Fra Angelico, Annunciation

The art of Fra Angelico (1400-1455) focused on serving the Roman Catholic Church. In the late 1430s, the abbot of the Dominican monastery of San Marco (Saint Mark) in Florence asked Fra Angelico to produce a series of frescoes for the order’s Florentine compound. The Dominicans of San Marco had dedicated themselves to lives of prayer and work, and their monastery was mostly spare and austere to encourage the monks to immerse themselves in their devotional lives. Fra Angelico’s Annunciation appears at the top of the stairs leading to the friars’ sleeping cells. Appropriately, Fra Angelico presented the scene of the Virgin Mary and Archangel Gabriel with simplicity and serenity. The two figures appear in a plain loggia resembling the portico of San Marco’s cloister, and the artist painted all the fresco elements with a pristine clarity. The figures do not cast shadows, however. Although Fra Angelico constructed the loggia according to the rules of Renaissance perspective (but with too few columns to support the vaults), the unnatural lighting removes the sacred event from the everyday world. Underscoring the devotional function of the image, Fra Angelico included a small inscription at the base of the fresco admonishing the friars: “As you venerate, while passing before it, this figure of the intact Virgin, beware lest you omit to say a Hail Mary.” Like most of Fra Angelico’s paintings, Annunciation, with it simplicity and directness, still has an almost universal appeal and fully reflects the artist’s simple, humble character.^[1]