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Updated: June 30, 2025
He loved art and spent large sums upon his collection; yet, said he, "I should grudge the money for other occasions did it not furnish me with the entrancing spectacle of a middle-aged statesman panting after masterpieces, fingering this or that painted board, and staking his position in this world and the next upon the momentous question, Is this ear in the manner of Fra Angelico? or, Could Mantegna have so foreshortened a leg?
According to Vasari he was Fra Angelico's master, but that is now considered doubtful, and yet the three little scenes from the life of Christ in the predella of this picture are nearer Fra Angelico in spirit and charm than any, not by a follower, that I have seen.
CARY. "To their own carol on they came Dancing, in festive ring angelical " WRIGHT. "And songs accompanied their angel dance." Here Mr. Longfellow has apparently followed the authority of the Crusca, reading "Cantando al loro angelico carribo," and translating carribo by saraband, a kind of Moorish dance. The best manuscripts, however, sanction M. Witte's reading:
So perhaps Nona did appear like a sudden vision of a Fra Angelico angel, standing unexpectedly in the dark corridor with her hair as golden as a shaft of sunlight. Sonya only stared at the girl without speaking. But Nona saw that her friend's dark hair, which had been a little streaked with gray at their first meeting more than two years before, was now almost pure white.
I name them now, because the gifts each had were exclusively Florentine; in whatever they have become to the mind of Europe since, they are utterly children of the Val d'Arno. You are accustomed, too carelessly, to think of Angelico as a child of the Church, rather than of Florence.
It is, impossible by any description to do justice to this wonderful picture, as remarkable for its elaborate workmanship, the mysticism of the conception, the quaint elegance of the details, and portrait-like reality of the faces, as that of Angelico for its spiritual, tender, imaginative grace. It is one vast composition, not divided by compartments.
It was another friar who was, as it were, to people that world, a little more human perhaps, a little less than Paradise, which Angelico had seen; to people it at least with children, little laughing rascals from the street corner, caught with a soldo and turned into angels. Another friar, but how different. The story, so romantic, so full of laughter and tears, that Vasari has told us of Fra Lippo Lippi, is one of his best known pages; I shall not tell it again. Four little panels painted by him are here in this room, beside the work of Fra Angelico. While not far away you come upon two splendid studies by Perugino of two monks of the Vallombrosa, Dom Biagio Milanesi and Dom Baldassare, the finest portraits he ever painted, and in some sort his most living work. Four other works by Perugino may also be found here, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, a Piet
Any one who came to see the glory of their city, the church where their saint lay, which Giotto had covered with his wonderful pictures, was never refused admittance. How often then must Fra Angelico have knelt in the dim light of that lower church of Assisi, learning his lesson on his knees, as was ever his habit.
In him are almost comprised Masaccio, Lorenzo di Credi, Leonardo, Buonarroti, and Andrea del Sarto." The first, Fra Angelico, "sets himself to contemplate in God the fount and architype of the beautiful, and, as much as is possible to mortal hands, reproduces and stamps it in those works which a sensual mind cannot understand, but which to the heavenly soul speak an eloquent language.
The gentle happiness of the redeemed, as represented by the blessed Frate Angelico is absent from the scene—it could not appear without destroying the unities of the tragedy. Peace will follow as the blessed walk in the Elysian fields after they have passed, with a fearful joy, from the judgment seat.
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