgin and Child Enthroned with SS. John the Evangelist, John the Baptist, Mark, and Peter (1433–1436; Florence, Mus. S Marco), commissioned by the Florentine Arte de’ Linaiuoli and thus known as the Linaiuoli Tabernacle, is Fra Angelico’s earliest surviving painting of unambiguous date. It epitomizes the artist’s early maturity and the processes by which he reached it. In the autumn of 1432 the officers of the Linenworkers Guild commissioned Lorenzo Ghiberti to design for the interior of their guildhall a marble frame to house an image of the Virgin that would be even larger and more sumptuous than the panel by Bernardo Daddi of 1347, standing over the altar of the miraculous Virgin at nearby Orsanmichele. The frame was ready by the summer of 1433, and on July 11 Fra Angelico agreed to paint the triptych for 190 florins, a staggering sum by comparison with what is known of his income before that date. The choice of Fra Angelico for the commission has been explained by the fact that in 1430 the treasurer of the Arte de’ Linaiuoli was Filippo de’ Lapaccini, whose son Giuliano entered the Dominican Observance at S. Domenico, Fiesole, in 1433 (Orlandi 1954).

The painting is the largest single-panel image of the Virgin and Child executed in the 15th century. The central panel depicts the Virgin seated in a richly draped, barrel-vaulted chamber with Christ, shown as a child, not an infant, standing on her left thigh. The Dove of the Holy Spirit hovers just above them and God the Father is sculpted in the pediment of the marble frame. Thus all three persons of the Trinity are represented on the tabernacle. On the curved inner frame, surrounding the main panel and standing on clouds, are twelve musicmaking angels. When open, the shutters show St. John the Baptist on the left and the patron saint of the guild, St. Mark, usually wrongly identified as St. John the Evangelist, on the right. When closed, St. Mark appears again on the left and St. Peter on the right. The predella consists of three independent, framed scenes. On the left is St. Peter Preaching, a scene that shows St. Mark writing down the sermon on a tablet, an illustration of the ancient tradition that St. Mark’s gospel is essentially St. Peter’s eyewitness account. On the right is the Martyrdom of St. Mark, which shows the dead body of the saint being dragged through the streets of Alexandria in a hailstorm. The central scene depicts the Adoration of the Magi.

The pose and psychological bearing of the Virgin and Child are much more stable and solemn than in their counterparts by Daddi. Fra Angelico’s Virgin accommodates the mass and weight of the frontally posed Child with only the slightest shift backwards and to the left of her center of gravity, her head and gaze only barely turning off the main axis of her body. The Child, unlike Daddi’s gurgling infant, stands calm and expressionless, regally dressed in a belted tunic, both arms extended to hold an orb in the left hand and to raise the right in blessing. This young Christ’s royal status has already deprived him of the innocence and vulnerability of childhood. In the Linaiuoli Tabernacle, Fra Angelico has eschewed reflective gold surfaces and at the same time chosen to enhance the plasticity of the Virgin and Child. Although figures and ground participate in the same representational discourse, Fra Angelico’s painting has little to do with the feelings of real human mothers and babies for each other. Even more than highly idealized representations of a young woman and a little boy, these are theophanic figures and, as such, vehicles of dogma. Icons of majesty, they exist fixed and motionless within a draped chamber, the curtains of which have been pulled back to reveal divinity. Once the subject matter and the requirements of the commission are thus understood, Fra Angelico’s formal solution becomes perfectly intelligible, if not predictable. The general form of the Linaiuoli Tabernacle recalls Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna (c. 1310; Florence, Uffizi) and late 13th-century panels such as Duccio’s Rucellai Madonna (begun 1285; Florence, Uffizi).

Like Masaccio, Fra Angelico looked to sculpture rather than to painted images to achieve an effect of monumentality in large-scale standing figures, and Ghiberti’s work provided the model for the four saints in the wings (Middeldorf 1955). Fra Angelico had the intellectual capacity to understand the recent innovations in Florentine art, and these greatly interested him, but only to the degree that they served expressive ends. His stylistic decisions were motivated by notions of decorum and were always in the service of the function and subject matter of the work. The Linaiuoli Tabernacle reveals an artist of faultless technical accomplishment who fully understood and exploited the typological symbolism inherent in, for example, the large Virgin and Child panels of the 13th century. He not only respected but even celebrated the chromatic brilliance and dazzling patterning of 14th-century Sienese panel painting. He was wary of full-scale capitulation to chiaroscuro modeling as it was shortly to be developed by Fra Filippo Lippi, because of his unwillingness to forgo the brilliant palette that he had inherited from the 14th century.

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Fra Angelico: Deposition, oil on panel, 2.75×2.85 m, c. 1430 (Florence, Museo di S. Marco); photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

The commission for the Linaiuoli Tabernacle caught the attention of a wider circle of rich and powerful citizens. Among these were Cosimo de’ Medici and Palla Strozzi, rivals both in politics and business. Within a year or so of beginning work for the Arte de’ Linaiuoli, Fra Angelico was working for both men, perhaps at the same time. Palla Strozzi is known to have commissioned Fra Angelico to paint the Deposition (Florence, Mus. S Marco), to hang in the sacristy of Santa Trìnita, Florence, with Gentile da Fabriano’s Adoration of the Magi (1423; Florence, Uffizi). The Deposition, which was not an altarpiece, had been left unfinished at Lorenzo Monaco’s death, c. 1425. The frame dates to that period and the three scenes in the gables are by Lorenzo. Fra Angelico’s shop executed the twelve standing figures on the pilasters and the Deposition, with its sublime landscape, in the main panel, but there is no consensus among scholars as to when the work was undertaken. In Fra Angelico’s surviving large-scale work nothing resembles the vast landscape, whose vistas extend into distant invisibility and beyond the lateral edges of the painted field, though the tour-de-force views of hills and valleys in the Cortona Annunciation predella seem to have prepared the way. The exactitude of his sympathetic penetration of human psychology in the central group around the dead Christ is incomparable, except perhaps in the tremulous exchange between the Virgin and the Angel Gabriel in, again, the Cortona painting. The groups of women to the left of center and men to the right were undoubtedly designed by Fra Angelico, although probably executed by others. The painter of the left-hand group has been identified as present in Fra Angelico’s shop from an early period. He stayed for a number of years and is recognizable as part of the team that later worked at S. Marco. Highly trusted, this painter was largely responsible for the execution of the Lamentation (1436; Florence, Mus. S Marco), painted for the Florentine Confraternity of S. Maria della Croce al Tempio. The master responsible for the right-hand group appeared briefly in Fra Angelico’s shop from c. 1432 to c. 1437. Among his first assignments was extensive work on the Coronation of the Virgin (c. 1430–1435; Paris, Louvre) executed for S. Domenico, Fiesole. Around 1434–1435 Fra Angelico entrusted to him most of the execution of the Virgin and Child Enthroned with SS. Peter Martyr, Cosmas, Damian, John the Evangelist, Lawrence, and Francis (ex-S. Vincenzo d’Annalena, Florence; Florence, Mus. S Marco), a work most probably commissioned by the Medici family. Prestigious commissions such as the Annalena Altarpiece, the Strozzi Deposition, and the Linaiuoli Tabernacle make it plain that Fra Angelico had emerged as the dominant painter in Florence by the mid-1430s.

Ordered less than eight months earlier, the Croce al Tempio Lamentation was finished by December 2, 1436. This is the last documented notice of Fra Angelico until March 1438, when he was in Cortona, and it is possible that he was already in Umbria by the autumn of 1437. The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Angels between SS. Dominic, Nicholas of Bari, John the Baptist, and Catherine of Alexandria (Perugia, G. N. Umbria), executed for the chapel of S. Niccolò dei Guidalotti, S. Domenico, Perugia, belongs to this period and was Fra Angelico’s last essay in the polyptych format, which was soon to be superseded by the rectangular, single-field pala commonly associated with Florentine Renaissance altarpieces. The Guidalotti Altarpiece may have been painted in Cortona and can be compared with the altarpiece depicting the Virgin and Child Enthroned between SS. (?)Mark, John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, and Mary Magdalene made for S. Domenico, Cortona, earlier in the decade (Cortona, Mus. Dioc.), where Fra Angelico had responded deeply to the Sienese style of Sassetta, whose own triptych of the same date formed a pendant to Fra Angelico’s. Just as the congress of natural and pictorial light and the brilliance of saturated hues are found in the Linaiuoli Tabernacle of 1433–1436, so the presence of these qualities locate the Perugia panel in the mid-to-late 1430s. Moreover, the searching but tender exploration of human feeling registered in facial expressions, carried to such heights in the Strozzi Deposition, here enlivens the standing figures of saints and angels, whose psychological presence on altarpieces such as this is usually unmotivated.

3. S. Marco, c. 1440–1445.

(ii) Frescoes.

In accordance with custom, frescoes embellished the public spaces of S. Marco. Half-length saints appear in pointed lunettes over each doorway in the cloister, and on the north wall Fra Angelico painted a large representation of Christ on the Cross Adored by St. Dominic (after 1442) on an axis with the main entrance from the Piazza S. Marco. The entire north wall of the chapter room was reserved for a huge, semicircular Crucifixion with Saints (1441–1442). The south wall of the refectory, opposite the entrance, was covered by a painting of unknown subject (destr. 1554) but probably either a Crucifixion or a miraculous episode from the life of St. Dominic, or possibly both. Upstairs in the dormitory, each of the forty-three original cells received a frescoed composition and three others were painted in the corridors. There is no precedent in known schemes of conventual decoration for such an extensive suite of frescoes in a dormitory, Dominican or otherwise.

(a) Ground-floor.

Although the extent and location of the ground-floor decoration is conventional, Fra Angelico’s choice of subject for the most public painting of all, Christ on the Cross Adored by St. Dominic, is without precedent. In the 15th century, cloisters and their adjacent rooms—the sacristy, chapter room, refectory, and guest quarters—were generally accessible to all men, both lay and clerical, though not to women. The social function of these spaces was to mediate between the private monastic enclosure of the monks or friars and the public sphere that surrounded it. In the second quarter of the 15th century a number of Florentine religious communities adopted a local and short-lived Sienese practice of the early 14th century by commissioning extensive cycles of fresco decoration for their cloisters. Most commonly, cloister decoration, in Florence as elsewhere, lacked any chronological, stylistic, or iconographical cohesiveness. The formal and ideological integrity of carefully planned programs, such as those in Florence at S. Maria Novella, the Badia, S. Miniato, and others, was new in this period. These pictorial cycles were forms of institutional propaganda orientated towards the public and thus different in both kind and effect from the private self-representations of religious institutions that were preserved in the texts and other instruction directed towards their members only. Unexceptionally, these programs stressed the relevant order’s history and mission in the Church. By contrast, Fra Angelico stressed St. Dominic’s inner or mystical life and thus by association the mystical lives of the friars at S. Marco.

The Crucifixion in the chapter room pairs and even opposes sacred history and its interiorization by means of disciplined contemplation. To the left of the figure of Christ, Fra Angelico included the biblical figures traditionally represented at the scene of the Crucifixion with SS. Mark, Lawrence, Cosmas, and Damian. On the right, however, he arranged a group of eleven standing and kneeling figures representing Dominican saints and renowned monastic reformers. All of them are shown in attitudes of prayer and meditation and can therefore be understood as models for the contemplation of Christ’s saving death, serving as examples for the friars who gathered daily in the chapter room to examine and expose their faults. Such joining of two levels of representation, the narrative and contemplative, within the same field also characterizes some of the cell frescoes in the dormitory.

(b) Dormitory.

As early as the 13th century the Constitution of the Order of Preachers stipulated that dormitories were to be decorated with an image of the Virgin in the corridor and that the cells were to contain images of Christ or the Virgin. It is thought that the Dominicans were the first order to specify the use of images in this context, though apart from those at S. Marco no other such suites are known. A number of small panels with secure Dominican provenances showing St. Dominic or some other Dominican figure kneeling before Christ on the Cross may be relics of this practice, and Fra Angelico’s Crucifixion with the Virgin, St. John the Evangelist, and Cardinal Juan de Torquemada (c. 1450–1455; Cambridge, MA, Fogg) is probably one of these. S. Marco must therefore be understood as a special case of a broad phenomenon, its extraordinary survival accountable in part to the medium of fresco. Fra Angelico certainly executed at least one fresco (Paris, Louvre) for the dormitory corridor at S. Domenico, Fiesole, and he may also have painted the dormitory at S. Domenico, Cortona, in 1438–1439, although that structure was destroyed and no description survives.

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Fra Angelico: Virgin and Child Enthroned with Eight Saints (c. 1440–1445), fresco (detail), east corridor, monastery of S. Marco, Florence

The dormitory corridor at S. Marco contains three frescoes, one of which is entirely by Fra Angelico. The composition and iconography of the Virgin and Child Enthroned with Eight Saints (the Madonna of the Shadows) in the east corridor, designed but probably not entirely executed by Fra Angelico, recalls the S. Marco Altarpiece and suggests that this was the spot where the community gathered to sing the Night Office of the Virgin, which the Constitutions specify was to be sung in the dormitory. Christ on the Cross Adored by St. Dominic, on an axis with the east corridor, is a variation of the cloister fresco and may be a late 15th-century addition in the style of Fra Angelico.

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Fra Angelico: Annunciation (c. 1440–1445), fresco, north corridor, monastery of S. Marco, Florence; photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

The autograph Annunciation opposite the head of the staircase leading from the ground-floor is the first image to greet the visitor on entering the most private area of the complex. In the 15th century only Dominican and Franciscan friars were permitted to enter the Order’s dormitories. A Dominican would have been singularly well equipped to read the messages of the Annunciation fresco because the traditional theme is embedded in the Order’s ethos. For example, the inscription across the bottom reads, “When you come before the figure of the intact Virgin, do not fail to say a Hail Mary.” It was the custom for Dominicans to greet the Virgin with the angelic salutation on entering the dormitory, and as this was done while genuflecting—just as the Angel Gabriel does in the Annunciation—Fra Angelico’s painting forged an indissoluble link between the image and its beholder. Exactly the same purpose informs the frescoes in the cells.

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Fra Angelico: Transfiguration (c. 1440–1445), fresco, Cell 6, monastery of S. Marco, Florence; photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY

The attribution and chronology of the forty-three frescoes in the cells is an enormous and probably insoluble problem. The overall conception and the design of most of the individual scenes are undoubtedly Fra Angelico’s. The frescoes wholly or almost wholly painted by the master are those in cells 3, 6, 7, 9, and 10, depicting, respectively, the Annunciation, the Transfiguration, the Mocking of Christ, the Coronation of the Virgin, and the Presentation in the Temple. Others show signs of his intervention alongside an assistant, and still others were executed on his designs but wholly independently. Iconographically, with the exception of two scenes, the cell frescoes fall into three groups, each corresponding to the section of the community assigned to live there. Novices were housed in the seven cells along the south corridor, clerics in the twenty on the east corridor, and lay brothers and guest friars probably in the north corridor, where cells 38 and 39 were reserved for the private use of Cosimo de’ Medici. These two were decorated, appropriately, with a Crucifixion with Patron Saints of the Medici Family in Cell 38 and the Adoration of the Magi, a subject with strong Medicean associations, in Cell 39.

The frescoes in the novitiate are the most uniform group. They are white-ground vertical rectangles in which St. Dominic kneels before the Cross, the only variation from fresco to fresco being in the gestures employed by the saint. These are derived from the gestures both described and illustrated in De modo orandi, a Dominican textbook for prayer based on eyewitness observations of the founder’s attitudes during personal prayer. Compiled in the 13th century, the text fell largely out of use but was revived by the Dominican Observance in its houses all over Europe in the 15th century.

The cells in the east corridor continue the theme of De modo orandi in compositions signifying feasts of Christ or the Virgin. The symbol of the Cross used in the novitiate is replaced with more historiated references that include ancillary figures and descriptive settings rather than the reduced dramatis personae and the flat, white ground of the first group of frescoes. Fra Angelico here expanded the repertory of exemplars to include other saints as well as Dominic. In the Annunciation (Cell 3), for example, St. Peter Martyr observes the colloquy between the Virgin and the Angel with a gesture that was believed to induce humility, while the gesture of the same saint when he reappears in the Presentation in the Temple (Cell 10) indicates that he is interceding on behalf of the brethren. In the clerics’ cells, therefore, as in the north corridor Annunciation or the Crucifixion in the chapter room, the friars were encouraged to identify with the mystical life of notable forerunners, mostly Dominican, as they meditated on the liturgical texts associated with the major feasts of the calendar.

At this period lay brothers were assumed to be untutored in Latin and would not have undergone even the minimal theological preparation required for ordination. Accordingly, the frescoes in their cells, on the south side of the north corridor, are devoid of the liturgical and even mystical references woven into the paintings made for novices and clerics. The compositions are fully narrative illustrations of various scenes from the Life of Christ, drawn mostly from the Passion cycle beginning with the Last Supper (Cell 35) and ending with the Noli me tangere (Cell 1). Here as elsewhere in the dormitory nothing determines the sequence of scenes from cell to cell. Fra Angelico, or perhaps his assistant Benozzo Gozzoli, seems intentionally to have based these frescoes on the didactic cycle in the chapter room, with its chapel of Corpus Domini, at S. Maria Novella, Florence. As early as the S. Domenico Altarpiece, Fra Angelico had made reference to the art of the mother house, as it was from there that the convent at Fiesole had been founded. A free variation of the S. Marco chapter room Crucifixion embellishes the large Cell 37, indicating that the room served a parallel function for the lay brothers, who were not voting members of the Conventual Chapter itself. Finally, the cells along the north side of the north corridor display rather conventional Crucifixions with saints, indicating that, as guest cells, their program was not designed to reinforce the mentality appropriate for each of the three segments of an Observant Dominican community.

4.c. 1446–1455.

Probably towards the end of 1445 Fra Angelico left Florence for a sojourn of about four years in Rome. In March 1446 Antonino Pierozzi, the former prior of S. Marco, became Archbishop of Florence. According to Vasari, in an anecdote that has persisted as an example of the artist’s legendary good nature, Pope Eugenius IV (reg 1431–1447) offered the post first to Fra Angelico, who turned it down out of modesty and suggested instead the name of his former superior and novice master. A close relationship between Pope and painter undoubtedly existed, dating from the nine years when Eugenius IV’s court had been housed in Florence at S. Maria Novella. The only recorded commissions of the Roman years were for large-scale mural decorations, a task that the Pope could confidently entrust to the artist in view of his familiarity with Fra Angelico’s Florentine works.

Fra Angelico was assigned a number of tasks in St. Peter’s and the Vatican Palace, although only one of them survives, the cycle of the Lives of SS. Stephen and Lawrence (1448–1449) in the private chapel of the humanist pope Nicholas V. Varying accounts of these commissions and the widespread reconstruction of the Vatican complex in the 16th century all but obscure the number and location of the projects apart from this chapel. It has been argued that there were four papal commissions in all: the chapel of St. Peter (1447), located near or on the site of the Sistine Chapel at that level, accessible from both the palace and the basilica; the chapel of Nicholas V in the palace (1448–1449); a studio for Nicholas V (1449); and a chapel of the Sacrament in the palace, painted either in 1446 or 1452, during Fra Angelico’s second Roman sojourn.

With the return of Eugenius IV to Rome in 1443, the popes established their major residence at the Vatican rather than at the Lateran, the official seat of the Roman pontiffs since the 4th century ce. The papal palace was therefore the site of constant building and renovation. Nicholas V expanded the palace and incorporated a 13th-century tower into the new edifice, and it was here that a small but lofty chapel (6.6 × 4 m) was built for his private use, dedicated to the deacon martyrs, SS. Stephen and Lawrence. Entirely preserved except for the altarpiece, which probably depicted the Deposition, a sumptuous program of decoration covers the vaulted ceiling and three walls in three horizontal zones. The Four Evangelists appear in the vault against a blue field studded with gold stars and the pilasters supporting the vault depict the Eight Doctors of the Church standing in tabernacles reminiscent of the classicizing Gothic style of the throne in Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin (Paris, Louvre). Half-length figures alternate with rosettes in the pair of window mullions in one long wall and trompe l’oeil brocaded damask covers all three walls in the lower zone. In 1447 Fra Angelico’s Roman shop included Benozzo Gozzoli and three other painters, all of whom may have worked in the chapel, though numerous restorations make it difficult to assign parts of the cycle to specific assistants.

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Fra Angelico: St. Lawrence Distributing Alms (c. 1448–1449), fresco, chapel of Nicholas V, Vatican Palace, Rome

Six scenes from the Life of St. Stephen appear in the three lunettes of the upper zone, while five depicting the Life of St. Lawrence follow in the rectangular fields below. The dedication to the two deacon martyrs reflects the Pope’s desire to underscore the legitimacy of the Roman pontiffs in a period ridden with schisms. St. Stephen’s traditional tomb in S. Stefano Rotondo was one of the major pilgrimage sites in Rome, as was the funerary basilica dedicated to the 3rd-century Roman martyr St. Lawrence. Religious humanists of the 15th century, among whom Nicholas V was a leading figure, were especially interested in Christian antiquity, and Nicholas may have dedicated his chapel with propagandist purposes deriving from his own Christian antiquarianism. The correspondences between the two ordination scenes must be attributed to Nicholas: in the Ordination of St. Stephen the bishop is depicted, appropriately, as St. Peter; in the Ordination of St. Lawrence, Nicholas V is portrayed as the bishop and thus shown to be the successor to St. Peter, Bishop of both Jerusalem and Rome. Other interests of the Roman humanists in this period may be discerned in Fra Angelico’s frescoes. Although many of the architectural backgrounds in the scenes may be traced directly to earlier panel paintings, others do not appear in Fra Angelico’s work before his transfer to Rome. The strongly differentiated Classical orders and contemporary Roman architectural motifs in the Ordination of St. Stephen, the Ordination of St. Lawrence, and St. Lawrence Distributing Alms suggest that these scenes may have been inspired or even designed by the architect and humanist Leon Battista Alberti, then present at the papal court.

It is difficult to analyze the development of Fra Angelico’s monumental narrative style because of the disappearance of the other three fresco cycles from the Vatican Palace. The more recondite, non-narrative paintings at S. Marco are far removed from the active and even didactic manner of such episodes as St. Stephen Preaching and St. Stephen Addressing the Council, although these may be felt to recall the predella scenes from the S. Marco Altarpiece. The expanse of space, the clarity of gesture and expression, and the carefully adjusted light in the chapel of Nicholas V profoundly reveal Fra Angelico’s long scrutiny of Masaccio’s frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel, S. Maria del Carmine, Florence. The poignantly humane sensitivity to the poor that informs Masaccio’s St. Peter Healing with his Shadow is also apparent in Fra Angelico’s scene of St. Lawrence Distributing Alms.

In the summer of 1447 Fra Angelico and his shop journeyed to Orvieto, where he had accepted a commission to paint the chapel of S. Brizio in the cathedral, now better known for Luca Signorelli’s wall paintings of the Last Judgment and the End of the World (1499–1503). Fra Angelico’s contribution was confined to the vaults, where Christ in Glory appears in the compartment over the altar, with sixteen Prophets appearing in the compartment to the right. Fra Angelico never returned to Orvieto and the contract was nullified in 1449.

By early 1450 Fra Angelico had returned to Tuscany from Rome to assume the priorate of S. Domenico, Fiesole, for the standard period of two years. The altarpiece depicting the Virgin and Child Enthroned with Two Angels and SS. Anthony of Padua, Louis of Toulouse, Francis, Cosmas, Damian, and Peter Martyr (Florence, Mus. S Marco), commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici for the Observant Franciscans of S. Bonaventura, Bosco ai Frati, near Florence, probably dates from this period. The church and convent, near Cosimo’s favorite villa at Cafaggiolo, were designed by Michelozzo di Bartolomeo and are a simpler and more rustic version of S. Marco. The general design of the altarpiece resembles both the Annalena Altarpiece and the S. Marco Altarpiece, although its sumptuous surfaces, grander rhythms, and more substantial figures reflect Fra Angelico’s recent Roman experiences.

In the same period Fra Angelico accepted another Medici commission: to decorate, for SS. Annunziata, Florence, a complex group of shutters (Florence, Mus. S Marco) covering the cabinet where the silver votive offerings to a miraculous image were stored. In 1448 Piero de’ Medici, Cosimo’s son, had assumed the patronage of the shrine, commissioning Michelozzo to erect, among other works, a magnificent marble tabernacle before the image. The thirty-five extant panels depicting scenes from the Life of Christ thus belonged to an ensemble. The compositions are related to those of similar subjects in the cells at S. Marco, although the numerous biblical inscriptions demonstrate that a complex iconographic program united an otherwise traditional array of episodes.

Fra Angelico’s tenure as prior of S. Domenico would have expired in the spring of 1452, and in March of that year he journeyed to Prato to discuss the fresco decoration for the main chapel of the cathedral. He declined the offer, and the commission subsequently went to Fra Filippo Lippi. Fra Angelico’s decision not to accept what would have been not only a prestigious but lucrative commission must be weighed against the fact that he and his brother Fra Benedetto, until his death in 1448, were the main supporters of S. Domenico. Unlike its sister convent at S. Marco, S. Domenico had no patron comparable with Cosimo de’ Medici and although the bequest of Barnaba degli Agli had provided funds for the convent’s construction, the friars of Fiesole lacked steady income and remained very poor throughout the period of S. Marco’s ascendancy. Fra Angelico’s decision not to take the Prato commission was most probably made in light of some other opportunity and this is likely to have been in Rome. A possible theory is that he had another commission at the Vatican, or that he had been engaged to paint the cloister of S. Maria sopra Minerva, Rome, the Dominican Order’s main Roman foundation. At about this time, the distinguished Dominican jurist and Master of the Papal Palace, Cardinal Juan de Torquemada (d 1468), designed an extensive program of decoration for the cloister, and it is plausible to assume that he wanted Fra Angelico to be responsible for it. The two men had been acquainted since the time of Torquemada’s residence in Florence in the 1430s, and Torquemada owned the Crucifixion panel by Fra Angelico in which he is portrayed (Cambridge, MA, Fogg). The cloister has entirely disappeared, but its iconographical program is preserved in a manuscript, probably in Torquemada’s own handwriting (Rome, Vatican, Bib. Apostolica), and a woodcut edition was printed at Subiaco in the 1460s. Despite his long spiritual and artistic associations with S. Domenico in Fiesole and S. Marco in Florence, Fra Angelico died in Rome and was buried at S. Maria sopra Minerva, where his tomb is now venerated as a shrine to his beatitude, which was implied in biographies of the artist since the 16th century and finally declared by Pope John Paul II (reg 1978–2005) in 1984.