PLATE VII.—THE INFANT CHRISTFrom the Convent of San Marco. This picture gives a fair idea of the exquisite sweetness and delicacy with which the painter handled the subject of the child Christ. He does not treat this subject very often, but when he does the result is in every way delightful.
PLATE VII.—THE INFANT CHRISTFrom the Convent of San Marco. This picture gives a fair idea of the exquisite sweetness and delicacy with which the painter handled the subject of the child Christ. He does not treat this subject very often, but when he does the result is in every way delightful.
From the Convent of San Marco. This picture gives a fair idea of the exquisite sweetness and delicacy with which the painter handled the subject of the child Christ. He does not treat this subject very often, but when he does the result is in every way delightful.
Pope Eugenius IV., who visited Florence when he was exiled from Rome, had settled for a while in Bologna until the anti-Pope Felix V. fell from power, and had then hastened back to Rome, and settled down to beautify the Vatican. Like all the great men of his generation he felt the spirit of the Renaissance in the air, and desired no more than leisure in order to respond to it. He remembered the cleverartist, whose work had charmed him in the days of his Florentine exile, and sent an invitation to Fra Angelico to come to Rome and decorate one of the chapels in the Vatican. In those days one travelled in Italy, even more slowly than one does to-day by the Italian express trains—strange as the statement may seem to moderns who know the country well—and by the time that the friar had received the summons and had responded to it, Eugenius IV. would appear to have relinquished the keys to his successor. Happily the new Pope Nicholas V. was a scholar, a gentleman, and a statesman, as responsive to the new ideas as his predecessor in office. He gathered the best men of his time to the Vatican, which he proposed to rebuild, and he entered upon a programme that could scarcely have been carried out had heenjoyed a much longer lease of life than Providence granted. Unfortunately he had no more than eight years to rule at St. Peter's, and that did not serve for much more than a beginning of his great scheme. He was succeeded by Tomaso Parentucelli, that ardent scholar whom Cosimo di Medici had appointed custodian of the collection of MSS. that he gave to San Marco in Florence when the Dominicans took possession. As it happened Parentucelli himself was in the last year of his life when he ascended the throne of St. Peter, and his schemes, whether for the aid and development of scholarship or art, saw no fruition. But for all that Nicholas V. ruled for no more than eight years in Rome, he did much for Fra Angelico, who painted the frescoes in the Pope's private studio, and decorated a chapel in St. Peter's that wasafterwards destroyed. This loss is of course a very serious one, and suggests that those who ruled in the Vatican were not always as careful as they might have been of works that would have outlived them so long had they been fairly treated. It is very unfortunate that art should suffer from the caprices of the unintelligent. When Savonarola, also a Dominican monk, roused the Florentines to a sense of their lapses from grace a few years after Fra Angelico's death, they made a bonfire in the streets of Florence of art work that was considered immoral. To sacrifice great work in the name of morality is bad enough, to destroy it for the sake of building operations is quite unpardonable.
In Rome the summer heat is well-nigh unbearable. Even to-day the voluntary prisoner of the Vatican retires to a villa in thefar end of his gardens towards the end of June, and none who can leave the city cares to remain in it when May has gone, and the Tiber becomes a thread, and fever haunts its banks. Fra Angelico felt the burden of the summer and wished to suspend his work for a while. It so happened that he received an invitation from Orvieto to decorate the Duomo there during the months of June, July, and August. The first arrangement was that he should go there every summer to escape the dog-days in Rome, but for reasons not known to us the visit did not extend beyond one year, and the frescoes that he had painted were seriously injured by rain, and were not completed until Luca Signorelli took them in hand half a century later. The little work that is attributed to the painter's brush to-day in Orvieto need not detain us here.
The frescoes in Rome represent the summit of Fra Angelico's achievement, but they have not escaped the somewhat destructive hand of nineteenth-century German criticism; one eminent authority having declared that they are not by Fra Angelico at all, but have been painted by pupils, Benozzo Gozzoli receiving special mention in this connection. It is not necessary to take this criticism too seriously. The hands may be the hands of Esau, but "the voice is Jacob's voice." The artist may have received some assistance from pupils, the backgrounds may owe something to another hand; there was no feeling, ethical or artistic, to keep assistants from coming to the aid of their master, but the whole composition and the whole feeling of the frescoes proclaim the friar. The subjects are incidents in the life of St. Stephen and St. Lorenzo,ending, of course, after the inevitable fashion of the time, with a representation of the martyrdom. For once these martyrdoms have a suggestion of reality. In the early days of Fra Angelico's work his representations of martyrdoms and suffering were so naïve that they could hardly do more than provoke a smile. His idea of hell was very simple, and when he wished to be very bitter indeed—to express his anger at its fullest—he peopled the nether world with brothers of the great rival order of St. Francis. For the founder of that order, Angelico had the greatest love and admiration; who indeed could refuse to pay such tribute even to-day? But all the brethren did not live up to the rule of their founder, and the Dominican painter's rebuke seems very quaint in our eyes, though doubtless it made a great sensation when it was administered.
PLATE VIII.—ST. PETER THE MARTYRThis is a fresco from the Cloisters of San Marco and represents St. Peter, a saint whose appeal to the artist was very great The fact that the saint has his finger to his lips may be taken as the artist's method of emphasising the rule of silence of his Order. In fact the St. Peter Martyr is generally called the "Silenzio," and like so many of the artist's pictures must be taken to have a special spiritual significance.
PLATE VIII.—ST. PETER THE MARTYRThis is a fresco from the Cloisters of San Marco and represents St. Peter, a saint whose appeal to the artist was very great The fact that the saint has his finger to his lips may be taken as the artist's method of emphasising the rule of silence of his Order. In fact the St. Peter Martyr is generally called the "Silenzio," and like so many of the artist's pictures must be taken to have a special spiritual significance.
This is a fresco from the Cloisters of San Marco and represents St. Peter, a saint whose appeal to the artist was very great The fact that the saint has his finger to his lips may be taken as the artist's method of emphasising the rule of silence of his Order. In fact the St. Peter Martyr is generally called the "Silenzio," and like so many of the artist's pictures must be taken to have a special spiritual significance.
In Rome the painter's feeling for natural beauty reaches the height of its expression, indeed one feels that every department of his work is at its best and highest there. After his departure from the Eternal City, the frescoes finished, and himself on the shady side of his sixtieth year, the intervening centuries descend like a cloud, blotting out the greater part of the record. The cloud lifts for a moment to show us "Beato" Angelico, Prior of the Dominican Monastery at Fiesole, to which more than forty years ago he had claimed admission as a novice, and then he is back again in Rome in the chief convent of his order, Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. There the light that had burned so brilliantly for nearly half a century, illuminating the most alluring aspects of the Christian faith, paled and went out. The body was laid to rest in the conventChurch, near the tomb of St. Catherine, and it is said that the epitaph was composed by the Pope. Thereafter the order of St. Dominic produced no great personality until it gave to the world a man of very different stamp in Fra Girolamo Savonarola.
In art as in music and literature the path of the innovator is beset by difficulties, and if, among all the movements that claim our attention to-day, that of the Renaissance in fifteenth-century Italy is the most fascinating, it is because the difficulties were conquered so brilliantly. The century seemed to breed a race of men that enjoyed the inestimable advantage of knowing what they wanted, and were determined to succeed.It did not matter that the paths they trod were new. Each man had mapped out a line of development for himself and went strenuously along his chosen road, quite certain that he would find the goal of his ambition at the journey's end. Curiously enough when the paths were those of conquest there was always a road leading from them to patronage of the arts. This may be because art in those days was largely devoted to the service of the Church, and when a man had acquired all that theft or conquest could give him, and realised that he could not hope to wage successful war upon time, he began to think of his latter days. Few men of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries could approach death with confidence, and they sought to put something to their credit against the Day of Judgment. To beautify religious houses,to build houses for Holy Brotherhoods, these were the simplest and most obvious ways of placating the Recording Angel, and to the uneasiness of rich and unscrupulous men the Church owes not a few of her most remarkable monuments. Moreover, even the tyrants wished to have some enduring memorial. Cosimo di Medici, who gave San Lorenzo and San Marco to Florence, remarked to his historian Bisticci, "Fifty years will not pass before we are driven out of Florence, but these buildings will remain." After all we can forget and forgive the superstition and self-glorification that gave so much enduring wealth to the great cities of Italy.
Doubtless there were many failures among the Renaissance artists; it is hardly an exaggeration to say that in painting alone there are scores of men belonging tothe Quattrocento who have left us nothing but their names. Victory was to the fittest; they alone survived and left the impress of their genius upon their own and succeeding generations. If we look for a moment to Fra Angelico's contemporaries we see at once that it was an age of great men. Filippo Brunelleschi was born ten years before Angelico, and lived until the year 1446. He designed the dome of the Cathedral of Florence, the Cloisters of San Lorenzo, the Sagrestia Vecchia, the Church of St. Lawrence, and other works too numerous to mention. Donatello, whose work to this hour is "all a wonder and a great desire;" Ghiberti, to whom Florence owes the gates of the Baptistery; Michelozzo, who built the Medici Palace and the Convent of San Marco, and was associated with Luca della Robbia in making the bronze gates of the Sacristyof the Duomo, belong to the same period, and were intimately associated with Brunelleschi in much of the work that makes Florence one of the show-places of the world to-day. Luca della Robbia was born when Fra Angelico was no more than twelve years old. Masolino, Masaccio, and Fra Filippo Lippi were among the painters of Fra Angelico's own time, while, when he was approaching middle age, Gian Bellini and Andrea Mantegna were growing up, and when Fra Angelico died, Florence was full of great artists who were destined to carry on his work. Of course, the literary activity was as great as the activity of the artists; one recalls with a thrill of emotion that Petrarch and Boccaccio were only just numbered among the dead—their work held all its earliest freshness. If at first sight these matters seem to be outside the scopeof a brief consideration of Fra Angelico's life and work, second thought will justify the inclusion even in these narrow limits.
Every artist is in a sense an echo of his environment and, although Fra Angelico must have passed the greater part of his life within monastery walls, yet the evidence of his pictures must convince all who look with discerning eyes, that he was profoundly influenced by the life that went on around him. The artistic and literary movements of the time affected him deeply and, in his own modest way he was constantly striving to enlarge the boundaries of his art, to develop its achievements in a manner that must have made even his early pictures appear as dangerous as the works of artists like Manet and Degas seemed to their contemporaries. Had he lived in other times,had his lines been cast in some quiet city to which no echo of the new movement in art and letters could penetrate, Fra Angelico might still have painted interesting pictures; but he would not have got beyond his earliest manner, indeed he might not have attained to what is best in that. It would have been so very easy for a narrow-minded superior to say that the innovations were wrong, that the human figure in all its beauty must not be expressed by a painter when presenting Virgin and Child, that the old formal way was the right one. There could have been no appeal against such a judgment. Doubtless many a budding genius has been nipped in this fashion by short-sighted authority. How happy then was the friar with time and place united in his service.
Fra Angelico has placed artists and laymen in his debt, and as far as the latter are concerned the cause is obvious enough. A certain conviction of the truth of every story he had to tell shines like a bright light through all his pictures; they are a force for the development and strengthening of belief. Even to-day one finds among the crowd of tourists that "does" San Marco in half-an-hour or more, a few visitors whose interest is of another kind, while there is no lack of admirers for the work to be seen in the Uffizi, though much of it belongs to the earliest part of the artist's life. So it happens that the pictures have a well-defined literary and spiritualvalue, and it is not surprising to think that the Church has granted posthumous honours to the man whose work has brought so much honour in its train. Artists acknowledge a great debt to the friar, but a debt of another kind. As Professor Langton Douglas has pointed out in his admirable and exhaustive work upon Fra Angelico, the friar, with his contemporaries, Hubert and Jan Van Eyck, are the fathers of modern landscape. The new movement was continued and developed by Verrocchio and Da Vinci on the one side, and by Perugino and Raphael on the other. Then again Fra Angelico made a definite movement towards portrait painting, by giving the likeness of some of his friends and patrons to saints and martyrs. This was yet another of the daring innovations that marked the opening of the Quattrocentoand, to realise how much it stood for we must consider for a moment the comparative barrenness of modern art, which in the hands of its most popular artists has little or nothing that is new to say to us. Indeed it may be remarked with regret that great praise often attaches to the man who goes back to the fifteenth and sixteenth century, although a little reflection would enable every thoughtful person to see that an art, forced to fall back upon traditions of the past, is far from being in a flourishing condition.
The plates are printed byBemrose & Sons, Ltd., Derby and LondonThe text at theBallantyne Press, Edinburgh