Fra Angelico: Tradition and Innovation at San Marco

Using light and shadow, Fra Angelico (Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, c. 1395-1455) mastered the depiction of three-dimensional space and figures, becoming one of the pioneers of the Early Renaissance alongside Masaccio. 

Fra Angelico probably began his career in the workshop of Lorenzo Monaco (c.1370 – 1423), a Camaldolese monk and master painter and manuscript illuminator working in the late Gothic style. Fra Angelico combined the brilliant color and light of late Gothic tradition with the innovations of Renaissance perspective in his deeply spiritual, religious works. He eventually moved away from Gothic elements and fully embraced a modern approach, incorporating perspective into religious art. 

An example of this early transitional phase is the Deposition, one of the many altar pieces housed in the newly-renovated San Marco Museum. Begun by Lorenzo Monaco and left unfinished at the time of his death, the work was completed by Fra Angelico in the 1430s. Despite the altarpiece’s tripartite division, Fra Angelico unified and opened the pictorial space by creating a perspective scene thanks to a carefully laid out composition. Thus the tryptic’s frame no longer divides the space but becomes a kind of window that draws the viewer into the scene that comes to life in a typical fifteenth-century Tuscan landscape. 

Among Fra Angelico’s best-known works are the frescoes commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici for the monastery of San Marco. He frescoed the cloister, chapter house, refectory, dormitory cells, and corridors. The frescoes in the cells show how Fra Angelico mastered perspective and preserved the divine, spiritual nature of the scenes meant to inspire the monks in their private devotion. They are like visions of profound meditation, bringing the monks closer to the scenes they represent. 

Besides the frescoes, Fra Angelo also created for the Medici an altarpiece for main altar of the church. Housed in the ground-floor gallery space, the San Marco Altarpiece, painted between 1438 and 1443, is one of the first Renaissance altarpieces. Eliminating the traditional gothic frame and tripartite structure in favor of an open, unified square field, the work fully embraces Renaissance innovation. The scene of Madonna and Child enthroned surrounded by angles and saints is now set in a perspective scene, where the figures no longer appear in separate arched panels. A lush green landscape has replaced the medieval gold ground as the kneeling saint on the left makes eye contact with the viewer, becoming a mediator between the faithful and the Madonna and Child. 

With his innovative compositions, mastery of perspective, and use of color and light, Fra Angelico introduced a whole new dimension into religious art and brought it into the modern world of the Renaissance.