The language of a saint
Keith Christiansen
FRA ANGELICO AT SAN MARCO by William Hood Yale, f45, pp. 368 Wen, at the end of May, 1845 John Ruskin arrived in Florence for the first time, he had two priorities: to visit the tomb of Giotto in the cathedral and to go to the convent of San Marco, 'the dwelling place of Fra Angelico'. Understandably, it was the visit to the second that left the more profound impression. In that far-off time, when travelling was limited to the few and an appreciation for 'primitive' painters (the name then commonly given to artists active before Raphael) was in its infancy, San Marco was little visited.
I have [wrote Ruskin to his father] had many a quiet, resting walk through their corridors, where no one ever comes, and where the work of Fra Angelico gives religion to every corner, and makes a temple of it.
Since Ruskin's day the artistic monu- ments of Italy have become the centre of a thriving industry, and countless tourists have made the pilgrimage to Florence to visit San Marco. Like Ruskin, they have been drawn not so much by the effulgent panel paintings, altarpieces and choirbooks that have transformed the ground floor of the convent into a veritable museum of Fra Angelico, as by the frescoes that adorn the cloister, chapter house, dormitory and cells of the Dominican priory — those works that have come to be indistinguishable from what Ruskin called the 'purity and intensity of Fra Angelico's religion'.
In the earliest description we have of the convent's decorations, written by a contem- porary, Fra Angelico is praised as 'the finest master in the art of painting in Italy' and as 'a man of complete modesty and religious life', as though the one were the obvious extension of the other. This confla- tion of hagiography (Fra Angelico was offi- cially beatified in the 1980s) with artistic output became the lietmotif of Giorgio Vasari's biography written in the 16th cen- tury, where we find fully developed the leg- end of the saintly painter who refused to make any alterations to his pictures, believ- ing that his hand was guided by God, who always prayed before taking up his brush, and who shed tears of contrition whenever he painted Christ crucified.
Implicit in these stories is the notion of an art subservient to religion and the acceptance of divine inspiration and empa- thy as primary ingredients in the creative process. Although 19th-century critics and artists — beginning with the Nazarenes and Pre-Rephaelites — eagerly embraced this vision of a sanctified art, modern critics have found the legacy distinctly problemat- ic. In this beautifully produced and richly informative book, William Hood has boldly set out to define the relationship of Fra Angelico's work at San Marco to the prac- tice of the reformed (or Observant) branch of the Dominican order without recourse to hagiography. So long as he deals with the constitutions of the order (reprinted Fra Angelico's Annunciation, the North Dormitory, San Marco with a translation in English as an appendix), Dominican practice and theolo- gy, and the uses to which the various parts of the priory were put, he is largely success- ful. But whenever he describes those more intimate aspects of style Angelico's approach to figural description, his han- dling of colour and his use of the fresco technique — the shadowy contours of the saintly friar-painter of San Marco are recognisably reconfigured in a heady, sometimes self-indulgent language that has the effect of pious adulation.
This is unfortunate, for the core of this book — as formulated in the last four chapters — really does make a strong case for Angelico's creation of a specifically Observant Dominican language that could be inflected according to the audience it addressed. There is the rich, public vocabu- lary of the high altarpiece (unfortunately badly damaged by disastrous cleaning in the last century), in which Angelico used the most advanced illusionistic and per- spectival devices together with an unsurpassed mimetic technique to conjure up for worshippers the holy court of the Virgin. Then there is the more reserved and didactic but still brilliant tone of the frescoes in the cloister and chapterhouse, addressing a more select and, one suppos- es, literate audience — one that required little introduction to the basic tenets of the Dominican order. And for those allowed within the dormitory, Angelico employs an intimate language that is the more elo- quent for being spare and unembellished, as though he knew that every understated gesture or inflection would be instinctively understood. These are the frescoes that have impressed every visitor to San Marco, and it is no mean achievement that Profes- sor Hood convinces us that Angelico fur- ther manipulated this monastic vocabulary to meet the particular needs and practices of the friars, novices and lay brothers to whom the cells on the three sides of the cloister were assigned. Ironically, he is best when he discusses those much neglected frescoes adorning the cells of the lay broth- ers, with which Fra Angelico was only mini- mally involved: perhaps there simply was not the temptation to match artistic achievement with rhetorical flourish.
Unfortunately, in order to get to those chapters with their truly illuminating com- ments one has to wade through page upon page of extraneous information about the origins of the Dominican order, Dominican altarpieces, cloister decoration in Tuscan convents, the putative relationship of Angelico's work to Sienese painting (a par- ticularly unconvincing chapter), and the theme of what Hood terms traditio: 'the Dominicans' belief that their authority to preach and teach descended directly from Christ and his apostles'. Surprisingly, there is no single place where Fra Angelico's decorations for the Observant convent of San Domenico at Fiesole, where he took holy orders and later served as prior, are
discussed.
Throughout these chapters there is a tendency — all too common in academic circles — to express relatively simple ideas in an opaque, inflated language. In one place we read that,
At their deepest level the frescoes at San Marco resonate with the sounds of a life that was self-consciously and straightforwardly sacramental, and that, like the paintings, effected the transcendent reality of which it was the earthly sign.
In another, Cosimo de'Medici is called the `efficient cause of Fra Angelico's new altar- piece' — a theological euphemism alluding to the fact that Cosimo footed the bill for the altarpiece, as, indeed, for the whole decorative project at San Marco. There is a related tendency to burden even relatively simple pictorial devices, like fictive frames surrounding a frescoed image, with esoteric meaning that, one feels quite sure, has little to do with Fra Angelico's intentions.
Sad to say, the text is not without some errors of fact: Gentile da Fabriano was active in Florence between 1420 and 1425, not 1423 and 1427; Masolino left Florence for Hungary in 1425 and, contrary to what Professor Hood writes, he returned to Flo- rence in 1428. At Santa Maria Novella Orcagna worked with his brother Nardo di Cione, not Andrea (who is identical with Orcagna!); there are, to my knowledge, no frescoes by Filippo Lippi at Montefalco (the reference must be to Spoleto). More substantially, one is at a loss to understand how the Virgin Fra Angelico shows in his celebrated fresco of the Annunciation wearing a blue cloak over a buff-coloured dress can be said to have donned the black and white habit of the Dominicans, as Pro- fessor Hood maintains in the concluding paragraph of chapter 12, ominously titled `Nature and Grace in the Art of Fra Angelico', or what possible connection exists between the restrained, carefully inflected language of Angelico and 'the ecstatic powers surging through the Saint Theresa' of Gianlorenzo Bernini in Rome. Here, as elsewhere, Professor Hood has allowed himself to be seduced by senti- ments that have nothing to do with the tasks he set himself, or the works he describes.
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