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Updated: June 30, 2025
Since, however, Fra Angelico was to be their next subject of study, he wished them to know all about him they possibly could before going to San Marco to really study his pictures. Lingering on the terrace outside, they looked at the lovely Villa Landor close at hand, where the English poet, Walter Savage Landor, spent several years. Here Malcom quoted, in a quietly impressive way:
It was after fastidious rites, the heart entirely devout and on his knees, that Angelico di Fiesole drew a picture of the Christ. The attitude is emulative. It is with brushes dipped in holy water that Jesus should be displayed, though more reverent still is the absence of any delineation. Reverence of that high character history formerly observed.
A famous coronation of the Virgin, which Fra Angelico painted for a church in his native town, and which is now in the Louvre, Paris, is thus described by Mrs Jameson: 'It represents a throne under a rich Gothic canopy, to which there is an ascent of nine steps; on the highest kneels the Virgin, veiled, her hands crossed on her bosom.
"As for me," said the Countess Martin, "I am not learned enough to admire Giotto and his school. What strikes me is the sensuality of that art of the fifteenth century which is said to be Christian. I have seen piety and purity only in the images of Fra Angelico, although they are very pretty.
Angelico, to return to the question, was not a St. Francis, a Fra Jacopone. But even Angelico had his passionately human side, though it was only the humanness of a nice child.
Let him meditate over the matter, and he will find ultimately that what I say is true, and that religious art at once complete and sincere never yet has existed. I knew nothing, when I wrote this passage, of Luini, Filippo Lippi, or Sandro Botticelli; and had not capacity to enter into the deeper feelings, even of the men whom I was chiefly studying, Tintoret and Fra Angelico.
It reminded him forcibly of those pale, sweet-faced saints of Fra Angelico, with whom the frail flesh seems ever on the point of yielding to the ardent aspirations of the spirit.
But to return to us moderns, who have to reconstitute deliberately a vanished æsthetic tradition, it seems to me that such familiarity with Tuscan art once initiated, we can learn more, producing and canalising its special moods, from a frosty afternoon like this one on the hillside, with its particular taste of air, its particular line of shelving rock and twisting road and accentuating reed or cypress in the delicate light, than from hours in a room where Signorelli and Lippi, Angelico and Pollaiolo, are all telling one different things in different languages.
The young cavalier, following the flickering torch of his conductor, had only a dim notion of long cloistered corridors, out of which now and then, as the light flared by, came a golden gleam from some quaint old painting, where the pure angel forms of Angelico stood in the gravity of an immortal youth, or the Madonna, like a bending lily, awaited the message of Heaven; but when they entered the refectory, a cheerful voice addressed them, and Father Antonio was clasped in the embrace of the father so much beloved.
He thought it a sin to study or to imitate the naked form, and his most beautiful faces seem copied from angels seen in visions, not from any sons of men. While the artists around him were absorbed in mastering the laws of geometry and anatomy, Fra Angelico sought to express the inner life of the adoring soul.
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