Fra Angelico's Simple and Direct Style

Fra Angelico's "Anunciation" at top of stairs in monastery of San Marco
Picture taken by Cava H.

Fra Angelico was a Dominican monk who lived and worked in the church of San Marco in Florence from 1438 to 1450. The abbot of the monastery of San Marco asked Fra Angelico to paint frescoes for the monastery in the late 1430s. At the top of the cells leading to the friars' cells, Fra Angelico painted “Anunciation,” the scene of the Virgin Mary and the Archangel Gabriel. The scene is simple and serene, appropriate for its function as a devotional image. The figures in the scene are slender and elegant in the international Gothic style. The angel's wings are colorful and resemble bird wings, suggesting that Fra Angelico had studied bird wings while he painted. At the base of the image is an inscription cautioning passersby to honor Mary: “As you venerate, while passing before it, this figure of the intact Virgin beware lest you omit to say a Hail Mary.” The fresco shows Renaissance perspective in the classical architecture and the way the columns recede towards a vanishing point, but its primary concern was not humanism. The simple and direct paintings of Fra Angelico served the Roman Catholic Church.