Angelico, Fra (c. 1400-1455)

Italian painter. He was a monk, active in Florence, and painted religious scenes. His series of frescoes at the monastery of San Marco, Florence, was begun after 1436. He also produced several altarpieces in a style characterized by a delicacy of line and colour.

Fra Angelico joined the Dominican order in about 1420. After his novitiate, he resumed a career as a painter of religious images and altarpieces, many of which have small predella scenes beneath them, depicting events in the life of a saint. The central images of the paintings are highly decorated with pure, bright colours and gold-leaf designs, while the predella scenes are often lively and relatively unsophisticated. There is a similar simplicity to his frescoes in the cells at San Marco, which are principally devotional works. Fra Angelico's later fresco sequences, Scenes from the Life of Christ (Orvieto Cathedral) and Scenes from the Lives of SS Stephen and Lawrence (1440s; chapel of Nicholas V, Vatican Palace), are more elaborate.

He became prior of the monastery in Fiesole, near Florence, in 1449, and known as ‘il Beato Fra Giovanni Angelico da Fiesole’, ‘the Blessed Brother John the Angelic of Fiesole’.