Fra Angelico
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
82nd Street and 5th Avenue
Until January 29, 2006

The Metropolitan Museum, already home to an impressive collection of religious art, brings us a very special group of pieces not seen together in half a century, and never before seen in the United States.

This exhibition is the first retrospective devoted to the work of Fra Angelico, the renowned Italian Renaissance artist. About 75 pieces from over 50 public institutions and private collections throughout Europe and America are included in this landmark show, which commemorates the 550th anniversary of the artist’s death.

The show begins with his earliest work, some of which was created while he worked as an apprentice to more established artists of the time. Even in these early pieces, it is immediately evident that Fra Angelico brought something special to his representations of religious figures. His treatment of the subject matter was sophisticated for its time. Details such as the spatial relationships between figures, the way he painted folds in clothing and fabric, and his intricate tapestry patterns set his work apart from that of his contemporaries.

But what makes Fra Angelico’s work particularly striking is the expressiveness of his subjects’ faces. He imbues his portraits of saints, angels, and other religious figures with the loftiness of the holy, and at the same time, very palpable human emotions. His portraits of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Romuald, St. Benedict, St. Jerome, St Roch, and St. Anthony Abbot are good examples of this. Shown together in a row, each saint is clearly an individual with his own distinct physical features, and in each of their faces you also see their experiences as human beings. You feel it possible to know them intimately. In an early piece circa 1411, called Head of a Saint, (originally attributed to Giovanni Toscani) the intensity of the subject’s expression makes it appear almost three-dimensional. It leaps off of its background as if preparing to reprimand you. In another early painting of the Virgin Mary surrounded by saints, the usual serene, pious and somewhat blank gaze attributed to Mary is replaced with a look that tells you she has a really interesting story to tell.

Ultimately, people want art that reflects themselves and their view of the world. Fra Angelico was blessed with the ability to make his pieces personal and accessible, even to today’s viewer. These works serve as a window—not just into the religious traditions that prevailed in that time and place, but into the people and their ideas about themselves.

Born Guido di Pietro in the countryside north of Florence, Angelico joined the Dominican order around 1419 changing his name to Fra Giovanni. Much of his early work was produced for Dominican patrons who commissioned devotional images and altarpieces. Some of this work was for the monastery he lived in, San Domenico in Fiesole. Demand for his paintings grew to the point where he needed to enlist the help of assistants. He became the leading painter in Tuscany, and kept that position for almost thirty years.

After his death in 1455 he was referred to as pictor angelicus, the Angelic Painter, a name translated in English as Fra Angelico. In 1984 he was beatified—the first step in the process toward sainthood—by Pope John Paul II.