Part 3

Doubtless there were many failures among the Renaissance artists; it is hardly an exaggeration to say that in painting alone there are scores of men belonging to the Quattrocento who have left us nothing but their names. Victory was to the fittest; they alone survived and left the impress of their genius upon their own and succeeding generations. If we look for a moment to Fra Angelico's contemporaries we see at once that it was an age of great men. Filippo Brunelleschi was born ten years before Angelico, and lived until the year 1446. He designed the dome of the Cathedral of Florence, the Cloisters of San Lorenzo, the Sagrestia Vecchia, the Church of St. Lawrence, and other works too numerous to mention. Donatello, whose work to this hour is "all a wonder and a great desire;" Ghiberti, to whom Florence owes the gates of the Baptistery; Michelozzo, who built the Medici Palace and the Convent of San Marco, and was associated with Luca della Robbia in making the bronze gates of the Sacristy of the Duomo, belong to the same period, and were intimately associated with Brunelleschi in much of the work that makes Florence one of the show-places of the world to-day. Luca della Robbia was born when Fra Angelico was no more than twelve years old. Masolino, Masaccio, and Fra Filippo Lippi were among the painters of Fra Angelico's own time, while, when he was approaching middle age, Gian Bellini and Andrea Mantegna were growing up, and when Fra Angelico died, Florence was full of great artists who were destined to carry on his work. Of course, the literary activity was as great as the activity of the artists; one recalls with a thrill of emotion that Petrarch and Boccaccio were only just numbered among the dead--their work held all its earliest freshness. If at first sight these matters seem to be outside the scope of a brief consideration of Fra Angelico's life and work, second thought will justify the inclusion even in these narrow limits.

Every artist is in a sense an echo of his environment and, although Fra Angelico must have passed the greater part of his life within monastery walls, yet the evidence of his pictures must convince all who look with discerning eyes, that he was profoundly influenced by the life that went on around him. The artistic and literary movements of the time affected him deeply and, in his own modest way he was constantly striving to enlarge the boundaries of his art, to develop its achievements in a manner that must have made even his early pictures appear as dangerous as the works of artists like Manet and Degas seemed to their contemporaries. Had he lived in other times, had his lines been cast in some quiet city to which no echo of the new movement in art and letters could penetrate, Fra Angelico might still have painted interesting pictures; but he would not have got beyond his earliest manner, indeed he might not have attained to what is best in that. It would have been so very easy for a narrow-minded superior to say that the innovations were wrong, that the human figure in all its beauty must not be expressed by a painter when presenting Virgin and Child, that the old formal way was the right one. There could have been no appeal against such a judgment. Doubtless many a budding genius has been nipped in this fashion by short-sighted authority. How happy then was the friar with time and place united in his service.

VI

CONCLUSION

Fra Angelico has placed artists and laymen in his debt, and as far as the latter are concerned the cause is obvious enough. A certain conviction of the truth of every story he had to tell shines like a bright light through all his pictures; they are a force for the development and strengthening of belief. Even to-day one finds among the crowd of tourists that "does" San Marco in half-an-hour or more, a few visitors whose interest is of another kind, while there is no lack of admirers for the work to be seen in the Uffizi, though much of it belongs to the earliest part of the artist's life. So it happens that the pictures have a well-defined literary and spiritual value, and it is not surprising to think that the Church has granted posthumous honours to the man whose work has brought so much honour in its train. Artists acknowledge a great debt to the friar, but a debt of another kind. As Professor Langton Douglas has pointed out in his admirable and exhaustive work upon Fra Angelico, the friar, with his contemporaries, Hubert and Jan Van Eyck, are the fathers of modern landscape. The new movement was continued and developed by Verrocchio and Da Vinci on the one side, and by Perugino and Raphael on the other. Then again Fra Angelico made a definite movement towards portrait painting, by giving the likeness of some of his friends and patrons to saints and martyrs. This was yet another of the daring innovations that marked the opening of the Quattrocento and, to realise how much it stood for we must consider for a moment the comparative barrenness of modern art, which in the hands of its most popular artists has little or nothing that is new to say to us. Indeed it may be remarked with regret that great praise often attaches to the man who goes back to the fifteenth and sixteenth century, although a little reflection would enable every thoughtful person to see that an art, forced to fall back upon traditions of the past, is far from being in a flourishing condition.

The plates are printed by BEMROSE & SONS, LTD., Derby and London The text at the BALLANTYNE PRESS, Edinburgh