Fra Angelico

The Artistic Revolution of the International Renaissance

The International Renaissance was a period of unprecedented artistic innovation, fueled by scientific advancements in anatomy, optics, and perspective. Artists sought a new realism, emphasizing proportion, harmony, and the resolution of complex and conflicting elements. This movement was not confined to Italy but spanned across Europe and beyond, influencing Flemish, Byzantine, and Chinese art traditions.

I. The Italian Renaissance: Masters of Proportion and Perspective

Italy was the epicenter of Renaissance art, producing visionary painters, sculptors, and architects who redefined artistic expression:

• Fra Angelico – A Dominican friar who blended spiritual devotion with Renaissance realism, best known for his frescoes at the Convent of San Marco in Florence.
• Jacopo de' Barbari – One of the first Italian artists to experiment with engraving, blending Venetian and Northern Renaissance influences.
• Sandro Botticelli – Known for his mythological masterpieces, including The Birth of Venus and Primavera, where elegance and fluidity of line define his style.
• Leonardo da Vinci – A polymath who mastered anatomy, light, and shadow, producing iconic works like Mona Lisa and The Last Supper.
• Fra Filippo Lippi – A master of delicate expressions and graceful figures, influencing later Florentine painters.
• Masaccio – The first painter to use scientific perspective in frescoes, revolutionizing spatial depth in painting.
• Piero della Francesca – Famous for his mathematical approach to perspective, exemplified in The Flagellation of Christ.
• Piero and Antonio del Pollaiuolo – Masters of anatomical accuracy and dynamic movement, pioneering the study of the human body in action.
• Luca Signorelli – Created some of the most vivid and muscular human forms, particularly in his frescoes in Orvieto Cathedral.
• Andrea del Verrocchio – Teacher of Leonardo da Vinci, known for his sculptures and refined painting techniques.

II. The Flemish Renaissance: Masters of Light and Detail

The Flemish Renaissance artists focused on realism, meticulous detail, and mastery of oil painting, influencing later European art:

• Hieronymus Bosch – Created surreal, dreamlike imagery with complex allegories and moral narratives, seen in The Garden of Earthly Delights.
• Hugo van der Goes – Renowned for his expressive emotion and intense realism, particularly in The Portinari Altarpiece.
• Hans Memling – Specialized in portraits and religious compositions, combining graceful figures with luminous color.
• Jan and Hubert van Eyck – Innovators of oil painting, with Jan's Arnolfini Portrait demonstrating unmatched precision and use of light.
• Rogier van der Weyden – Master of pathos and human expression, particularly in The Descent from the Cross.
• Michael Wolgemut – A leading German painter and printmaker, influential as the teacher of Albrecht Dürer.

III. The Byzantine and Chinese Renaissance Masters

• Theophanes the Greek (Byzantium) – The most famous Byzantine painter of the period, known for his dynamic, expressive figures and influence on early Russian iconography.
• Shen Zhou and Wen Zhengming (China) – Masters of the Wu School, blending traditional Chinese landscape painting with poetic expression, emphasizing personal expression over strict realism.

IV. Bridging the Early and High Renaissance: Dürer and Michelangelo

• Albrecht Dürer (Germany) – Bridged Gothic tradition and Renaissance humanism, mastering woodcuts, engravings, and scientific perspective in works like Melencolia I.
• Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italy) – His career spanned the transition from the Early to High Renaissance, creating sculptures, paintings, and architectural marvels, such as the Sistine Chapel frescoes and David.

V. The Legacy of the Renaissance Masters

The International Renaissance was an era of unparalleled artistic achievement, shaped by scientific inquiry, humanistic ideals, and cross-cultural influences. Through innovations in light, color, and perspective, artists redefined realism and transformed the visual world, leaving a legacy that continues to inspire modern art.

Guido di Pietro is mentioned in June 1423 as Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, the name by which he is known to his contemporaries.

Fra Angelico becomes the artistic spokesman for the Dominicans, as Masaccio is for the Carmelites, and remains a professional artist in touch with contemporary advancements in Florentine painting.

Gentile da Fabriano executes his most famous works, two large altarpieces: “Adoration of the Magi,” commissioned in 1423 by the wealthy Florentine Palla Strozzi for his family chapel in the sacristy of Santa Trinita in Florence; and a large polyptych, “Quaratesi Polyptych,” made in 1425 for the Florentine Quaratesi family (whose panels are now dispersed in museums in London, Florence, Rome, and Washington, D.C.).

“Adoration of the Magi” (generally regarded as the quintessential International Gothic style painting), features sinuous lines and elegant decorative effects, with little concentration on volume or depth.

In the main panel, a throng of attendants dressed in elaborate and richly colored costumes surround the Virgin and Child with the three Magi in a fairy-tale landscape filled with a procession of birds, monkeys, dogs, horses, camels, and leopards.

The first dated work by Italian painter Masolino da Panicale (Tommaso di Cristofano Fino), “Madonna and Child,”painted in 1423, conveys the forty-year-old artist’s leanings toward an established style of grace, gentleness, and elegance.

He soon commences work on the frescoes, mostly illustrating the life of Saint Peter, in the Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence; there he comes into direct contact with one of his most artistically radical contemporaries, Masaccio, who also works on the project and with whom, despite Masolino’s conservative temperament, he collaborates.

(As tradition has it, Masolino trains Masaccio.)

Giovanni di Paolo executes altarpieces for churches in Siena from 1426 on.

An eclectic yet distinctive painter, he borrows artistic ideas from his Sienese contemporary, Sassetta, as well as from such contemporary Florentine masters as Lorenzo Monaco, Fra Angelico, and Donatello.

Indifferent, however, to his Florentine contemporaries' preoccupation with perspective, Giovanni instead creates fantastic, seemingly endless vistas that are uniquely his own, such as that in the undated “St.

John Entering the Wilderness.” Both his panel paintings and his illuminated manuscripts display Giovanni’s special gift for depicting narratives.

Other influences that pervade Giovanni's work include the richly decorated but naturalistically detailed style of his Florentine contemporary Gentile da Fabriano, and the art of Giovanni's fourteenth-century Sienese predecessors, Duccio di Buoninsegna, Simone Martini, and the Lorenzetti family.

Guido di Pietro (posthumously known as Fra Angelico), born about 1400 and documented as receiving payment as a layman for an altarpiece in 1418, had apparently been trained as an illuminator.

The Florentine painter had become a member of the Dominican order between 1418 and 1421.

Fra Angelico’s “Linaiuoli Triptych,” a secular work commissioned in 1433 for the Linen Drapers Guild, features monumental figures that reflect the painter's awareness of contemporary sculpture by Donatello and Lorenzo Ghiberti for Orsanmichele, the Florentine grain market.

Fra Angelico’s Cortona “Annunciation” panel, painted in 1432-38, is among the finest of is large number of early paintings (and one that will prove greatly influential).

The accomplished Florentine painter Domenico Veneziano, asking a member of the Medici family for commissions in a letter written in 1438, acclaims Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi as the two most important Italian painters of the day.

Domenico, who spends much of his working life in Florence, here executes a group of frescoes (now lost) with the assistance of Piero della Francesca.

Described by sixteenth-century writer Giorgio Vasari as kindly and pleasure-loving, Domenico’s painting has nothing in common with the style of the Venetian school, although his name implies Venetian origin.

Two graceful Madonnas are among his  few surviving works. (Domenico is believed by Vasari to be among the earliest painters to work in oils.)

Florentine sculptor Luca della Robbia, who had matriculated in 1432 in the guild of workers in stone and wood, is already an established artist when he produces his first major work, the “Cantoria” or “Singing Gallery,” a series of relief panels executed in 1431-38 for the Cathedral of Florence.

The lively expression of the performing musicians, together with the classical serenity with which Luca imbues the reliefs, displays the artist’s individualistic style.

In the late 1430s, Luca begins to employ enameled terra cotta as a coloristic accessory to marble sculpture.

He may have developed this form of sculpture in response to Brunelleschi’s new architectural ideal, compensating for Brunelleschi's relative bareness of color with further ornamentation.

Plague forces the council at Ferrara to move to Florence on January 10, 1439, and is thus known as the Council of Ferrara-Florence.

Here, the Council affirms the so-called Peterine theory, according to which Jesus Christ conferred the position of primacy in the church upon Peter alone, thus grounding his successors' claim to jurisdictional primacy in the church.

After protracted and difficult discussion of their theological differences, the Greeks agree to accept the Filioque and also the Latin statements on purgatory, the Eucharist, and papal primacy.

Isidore of Kiev has attended the council, first in Ferrara, then in Florence, at which he is one of six Greek spokesmen.

Together with the Greek cardinal John Bessarion, he draws up the document of unification, Laetentur Caeli, under which the two churches are formally reunited on July 6, 1439, Constantinople agreeing to submit to the authority of Rome.

The Orthodox leaders will have trouble, however, winning approval from the clergy at home.

The council also negotiates reunion with several smaller eastern churches, such as the Armenian church, Nestorian church, Jacobite church, and Eastern Rite churches, and challenges the conciliar theory enunciated at the councils of Constance and Basel.

Cosimo de' Medici and Pope Eugene IV had requisitioned the decaying convent of San Marco in 1436 and invited the Dominicans to build and decorate a new monastery.

In collaboration with the architect Michelozzo, Fra Angelico and his assistants have frescoed numerous scenes from the life of Christ in the forty-four monks' dormitory cells and connecting corridors.

Angelico has designed each of these clearly drawn frescoes, such as the San Marco “Annunciation,” to enhance the contemplative, religious setting.

In the (now overcleaned) altarpiece for San Marco, painted by Angelico in 1438-39 and entitled “Madonna and Saints in a Sacred Conversation” (he has created the form called “Sacra Conversazione”), the artist employs natural light and Alberti's systematic perspective to produce a remarkable rendering of the human figure.

The versatile Alberti, better known as an architect, publishes a lengthy treatise, “On the Family,” written from 1433 to 1439; its wisdom and rationality mirror the abiding concern of Italian letters with social and ethical topics.

Franco-Flemish composer Guillaume Dufay, highly respected not only for his music but also for his learning, has attained influential appointments in the church, taking part in the Council of Basel as a delegate from Cambrai.

He had remained a member of the papal choir in Rome until 1434 when, because of a crisis in the finances of the papal choir, and to escape the turbulence and uncertainty during the struggle between the papacy and the Council of Basel, he had entered the service of Duke Amadeus VIII of Savoy for a year.

In 1435 he was again in the service of the papal chapel, but this time it was in Florence.

In 1436, Dufay had composed the festive motet Nuper rosarum flores, one of his most famous compositions, which is sung at the dedication of Brunelleschi's dome of the cathedral in Florence, where Eugenius lives in exile.

During this period Dufay also begins his long association with the d'Este family in Ferrara, some of the most important musical patrons of the Renaissance, and with which he probably had become acquainted during the days of his association with the Malatesta family; Rimini and Ferrara are not only geographically close, but the two families are related by marriage, and Dufay composes at least one ballade for Niccolò III, Marquis of Ferrara.

In 1437, Dufay had visited the town.

The struggle between the papacy and the rump Council of Basel has continued: when the rump council had suspended Eugenius, he had excommunicated its members.

The council, with only seven bishops present, had declared Eugenius deposed and in 1439 elects as his successor a layman, Duke Amadeus himself, who takes the name Pope Felix V.

Benozzo Gozzoli, born Benozzo di Lese in the village of Sant'Ilario a Colombano around 1421, had moved with his family to Florence in 1427.

According to Giorgio Vasari, in the early part of his career he was a pupil and assistant of Fra Angelico: some of the works in the convent of San Marco of Florence were executed by Gozzoli from Angelico's design.

In 1444-1447, he had collaborated with Lorenzo Ghiberti and his studio on the Paradise Doors of the Battistero di San Giovanni.

Gozzoli had been in Rome with Fra Angelico on May 23, 1447 called by Pope Eugene IV to carry out the fresco decoration of a chapel in the Vatican Palace.

Later, the two had worked until June 1448 in the Cappella Niccolina for Nicholas V. From 1449 is a banner with Madonna and Child in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, perhaps designed by Angelico.

In Rome he executed also, in Santa Maria in Aracoeli, a fresco of St. Anthony and Two Angels.

Benozzo's last collaboration with Angelico was the vault of the Duomo di Orvieto in Umbria.

He had left Angelico in 1449 and moved to Umbria.

From 1450 is an Annunciation in Narni, signed OPU[S] BENOT[I] DE FLORENT[IA].

In the monastery of San Fortunato, near Montefalco, he has painted a Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels, and three other works.

One of these, the altarpiece representing St. Thomas receiving the Girdle of the Virgin, is now in the Lateran Museum and shows the affinity of Benozzo's early style to Angelico's.

He next painted in the monastery of San Francesco, Montefalco, filling the choir with three registers of subjects from the life of the saint, with various accessories, including portrait heads of Dante, Petrarch and Giotto.

This work, completed in 1452, is still marked by the style of Angelico, crossed in places with a more distinctly Giottesque influence.

In the same church, in the chapel of Saint Jerome, is a fresco by Gozzoli of the Virgin and Saints, the Crucifixion and other subjects.

Fra Angelico had been called in about 1445 to Rome, where he has continued to paint.

(Except for the private chapel of Pope Nicholas V in the Vatican, which contains Angelico's frescoes of scenes from the lives of Saint Stephen and Saint Lawrence, all the buildings he worked on there have been destroyed.).

At his death in Rome at fifty-five on February 18, 1455, he is considered the most influential of all contemporary Florentine painters.

The fall of Constantinople to the hands of the Ottomans is a blow to Christianity and the established business relations linking with the east.

In 1455, Pope Nicholas issues the bull Romanus Pontifex, reinforcing previous Dum Diversas (1452), granting all lands and seas discovered beyond Cape Bojador to King Afonso V of Portugal and his successors, as well as trade and conquest against Muslims and pagans, initiating a mare clausum policy in the Atlantic.

At the death of Nicholas on March 24, 1455, seventy-six-year-old Alfonso de Borgia, a member of a noble family from Valencia, succeeds him on April 8 as Callistus III, 1455.

Callixtus canonizes his late countryman, the Valencian Dominican friar Vincent Ferrer, on June 8.