Fra Angelico and the Masters of Light

Fra Angelico (1395–1455), Il Beato (‘the Blessed One’) to his contemporaries as well as to John Paul II, who beatified him in 1982, is probably best known today for his frescoes in Florence’s San Marco, the Dominican convent where he lived as a monk. Perhaps fearing that some art-lovers will question the wisdom of mounting a Fra Angelico exhibition without the San Marco frescoes, the show’s curators have included a video of them. They need not have worried. Even without the frescoes, the 25 Fra Angelicos at the Musée Jacquemart-André, together with a well-chosen assortment of pictures by the friar’s colleagues working in the same religious vein, are more than enough to make this a rich exhibition.

The art created in the Florence of Fra Angelico was a bridge between the International Gothic as practised by Fra Angelico’s master and fellow monk, Lorenzo Monaco (c.1370–1424), and the dawning Renaissance exemplified by painters such as Masaccio and Masolino, whose ‘Saint Julian’ (1423–5) and ‘The Story of Saint Julian the Hospitaller’ (1427–30) appear in this exhibition.