The Birth Of Modern Painting

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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The most considerable figure in Florence after Orcagna was the Dominican monk Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, known as Fra Angelico (1387-1455), who belonged essentially to the psychic or spiritual school, and only approached the physical in his loving observation of nature. Here he was an innovator, for his eye dwells on gentle aspects, and in his landscape backgrounds he introduces pleasing forms of mountains and verdant meadows multicolored with the budding flowers of spring. Indeed, all his paintings is flower-like, but this delicate naturalism does not determine its character. It is the soulful quality of his work which gives it supreme distinction. The unworldliness of his art is explained partly by his cloistered existence and the fact that he lived until his fiftieth year in the little hill towns of Cortona and Fiesole. He led a holy and retired life, and like St. Francis, was a little brother to the poor.

If Fra Angelico had his excellencies, he also had his limitations. His angels are so beautiful that, as Vasari wrote, ‘they appear to be truly beings of Paradise’. But his devils inspire us with no terror; they are too harmless and self-evidently ashamed of their profession to be anything but ludicrous. His frescoes in San Marco at Florence and in the Vatican at Rome remain the most enchanting visions of the heavenly world, a world he decked with bright joyful colors culled from the flower gardens of earth.

The Birth Of Modern Painting (continued)