Fra Angelico

2 Pages 564 Words

Work of an Angelic Monk
The Italian renaissance raced forward through history as the vanguard of artistic innovations, settling in Florence which became the great center of quattrocento (15th-century) art and art theory. As forerunners, early renaissance artists “made a radical break from the medieval methods of representing the visible world,” creating bold and new, more realistic depiction of space (Renaissance art and architecture). In a rebirth of a vital enthusiasm for classical antiquity, many artists began to reincorporate many ancient principles to their own work. At the same time artists became intensely preoccupied with problems of representing the dimensions of nature on flat surfaces, developing a mathematically based illusion of space-the system of perspective.
In this era of unprecedented artistic achievements, Fra Anglico rose above and beyond combining “the influence of the elegantly decorative Gothic style” of the past “with the more realistic styles of such Renaissance (contemporaries) as the painter Masaccio and the sculptor Donatello” (Fra Angelico). Originally named Guido di Pietro, Angelico was born in Vicchio, Tuscany. He entered a Dominican convent in Fiesole in 1418 became a friar adopting the pseudonym Fra Angelico. He inherited the name of “Angelico (Italian for ‘angelic’)” because of his extraordinary personal piety and “because the paintings he did were of calm, religious subjects … combining the life of a devout friar with that of an accomplished painter” (Fra Angelico).
Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin presents a perfect personification of both his artistic and religious natures and melding of new and old artistic ideology. Reviving the Romanesque style of “a unifying color scheme” within a fresco painting, Angelico attained “the achievement of color that unites all the techniques of form and perspective” (Angelico 444). It is through this implementatio...