Life and createvity of Fra Angelico /Part 2/
In 1436, thanks to the intervention of the ruler of Florence Cosimo Medici, Pope Eugene IV entrusted the Dominicans of Fiesole to the collapsing buildings of the Florentine monastery of San Marco. The architect and sculptor Michelotzo was entrusted with the restoration of the buildings, and the painting decoration was assigned to Fra Angelico. The restoration works and interior decoration began in 1438 and continued until 1452. The campus includes the church, 44 monk cells, an inner square with a colonnade, a library and a hall for the gatherings of the entire fraternal community. The beautification of the monastery, designed for religious contemplation, is one of the most spectacular creations of Fra Angelico and its atelier - the highest achievement in Italian fresco art. More than three-quarters of the frescoes are designed to predispose the monks to meditation, where the central subject is the sufferings of Christ.
Unlike the painted panes, the frescoes are distinguished by the lack of any decoration, as the strict Dominican statutes require. They are designed to incite the activation of the mystical attitudes in the contemplative face of God-suffering monks. Impresses the solemnity of the expression and purity of forms in some of the frescoes that decorate monastic cells, such as Annunciation, Transfiguration, Christ, and Laughing, and the Coronation of the Virgin. In them, color plays a major role. Chromaticism (cf. The vocabulary of Fra Angelico builds on the sophisticated processing of halftones. Light is minimized, whereas light radiation, whose even distribution ensures the balance of colors, is reinforced to the limit. These frescoes (in the cells) are opposed to the great altar in the monastery church, known as St. Mark's altar (1438) - a work designed for a wider audience, where Fra Angelico reproduces for the first time the Holy Talk / gathering of angels and saints around The Virgin and Child Christ in Paradise. At the suggestion of Pope Eugene IV, by the end of 1445,Fra Angelico went to Rome-probably for a while-to make the decoration of the Chapel / Chapel / of the Holy Communion. The painter and his assistants work in the execution of the papal order until June 1447, but the chapel was destroyed in the 16th century and the frescoes did not survive to us. It is accepted to mention that the same pope instructed Fran Angelo to design the decoration of the Bishop's building in Florence, but the artist refused the order because he had to fulfill the instruction of his abbot, the future Saint Anthony. In the summer of 1447, he, along with his aides, took up the ornamentation of the chapel Santo Bricho in the cathedral of Orvieto, where he painted the Ascension of Christ and the Choir of the Prophets. Fra Angelico managed to establish close ties with the heir of Eugene IV - the newly proclaimed Pope Nicolas V, who assigned him the frescoes of his personal chapel and workroom. In the frescoes painted by Fra Angelico and his students during the period 1447-1450 in Capella Nikolina , they emit the artist's new sense of monumentality and his return to the plastic poetics of Antiquity. In the scenes that trace the life of martyrs Etienne and Lorenzo, the artist rises to the plastic concept of the rising Renaissance.
In 1450 Fra Angelico returned to the monastery of Fiesole, where for two years he performed the responsibilities of Abbot (First Brother). He then worked on his latest works, including the altar for Bozco de Frattas, whose commissioner was probably Cosimo Medici, and the 35 small paintings for the Armadio degli Argenti that reproduce scenes from the life of Christ. Fra Angelico was a monk with a simple and sensitive soul, inclined to sentimentality and delight ... He had the prospect and the brightness and obeyed their tasks. His clear perspective gives his scenes a touch that we do not encounter in either the Gothic or the Sienese paintings. At the same time, he prefers incomplete figures, light and transparent colors and restrained movement ... In the art of Fra Angelico he finds the most demanding expression of spirituality ... his painting is permeated by that purity and clarity of the spirit that Brunelles has embodied in architecture . Fra Angelico is an artist who plays only one string, but this string always sounds with a bright, jubilant joy. For the past three years of his life, nothing is known about the activities of Fra Angelico. It is only known that he was in Rome in 1453 or 1454, where he probably participated in the restoration work of the restoration of the Dominican monastery of Sante Maria della Minerva. He is known to have died on February 18, 1455, and is buried in the St. Thomas Chapel of Aquino.