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Original link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/28/arts/design/28smit.html

"Fra Angelico" is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, (212) 535-7710, through Jan. 29, 2006.

By ROBERTA SMITH
Pinch yourself. The Metropolitan Museum's sublime exhibition of the Renaissance painter Fra Angelico is not a dream, much less a heavenly vision. Sure, its images are populated by figures with halos, wings or both. And yes, these motifs create a veritable mirage of grace and elegance, color and light, serenity and perfect form.

But this show is entirely, memorably real. It brings the work of a beloved artist, long mythologized as a modest, devout Dominican friar who painted with divine guidance, solidly down to earth.

It is the exhibition of a lifetime, and not just because Fra Angelico is the first beatified artist to have a retrospective at the Met. (Pope John Paul II started him on the path to sainthood in 1982.) The only other large survey of Angelico's work took place 50 years ago in Florence, where he did much of his work. The main monuments of his career - the great fresco cycle of the Dominican convent of San Marco and sundry altarpieces - lay just outside the exhibition's doors.

The Met's show, which has been organized by Laurence Kantor, curator in charge of the Robert Lehman Collection, lacks any off-site perks. But it has the benefit of an astounding amount of cooperation from museums in both the United States and Europe. As a result, while Fra Angelico the great fresco painter is entirely absent, Fra Angelico the genius of the flat, pure tones of tempera on wood is fully present. Even a mostly black-and-white work like "18 Blessed of the Dominican Order" seems brilliantly colored.

Many of the works on view come from disassembled altarpieces and reliquaries, and some are being reunited here for the first time. A disadvantage in some regards, this nonetheless means that Angelico's art is seen as it was painted, up close, one extraordinarily concentrated panel at a time. The show creates an unusually vivid chronological portrait of an artist at work, from precocious beginnings to last hurrahs. This is rare for a Renaissance artist, but Fra Angelico was both productive and venerated in his own time; his work has an unusually high survival rate.

Born in the mid-1390's, Angelico came of age in one of Western painting's great moments: the early-15th-century ramp-up to the glory years of the Italian Renaissance. His achievements came between the lone craggy peak of Giotto, who broke through to illusionistic space, and the High Renaissance - the majestic mountain range of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael that emerged in the late 1500's and early 1600's.

It was a complex, up-for-grabs time. Give or take a year or two, the 1390's produced what might be the first great generation, a sprawl of sensibilities that includes the eminent Sienese primitive Sassetta; the Florentine radical Masaccio, who finished what Giotto had begun by pushing spatial illusion into the unity of one-point perspective; and the mathematically inclined Uccello, also of Florence, whose paintings brought an almost manic rigor to perspectival illusion. And let's not forget Northern Europe and the births of Jan van Eyck (1390) and his student Rogier van der Weyden (1399/1400), who brought a new realism to depictions of either the world or of human emotions. Look no further for proof that art history is less a linear succession of movements than a crazy quilt. With typical and, in this case, accurate flair, Bernard Berenson referred to Masaccio as "Giotto born again." Stripping away the decorative felicities of the early Renaissance, Masaccio depicted real people in real space, using body weight and emptiness to achieve a new sense of tragic grandeur. But his images are also a bit severe.

Angelico was more tradition bound, but in many ways he also gave himself greater license when it came to visual seduction. Using the model of New York Abstract Expressionists, he played de Kooning to Masaccio's aggressively original Pollock. Unlike Masaccio, Angelico retained the Sienese artifice - the singing pinks, blues and reds, the gold trim and the stage-set geometries of town and country. His figures occasionally walk on air, like the man stepping into the courtyard on the left side of "The Healing of Palladia by Saints Cosmas and Damian." And when his subjects turn their backs to the viewer, they are very often smacked in the face by their seemingly immobile halos, as if by pies of gold.

Angelico is usually described pejoratively as "transitional." But perhaps he should be credited with combining the best of both worlds, using the innovations of the Renaissance to bring Gothic art to its final perfection. By doing this - and perhaps more in tempera than in fresco - Angelico brought a new visual intensity to painting. He made every milligram of surface, every detail and form communicate at full strength, yet all within a carefully constructed whole, a Renaissance unity.

Berenson was also astute when he wrote of Angelico, "The sources of his feelings are in the Middle Ages, but he enjoys his feelings in a way which is almost modern." We sense what he means in the combined symmetry and disarray of "The Attempted Martyrdom of Saints Cosmas and Damian," with its brocade and stone parade stand of kingly witnesses overlooking the rebellious but feathery fire that has turned from the figures at the stake to tickle more than burn the writhing executioners. The show begins with a clumsy yet surprisingly coherent bacchanal-like scene that Angelico painted while he was still a teenager; it is his only known secular subject. It then moves on to several works on paper, including three unfinished illuminated manuscript initials, each full of people, made during his apprenticeship to the Florentine painter Lorenzo Monaco, in which his drawing skills blossom.

In the second section, you get especially strong hints of an artist enjoying himself in several narrow panels of paired saints. Set against a background of traditional Gothic gold, they stand in pools of brilliant color that represent marbleized floors of blue, pink and white. The almost bubbly fluidity may remind you of Sam Francis's crepuscular abstractions from the 1950's.

These floors are disconcerting, almost flagrant. But they alert you to the liveliness of the seemingly restrained renderings of the saints: the flowing line of their radiantly colored but also carefully shadowed robes; the grave reality of their faces; and the fineness of anatomical details, like hands, feet and especially ears. One of the most sympathetic visages belongs to the alert, softly stern, tastefully bearded St. Zenobius, who appears with St. Agnes in one painting and, judging from the precise repetition of the likeness, with John the Baptist in another.

These earthbound human presences, which clearly show Masaccio's influence, are reiterated in their solid attributes - for example, the imposing Bible bound in blue and gold prominently held by St. Dominic as he stands next to John the Baptist.

By the third section, the paintings teem with observed facts, decorative riffs and painterly pleasures. Even if hills seem carved out of clay, as is the case in the unusually compact "Stigmatization of Saint Francis," from the late 1420's, the plants in the foreground are always identifiable. In a "Nativity," the stable is a nearly perfect gridded cube, made from reeds whose tiny knots are visible. In the "Healing of Palladia," light falls delicately across the red-fringed bedcover of the convalescent. Such details assert themselves but never obtrude. Angelico favored a well-edited serenity - even the anguish of his beautiful, red-tinted "Christ Crowned With Thorns" has an unsettling calm. That this ability was unequaled in his time is suggested by the fascinating display of paintings by his contemporaries and students.

While excelling at the finer arts of drawing and painting, Angelico did not stint on the more traditionally artisanal ones. He had a special wizardry for Gothic gold. In "The Coronation of the Virgin," he manipulates this usually inert background for utmost spatial flexibility and textural suggestion; through stamping and engraving, he indicates not only the usual auras and halos, but also a succession of draped textiles.

Nearby, in a display of 10 panels from the Santa Lucia (Da Filicaia) Altarpiece, the individual feathers on the wings of an annunciating angel are softly eked out of the gold background with thin tints of black and red and delicate engraving, to breathtaking effect.

Any out-of-body experiences precipitated by this amazing exhibition will be purely pictorial in origin. Fra Angelico understood, as few painters before him did, the triple life of painting as a tangible object, a volumetric fiction and a searing formal construction. Being almost modern was modern enough.

"Fra Angelico" is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, (212) 535-7710, through Jan. 29, 2006.
 

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