Legend tells us that Fra Angelico never took up his brush to paint without first making a prayer. To behold the luminosity of his work convinces us this must be true and further, that the act of painting itself was prayer. He hoped in his works to evoke feelings of devotion to God in all who saw them. Now, as we move ahead into this new year, can we answer the call to bring Fra Angelico's mystical vision to all aspects of our lives: to the things we make, the activities we undertake, the relationships we share? As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, "Already in the taking up of the tool there is prayerfulness." --Linda Fisher

“He often commented that…the man who occupies himself with the things of Christ should live with Christ.” -- Vasari

Fra. Angelico, born Guido di Piero sometime between 1395 and 1400, was a Dominican friar and artist who lived in the community of San Domenico da Fiesole near Florence. His religious name was Fra Giovanni, but he became better known to his brothers as Fra Angelico – a tribute both to his angelic piety and to his artistic talents. He occupied a number of offices within his community but otherwise declined any higher ecclesiastical calling, feeling that complete dedication to painting was the true expression of his religious vocation.

Fra Angelico was one of the great early precursors of the Florentine Renaissance. His frescos and paintings featured vivid color, startlingly lifelike portraits, an ingenious use of perspective, and realistic backgrounds. But for all their stunning beauty and technical virtuosity, the artist's primary end was not the aesthetic but the religious impact of his work. What makes his painting religious is not the subject matter but their intended purpose in exciting the viewer to feelings of religious devotion.

The frescoes that Fra Angelico painted in the Florentine monastery of San Marco are among his most famous. They include scenes from the lives of Mary and Christ. Nearly all of them include Dominican saints – dressed identically to the friars who would be viewing the paintings. The message was plain. The viewer was to place himself imaginatively in the scene before him and identify with the attitude of devotion as displayed in the painting itself.

In one picture of the crucifixion St. Dominic himself kneels at the foot of the cross, his eyes fixed in grief-stricken adoration of the Holy Wounds. Likewise, in a painting of the heavenly Coronation of the Virgin, the scene is embraced by a cloud of holy witnesses, all kneeling with arms raised in an attitude of prayer. In a particularly haunting depiction of the mocking of Christ, the blindfolded Savior is beset by a swarm of disembodied hands, while in the foreground sit the Blessed Mother, lost in private meditation, and St. Dominic, contemplating an open book in his lap.

In these paintings the distances of time and place are collapsed. The figures are dressed in contemporary clothes and set against backgrounds familiar to the time. For Fra Angelico the religious life was a life lived in the presence of Christ and emotionally engaged in the ongoing drama of redemption. It was this mystical vision that was communicated in his paintings with such angelic purity.

Fra Anglico was beatified in 1982 by Pope John Paul II, who also named him patron of artists.

Additional Resources
- Jacqueline and Maurice Guillaud, Fra Angelico: The Light of the Soul (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1986); Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists (Baltimore: Penguin, 1965)
- ABC Gallery
- Web Gallery of Art