Having volunteered to do a report on Fra Angelico for our Renaissance Society class, Learning in Retirement, Sacramento State University, I hurried home to open some books and see what I had gotten myself into. The Encyclopedia Britannica gives the high points of Fra Angelico’s life: He was baptized, Guido di Pietro, in Viccio the republic of Florence, in 1400, and died in 1455 in Rome. In recognition of his angelic life, after his death he was named Fra Angelico. He became a Dominican monk in his early twenties and resided in the monastery of San Domenico at Feisole, and took the name Fra Giovanni da Feisole, the “Fra,” meaning Brother. Vasari tells us that he was a devout Dominican who was offered the post of archbishop of Florence at one time and refused it.
Brother Angelico was no cloistered monk. Such men as Cosimo de Medici the Elder and Pope Eugene IV commissioned him to do many pieces. Most of his surviving work is found in Florence and Rome. Several of his great altarpieces have been dismantled and now appear in many galleries around the world. His art represents what is known as the “Early Renaissance Florentine style,” the style that prevailed between Giotto of the fourteenth century, whom the art historians Dora and H.W. Janson designate “Medieval,” and Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo Da Vinci in the sixteenth century, whom they designate “High Renaissance.”
I scribbled these facts and late that night went to my computer and called up Fra Angelico on google.com with the trepidation of King Saul commanding the witch of Indore to call up Samuel’s soul from the grave and tell him what the morrow would bring. From the grave Samuel told King Saul that tomorrow he and his sons would be where he was. Thankfully my research was not fatal. In fact it enlivened me so much that this report is as much about Fra Angelico’s affect on me as it is on the artist himself.
Pictures the size of postage stamps appeared on my screen and I selected one attributed to Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi, “The Adoration of the Magi.” It hangs in the National Gallery in Washington DC. I had just been looking at a black and white rendition of it in my miniature copy of the Janson’s The Picture History of Painting that I bought for 90 cents in 1964. Layer by layer a picture of people and animals and rocks and hills and ruined walls of classic antiquity appeared on my screen in luminous browns and reds and pinks and blacks. Thrust into the center of it all, extraneous, was a recently constructed wooden and stone stable. This picture blew me away. Had I the spiritual capacity, my encounter with this picture that night might have initiated a mystical experience. Wherever he was in the history and development of art, that night he was not merely taking up space between greater painters—he was Fra Angelico. For this single moment in my own stage of art appreciation, late at night, on my computer screen in this painting—if indeed the whole painting is his—he gave me as much delight as I could have asked of Michelangelo. He gave an experience that perhaps Michelangelo could never give me.
But the initial awe cannot be maintained for long. Before I had a chance to analyze what in this painting so struck me, and what in me was struck, the intensity was gone. I was given a glimpse of wonder and it was taken away. But it is not all taken away, thankfully, wiped completely from my mind. The memory of the awe lingers, and I can view the painting and remember that this painting once held for me something more than an educated appreciation. This painting is for me what Robert Frost in “The Figure A Poem Makes” tells us a good poem is: “…a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but a momentary stay against confusion.” In my confused world I need a stay, however momentary.
Obviously, whatever in this painting zeroed-in my workaday modern consciousness was more than the sum of the painting’s parts. I can call up all the parts before me on a computer and analyze them at my leisure, and pleasant as that is it does not recapture the euphoria. However, it is inaccurate to say that I “came down” from one level of art experience to a lower level. An educated appreciation is not on a lower level than was my initial excitement with this painting, just a different level, different but closely related, as love-making and love are related but not the same. Like my late night experience with this painting, love-making demands an intensity one cannot maintain. But love may last a lifetime and involve sharing, sacrifice, devotion, care, and perhaps children as a result of love-making. Studied discussions of art is like love and involves love. It is the celebration and nurture of culture. Euphoria won’t tell me what Fra Angelico copied of his 15th century world that it should be a momentary stay against my 21st century confusion; what in Angelico’s “Adoration of the Magi” I can discuss with my art classmates.
It is not the best painting Fra Angelico did, and to the lesser informed in art, like me, it is something of a footnote: one panel taken from several small paintings at the foot of a large altarpiece enclosed in a shrine designed by Ghiberti, the sculptor who did the famous doors on the Florence Baptistery. It may not even be by Fra Angelico; after all it is attributed also to Fra Filippo Lippi. None of that detracts from the initial impact this painting made on me. It is not always the most accomplished, the most powerful, the most beautiful that moves us. One wouldn’t call a leper waddling alongside a dusty road, beautiful. But just such a picture might change ones life forever.
What then do the lines and colors applied to this flat surface mean to an untrained eye like mine? It’s misleading to ask what the modern paintings of Mondrian mean. Such art does not mean in a traditional sense. Their lines and colors don’t copy any particular object in nature (although, since Mondrian, much wallpaper has come to copy him). There is no such puzzle about Holbein’s King Henry VIII; the subject is Henry VIII. We should ask, however, what Henry’s determined demeanor or sumptuous clothing tell us about him.
Fra Angelico’s “Adoration of the Magi” is like Holbein’s “Henry VIII”; we don’t puzzle over what his figures are. But we should ask why Angelico chose these particular figures and why he arranged them as he did. To answer that I used the method I use for poetry, the only method I know: note the obvious and ask its meaning for me; pay attention to detail; don’t hazard too many guesses about unfamiliar symbols. The first admonition is not always easy. In my report to the class, I missed the most obvious detail about this painting—its shape, a circle, which represents perfection. The last admonition—don’t guess what unfamiliar symbols mean—is easy enough but perhaps I should have heeded it more closely.
From its name I know this painting is about the magi who, bearing gold, frankincense and myrrh, journeyed from the east to Bethlehem to adore the new born Jesus, have known it since I was a child, although in our fundamentalist household back then we called them The Three Wise Men. I also know it from a significant poem in my life, T.S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi:”
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey...
and so forth. I used to read it to my children every Christmas.
On both sides of this painting and across the bottom are a horde of people. The line of people on the right seems to have emptied the city that one can just see to the right of that formidable rock, top center. These people are here for the same reason the magi are, but with a less informed purpose. They are not bearing gifts but have come to get something. I suggest that these are the hordes who will answer the call of Jesus, “Come unto me all ye who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.”
As for the formidable rock, I know that Jesus said to Peter whose name means rock, “...thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.” My guess is that this rock represents for Angelico, Peter as the first pope.
Most of the people are on foot, some are on horseback and a few on camelback. The stable is prominent here, and the peacock on the roost above it. The Jansons say this peacock is out of proportion to the painting, perhaps the practice of an apprentice. I can’t believe that in an altarpiece of this importance, this crowned peacock is merely done for practice. Perhaps it is God the Father, or the Holy Spirit who, at this point in history, defer to The Son. Were it to face us and fan its tail it would dominate the whole scene.
I read my interpretation of the peacock and my ego fanned like its tail, then folded and drug off when I read that in the renaissance the peacock represents resurrection. So much for my self-admonition not to interpret symbols one knows nothing about.
There is, however, a legitimacy in my interpretation, since my first order for interpreting a painting is to note the obvious and ask what it means for me. Peacocks are obvious and mean something to me. Were a rat balancing on that perch I would have a problem. For people like me there is not much in a piece of art whose every detail requires that we consult an expert to tell us its meaning.
The objective of symbols is to illustrate reality rather than explain it. Indeed, the best myths illustrate subjects whose meaning cannot be explained, such as why there is something rather than nothing. Good paintings do the same thing, they illustrate a reality which cannot be fully explained. If the painting is a true representation of nature—and by that I do not mean a photographic image—the painter may not know the full meaning of the nature he is representing. If an artist knows the meaning of his every representation then his art is simple pedantry. The peacock shall always remain God the Father or the Holy Spirit for me, even if in hindsight I have learned that conventionally it means the resurrection. It is convenient to know both, but one interpretation need not exclude the other. If this painting is to be valuable to me at all it is crucial that it mean something to me.
And what else, in “The Adoration of the Magi,” means something to me? Men inside the stable tending to the hooves of horses. Those hooves need tending because they have come a long way. To verify this I can ask myself what picture I might have drawn to illustrate that when saddleback was prominent someone had ridden a long way. I haven’t the genius to originate such ideas, and certainly not the craft to draw them, but we all can ask of a picture what its figures mean, even an abstract painting. The reason for their long journey is obvious, almost all of them are focused on the three haloed figures at the lower center: the newborn Jesus with Mary and Joseph.
But the people in the line on the right have no access to these haloed people. Their trail ends at an abrupt drop-off. Just prior to the drop-off stands a woman, her back to us, her arms spread. She seems to be telling the crowd, “Go Back! You can’t get to the stable this way.” At the end of the trail a kneeling figure worships the savior, but from afar. Beside him, at the very edge of the cliff, stands a woman with two children, one clinging to her knees. With her hand at her forehead she looks toward the holy scene as if to ask, “How does one get there?” Because the people on this path are perplexed, I interpret this to be that path which the New Testament says seems right unto men but whose end is death.
The woman with the two children—and the kneeling figure if he is her husband—at the very cliff that marks the end of the path, needs no interpretation. One step backward and the child at her knees might fall to its death. This scene dramatically illustrates that our first responsibility is to those in our immediate care, especially children. Not even religion supersedes this responsibility. And if not religion then certainly not pleasure or business. Followers of Christ cannot get closer to the kingdom of God than to be attentive to children, “for of such is the kingdom of God.”
The people on the left have arrived by way of a narrow gate and a difficult path, albeit, the exhibitionists on the ledge beside the gate, one totally nude, surely intend to attract attention to themselves and away from the Savior. They look like hecklers, or perhaps temple prostitutes of pagan Rome and Greece.
For Fra Angelico, the pagan walls have all collapsed, as have the walls of Judaism and all other religions. These temple prostitutes are a vanishing culture in Angelico's world, displaced in history by the humble stable and manger. For Fra Angelico’s time and his conviction, the “Way” was under the exclusive control of Rome. Had been since Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, established its authority a thousand years before. Anytime Christianity, whether Protestantism or Catholicism, takes a different tack this is the man it has to go back to and renegotiate with, whether it knows it or not. And Christianity was indeed on a new tack.
Angelico feared that the tack back to the humanism that was the glory of ancient Rome and Greece might eventuate in making man, rather than God, the measure of all things. All his monastic life he struggled against this humanism which at once threatened the power of the Roman Church and immortalized its art—Angelico’s art included. Absent that humanism in his art, we probably would not be talking about him today.
It is ironical that Fra Angelico illustrated with such conviction these walls in ruins while the walls of his own beloved City of God, so ingeniously designed by Augustine in his monumental theological treatise of that name, were themselves beginning to crumble. He struggled for a losing cause. Humanism was on the advance, and nothing illustrates that better than a painting by his great contemporary, Massaccio, “Expulsion From Paradise.” Who cannot sympathize with that tragic couple on their way out of Eden?
I had set out to find what in this painting applied to my modern world that it moved me as it did that night. I see now there is no identifying what triggered my experience; it was a gift. My gift does not approach the mystical experience of a St Thomas or a Pascal, but that night I got an intimation of what such an experience could be. Neither St Thomas or Pascal could describe their experience so one could hardly expect me to describe mine. My experience is shallow compared to theirs, and so are my intellect and powers of articulation.
It is of utmost importance that we see the art of man as only a stay against confusion, never as an ingenious means toward the ultimate clarification of all confusion. Currently, that warning must apply to our faith in and dependence on science and technology. Fra Angelico probably regretted losing the Catholic Church as the sole representative of the City of God on earth more than he feared what would take its place. But could he have foreseen modern science and technology exalted to the level of sect or cult in which man worships his own accomplishments, given the insight of “The Adoration of the Magi,” it would likely have horrified him as much as losing Catholicism saddened him. Popular scientist such as Stephen Hawking leave the impression that we are on the threshold of a unified cosmological theory that will explain all existence and demonstrate that while we and our science may not have caused the big bang that brought nature into existence, we can be confident no other sentient being could have. The terrifying aspect of this is that the human mind has deceived itself into believing that it can comprehend all existence that it encounters.
My guess is that beneath Fra Angelico’s brush we would be a clever people busy about our tower to heaven; Auschwitz and the atomic bomb and Stalin safely tucked away as only momentary stays against science’s ultimate clarification of all confusion. In truth, if all the carnage of the twentieth century failed to tell us that we are, with all our technology, a species who passes through periods of mortal madness, no painter can. Nor did our madness end with the twentieth century. Images of death in Iraq and Darfur would break a sane world’s heart. Gerard Hopkins’s poem to Margaret, “Spring and Fall,” reminds us that our mortality warrants mourning; none of us shall escape it and no science can eliminate it:
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you morn for.
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