Fra Angelico died in Rome on February 18, 1455. His tomb still stands in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, in what used to be a chapel dedicated to Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor. An inscription on the tomb describes him as Angelicus Pictor—the Angelic Painter. This is not idle praise. Fra Angelico is the first painter to give his viewers the uncanny sensation of being present at a martyrdom or a miracle. He has a rare feel for the apparent randomness of life, not to mention a keen sensitivity to the unique qualities of each soul. These gifts can lead him in risky directions.

Anyone who has ever attended a state function or other such lengthy ceremony has seen the way dignitaries can rarely help themselves from commenting on the proceedings to one another, if only to confirm their approval of what is going on. Do such things also happen in Heaven? Fra Angelico seems to think so. In The Coronation of the Virgin (ca. 1434–35), he paints Saint Catherine of Alexandria smiling gently at a sotto voce comment from Saint Agnes. Neither is paying attention to the coronation itself. What could possibly have distracted them?

Most public figures know better than to avoid gossiping in public, not necessarily because they know it to be potentially sinful, but simply because it looks bad (the Italian term is brutta figura). To see politely bored saints in Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin is unexpected, to say the least. For Saint Agnes to be caught making what appears to be an irrelevant remark—if not a catty one—seems shocking, if only in the eyes of a believer.

Fra Angelico was neither irreverent nor theologically illiterate; indeed, he was probably instructed in the faith by some of the holiest, most brilliant Dominicans of the day, including Saint Antonino Pierozzi, who became bishop of Florence in 1446. Then why does he depict so many inattentive saints in Heaven, and two who look conspiratorial in a way that might merit a visit to the closest confessional, if they are talking about what it looks like they are talking about?

For those of us with no theological training, the best explanation might be that Fra Angelico is looking for ways to transform inaccessible symbols of holiness into personalities with whom we can sympathize as part of our progress towards greater personal holiness. But other arguments are possible. We should never regard sacred art as beyond criticism, even when produced by one of the greatest geniuses in the history of painting.

Cosimo de’ Medici was one of Fra Angelico’s early admirers; Pope Nicholas V was another. Despite such influential patrons, a great deal of Fra Angelico’s work was later discarded or even destroyed. Next to nothing survives of the paintings he created during the last decade of his life, which he spent in Rome, creating frescoes for Old Saint Peter’s and Santa Maria sopra Minerva. In a few instances we do not have drawings or even reliable written descriptions for some of his most important creations.

One of Fra Angelico’s only commissions from the period that can still be seen is the Niccoline Chapel, a private chapel for Pope Nicholas that was completed between 1447 and 1451. Most of the painting seems to be the work of assistants: The artist’s delicacy of touch is often absent. But the work of his own hand is unmistakable, and the design has a grace about it that nobody else could achieve. Visitors in Rome too often miss the Niccoline Chapel. Those who have had the opportunity to contemplate it at length understand why Piero della Francesca, Raphael, and—above all—Michelangelo treasured Fra Angelico’s work, which set the pattern for sacred narrative scenes throughout the Renaissance, and not only in the Vatican.

When it comes to providing hints and glimpses of Heaven that feel somehow true, perhaps only Botticelli approaches Fra Angelico. Botticelli’s air of holiness was hard won. Like his master Filippo Lippi, he sometimes struggled to harness his various urges. He was obviously a sensualist; purity did not come naturally to him. Yet he and Fra Angelico are among the only artists in history who could paint convincing angels. This is related to a peculiar inability that is not necessarily a weakness: They could not successfully imagine devils, or demons, or dragons, or anything evil. Nor did they understand how to depict eternal damnation.

Fra Angelico had no difficulty representing human angst, neurosis, despair, pain, madness, stress, or chaos, to be sure. His famous Conversion of Saint Augustine panel (ca. 1430–35) is a harrowing depiction not of sin but of the sorrow and grief it causes. Nor did he shrink from causing shock: One of the best-known examples is his scene of the martyrdoms of Saints Cosmas and Damian (ca. 1438–40), which combines dynamic action and casual violence. The bright colors and lovely Tuscan daylight intensify the shock of the beheading and effect of the corpses lying on the ground.

Compare any of Fra Angelico’s horrifying martyrdoms with the devils in his various attempts to represent the Last Judgement. He had no problem representing the effects of evil on the soul, but he struggled with depicting anything squalid or disgusting. It seemed beneath him even to think about these things. Far more unsettling than his various devils is the central panel in his version of the Last Judgement in the Museo di San Marco in Florence. This shows the empty tombs of the risen dead as black squares on a flat gray stone slab. The lids of these graves are scattered around the surface. Not even Michelangelo could equal the effect of this image in his monumental Last Judgement fresco in the Sistine Chapel.

There are clues to understanding Fra Angelico’s inability (or refusal) to imagine demons in Botticelli’s set of line drawings illustrating Dante’s Divine Comedy. These were produced in the 1480s and 1490s. Their elegance and perfection might not be instantly obvious; nor is Botticelli’s success at creating a visual equivalent to some of the most beautiful poetry ever composed, in the Purgatorio and Paradiso. It takes time to accept that the connoisseurs are in fact right about these illustrations: They are the work of an artist’s artist, and we laymen might not be refined enough to understand the magnitude of Botticelli’s achievement until someone patiently explains it to us, drawing by drawing.

In his depictions of the final sections of the poem, Botticelli succeeds in capturing something not just of Dante’s verses but of Heaven itself. This ought to be impossible, but Botticelli makes it happen. Yet his entire aesthetic program in these illustrations of radical simplicity, with little indication of light, shade, or color—just lines and outlines—comes at a price.

In the eyes of most laymen, Botticelli’s Inferno illustrations are not a success. Few are arresting, or even memorable; nor is there any equivalent to the emotional impact of the original scenes in Dante’s poem. To a nonbeliever, or an aesthetically insensitive onlooker, these are bewildering. Did the man who painted The Birth of Venus create this amateurish mess? Those who think this way rarely have the patience to understand how accomplished these drawings are or how brilliant Botticelli’s artistic strategy really is. By sacrificing some superficial vividness in the Inferno, he creates a coherent visual idiom that allows him to represent the glories of Heaven without needing to create a new style or approach.

Needless to say, many of those who dismiss Botticelli’s Divine Comedy drawings on account of the Inferno tend to know little of the poem other than the torture sections or the inscription over the gates of Hell telling those who enter to abandon all hope. Most who enjoy depictions of divine punishment merely seek to feed morbid appetites of a kind that can never be satisfied. We may ignore their opinions without missing anything of value.

By focusing all of his attention and creative imagination on angels and Heaven, Botticelli is implicitly reminding us that sin, vice, and evil really are in fact beneath us all, in more ways than one. Botticelli’s desire for purity was inspired in no small part by the preaching of Savonarola. But how much of it came from hearing about Fra Angelico and contemplating his paintings around Florence?

Relatively little is known about Fra Angelico—not even the year of his birth. He was born Guido di Piero, in the Mugello region just north of Florence, and seems to have entered the Dominican order around 1420. His brother Benedetto di Piero trained as a scribe and also became a friar at some point. Like Benedetto, Guido embarked on a successful career as a skilled artisan before he decided to enter religious life.

We know nothing of his artistic training, only a few scraps of information to make clear that his work was in demand by 1418. He lived for a while in the parish of San Michele Visdomini in Florence, near the workshop of the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti, who was the creator of the splendid bronze doors on the Florentine Baptistery. On October 31, 1417, the future Fra Angelico enrolled in the religious confraternity of San Niccolò di Bari, in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine. After that, there is very little information about him, and none at all in terms of documentation between June 1419 and June 1423, when, according to a contract, “Fra Giovanni” of the friars of San Domenico in Fiesole received ten lire from the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence for a painted cross.

Perhaps the earliest surviving work by Fra Angelico is a large Thebaid—a landscape painting featuring the lives of saints and monks in the deserts around the ancient city of Thebes in Upper Egypt. Fra Angelico’s was completed on a large fir-wood panel (thirty by eighty inches in size) at some point between 1415 and 1420. In other words, he completed this meditation on the realities of religious life before becoming a friar himself. This unexpectedly lively panel is by no means one of his better-known works in the Museo di San Marco, yet it offers fascinating insights into the special nature of his gifts.

From a distance, the Thebaid seems largely indistinguishable from other such works from the period, except for its exceptional quality. This is a stylized landscape teeming with life and detail, featuring mountains, rocks, trees, churches, hermitages, a lake, and boats, all of which could, by themselves, have been painted by a fourteenth-century Sienese artist or some follower of Giotto. What distinguishes Fra Angelico from even the finest of his contemporaries is the sheer unpredictability of the narratives he creates, along with the animated character of all his little scenes, none of which conforms to any obvious symbol or pattern. Yet the overall composition turns out to be coherent and harmonious.

There are perhaps as many as three dozen discrete subjects in the Thebaid, possibly more, each of which could have been the subject of a large canvas in its own right. Monks are seen praying, thinking, meditating, reading out loud, or writing quietly in a garden while a dog watches. Others are on pilgrimage or begging for alms. One fetches water from a well; another catches it from a spring in a pitcher. Monks garden, hunt, or carry provisions. One sits in a tree while another perches below him, either in ecstasy or else asking him why he is up in the branches. Elsewhere, a monk reads a book while a young woman in a red dress interrupts him; another woman in red appears to be up to no good while yet another monk watches her from inside his confessional-sized hut. Finally, there is a funeral for a monk, attended by other monks.

The overall effect is placidly orderly, yet consistently fresh and surprising. Compare it to Paolo Uccello’s 1460 Thebaid, which has the sophisticated style of a later period but lacks the invention and sheer joy of Fra Angelico’s panel. Is there a more contented painter in the Western tradition than Fra Angelico? He seems wholly detached from what he observes, or depicts; yet there is warmth and sympathy in his distance rather than coldness.

Fra Angelico’s gift as a storyteller is self-evident even in an early Crucifixion from roughly the same period (before 1420 or so, when he joined the Dominicans) that is the older of two crucifixion scenes now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This is not very large (nineteen inches by twenty-five); it has a gold-leaf background, in the old-fashioned Byzantine manner. In most respects this Crucifixion might be the work, again, of an accomplished Sienese painter or follower of Giotto except for two features.

The first of these involves Our Lady, who has swooned from grief. She is wearing a shade of pink that seems to be the painter’s favorite color. Fra Angelico likes bright colors, even in sorrowful images, perhaps because of that naturally serene, cheerful temperament which makes him insensible to angst or horror, except as experienced from the outside. He has too much real hope to feel despair, or fear, or the other emotions that arise in those who have lost heart. Grief, trauma, and pain are possible within his art, but he regards them as mere passing phenomena, at least for those who are not yet hopeless. Perhaps this is another reason why he cannot convincingly or sympathetically depict the torments of Hell.

The second exceptional feature of Fra Angelico’s art can be seen in Our Lady’s hands and arms and in the faces and attitudes of the bored soldiers standing around the foot of the Cross. Fra Angelico always takes note of the sorts of details that escape the attention of other painters. He takes little pleasure in overt convention, except to modify it through close observation. See how completely Our Lady has lost consciousness. Not only does her head loll; her arms are completely limp, and her hands hang from the wrists. The angle of this pose suggests not a model but a memory that the painter kept in his mind.

As for the soldiers, they are all casually bored, like the background performers in a school play, stifling yawns and wondering what they are going to eat when they get home. Only two are looking up and paying attention to Our Lord on the Cross, and neither seems particularly interested. This is how you would expect most people to behave at the focal point of human history: They would have no idea of what they were witnessing, being wrapped up in their own lives. In most cases they would not behave in the way the average Christian would want to be seen behaving on such an occasion.

Even before he joined the Dominicans and began hearing confessions, Fra Angelico demonstrated remarkable insight into human psychology. Scholars will no doubt be able to determine whether there is a distinctly theological element to his originality, especially where his approach to and depiction of reality are concerned. At least he has a recognizable spirituality, as is not the case with, for example, his colorful contemporary Filippo Lippi, who began as a Carmelite friar but left the priory and led a rather disorderly existence thereafter. Fra Angelico’s spirituality is difficult to describe but seems easy to discern, and one wonders how specifically Dominican it is.

One of the many delights afforded by the recent Fra Angelico exhibition in Florence (divided between Palazzo Strozzi in the center of the city and the Museo di San Marco a fifteen-minute stroll away) was the opportunities it afforded for comparing Fra Angelico’s works with those of his contemporaries at close quarters without the need for relying on reproductions or faulty memories. As with the recent exhibition of Sienese art at the National Gallery in London and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the curators made heroic efforts to reconstruct altarpieces that had been dismantled centuries ago and dispersed through multiple collections. They also brought together pieces that had once been in the same room but have been in different collections for decades or even centuries.

Just down the Via de’ Tornabuoni from Palazzo Strozzi is the church of Santa Trinita, where, in what is now called the Strozzi Chapel, Fra Angelico’s Deposition (with decorative elements by Lorenzo Monaco, now in the Museo di San Marco) could be seen close to the Adoration by Gentile da Fabriano (now in the collection of the Uffizi Gallery, which is also within strolling distance from Palazzo Strozzi). Gentile’s Adoration was finished in May 1423. There are few better examples of the style of Italian painting unhelpfully known as International Gothic.

Individual elements of the composition—faces and clothes, for example—are skillfully handled. The realism of the horses is particularly impressive. But Gentile’s talent and ambition are far in advance of his training and technical skill, particularly with respect to his handling of light, space, and composition. The organization of figures is unexpectedly inert and even clumsy. There is a typical Gothic discomfort with depth. Of course, the science of perspective was still being refined into a system. But Gentile’s awkwardness is only obvious because he has not found a means of harmonizing all these disparate elements.

The Strozzi Chapel ought to have contained a full altarpiece of the Deposition of Christ by the Camaldolese hermit known as Lorenzo Monaco, who took his first vows in 1391 and was, like Gentile, renowned as a master in the style whose tradition had been established by Giotto. But Lorenzo died on May 24, 1424, after finishing the predella for this altarpiece and three scenes for the “pinnacles.” The main section was left incomplete.

The work Lorenzo finished on this altarpiece is certainly impressive. It demonstrates not just the sharpness and legibility of the International Gothic style but a bravura handling of light, shade, and contrast that is all the artist’s own. Yet despite the real dynamism of his handling of color, Lorenzo’s pictures all seem frozen in a moment of time. He can often create the illusion of life in his figures, but when he does they always appear to be in suspended animation. There is a curious inertia to his work, which can be depressing when you look at too many examples of it in close succession.

Fra Angelico eventually completed the main panel for the Deposition. The finished altarpiece was installed in July 1432. Of course he picked up on the visual cues left behind in Lorenzo’s work—he had the most refined instinct for visual harmony of his time—but even in this piece he allowed himself to break decisively with the tradition of Giotto that had dominated the best Italian art for over a century.

Fra Angelico’s Deposition is a delightful picture, despite the occasion it represents. There is a deep blue sky, with figures in pink and blue clothing, clean, well-maintained public buildings, refreshing greenery, and bright pale-gold halos on Our Lady, Saint John the Apostle, the holy women, and other saints. Each face has a distinct, recognizable character, personality, and physical type, and a solid-looking form. There is a sadness in most faces and in the bodies of the holy women, but the deposition itself is treated as a job, involving the careful use of two ladders. The overall effect is less like a somber Good Friday than a premature Easter Sunday afternoon. The Resurrection is assured.

The biggest single technical advance on Gentile and Lorenzo in the Deposition can be seen in the composition and the intelligently arranged visual harmony of Fra Angelico’s storytelling. It enables multiple aspects of the narrative to be communicated all at once without confusion or the sense of crowding and disunity that affects Gentile’s Adoration, despite its great beauty and charm.

Fra Angelico’s own little Adoration from the same period (ca. 1423–24), in the collection of the Abegg Foundation in Riggisberg, Switzerland, is worth comparing to Gentile’s version of the same scene. Fra Angelico’s panel is considerably smaller (twenty-one by twenty-five inches), but even here you see his intelligent use of space and intuitive sense of how to combine shapes, colors, and patterns to guide the viewer’s eye around the frame, creating the illusions of motion, depth, and physical distance.

Every element in this panel is subordinated to the painter’s storytelling, even the seemingly random gestures of figures in the background, who help focus the viewer’s attention on the Holy Family, and the king who kneels before baby Jesus, having removed his own crown to kiss the feet of the infant King. Fra Angelico’s imagining of this scene is, as always, playfully unconventional without ever seeming irreverent. He simply wants to avoid monotony, of the sort that makes even the most innovative International Gothic painting seem predictable.

Fra Angelico’s delight in color is infectious: His Last Judgement in the Museo di San Marco makes Hell itself seem unexpectedly beautiful. Perhaps his loveliest use of his favorite pink pigment is in his 1434 Annunciation altarpiece in the diocesan museum at Cortona. This is in and of itself a reason to visit Cortona. The paint used to represent the silken robe of the Archangel Gabriel is one of the most memorable patches of color in the history of painting. Once you have the image in your mind’s eye of Gabriel in flowing pink embellished with gold leaf, it is all but impossible to think of him looking any other way.

The Lamentation (ca. 1436–41) may be Fra Angelico’s most interesting exercise in the use of color, not for its own sake but as another element in the overall composition. Sadly this panel has been damaged by flooding, but not so much as to make the act of appreciating it a struggle. This is one of his soberest, most somber pieces, despite the bright palette of blues, pinks, and greens, accented with pale-gold halos. Fra Angelico has orchestrated this effect through ingenious control of the overall arrangement of shapes and figures so that the image conveys a sense of mourning from a distance even before the subject comes into focus and reveals itself.

Fra Angelico allows the viewer to project his own grief onto the image. Perhaps only Giovanni Bellini’s heartbreaking Martinengo Pietà (1505) achieves a similar degree of emotion through sheer restraint. The technical brilliance of The Lamentation becomes clear only after lengthy contemplation. There is no way that the lamentation over the body of Our Lord could have looked like that, but Fra Angelico has staged his version so convincingly that even shrewd observers often miss the illusion.

Between 1438 and 1443, Fra Angelico produced an elaborate series of frescoes for the Dominican convent of San Marco, where he lived before being sent to Rome. His assistants included his favorite pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli, who later created the frescoes in the so-called Magi Chapel in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi in Florence (1459–61) and a magnificent cycle of murals (1463–65) in the church of Saint Augustine in San Gimignano. But for all their impressive qualities, none of these has the impact of the San Marco frescoes, which have never been surpassed in the sheer economy of means with which they achieve their effect.

In the north end of the Cloisters at San Marco is a version of the Annunciation that seems like a more austere, restrained version of the Cortona Annunciation. Part of the difference is dictated by the medium: Fresco allows a limited range of possibilities in terms of coloring and texture, at least when compared to egg tempera. But this does not mean that special effects are impossible: Art historians cherish The Madonna of the Shadows in the same corridor for its convincing illusion of soft daylight playing over the Corinthian capitals of pilasters set into the wall behind Our Lady. Below The Madonna of the Shadows are four trompe-l’oeil panels painted to look like marble. These are self-evidently an assistant’s skillful handiwork, but they remind us further that Fra Angelico’s restrained manner is a conscious choice.

There are forty-four cells in the dormitory at San Marco; all are decorated by frescoes. The best of these demonstrate an extraordinary intimacy and power. Yet their only intended audience consisted of the Dominicans who slept in these cells. They were not meant for public consumption.

There is a “public” fresco of Saint Dominic adoring the Holy Cross as Our Crucified Lord looks down on him. This is visible near the entrance to the convent that opens onto Piazza San Marco. Compare this to the “private” version of a similar scene of Dominic praying before the crucified Christ in cell nineteen. The public fresco, with its deep blue background and unusual shape, is most remarkable for the hands with which the kneeling Dominic caresses the wood of the Cross and the tender filial adoration with which he looks up at Jesus, whose paternal affection is obvious even as He suffers. As for the version he created for a friar’s private devotion: This is stark, and painful.

In this image, Saint Dominic covers his face with his hands as he prays. He cannot bear to look at Our Lord, whose five wounds drip blood. The illusion is shocking. It seems as though a droplet has splashed onto Dominic’s halo. The spiritual anguish is all the more immediate because there is no escape from it in this cell. Imagine what it would have been like to go to sleep here every night. Fra Angelico’s temperament is sunny, but he does not flinch from suffering. There are seven versions of this scene in the dormitory; the one in cell nineteen is by far the most harrowing.

Of all the dormitory frescoes, the most fascinating is the one in cell seven, featuring the mockery of Christ. Saint Dominic sits peacefully to one side, lost in a book, while Our Lady sits nearby on the same step, quietly grieving. Behind them is a makeshift throne against a sea-green background. Christ sits on the throne in a white robe and gauze blindfold enduring mockery while disembodied hands slap him and hit him with a reed. The disembodied head of a soldier spits at him. As in Botticelli’s depictions of Dante’s Paradiso, the abstraction of the rendering makes it feel more vivid, immediate, and even realistic. This is far more convincing than any modern attempt at a “photorealistic” rendering. Fra Angelico provides just enough visual information to enable our imaginations to do the rest of the work.

Fra Angelico’s Annunciation in cell five, Coronation of the Virgin in cell nine, and Transfiguration in cell six all boast deceptively primitive-seeming qualities. He could do as much with a paintbrush as any of his contemporaries, but his judgement and self-control kept him from showing off. He was just a friar, praising God through exercising his gifts. There is a deep humility inherent in his refusal to show off his genius. He never innovated for the sake of mere technical experimentation. Instead, he aimed at showing us greater beauties than we could ever hope to see in this life.