Fra Angelico

Mr John Pope Hennessy’s recent study on Fra Angelico has already been widely and appreciatively reviewed. Yet it is curious how few of its reviewers seem to have noted the profound originality of his treatment and conclusion.The volume is in itself an admirable specimen of the Phaidon productions at their best. It would be possible to criticise some of the colour reproductions but we are still at the stage when the majority of colour reproductions are liable to criticism. The photographing is excellent, the selection of details ideal for its purpose. The reproductions are predominant over the text as is so often the case in English Art History publications, yet here this is counter-balanced by Mr Pope-Hennessy’s rare capacity for conciseness. In ninety pages of introduction and of catalogue he describes definitively three previouly unknown yet major Italian painters of the Quattrocento.One of these may still be described as Fra Angelico, but there is little in common between this Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, ‘Fr Ioannes Petri de Magello iuxta Vichium Optimus Pictor’, and the Angelico popularised by Rio in De l’Art Chrétien. He is a consummately accomplished and professional painter, employed by many patrons, working from carefully considered and balanced schemes, and consistently influenced by the ideals in the Lucula Noctis of his Dominican master Giovanni Dominici. The author of the Lucula Noctis was familiar with the technique of his contemporary Italian humanists and could write as well as they of ‘Myrrha, Phaedra or Ganymede’, but he rejected so many of their standards of value. To him the art of rhetoric seems over-prized. ‘The beautiful form of the poem is like clothing.