(jazzy piano music)
- [Steven] We're in the monastery
of San Marco in Florence, now a museum.
We've just walked up a staircase from an inner cloister
and the first thing you see at the top of the stairs
is a large fresco by Fra Angelico.
- [Beth] As soon as one enters, one gets a sense
of the contemplative life of the monks
who lived here and their dedication to prayer.
- [Steven] The painting is set in a hallway
amongst the monks' cells.
- [Beth] And many of them decorated with frescoes
that would help to focus the monks' prayers and meditation.
This monastery was built in the 15th century.
There was a pre-existing building here,
but the observant Dominican's and Fiesole
were in need of a new home.
And this location was given to them by the Pope.
And then the rebuilding of the monastery was supported
by Cosimo de Medici, the defacto ruler of Florence.
- [Steven] Cosimo lavished money on San Marco.
- [Beth] And the motivation for Cosimo de Medici
was to help him achieve salvation, to do good works
that would hopefully on the day of judgment
help redeem his soul.
- [Steven] This was especially important
to somebody like Cosimo de Medici,
who was fabulously wealthy.
He sought out this new order of Dominicans
because they had so strictly renounced worldly possessions.
And so there does seem to be a conflict here.
One of the wealthiest men lavishing his fortune
on monks who have taken vows of poverty.
And it's within that conflicted environment
that Fra Angelico, who was a monk here
produced this extraordinary fresco
and who had distinguished himself
as one of the great painters
of the early and mid 15th Century.
We see two principal figures, the Virgin Mary on the right,
the Archangel Gabriel on left at the moment
when Gabriel is announcing to Mary
that she will bear the son of God.
- [Beth] The angel Gabriel greets Mary
and says, hail, Mary, full of grace.
Blessed art thou among women.
Appropriately, the angel bows.
We can see the left knee pressing through the drapery
as the angel lowers her head.
- [Steven] They're placed within this loggia
with these beautiful classicized columns.
We can just make out a room beyond,
and to the left and enclosed garden.
- [Beth] And that fenced in garden is a symbol.
It's called a hortus conclusus,
translated as a closed garden in Latin.
It's a symbol of Mary's virginity,
the fact that she conceives Christ, but remains a virgin.
The central column divides the scene in two
and we can see on the left that the column is illuminated
and on the right, the column is in shadow.
And that draws my attention to the illusionism.
- [Steven] The light and the shadows
that that light casts are consistent.
Look at the light that moves to the upper right
in back of Mary's stool.
If you look at the pointed arch just above Mary's head,
the right side seems to be illuminated,
and that light seems to come from the angel.
- [Beth] And the angel doesn't cast a shadow.
- [Steven] The naturalism co-exists in his work
with representations of spirituality.
Look for example, at the wing of the angel.
It sparkles, it seems divine.
And this is because the artist mixed silica
in with the fresco.
- [Beth] The increasing naturalism that artists were
interested in in the Renaissance was in some ways
in direct conflict with their representation
of divine, of spiritual figures.
And I see that here in Fra Angelico choosing
not to use perfect linear perspective.
That's obvious when we look closely
at the space of this loggia.
The floor seems to tilt upward
and the figures themselves are too large
for the space they occupy,
and their faces are very nondescript.
Neither the angel nor Mary seem like specific individuals.
All of these things would have helped the monks
to engage in their own meditation, their own contemplation,
to picture these things for themselves.
Fra Angelico doesn't want to give them a very concrete image
of the Enunciation that shows the scene in a particular way.
He wants to open up the possibility
for imaginative contemplation of this moment
when God is made flesh.
- [Steven] One of the ways he does that is he removes
a lot of the symbolic forms
that would normally be seen in an Enunciation.
Gone is the vase of lilies, a symbol of Mary's virginity,
gone is the book that she's often shown holding.
The people who would have walked this corridor
would have been extremely well-schooled in this story
and didn't need those prompts.
- [Beth] That tension that we're talking about
is seen also in those fabulous wings.
You mentioned how they sparkle,
but they're also the most colorful part of this painting.
So to me on the right, we have Mary on earth
seated humbly on a wooden stool, dressed humbly,
and then this divine figure with gold embroidery,
or this moment when the divine enters the earthly realm.
Of course he wasn't going to make this
a perfect illusion of reality.
This is the central miracle of Christianity.
And as we look at the architecture,
we can see that Fra Angelico is using
the vocabulary of architecture developed
by Brunelleschi in the beginning of the 15th Century,
these beautiful spare columns that have composite
and ionic capitals straight from classical antiquity,
the round arches.
And so what we're looking at is actually architecture
that's very similar to the architecture you could see
if you looked out the window toward the cloister.
- [Steven] But it's important to remember
that we're seeing this painting differently
than it would have been seen in the 15th Century.
The painting is illuminated by electric lights
and the window to the left, which is flooding
the fresco with light and through which you can hear
the traffic outside was enlarged.
And so we would have seen this painting in much dimmer light
and I can only imagine that as a result,
the spirituality of the painting would have been enhanced
to an even greater extent
and the sparkling of the wing of the archangel
would have pierced the light
in an even more transcendent way.
(jazzy piano music)