Fra Angélico

(Guido di Pietry, ca. 1400-1455)

   Italian Dominican friar and artist, known especially for the frescoes he painted in 1437-1452 for the monastery of San Marco in Florence; the best known part of that cycle is The Annunciation. He was noted for his personal piety and for the tender religious spirit and delicate figures of his paintings. His personal style was far more traditional than that of many contemporary artists, continuing the use of gilding and brilliant coloring typical of painters who lived a century earlier. Although most of his paintings were produced for Dominican convents in Tuscany, he worked on a more lavish scale when the pope commissioned him to produce paintings for (old) St. Peter's and the Vatican palace in Rome. Except for paintings done for the cathedral in Orvieto and a series on the lives of Saints Stephen and Lawrence in the private chapel of Pope Nicholas V at the Vatican palace, little of the work he did outside of Florence survives.