Fra Angelico Quotes

Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. This has been always the instinct of Christendom, and especially the instinct of Christian art. Remember how Fra Angelico represented all his angels, not only as birds, but almost as butterflies. Remember how the most earnest mediaeval art was full of light and fluttering draperies, of quick and capering feet. It was the one thing that the modern Pre-raphaelites could not imitate in the real Pre-raphaelites. Burne-Jones could never recover the deep levity of the Middle Ages. In the old Christian pictures the sky over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute. Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens. The tattered cloak of the beggar will bear him up like the rayed plumes of the angels. But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards, for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation. Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One "settles down" into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. A man "falls" into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.

J'aime mieux Un Fra Angelico qu'un torche-cul de Degas!" (cité par Charles Camoin).

I raided libraries and church bazaars for art books. It was possible then to find beautiful volumes for next to nothing and I happily dwelt in the world of Modigliani, Dubuffet, Picasso, Fra Angelico, and Albert Ryder.

Observe this beautiful fact: By bringing us into communion with God, prayer makes us share in God’s creativity. Contemplation nourishes our creative faculties and our inventiveness, particularly in the realm of beauty. Contemporary art is cruelly lacking in inspiration and very often produces nothing but painful ugliness, when people are so thirsty for beauty. Only a renewal of faith and prayer will enable artists to rediscover the sources of true creativity, so that they will once again be able to provide people with the beauty they so badly need, as was done by Fra Angelico, Rembrandt, or Johann Sebastian Bach. 5.

while D, suddenly interested in our progress, produced for our enlightenment some forty small books on the Old Masters fully illustrated, and to test our knowledge would open them at random, thrusting a reproduction of a Virgin and Child before us and saying, ‘Who by?’ He was delighted when we got the answer right—Botticelli—Murillo—Perugino—Fra Angelico—and, what was more, quoted the city of origin!

Sooner or later the world must burn, and all things in it—all the books, the cloister together with the brothel, Fra Angelico together with the Lucky Strike ads which I haven’t seen for seven years because I don’t remember seeing one in Louisville. Sooner or later it will all be consumed by fire and nobody will be left—for by that time the last man in the universe will have discovered the bomb capable of destroying the universe and will have been unable to resist the temptation to throw the thing and get it over with. And here I sit writing a diary. But love laughs at the end of the world because love is the door to eternity and he who loves God is playing on the doorstep of eternity, and before anything can happen love will have drawn him over the sill and closed the door and he won’t bother about the world burning because he will know nothing but love.

In Florence I rebelled and told her that frankly I thought her Fra Angelico rather mawkish. Then I corrected myself and said “naive.” She didn’t deny it, on the contrary, she was delighted; it couldn’t be naïve enough for her. What I enjoyed was campari!

Of the Seven Joys, the scene that most interested the painters of the Italian Renaissance was the Annunciation: the moment in which the Archangel Gabriel announces to the Virgin Mary that she is, miraculously, with child. All of the era’s masters tackled this subject, and exquisitely so. Fra Angelico (ca. 1440), Filippo Lippi (ca. 1455), Piero della Francesca (ca. 1455), Leonardo da Vinci (ca. 1473), Botticelli (1489), Raphael (1503), etc. But what is most interesting, and perhaps most revealing, about the masters’ interest in the Annunciation, is that they all chose to paint it with the same composition. While, in theory, the scene could be imagined in a thousand different ways, for the Italian masters Mary was always on the right side of the painting and the Archangel always on the left; Mary was generally seated with a book at hand, and the winged Gabriel kneeling with a lily; Mary was always in a quasi-interior (such as under a portico or in a room that opened on a garden) while Gabriel was either outside the interior space or in front of a window—such that the countryside could be seen in the distance over his shoulder.

una risposta positiva. Fra un sorriso e un saluto, il

Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. This has always been the instinct of Christendom, and especially the instinct of Christian art. Remember how Fra Angelico represented all his angels, not only as birds, but almost as butterflies. Remember how the most earnest medieval art was full of light and fluttering draperies, of quick and capering feet...In the old Christian pictures the sky over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute. Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens. The tattered cloak of the beggar will bear him up like the rayed plumes of the angels. But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards, for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation. Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One "settles down" into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. A man "falls" into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky.

So Disney merely has to stoop down to pick up reality as it is. 'Built-in spectacle', as Guy Debord would say. But we are no longer in the society of the spectacle, which has itself become a spectacular concept. It is no longer the contagion of spectacle which alters reality, it is the contagion of the virtual which obliterates the spectacle. With its diverting, distancing effects, Disneyland still represented spectacle and folklore, but with Disneyworld and its tentacular extension, we are dealing with a generalized metastasis, with a cloning of the world and of our mental universe, not in the imaginary register, but in the viral and the virtual. We are becoming not alienated, passive spectators, but interactive extras, the meek, freeze-dried extras in this immense reality show. This is no longer the spectacular logic of alienation, but a spectral logic of disembodiment; not a fantastic logic of diversion, but a corpuscular logic of transfusion, transubstantiation of each of our cells. An undertaking of radical deterrence of the world, then, but from the inside this time, not from outside, as we saw in what is now the almost nostalgic world of capitalist reality. In virtual reality the extra is no longer either an actor or a spectator; he is off-stage, he is a transparent operator. And Disney wins on yet another level. Not content with obliterating the real by turning it into a 3-D, but depthless, virtual image, it obliterates time by synchronizing all periods, all cultures in the same tracking shot, by setting them alongside each other in the same scenario. In this way, it inaugurates real time — time as a single point, one-dimensional time, a thing which is also without depth: neither present, past nor future, but the immediate synchrony of all places and all times in the same timeless virtuality. The lapsing or collapsing of time: this is the real fourth dimension . The dimension of the virtual, of real time, the dimension which, far from superadding itself to the three dimensions of real space, obliterates them all. So it has been suggested that in a century or a millennium, the old 'swords and sandals' epics will be seen as actual Roman films, dating from the Roman period, as true documentaries on Antiquity; that the Paul Getty Museum at Malibu, a pastiche of a villa from Pompeii, will be confused anachronistically with a villa from the third century B.C. (as will the works inside: Rembrandt and Fra Angelico will all be jumbled together in the same flattening of time); and that the commemoration of the French Revolution at Los Angeles in 1989 will be confused retrospectively with the real event. Disney achieves the de facto realization of this timeless Utopia by producing all events, past or future, on simultaneous screens, remorselessly mixing all the sequences as they would — or will — appear to a civilization other than our own. But this is already our civilization. It is already increasingly difficult for us to imagine the real, to imagine History, the depth of time, three-dimensional space - just as difficult as it once was, starting out from the real world, to imagine the virtual one or the fourth dimension.

Fra Angelico comprendió que el mundo, tal y como lo percibimos, no es una realidad inmutable. Existen múltiples realidades alternativas. Para verlas, es necesario modificar el punto de vista.

Fra Angelico fue uno de los primeros en adoptar las leyes sobre la perspectiva de Brunelleschi y se sirvió de ellas cuando pintó (no sin la ayuda de sus amigos dominicos) los nuevos frescos que Cosme había encargado para el convento de San Marcos. Estos frescos, vistos en conjunto, son uno de los grandes logros del Renacimiento florentino. El más conocido es la ya mencionada Anunciación, con el que los monjes se encontrarían, de seguro, a diario, al subir las empinadas escaleras que conducían a sus dormitorios en el primer piso. En la actualidad, a este tipo de obras se las conoce como site-specific-artworks,[9] lo que significa que, para apreciarlas en toda su magnitud, hay que verlas in situ. Evidentemente,

Los frescos de Fra Angelico son obras de arte maravillosas y excepcionales. Pero no se limitan a ser imágenes meramente estéticas. Son, también, ambiciosas desde el punto de vista conceptual. Llevaban a los monjes a un viaje a través del tiempo, al situar la historia cristiana en un escenario contemporáneo, para demostrar que los espacios físicos que habitaban podían reinterpretarse y reconfigurarse hasta el punto de transformar su realidad desde sus mismos cimientos. Los cuadros no tratan únicamente de la historia cristiana, sino de nuestra imaginación —nuestra memoria y nuestra conciencia—. El mundo que vemos y experimentamos no es inmutable. Hay realidades alternativas ante nuestros ojos.

- Érdekes. Talán azért, mert te már sokszor voltál Olaszországban, már nem ájulsz el, ha egy Fra Angelico képet vagy egy Bel Paese sajtot látsz. Én meg úgy érzem, hogy halálos vétket követek el minden állomásnál, ahol nem szállok ki. Nincs frivolabb dolog, mint vonaton utazni. Gyalog kellene menni, vagy legalábbis postakocsin, mint Goethe. Hátborzongató, hogy voltam Toszkánában, meg nem is. Hogy íme, elutaztam Arezzo mellett, és hogy arra van valahol Siena, és én nem mentem oda. Ki tudja, eljutok-e még valaha Sienába, ha most nem megyek el? - Mondd már. Otthon sosem árultad el, hogy ilyen sznob vagy. Mi baj lesz abból, hogy nem nézted meg a sienai primitíveket? - Ki kíváncsi a sienai primitívekre? - Hát mit akarsz csinálni Sienában? - Mit tudom én. Ha tudnám, talán már nem is izgatna. De ha kimondom ezt a szót, Siena, az az érzésem, hogy ott megláthatnék valamit, amitől minden rendbe jönne.

Peruginos, Bellinis, Titians, Georgiones, Simibaldos, Lottos, Pintoricchios, Solarios, Tifernates, Botticellis, Ghirlandaios, and all the Fras (Fra Bartolommeo, Fra Filippo Lippi, Fra Lippo Lippi, Fra Angelico).