Fra_Angelico

Fra Angelico Work of an Angelic Monk The Italian renaissance raced forward through history as the vanguard of artistic innovations, settling in Florence which became the great center of quattrocento (15th-century) art and art theory. As forerunners, early renaissance artists “made a radical break from the medieval methods of representing the visible world,” creating bold and new, more realistic depiction of space (Renaissance art and architecture). In a rebirth of a vital enthusiasm for classical antiquity, many artists began to reincorporate many ancient principles to their own work. At the same time artists became intensely preoccupied with problems of representing the dimensions of nature on flat surfaces, developing a mathematically based illusion of space-the system of perspective. In this era of unprecedented artistic achievements, Fra Anglico rose above and beyond combining “the influence of the elegantly decorative Gothic style” of the past “with the more realistic styles of such Renaissance (contemporaries) as the painter Masaccio and the sculptor Donatello” (Fra Angelico). Originally named Guido di Pietro, Angelico was born in Vicchio, Tuscany. He entered a Dominican convent in Fiesole in 1418 became a friar adopting the pseudonym Fra Angelico. He inherited the name of “Angelico (Italian angelico, fra, perspective, art, through, renaissance, depth, color, artistic, within, angelico’s, work, space, painting, became, artists, ‘unifying, world, time, style, spatial, sense, seems, scheme, representing, religious, realistic, piety, painter, own, new, italian, innovations, gilbert, friar