Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 10, 2025
But if his body lies in Rome, his gentle spirit still seems to hover around the old convent of San Marco, and there we learn to know and love him best. Little wonder that in after ages they looked upon him almost as a saint, and gave him the title of 'Beato, or the blessed angel-painter.
I have come to the last and probably the best appreciated among modems of the early Italian painters. Fra Angelico da Fiesole, the gentle devout monk whom Italians called 'Il Beato, the Blessed, and who probably did receive the distinction of beatification, a distinction only second in the Roman Catholic Church to that of canonization.
Then, as now, there were two types of artists, considered as men; there were Bohemians and scholars. Lionardo and Michelangelo were grave and learned students; so was Beato Angelico in a sense limited to theology. But Benvenuto, Lippo Lippi and Buffalmacco were typical Bohemians.
While the wolf was escaping with his prey between his teeth, he came, as it pleased God who thus began to make known the reward of his service to the cell of the Beato Torello; who, when he saw this, instantly ordered the wolf, in God's name, to lay the child on the ground, safe and sound; which command the wolf no sooner heard than he came to him immediately, and laid the child at his feet.
In the peaceful convent of Saint Mark, among the Dominican brethren, Beato Angelico's character and genius grew together; the devout artist and the devotional mystic were inseparably blended in one man, and he who is best remembered as a famous painter was chosen by a wise Pope to be Archbishop of Florence, for his holy life, his gentle character and his undoubted learning.
Fra Angelico the sweetest of all the Florentine painters was a monk of Fiesole, whose real name was Guido Petri da Mugello, but becoming a Dominican he called himself Giovanni, and now through the sanctity and happiness of his brush is for all time Beato Angelico. He was born in 1390, nearly sixty years after Giotto's death, when Chaucer was fifty, and Richard II on the English throne.
It is striking that, without any at all intense religious purpose, the figures, in their varied naturalness, have a dignity and sweetness of attitude that admits of numberless reverential constructions. I should call all this the happy tact of a robust faith. On the staircase leading up to the little painted cells of the Beato Angelico, however, I suddenly faltered and paused.
The last may be the greatest, but the first will always have been the first, the daring, the romantic, who did what no man had done before them. And so it is also in the peaceful ways of art. Giotto, Beato Angelico, Lippo Lippi, Botticelli, never attained to the greatness of Lionardo or Michelangelo or Raphael.
The first two stand out in tremendous contrast as contemporaries the realist of the Soul, and the realist of the Flesh, the Saint and the Sinner, the Ascetic and the Sensualist. Beato Angelico of his many names, it is easier to call him by the one we know best was born in 1387. At that time the influence of the Empire in Italy was ended, and that of the Popes was small.
Nor was he a bit of a prig, Miss Winchelsea said, and indeed she detested prigs. He had a distinct undertone of humour, and was funny, for example, without being vulgar, at the expense of the quaint work of Beato Angelico. He had a grave seriousness beneath it all, and was quick to seize the moral lessons of the pictures.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking