The Abiding Influence of Fra Angelico

The Renaissance painter Guido di Pietro – known in his lifetime as Fra Giovanni da Fiesole and posthumously as Fra Angelico – died in 1455 in Rome and was buried in a tomb with his effigy in Santa Maria sopra Minerva, a rare honour for a painter and a Dominican friar. Angelico’s fame never entirely faded, but his reputation narrowed. By the Counter-Reformation, he was celebrated chiefly as a saintly figure and his art valued for its piety rather than its innovation. In 1982, he was even officially beatified by Pope John Paul II. 

The modern rediscovery of Fra Angelico began in the early 19th century, when Napoleonic suppressions dispersed his altarpieces, including the Coronation of the Virgin (before 1435) and the Perugia Altarpiece (c.1437–43), which were both brought to the Louvre in Paris. (The former is still at the museum, while the latter was returned to Italy after the fall of Bonaparte.) Freed from ecclesiastical contexts, these works circulated in private collections, from that of the famed Italian tenor Nicola Tacchinardi to the future King Ludwig II of Bavaria to the Prince Regent, later King George IV. Admiration for the artist by the English Pre-Raphaelites and the German Nazarenes probably prompted Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to exchange his paintings as Christmas and birthday gifts.

Edgar Degas copied figures from the Louvre’s Coronation and Édouard Manet from Angelico’s frescoes in the convent of San Marco in Florence, turning one of them into the etching Silentium (Silence, 1862–64). Marcel Proust, in Swann’s Way (1913), compared springtime in Florence and Fiesole to Angelico’s brilliant colours on gold ground, while the novelist Henry James, overwhelmed by the rawness of the artist’s ‘lacerated saints’, cut short his visit to San Marco – missing the dormitory frescoes and the famous Annunciation (c.1443) at the top of the stairs.

By the mid-20th century, Angelico’s influence took unexpected turns. In 1970, in her evocative essay ‘The Blessed Propagandist of Paradise’, written shortly after the Apollo 11 moon landing, Italian writer Elsa Morante compared the painter to an astronaut capable of bringing the heavens back to earth. She asked: did this space traveller ‘participate in the revolution?’, referring to the artistic transformation of the Italian Renaissance. 

In the decades after World War II, many US artists got the opportunity to travel to Europe, renewing interest in the Italian ‘primitives’ and the Tuscan masters – Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca and Angelico. Among them was the painter Bob Thompson, who on a Whitney fellowship produced vivid reinterpretations of Renaissance art, including Angelico’s Deposition of Christ from the Cross (c.1430–32), saturating the palette and transforming the figures into people of diverse colours.

Mark Rothko, with his own inner spiritualism, visited Florence in the 1950s and ’60s and found in Angelico’s dormitory frescoes at San Marco a model for art as a meditative practice. Angelico had frescoed each friar’s cell with intimate scenes from the Gospels, intended for daily contemplation. Rothko essentially adopted the idea for his great chapel in Houston, commissioned in 1964. While Rothko used a monochrome range of blacks in Houston, his easel paintings with tiered colour fields invite a similarly intense looking, in which the eye becomes mesmerized and colours take on another dimension. This is exactly what Angelico hoped his Dominican brethren would experience when contemplating his distilled Gospel narratives: a higher plane of understanding, an out-of-body experience.

Such concepts also fascinated British pop artist Richard Hamilton, who, in his work Annunciation (2005), an edition of inkjet prints, replaced the angel and Mary with a naked woman talking on the phone, suggesting Gabriel’s message is now mediated by technology. David Hockney, in his Annunciation II (2017), recreated Angelico’s scene in full colour on a shaped canvas, stretching the perspective into three dimensions so we seem to parachute into Mary’s room from above. And arte povera artist Giulio Paolini, confronting Angelico’s Noli me tangere (Touch Me Not, c.1439–43), juxtaposed two photographs of reaching hands that do not touch, layering blank sheets of paper over them, with Angelico’s fresco in the background – a collage of questions about influence, tactility and distance.

What keeps Angelico persistently relevant is not simply his beauty or faith, but how his art is embedded in daily life and thought. Far from being just a painter of piety, Angelico is – and remains – an artist of radical seeing. His work continues to challenge and inspire artists to think beyond the picture plane, to reimagine how colour, space and encounter can transform perception. Modern and contemporary artists have not merely quoted Angelico; they have answered his call to create art that reshapes how we inhabit both the visible and invisible worlds.

This article first appeared in Frieze Masters magazine under the title ‘The Painter of Modern Life’.

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^{Main image: Bob Thompson, The Descension, 1961. Oil on canvas. Courtesy: the Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, New York / Scala, Florence}