Re—Assessment of a Master
RARELY has the true stature of an artist been so successfully disguised by popular acclamation as in the case of Fra Angelico. He was hardly dead when the title " angelicus pictor " was bestowed on him by a fellow Dpminican. " Frate al bene ardente " rhymes Giovanni Santi a little later, and Vasari continues with " most holy " and " most gentle and temperate." And so it goes on to Stendhal, Ruskin and the present day, and the indifferent colour prints of slender swaying angels with no visible body and no credible weight which the visitor to Florence, and notably the English visitor, takes home. Yet, as Mr. Pope-Hennessy in his excellent book proves conclusively (without perhaps stressing it quite sufficiently), Fra Angelico was amongst the first—earlier than Uccello, earlier than Castagno—to understand and emulate the revolutionary innovations of Masaccio. Masaccio's sombre saints, his farouche faces, his voluminous modelling, his Renaissance architectures and his un- mistakable Florentine street-scenes painted in accurate perspective,
and especially his reflections of the sun on walls or faces, all this reappears in Fra Angelico's work of the late 1430s, and such—it is true, small—scenes as the attempted execution of St. Cosmas and St. Damian (Dublin) must indeed have been eagerly studied by young Piero della Francesca, working at that very moment under Domenico Veneziano in Florence. Domenico Veneziano himself, about 1438- 39, was so close in his style to Fra Angelico that Mr. Pope-Hennessy makes a good case for his having taken some part in the older master's Coronation of the Virgin at the Louvre.
Soon after 1440, however, Fra Angelico turned away, with delibera- tion no doubt, from this fresh and sunny style, but his celebrated frescoes in the cells of his fellow monks at S. Marco would not possess their characteristic blend of simplicity, naiveté and monu- mentality if their master had not gone through the experience of Masaccio. If former historians have tended to treat the Angelico too sentimentally, they were not sufficiently aware of that formative factor in his style.
Mr. Pope-Hennessy is severe in his limitations of Fra Angelico's work. He leaves out as not by the master's own hand much that is familiar and popular, and perhaps occasionally goes too far. To say for instance that it would be manifestly beyond the capacity of a single artist " to paint all the 54 frescoes in S. Marco is an exaggera- tion. Fra Angelico may well have had eight years to paint them in and comparatively little other work. Michelangelo after all painted the whole Sistine ceiling with 343 figures in four years, practically unaided. It is in that sense a pity that Mr. Pope-Hennessy does not illustrate, even if only in small size, all the frescoes. As to panel- paintings, many would certainly like to see the early Coronation of the Virgin in the Uffizi Gallery restored among the originals, admitting that its execution is not entirely Fra Angelico's own. As a later version of the Louvre theme it is not convincing.
Mr. Pope-Hennessy is a scholar of amazing energy. He has now to his credit four monographs on early fifteenth-century painters, besides the volume oh the Sienese Quattrocento and many papers. In whatever he writes he has proved reliable as well as readable, and his treatment of Fra Angelico is no exception. It consists of thirty pages of general introduction and over forty of closely printed cata- logue notes. Sandwiched between these two parts are the admirable plates, admirable especially (as it has now become the Phaidon tradition) in the many enlarged details. These show amongst many other things Fra Angelico to have been an entirely personal and highly sensitive landscape-painter. Mr. Pope-Hennessy praises these back- grounds of Tuscan hills and hill-towns, but with moderation, and readers may well sometimes wish that he could have let himself go a little more before he reached the two last paragraphs of his intro- duction. With his eye, his discipline and his musicality, he could afford to relax more often than just once in such a task of research
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