HEAVEN ON EARTH.(Fra Angelico)

The sweet gravitas of Fra Angelico's paintings may be the all-time best advertising for Christian piety. The early-Renaissance master (circa 1395-1455), seen in a rare retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum (the first in the United States and the second anywhere), breathes spiritual gladness--not ecstasy or bliss, nothing strenuous or unhinged--in a palette given to effulgent pinks, ambrosial blues, and embossed gold, which he uses as a color. His secret is sincerity. Wholly absorbed in his subjects, Angelico seems freshly surprised by the poignance of each conventionally composed Madonna and by the unfathomable sorrow of every Crucifixion. Legend holds that he wept whenever he painted the Passion; the tender, gazing concentration of the pictures--including a highly unusual "Christ Crowned with Thorns," with blood-red eyes--makes this plausible to me. (So much pain, for an undeserved love of humanity.) In predella panels, Angelico retells the adventures of the saints with wondering excitement. They are palpably interesting, remarkably even-tempered people; even having their heads chopped off doesn't rattle them much. And his angels! So nice! Only Angelico, in all of Western art and literature, not excluding Dante and Milton, persuades me that Heaven might be really enjoyable, owing to the liveliness of the company. In the painting "Paradise," saints and angels stroll skyward through a verdant garden and break into pretty turns of courtly dancing. Eternity is going to be fun for them.

Angelico was born Guido di Pietro, near Florence, of unknown parents. He was a freelance artist, probably studying with Lorenzo Monaco, before entering a Dominican convent in his early twenties. By 1423, he was a friar, taking the name Giovanni da Fiesole. His earliest, tentatively attributed works, sampled at the Met, are lovely drawings for illuminated manuscripts. (Since the first Angelico retrospective, in Florence in 1955, new attributions to the artist have come thick and fast, by the standards of art history, incidentally reducing the already doubtful status of the Late Gothic painter Gherardo Starnina, whose putative touchstone "Thebaid," a teeming narrative of a monk's travels to Egypt, now belongs to the young Angelico.) The scant record of Angelico's life does not contradict Vasari's portrait of him in "The Lives of the Artists," written a century after his death, as a devout, obedient servant of his order. To those who wanted work from him, Vasari noted, Angelico "would say with great charm that they should first secure the consent of the prior and then he would not fail them." (For conjoined humility and grandeur, nothing touches Angelico's frescoes in the cells of the Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence: each austere little chamber is graced with a masterwork.) Angelico died in Rome, the most celebrated Italian painter of his generation. Vasari says that he was always called Fra Giovanni Angelico (Angelic Brother John), though the sobriquet was not documented in his lifetime. Since then, it has alternated, especially in Italy, with Beato Angelico, a nomination for sainthood that John Paul II made official in 1984.

How much weight should be given to the notion of Angelico as a holy innocent? Vasari says that the artist renounced wealth and power and lived "withdrawn from the snares of the world," and he recounts that, on one occasion, Angelico declined to eat meat with Pope Nicholas V, because his prior had not granted him permission, "the Pope's authority in this matter not occurring to him." The show's chief curator, Laurence Kanter, and other scholars, writing aridly in the beautiful catalogue, are at pains to discount the tenor of such tales as a sentimental distraction from Angelico's artistic genius. They argue that he was intellectually acute and stylistically progressive, notably in his response to the innovations in perspective and modelling of his meteoric contemporary Masaccio (1401-28). The corrective would be welcome if anyone needed correcting, but who mistakes Angelico for a cloistered Grandma Moses? There is much to be said for the services to mental clarity of just-the-facts scholarship, a discipline with its own equivalents of monkish virtue. I've just never been more struck by the ...