Fra Angelico (c.1395-1455), the beatified artist of the Dominican Order, whose tomb lies in S. Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome, left a heritage of beauty and incomparable artistic skill that has enthralled millions. This essay highlights some of the major works of Fra Angelico at the Dominican priory of San Marco. San Marco is an amazing building complex with an amazing history, notable for two things; the home of Fra Angelico’s frescoes and the base where the famous Dominican Savonarola held spiritual sway over Florence. When it was given to the Order of Preachers in 1435 they embarked upon an extensive refurbishment, under the patronage of Cosimo de’Medici (the Elder) which resulted in the stupendous images that are still there today.

The priory overflows with astounding frescoes that adorn all spaces of importance – cloister, church, cells and hallways – and acted as a constant reminder to those who dwelt within its walls. San Marco is, as it were, a place where windows into heaven are open at every turn. The frescoes, to the untrained eye, look beautiful enough, but the depth of meaning and allusion to the Christian, and particularly the Dominican, way of life needs to be identified for a proper understanding of their purpose. These, like all art in the middle ages, were not merely nice pictures. They had a deep meditative, ceremonial and liturgical message. The influence of the Order’s constitutions as well as the early Dominican text, De Modo Orandi (The Ways of Prayer), is ingrained in the iconography of the images, as it is in Dominican ceremonial and pious practice. This work, written by an anonymous eye-witness between 1260 and 1288, describes the different ways St Dominic prayed, using both his body (bowing, kneeling etc) and his pious thoughts and prayers. This ‘way of prayer’ was very deeply embedded in the daily round of Dominican ceremony and private devotion of which every friar would have been constantly reminded wherever he went in the priory. At San Marco the novices’ cells are explicitly based on this treatise, but the entire complex is awash with continual references to it and the Dominican constitutions.

 Much of this study has been taken from the excellent works of William Hood, among others, and for a more in depth analysis of the priory I encourage you to read his works. I also encourage you, obviously, to visit San Marco and pray there for a new awakening of beauty in a world so often hostile towards it.

St Dominic with the Crucifix was undoubtedly designed to be the central image for the entire fresco assembly of the priory.  Its basic iconography defines that of the rest of the works, in the chapter room, cloisters, chapel  and dormitories.  This image is located on the wall of the cloister directly opposite the entry where both friars and laymen entered.  The fresco is 3.5 metres high and 1.5 metres wide (before Cecco Bravo’s alterations it would have been much wider) By the standards of the time it is massive, with the life size figure of St Dominic placed at around the beholder’s eye level.  Originally, the image’s bottom edge would have been at shoulder height to match the window embrasures further down the cloister. Its upper border ran parallel with the curve of Michelozzo’s vaulting, now only visible just blow the existing later frame.  Actually, the fresco’s size and original shape parallels the entrance door at the other end of the cloister. This connection is not simply one of symmetry.  Fra Angelico gave the painting the appearance of piercing the wall, opening up a reality wholly different from that of the cloister and its environment based on the physical senses, to that of the spiritual;  St Dominic is ‘there’ mediating just as one of the friars would have been. He is shown as the exemplar of the meditative life at the very ‘door’ to the priory. This ‘piercing’ is emphasized by the way Fra Angelico composed the picture’s field. The back is painted in a dark, flat plane of blue, with a sandy, desert colour taking up the lower ground and modelled to promote recession.

He went to a great deal of trouble to stress the humanity of Christ through the representation of His body. The study of the muscles shows an adept and deep knowledge of the composition of the human physique. Though visually influenced by others, the image has its own unique and clearly original qualities.    The light source is at the upper right and in itself pronounces the texture and composition of the Saviour’s figure.  It models the face, outlining the eyes and nose and adds definition to the hair. Similarly it spills over the stressed body, making the stretched abdomen and protruding ribs unable to be missed by the meditative viewer. Slender brush strokes add detail to the image, showing that Christ has his mouth slightly parted. Likewise these fine strokes articulate the underarm, pubic and facial hair of a very ‘human’ Jesus. Moreover, the lips, skin and red blood of pure haematite, both on His head and side and running down the face of the wood adds clarity and realism.

The stressing of the human nature of the Son of God is one central to Dominican spirituality.  Founded during the Albigensian/Catharist heresy, the Friars Preacher needed to combat the idea that the body was a depraved object, a realm of the evil sphere of the Catharist god.  To combat this notion, the Dominicans emphasised the full humanity of Christ, in an effort to display the goodness of God’s physical creation, albeit (apart from Christ and His Mother) tainted by the original sin of Adam and Eve.  This inherent goodness of the body therefore made it possible for the human to pray not only with the mind, but physically, leading to the strong notion of an inseparable union between body and soul that characterised the Dominicans. With this knowledge one can view the image of St Dominic with more clarity.

The pivot of the painting is St Dominic’s face and, along with his image in the chapter room (see below), is in many ways the key to understanding the function of the paintings in San Marco as a whole. The image is characterised by a high degree of emotion. St Dominic, it seems, cannot spiritually or physically detach himself from the cross. Generally this image is a founder-portrait common in most cloisters, but it is much more on closer scrutiny; the kind of scrutiny a friar would have had as he passed the image over six times per day at least.  This close viewing enables one to see his teary eyes, stubbled beard, flushed ears and the veins in his hand. The De Modo Orandi by a monk in Bologna is strongly represented in this image.  The observant Dominican was encouraged to meditate through composing his body in prayerful positions. Likewise he was governed by the rule and the Constitutions which regulated his way of life and the way the order ran. The Friars Preacher applied the notion of liturgical manners not only on their actions within the church but to broader situations of everyday life as dictated by the constitutions. One of these laws was that each friar should have an image of Christ Crucified, St Dominic or the Virgin Mary to contemplate in his cell. It is highly likely (though of course improvable) that the original also included images of Mary and St John the Evangelist. Thus the painting, the first seen when entering the convent, emulated both aspects of observant Dominican life and was the foundational fresco from which the art in the friars cells pivoted. It centered on the two men they wished to emulate, St Dominic and his master, Christ.

Just as St Dominic with the Crucifix is a pictorial introduction to the life of the Dominican friar, the chapter room Crucifixion is a full emulation of the themes in priory of San Marco. The chapter room was the most important space after the Church where the monks met every day in chapter to discuss business and to endure the ‘chapter of faults.’  It was also here that prospective members of the Order were accepted or denied and business with people from the outside took place. The image is framed along the bottom by medallions depicting both famous and saintly Dominicans.  It begins from St Dominic, holding the vine of the tree in each hand. It stresses St Dominic as the human ‘source’ of the order and its glories come from his initial holiness.  The frame encompassing the large curve of the fresco on the other hand functions as a link to the liturgy the friars celebrated, particularly in Holy Week and in the sacrifice of the Mass, where the salvific acts of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection were recreated.

The iconography of the pelican surmounting the cross, which runs down through the skull of Adam to Saint Dominic (underneath which the prior would have sat), underlines the connection between the constitutions of the order to the divine plan.  The first inscription is not biblical but is taken from Dionysus the Areopagite; Deus Nature Patitur [In His nature God suffers].  The next eight inscriptions are from the Prophets and Patriarchs.  They serve as introductions to longer texts which the friars would have known and therefore served as an aid to mediation on the Crucifixion. The last inscription is held by an Eritrean Syble who closes with Morte morietur, tribus diebus somno subscepto et tunc ab inferis regressus ad lucem veniet primus [ He will die by death, on the third day He will be the first to rise from the dominion of sleep into the light from the lower depths].  The Passion cycle is represented here. In conjunction with the image, as Dionysus opens with the passion, so the Syble closes with the Resurrection and the prophets explain God’s mission, three inscriptions of which occur during holy week itself.  Above the cross, the symbol of the Pelican in her piety, a Eucharistic symbol of Christ shedding His blood and giving it to his people to drink in the chalice, calls the Friars attention again to the liturgy, while the inscription Similis factus sum pellicano solitudinis [I have become as a pelican in the wilderness] from psalm 101 focuses this iconographic device directly on Christ’s suffering and is another aid to meditation. The red and green foliated border connects the scene to other parts of the priory, especially the crucifix in the dormitory hallway and the lunettes in the cloister.

The ‘non- historical’ saints depicted function to represent both the civic and personal ties of the priory as well as the spirituality of the observance. On the proper left, St Mark is the patron of the Church, St John the Baptist that of Florence and Lorenzo, Cosmas and Damian as Medici patrons. On the right, St Dominic takes the pride of place as the founder, while St Augustine come second as the Dominicans adopted his rule.  There is some confusion over the next character. Hood describes him St Anthony Abbot, while Morachiello has him as Ambrose. While the first figure after Dominic definitely is a bishop, the iconography of the second figure makes it more likely to be that of Anthony Abbott, the founder of western monasticism.  He is dressed in a habit, holds his crosier inwards, a sign of an Abbott, and has a book and quill, most likely symbolising a rule. Ambrose never wrote a monastic rule. The rest of the religious saints are those who were great reformers within their orders, something the observants wished to emulate, with Sts Peter Martyr and Thomas Aquinas filling the Dominican ranks.

The image itself is slightly damaged, the dark background was originally of azurite, applied a secco over the morellone and white grounds now visible to create different shades. Thus the image would have been even darker than it is now.  Hood likens it to the darkness of Tenebrae; a Holy Week liturgy where the candles in the church are extinguished slowly until absolute darkness (as when Christ died) is achieved; after this the choir makes a large crashing sound to imitate the sound of the earthquake that occurred at Jesus’ death. This indeed would have had a great effect on the way the friars perceived the image and the designs would have been totally aware of this.  But this darkness is not simply a creation of the flat plane backdrop.  The image is emotionally dark because only Dismas the good thief, who has just been told “…this day thou shalt be with me in paradise,” shines in the darkness, as if one who foreshadows the joy of the resurrection and the surety of salvation that is to follow the suffering of Calvary.

Each saint, if looking at all, meditates on the suffering of the Virgin whose posture parallels her Son’s.  The friars are being reminded that Mary suffered with Jesus in full union with Him as the prophet Simeon said “And thy own soul a sword shall pierce, that out of many hearts thoughts may be revealed” Indeed it is in this fresco that the most expensive material is used; Mary is coloured with ultramarine blue, while the saints around her enjoy vermillion red and malachite green.  This colouring functions to heighten Mary’s importance within the image. The friars are reminded that Mary is not only the chief mediator between God and humanity, but also the model of contemplation, who “pondered all these words in her heart.”  The image is intended to encourage those who see it to meditate on the mystery of the Passion. This invitation is explicitly portrayed by St Mark and St John the Baptist, who look directly at the viewer. St John points to the central action, while St Mark shows an open book.  It has been discovered that it once had letters on it; one would assume that it was the opening of Mark’s passion narrative.

The type of meditation the image invites is indicative of all the frescoes of San Marco. It is not an image of a crucifix, but a crucifixion scene. Nevertheless, it does not seem to be the artist’s goal to portray the purely historical event. Nor does he propose to have one believe that the saints (except of course those who were there historically) are somehow physically ‘there’ at the actual scene. Instead the intention is to portray the different reactions of the saints to their meditations on the events taking place, just as the friars were taught to meditate. Like the image in the cloister, the chapter room fresco brings the saints and their habits to life.  Just as the life size cloister image brings St Dominic to the friars’ world, so the similarly life-size Crucifixion brings the friar to, in a sense, meditate with the saints. At the same time he could contemplate their reactions to the scene, take up the prompting of an inscription or be reminded of the readings of the passion from Passion Sunday and Good Friday liturgies.

The chapter room Crucifixion is far more complex than the cloister image, but it almost acts as an expansion on the themes of St Dominic with the Crucifix. The image calls all that look at it to contemplate the passion, as the epitome of obedience needed in the ‘chapter of faults,’ but also as the central goal of the Church in her Passion liturgy and the contemplative goal of each individual friar and its inclusion in the chapter room reminded the friar that those saints too were their supernatural brethren.

  
Hyperlinks to pictures of the frescos mentioned, hosted on the Web Gallery of Art (also contained within the article above):

• http://www.wga.hu/art/a/angelico/09/corridor/dominic.jpg
• http://www.wga.hu/art/a/angelico/09/corridor/crucifi.jpg