ROME LETTER

New Zealand Tablet, 28 October 1915, Page 41

ROME LETTER

(From our own (correspondent.) August 2. FRA ANGELICO.

When next in Rome, reader, do not forget to enter St. Maria in Minerva, the titular church of his Eminence Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York, and visit the tomb of that sweet prince of religious painters, Fra Angelico, who was laid there in 1455. He sleeps to the left of the high altar, near the side entrance. What a lot of history clusters round that grave, Giotto and Cimabue had painted only religious subjects. ' But,' as a modern writer says, '"in the fifteenth century, with the spread of learning, and an increasing familiarity with the art and literature of ancient Greece, men became filled with a new spirit, with a passionate love of the beautiful for its own sake, a craving after more perfect means of expression.' Just at this epoch a gentle, refined boy was growing up in the village of Vicchio, high on the slopes of the Apennines. This was Guido di Pietro who, with his brother, was soon to present himself at the door of the Dominican monastery of Fiesole, Florence, and beg for both the white habit of St. Dominic. THE YOUNG DOMINICAN. Too little does the world understand the debt art owes to the Orders of St. Francis of Assisi and of St. Dominic. Wherever these friars spread, they encouraged art in its most perfect form. Giotto covered the interior of San Francesco at Assisi with those glorious creations that have attracted men of all nations there for seven centuries. Cimabue, Orcagna, and Gaddi live yet in their paintings in the grand Church of St. Maria Novella of the Friars Preachers in Florence. In southern Europe the then young Orders made the erection and internal adornment of stately temples to the Most High a complement to their apostolic labors. Hence Guido, the. painter, felt doubly at. home on being admitted to the company of the white-robed Dominicans of Fiesole. ' We must realise,' savs Crawford, ' something of the personality of this wonderful friar if we would rightly understand pictures. He combined a very rare artistic genius with an exquisite holiness and purity of life. If he was one of the world's greatest painters, he was also, through all the years of his manhood, a humble and devout son of St. Dominic. To Fra Angelico painting was prayer. He never took brush in hand save for the greater glory of God ; he never painted for money, neither did he ever undertake any save religious subjects. He drew his inspiration direct from Holy Scripture, of which he was a constant, even a learned, student. His own portrait, painted, however, only from tradition by the Dominican artist, Fra Bartolommeo, shows him with a wide, noble forehead, a sensitive, well-cut mouth, and large eyes cast down, a face at once strong and gentle and radiant with inward peace.' THE PAINTER'S AMBITIONS.' To-day the works of this good friar are admired in Rome, Berlin, Florence, Cortona, and other centres of art in Europe. The world proclaims him 'the prince of religious painters.' What were his ambitions? Let Vasari reply: Fra Giovanni was a man of simple and blameless life; he shunned the world, and he led a life of such purity and holiness, and served the poor with such fervent zeal, that I believe his soul must now be in heaven. He painted incessantly, but he would never paint other than religious subjects. He might have amassed a fortune, but he scorned to do so, saying that true riches consisted simply in being content with little. ... He might'have enjoyed dignities both within and without his convent, but he refused, saying that his sole ambition was to escape hell and win heaven.' A PEEP AT THE ANGELS. Can it be that this artist while on earth was ever favored by a sight of the angels or of someone still higher in heaven? Standing before the Madonnas

and the angels of other masters, you can well realise how their great minds evolved from their consciousness those ideas of beauty, purity, happiness. But how about Fra Angelico ? While gazing at his angels and his Madonnas, did it ever occur to you to say : He must have been favored with a glance, at them in person from time to time. Tfie exquisite sweetness shown in every line of his frescoes in the little cells of St. Mark’s, Florence, attracts -you strangely, . Fra Angelico’s beautiful soul seemed to dislike dwelling on things redolent of horror. His life-sized ‘ Christ on the Cross ', in St. Mark’s represent our ' Lord still alive and serenely awaiting death. The loveliest and most simple of all the painter-marks are those dainty angels whom he, as it were, called down from beside the Great White Throne, and, brush and palette in hand, got them— I say it with the utmost reverence- to pose for him. From Ruskin we learn how Fra Angelico was able to paint with such intuition into heavenly things. ‘ The little cell,’ wrote the great art critic, ‘ was as one of the houses of heaven prepared for him by his Master. What need had it to be elsewhere ? Was not the Val d’ Arno, with its olive woods in white blossom, paradise 1 enough for a poor monk ? Or could Christ be indeed in heaven more than here ? Was He not always with him ? Could he breathe or see but that Christ breathed beside him and looked into his eyes? Under every cypress avenue the angels walked. He ha-d seen their white robes, whiter than the dawn, at his bedside as he awoke in early summer. They had sung with him, one on each side, when his voice failed for joy at sweet Vespers or Matin time ; his eyes were blinded by their wings in the sunset when it sank behind the hills of Luni.’