Fra Angelico

In September 1968, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, staged its exhibition The Great Age of Fresco: Giotto to Pontormo. An Exhibition of Mural Paintings and Monumental Drawings. Two years before it opened, devastating floodwaters had surged through many Italian cities, causing extensive damage to historical sites and killing over 100 people. The wall paintings on show at the Met had been salvaged from ancient buildings whose structures were sodden with rising water. What this delicate process of removal and remounting had revealed were the underdrawings, or sinopias, that had been until then hidden beneath layers of plaster and pigment, ostensibly forever. The revelation of these huge drawings, and their display in New York, obliged a reappraisal of what Renaissance painting was—and what contemporary art could be. In a 2009 essay for October, “Why Would Anyone Want to Draw on the Wall?,” conceptual artist Mel Bochner looked back at his encounter with these works at the Met and answered his own question by declaring that large-scale wall work could “negate the gap between lived time and pictorial time.” The problem of painting in the late ’60s—its apparent inability to speak beyond itself, to rub up against the issues of its moment—found an unlikely solution in centuries-old works of art, for which that gap barely existed.

It was easy enough to pass by Fra Angelico’s work in the 1968 exhibition. Compared to the huge sinopias of his fellow Florentines Andrea del Castagno and Paolo Uccello, his contribution was small: three or four sinopias, saved from sites in and around Florence just after the floods. One of these, a Virgin and Child in rust-red pigment (the term “sinopia” refers to that material, almost always used in underdrawings), charms for its repeated attempts to nail the crook of the baby’s elbow. It has a tentativeness absent from the artist’s completed works. Yet Bochner’s claim that Renaissance wall painting could suggest “a new site, a new scale, a new sense of time” for contemporary art resounds in those of Angelico’s frescoes that remain in their original locations more strongly than in the work of any of his peers. You can see this for yourself: Step off the street in Florence and into the whitewashed cloister of the Dominican monastery of San Marco. Ascend the steep stairs to the top floor, where long corridors are punctuated by arched doorways. Within each of these is a monk’s cell containing a single fresco by Angelico. Each is an argument in paint for the interdependence of life and art. Each says: What gap?

Take this one. An angel with rainbow wings stands before a woman who, like her, is pale, thin, and haloed. Her arms folded in front of her, with right hand up and left hand down, the angel is silently communicating something, announcing something. The woman (a girl, really) echoes that arms-folded gesture, her right fingers holding open the book she’s been reading up to this moment. Those up-and-down gestures condense the subject of the painting: It’s a meeting of worlds, the up and the down, immortal and mortal, heaven and earth. Held still in front of the bellies of the two figures, the gesture also anticipates what’s coming next, namely the birth of a child, who’ll be held in a similar gesture, as babies tend to be. The painting’s subject is the annunciation of the birth of Jesus to Mary by the Archangel Gabriel, but none of Angelico’s presumed viewers would need that story spelled out. It’s entry-level Christian narrative, familiar to even a novice Dominican. Instead, Angelico leans into the implications of the story. That cloister you passed through on the way here, designed by the architect Michelozzo in the late 1430s—contemporary, that is, with Angelico’s fresco—is clearly the model for the painting’s plain architectural interior. The cool Tuscan light that picks out the folds of Gabriel’s garment is the same light illuminating you. And a robed figure behind Gabriel—a man with an alarming gash in his head, the blood dribbling down—is a modern figure, inserted into the ancient narrative: Saint Peter Martyr, a Dominican saint murdered a century before the painting was made. The complex temporality of the work makes demands on its viewers even now. What it means is that the painting is both about the interaction of heaven and earth and is that. Literally embedded in the walls of the monastery, the painting collapses real and painted space, lived and pictorial time: It extends art into life, and vice versa.

Even the name of Fra Angelico has something of the divine about it, yet it wasn’t a name he knew. He was born Guido di Pietro in the Mugello valley north of Florence, sometime toward the end of the fourteenth century. His first recorded paintings coincide with the beginning of his life as a monk; it’s impossible, then, to separate his artistic production from his spiritual life, as the posthumous name “Fra Angelico” (meaning “Angelic friar,” a name that emerged within a decade or so of his death) reflects. By the middle of the nineteenth century, critics such as John Ruskin were asserting (without evidence) that his “purity of life . . . and natural sweetness of disposition” accounted for the spiritual sincerity of his art. In 1982, he was beatified by Pope John Paul II—the only artist thus far to have received that honor, making him the default patron saint of artists. That status provided a framework, perhaps misleading, for understanding his art as a direct expression of spiritual purity. It also set him apart from his contemporaries, many of whom, such as Donatello and Piero di Cosimo, were quite happy to produce images of Roman gods and goddesses for private patrons, something it’s impossible to imagine Angelico doing.

This and other qualities make him an anachronistic figure, whose work never quite shook off the decorative Gothic elements and serene abstraction of his earliest work, from the 1420s. Well into his career he was making ethereal paintings with backgrounds of pure gold leaf while his peers had moved on to more naturalistic settings and anatomies. The 2025 exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco, the first in Florence in seventy years, reiterates the case for Angelico’s place within the constellation of Renaissance household names, showing newly restored paintings and reuniting altarpieces dismantled in the nineteenth century. Yet Angelico resists such company. His work troubles the clean break between medieval and modern worlds. And that generative anachronism accounts for his reappraisal in the work of artists centuries after his death in Rome in 1455.

In 1950, nearly 500 years after that date, Mark Rothko came to Florence to see the frescoes in San Marco. The visit—the first of two he made to the site (the second was in 1966)—coincided with the emergence of the approach with which he has become synonymous: large-scale, light-absorbent abstractions, often shown in low-lit, chapel-like interiors. The site-specificity of Angelico’s frescoes in the monastery, and their address of a single viewer resident in the room, evidently left a lasting impression. When, eight years later, Rothko accepted the commission from the Canadian whiskey manufacturer Seagram to create paintings for the walls of the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building, New York, the example of Angelico informed the calm solemnity of his canvases—and, perhaps, his decision to pull out of the commission the following year, citing the restaurant’s inappropriate atmosphere. The pale geometric planes that provide the infrastructure for Angelico’s San Marco fresco The Mocking of Christ, for instance, and the even, clear illumination within the painting, seem eminently translatable into Rothko’s delicate, numinous color zones.

Rothko’s reading of Angelico speaks to his desire to create religious art for an irreligious age. But the richness of Angelico’s painting is such that artists indifferent to art’s spiritual pretensions also found possibility in his work. Bochner’s Measurement Room (1969), which used black tape to indicate the specific measurements of a given interior space, feels informed by his encounter with wall paintings such as Angelico’s at the Met’s Great Age of Fresco exhibition the previous year. The mapping of space in Angelico’s San Marco frescoes, their precise reiterations of the simple geometries of Michelozzo’s cloister, does related work to Bochner’s conceptual cartography, saying, to related but divergent ends, You are here.

This probing at the spatial mysteries of Angelico’s work returns in Richard Hamilton’s inkjet digital print The annunciation (2005), which is directly based on Angelico’s fresco of the same name at the top of the steps in the monastery of San Marco. Hamilton’s work shows a white-cube gallery interior, based on the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, that resembles the bare spaces of the monastery, implying the secular replacement of religion by art. On the wall of the gallery is an artwork showing a nude woman in an interior, speaking on the phone: like Mary, she is receiving a message that remains silent to the viewer. Eleanor Ray’s small 2016 painting also based on Angelico’s Annunciation articulates the artist’s modernist appeal by reducing the fresco and its surroundings to thinly painted areas of pale color, a Piet Mondrian by way of Giorgio Morandi. What her painting shows, too, is what seems to have captured many artists in contemplating Angelico: the quasi-magical extension of real space into illusion, the melting of one into another.

In late 1970, Philip Guston visited Florence for the third time. He and his wife, Musa McKim, traveled there under a cloud: his exhibition of new paintings at the Marlborough Gallery, New York, that October had received withering critical reviews and general lack of acceptance among his peers. These were the works for which he is best-known today—the awkward figurations of hoods and hands, the blood-spattered robes and junky piles—but at the time, their anachronistic embrace of the figure, and indirect evocation of American violence, failed to find purchase within a post-Pop artistic landscape. In returning to Italy in these gloomy circumstances, Guston sought to reconnect with the support network of artists he had always turned to, Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, and Angelico among them. His early career as a muralist in the United States and Mexico certainly informed his engagement with artists working in fresco. Visiting Masaccio’s Brancacci Chapel in Florence, he talked about “smelling the lime,” and about how the works were “painted like billboards, like sign painting, bing boom.” What Guston drew from the art of the past was its ability to communicate in everyday vernacular: bing boom. Angelico’s Mocking of Christ is like that. In the center of the fresco, Christ sits on a plain dais, holding a reed and a stone—a mock version of the scepter and orb conventionally held by a king. Two figures sit beneath, like courtiers—Mary on his right, Saint Dominic on his left. At the same time, all pretense to regality is undermined by the blindfold across his eyes and the disembodied hands that slap and strike him. A floating head raises his hat in mock greeting and spits into his face. Painted on the wall of one of the San Marco cells, this is a work aimed at a single viewer devout enough to disentangle the strange ironies of this inversion of the iconography of power. Its violence is, as so often in Angelico, told plainly. Blood drips, heads roll, tortures are carried out: these shocking incidents in Angelico’s paintings are folded into his clear-eyed vision of human behavior, with horror and serenity side by side, as in Guston’s work of the 1970s.

Rothko’s and Guston’s encounters with Angelico produce forking paths in contemporary art. One heads toward a limpid sublime, accessed through a controlled engagement with art in space; the other toward a stark accounting of the textures of modern experience, in all its violence and tenderness. The floating hands and heads in Guston’s paintings put forward a vision of tragedy that is, as in The Mocking of Christ, timeless, in that it’s taking place right now as well as in the past. It’s outside time. Angelico’s anachronism turns out to be the very thing that has revitalized his work in the eyes of his successors. Its temporal discrepancies—that bloodied monk in the archway, peering in—remind us that his is an art of eternal presentness: an annunciation from the past that is always happening now.