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Updated: June 30, 2025
We cannot trace Caterina's artist life step by step, but she doubtless worked with the same spirit of consecration and prayer as did that Beato whom we call Angelico, in his Florentine convent, a century earlier. Caterina executed many miniatures, and her easel pictures were not large. These were owned by private families. She is known to us by two pictures of "St.
Though I have ventured to call him the painter of adoration, he did not feel even this movement of the soul with the intensity of Fra Angelico. In the person of S. Dominic kneeling beneath the cross Fra Angelico painted worship as an ecstasy, wherein the soul goes forth with love and pain and yearning beyond any power of words or tears or music to express what it would utter.
On the wall that forms an angle with this is a fresco, The Crucifixion, 1294, by Fra Angelico from the Dominican monastery at Fiesole. A door L. of 1297 leads to containing a small but choice collection of early Italian paintings, all of which will repay careful study.
Mantegna, the learned, the archæological, the pagan, who renounces his times and his faith; and Angelico, the monk, the saint, who shuts and bolts his monastery doors and sprinkles holy water in the face of the antique; the two extremes, are both exceptions.
And the greater the artist, the more cruel the portrait: cruellest in representation of utter spiritual baseness in the two greatest of these idealistic decorators; Giotto, and his latest disciple, Fra Angelico. Of this I should like to give a couple of examples.
Fra Angelico is a man much admired by those who have a taste for Pre-Raphaelite painters; and, though I take little or no pleasure in his works, I can see that there is great delicacy of execution in his heads, and that generally he produces such a Christ, and such a Virgin, and such saints, as he could not have foreseen, except in a pure and holy imagination, nor have wrought out without saying a prayer between every two touches of his brush.
Thus Giotto or Fra Angelico would have at once admitted theologically that God was too good to be painted; but they would always try to paint Him. That is why the Christian world is full of gaudy pictures and twisted statues which seem, to many refined persons, more blasphemous than the secret volumes of an atheist. The trend of good is always towards Incarnation.
But best of all I like the Flight into Egypt, in No. 235. It is when one looks at Fra Angelico that one understands how wise were the Old Masters to seek their inspiration in the life of Christ. One cannot imagine Fra Angelico's existence in a pagan country. Look, in No. 236, at the six radiant and rapturous angels clustering above the manger. Was there ever anything prettier?
On the other hand, and lest some one take Puritanic umbrage at my remarks on early Italian art, and deprecate the notion that religious painters could be so very human, I shall say a few parting words about the religious painter, the saint par excellence, I mean the Blessed Angelico. Heaven forbid I should attempt to turn him into a brother Lippo, of the Landor or Browning pattern!
"Danzando al loro angelico carribo." If this be correct, carribo cannot signify "a dance," but rather "the song which accompanies the dance"; and the true sense of the passage will have been best rendered by Mr. Cary. See Blanc, Vocabolario Dantesco, s. v. "caribo." Whenever Mr. Longfellow's translation is kept free from oddities of diction and construction, it is very animated and vigorous.
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