Let's write about inspired religious art- Fra Angelico (born1395- died 1455)

Can a Painting Make a Skeptic Believe? By Cody Delistraty

Following the death of his mother, the artist Mark Rothko set off on a five-month trip across Europe in 1950, visiting the continent’s great museums. Echo opinion art review published in The New York Times.

The Annunciation- Archangel Gabriel with the Virgin Mary by Fra Angelico

But, it wasn’t until he visited a former Dominican convent in Florence, Italy, that he found what he was looking for.✝️👼😇 👼🏽🙏Each “cell” — where the convent’s friars lived — was adorned with a fresco painted by the 15th-century friar Fra Angelico that captured, Rothko said, what no other art he’d seen could.

“I traveled all over Europe and looked at hundreds of Madonnas,” Rothko wrote to a friend, “but all I saw was the symbol, never the concrete expression of motherhood.” 

With Angelico, though, Rothko recognized an artist of the highest order: Angelico’s paintings transcended representation to transmit deep emotional, spiritual experience.

A major influence on Abstract Expressionists like Rothko, wherein emotional evocation trumped figuration, Angelico’s great gift was his ability to convey a sense of the divine. 

Centuries later, his work invites a skeptic to belief. Angelico’s art has pushed me to find within myself a desire for belief I’d thought had been extinguished long ago.

So strong is Angelico’s own vision, so capable is he of showing it that while his foreign, 15th-century world of asceticism, magic and unconditional faith is at first discombobulating, it is a testament to his artistic ability that even more than half a millennium later, I find myself transported into his way of seeing the world, as though I were a friar in one of his cells.

Angelico began as an illustrator of illuminated manuscripts and had sold a few paintings by the time he joined the convent of San Domenico near Florence, where he took the name Fra Giovanni. (He posthumously gained the “angelic” moniker.) He was a man of deep faith, said to have wept every time he painted Jesus on the cross.

The Dominican friars of Angelico’s order were a particularly disciplined breed, following a 13th-century credo that encouraged extreme austerity. There was no search for meaning in that convent; it was a given. When Cosimo de’ Medici commissioned him to paint many of the frescoes in Angelico’s new convent of San Marco, it’s very likely Angelico didn’t even consider what he was doing to be “art.” His painting was, more than anything, an act of devotion — “visions,” as the art critic John Ruskin would later write.

This fall, I visited a major exhibit — running through January — at the Museo Nazionale di San Marco (where Rothko visited) and the nearby Palazzo Strozzi that brings one into Angelico’s world and faith.

There, you’ll find Angelico’s most stunning work, “The Annunciation,” outside the friars’ cells, up the stairs in the convent, which became a museum in 1869. A large-scale fresco painted in the 1440s, it depicts Mary and the Archangel Gabriel. 

Look first at Gabriel’s wings. Though the light and shadow of the scene are otherwise realistic, Angelico omits the shadows that would otherwise emanate from the angel’s wings, lending Gabriel an other worldliness.

Look next at both Gabriel and Mary’s eyes. Angelico has given the angel a feminized face — neat lashes, reddened cheeks, golden and curly hair. He looks ever so slightly upward at Mary. He is here to deliver impossible news. His eyes pretend toward authority, but mostly he appears puzzled. Mary meets his gaze with a look of her own weighted shock, her lips pursed, her neck arched downward so that she has quietly become the one in control of the conversation, as though, with the exchange of this revelation, she now embodies a divinity greater even than an angel.

Look then at the architecture around them. The ornate, Corinthian columns, the mathematically precise Roman arches. How classical and ordered. What a contrast these exacting, human creations are to the cosmic information being delivered and received by these startlingly modern, expressive faces. It is as though the word of the Virgin birth has slashed its way through art history itself, so that we can practically see the Classical giving way to the early Renaissance.

And though it would have mattered a great deal to Angelico, it matters not to contemporary eyes whether the viewer believes this scene to have ever occurred. It will capture you regardless.

“You may be as little of a formal Christian as Fra Angelico was much of one,” the novelist Henry James wrote after visiting the former convent, “you yet feel admonished by spiritual decency to let so yearning a view of the Christian story work its utmost will on you.”

It is this ability to emotionally spellbind the viewer that most sets Angelico apart — imparting belief through art. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the philosopher, described Angelico’s key artistic invention as interiority: “that indwelling significance of human features.” Angelico did not just depict; he evoked. Before Angelico, one largely found ideas in art, but not necessarily feeling.

Consider, as Hegel does, an ancient Egyptian sculpture of Isis embracing her son, Horus. In this, there is no warmth, no “soul,” writes Hegel. The artist expects the viewer to know that there exists love between these two by the nature of their relationship. The viewer must generate within himself the associated feelings and apply it to the art.

Angelico, by contrast, elicits these emotions — through his depictions of eyes, hands, the use of light and so much else — so that upon looking at his art one is immediately struck by the love and intimacy flowing between his depictions of Virgin and Child or the awe and befuddlement between her and Gabriel in “The Annunciation.” 

Angelico broke through art history by subtracting a crucial step. One does not regard his art, then create feeling, then look again to see that feeling manifest; rather, the seeing and the feeling are simultaneous, as Rothko saw in Angelico’s work. The artwork has become the emotion.