Dec 17th 2011 PARIS
A WORLD apart from the roaring traffic on the Boulevard Haussmann in Paris lies the Musée Jacquemart-André, a discreet but vast mansion replete with Italian Renaissance treasures. There, nearly 25 exquisite, carefully lit paintings by Fra Angelico (mostly from Italian museums and churches), bulked out with a similar number of works by his early Renaissance contemporaries, have been beguiling visitors at a rare exhibition outside the friar’s native Tuscany.
The celestial array of apostles, prophets and saints with their intricate golden haloes, combined with contrasting lapis lazuli and vermilion, is still vibrant after six centuries. Fra Angelico’s Madonnas, painted with graceful, sinuous lines, rub shoulders with illuminated manuscripts, Paolo Uccello’s Adam and Eve, as well as his youthful St George on his white horse as he spears a green dragon. One of the friar’s early paintings, “Thebaid” (named after a refuge in upper Egypt for Christians fleeing Roman persecution), from 1410, depicts a landscape filled with monks, whether in conversation, gardening or at play with a bear, while hermits peek out of their caves.
Fra Angelico was first described as a Dominican friar in about 1423 and beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1982. His religious gravity has long overshadowed his gifts as an artistic innovator. That is a shame. His paintings embody all the delicate grace and intense colours of the “international gothic” style learned from his fellow-monk and master, Lorenzo Monaco. Yet he also absorbed the daring new techniques that were emerging at the time, illustrated here by the work of Masaccio and Uccello with their grasp of three- dimensional form and the rules of perspective. Fra Angelico’s 1428 “Madonna of Humility” (pictured above), one of four Madonnas on display, shows her as a solid, motherly presence, with her son playing with her diaphanous veil, and imbued with a serene, mystical quality that is peculiar to all Fra Angelico’s work.
In one clear example, Monaco’s “St Nicholas Saving the Sailors” has a flat, almost abstract feel, with the saint rescuing sailors who are perched on a sea symbolised by greenish curls. Fra Angelico’s figures, by contrast, have a sculptural dignity, moving in light-filled space. The sunlit landscape in “Beheading of St Cosmas and St Damian” illustrates Fra Angelico’s mastery of perspective. Three haloed, decapitated saints sprawl on the grass. As the fourth man kneels, awaiting his fate, tall dark cypresses, white city walls and the Tuscan hills behind him recede into the distance. In another painting, “Episodes from the Life of St Nicholas: Birth, Vocation and Gift to Three Poor Young Girls”, Fra Angelico places his figures in full Renaissance costume surrounded by different-coloured cubes, walls and pillars.
Fra Angelico’s best-known work is his series of frescoes at San Marco in Florence, the Dominican convent from which he ventured forth under the aegis of his patron and friend, Cosimo de’ Medici. They are shown here on video, which requires a leap of imagination for the viewer. Yet this rich exhibition, the first of its kind in France, is still a remarkable coup given that curators fear lending fragile tempera paintings on wood. In return, the Jacquemart-André will be obliged to lend its own Renaissance masterpieces for an exhibition in Italy. But it is hard not to conclude that the Parisians have had the better deal: the paintings on display reveal all the subtle sophistication of Fra Angelico’s art, lively survivors of a spiritual age on the brink of discovery.
“Fra Angelico and the Masters of Light” is at the Musée Jacquemart-André ( http://www.musee-jacquemart-andre.com/fr/home) in Paris until January 16th
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