What is it about stepping into the Renaissance galleries of an art museum that causes the paintings to snap into focus? It’s not just the egg tempera paint. It’s because 15th-century artists conveyed big ideas through easily recognized visual elements rather than loose, expressive brushstrokes.
The difference may seem slight, but it’s critical. An abstract artist like Kandinsky walks you through the meaning of his pictures. A Renaissance artist like Titian simply points to his work and confidently walks away.
Fra Angelico offers this same quiet clarity. He presents familiar figures and objects, letting his remarkably innovative touches speak for themselves.
A storyteller at heart
Angelico was baptized Guido di Pietro in Florence, Italy, around 1395. He joined the Dominican Order of friars at a young age and likely apprenticed with a manuscript illuminator.
Crucially, Dominican friars were permitted to venture beyond the walls of their cloister. Angelico was free to explore the narrow and noisy streets of Florence, honing his skills as a visual storyteller.
In Saint James the Greater Freeing the Magician Hermogenes, the devil is truly in the details. This vivid scene is drawn from The Golden Legend, a 13th-century text famous for its stylized accounts of Christian saints.
Angelico illustrates the pivotal moment when Saint James, one of Christ’s original twelve apostles, asks a new Christian convert to untie the evil magician Hermogenes.
In a delicious twist of fate, the sorcerer finds himself bound by the very devils he summoned to kill James. The rope symbolizes his entanglement in the dark arts. Just behind him, six double-crossing demons breathe fire and taunt him with their little pitchforks.
By choosing to release the now-remorseful magician, James is essentially saying, “Let’s return good for evil, as Christ taught us to do.”
Angelico’s elegant brushwork elevates this tale of sorcery into an Early Renaissance masterpiece. Equally striking is his use of gold leaf, which adds visual weight to the fabrics and the magician’s vainglorious hat.
Making the invisible visible
To create the large Deposition of Christ altarpiece, Angelico transformed the traditional multi-paneled portrait format into a seamless Tuscan landscape filled with figures expressing deeply relatable emotions.
Fra Angelico pioneered emotional interiority in art. He laid the stylistic groundwork for Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and even modern artists like Mark Rothko.
Arts writer Cody Delistraty, “The Paris Review,” 2019
In the center of the painting, Christ’s body slides into the arms of his followers, who synchronize their somber task with a glance here and a gesture there. His mother kneels in prayer, her eyes fixed on her dead son. Mary Magdalene kisses his bloodied feet.
Meanwhile, a man holds up a crown of thorns and three long nails as if to say, “Won’t these make great holy relics?” The man looks like Palla Strozzi, the financier who commissioned the altarpiece.
Angelico’s fidelity to genuine human emotion stems directly from Giotto, the 14th-century visionary who was instrumental in developing European naturalism.
A mysterious drawing
Long ago, an artist layered brown ink on art paper to depict the lifeless body of Christ. While some crucifixions feel overdone, this one does not.
Art historians widely credit the exquisite, unsigned drawing The Dead Christ to Angelico, who may have been working from his own Deposition altarpiece.
Did the Strozzi family who commissioned the altarpiece also receive this drawing from the artist? No one knows. However, we do know the banking family’s luck was about to run out:
The Strozzi family fortunes turned in 1434 after the return to Florence from political exile of Cosimo de’ Medici. Palla Stozzi was exiled the next month, followed four years later by his son Lorenzo. The Deposition altarpiece would be their final commission.
Carl Brandon Strehlke, “Fra Angelico and the Rise of the Florentine Renaissance,” 2019
Being a sentimentalist, I believe Palla Strozzi took this drawing with him as he fled Florence, never to return.
Little pictures with cinematic pacing
Many Renaissance altarpieces sit on a predella, a low wooden base decorated with painted panels. Because these small pictures invite close inspection, artists favored animated storytelling over formal symbolism.
A prime example is Fra Angelico’s Perugia Altarpiece, whose predella illustrates the story of Saint Nicholas of Bari, the fourth-century bishop who inspired the legend of Santa Claus.
It was a dark and stormy night…
Angelico’s first panel acts as a time-lapse, seamlessly blending three moments from Nicholas’s youth into one landscape. On the far left, a newborn precociously stands by himself after his first bath. In the center, the adolescent Nicholas listens to a preacher. The figure entering a church is also the saint, who has found his true calling.
On the far right, Nicholas discreetly tosses a pouch of gold through a window to provide dowries for three sisters. Their worried father, seen through the doorway, has yet to learn that his daughters have just been saved from poverty—or worse.
In the second panel, Nicholas—now the Bishop of Myra—urges merchants to donate grain to save his city from famine. The scene then shifts to a blustery sea where sailors pray to Nicholas to save their sinking ship. (He does.) A dramatic shift in light separates the two storylines.
The final panel shows Nicholas grabbing an executioner’s blade just in time to save three innocent men from beheading. The story ends with friends mourning the saint while angels escort his soul to heaven.
A sublime restoration
Angelico’s altarpieces are so luminous, they can knock the wind out of you. I experienced this firsthand when I saw The Annunciation in Madrid. I didn’t faint on the spot, but for a moment it felt entirely possible.
Painted for the San Domenico monastery, The Annunciation now resides in the Prado, where it underwent a breathtaking restoration. Free of the residue accumulated over 600 years, the surface glistens.
As we removed the gray curtain of pollution, a powerful source of light took possession of the picture. The light recovered its leading role in the composition, a role that transforms it into a mystical light.
Painting restorer Almudena Sánchez, Museo del Prado, 2019
The painting portrays a story of unique breadth. For the first time in art history, an artist places Adam and Eve in an Annunciation scene. As the couple is being driven out of Paradise, Eve casts a furtive look at Mary, who is quietly accepting the cosmic responsibility of setting things right.
Angelico captures the gravity of Mary’s response to the revelation that she is to give birth to God in human form:
Mary bends forward, holding her hands to her middle, as if protecting the life that is already within. The angel genuflects, acknowledging the difference in their stations.
The drama is enacted in a loggia. The rational order of the architecture contrasts with the disruption of the historical order. A new era has begun.
Art critic Arthur C. Danto, “The Nation,” 2006
Behind closed doors, a new kind of art
In 1848 art critic John Ruskin traveled from London to Florence to view paintings rarely seen by outsiders. Their emotional impact was so profound that he later wrote they “transcend art.”
Ruskin explored works within the San Marco monastery, where Angelico had painted nearly 50 frescoes directly onto the walls—including individual pieces for each of the 44 friars’ cells on the cloistered upper floor. In these private spaces, away from the demands of wealthy patrons, the artist abandoned ornate detail in favor of simple compositions that inspire meditation and humility.
In cell #7, for instance, the startlingly modern fresco Mocking of Christ depicts Jesus sitting on a red block rather than a throne. He holds a reed and a rock instead of a scepter and an orb. Floating, disembodied hands slap him upside the head, while a lout tips his cap and spits in his face.
It’s a provocative image. What emotions might a new friar experience while reflecting on Jesus of Nazareth being mocked for speaking out on behalf of our humanity?
The dawn of the Renaissance
Together with Masaccio—the first painter to adopt linear perspective in his work—Fra Angelico led a revolution in Italian painting that profoundly shifted the focus from religious dogma to human potential.
Yet, the modern world scarcely knows his name.
I don’t think Angelico would mind. Ultimately, he painted for an audience of one. The inscription he wrote for his epitaph in a Roman basilica reads:
WHEN SINGING MY PRAISE,
DO NOT LIKEN MY TALENT TO APELLES.
SAY, RATHER, THAT, IN THE NAME OF CHRIST,
I GAVE ALL I HAD.
