On the right, as we approach the giant, is the _Sala del Beato
Angelico_, containing a lovely array of Fra Angelico's smaller
paintings. Were we to attempt to sum up Angelico's chief
characteristics in one word, that word would be _onestà_, in its early
mediaeval sense as Dante uses it in the _Vita Nuova_, signifying not
merely purity or chastity, as it came later to mean, but the outward
manifestation of spiritual beauty,--the _honestas_ of which Aquinas
speaks. A supreme expression of this may be found in the Paradise of
his Last Judgment (266), the mystical dance of saints and Angels in
the celestial garden that blossoms under the rays of the Sun of Divine
Love, and on all the faces of the blessed beneath the Queen of Mercy
on the Judge's right. The Hell is, naturally, almost a failure. In
many of the small scenes from the lives of Christ and His Mother, of
which there are several complete series here, some of the heads are
absolute miracles of expression; notice, for instance, the Judas
receiving the thirty pieces of silver, and all the faces in the
Betrayal (237), and, above all perhaps, the Peter in the Entry into
Jerusalem (252), on every line of whose face seems written: "Lord, why
can I not follow thee now? I will lay down my life for thy sake." The
Deposition from the Cross (246), contemplated by St. Dominic, the
Beata Villana and St. Catherine of Alexandria, appears to be an
earlier work of Angelico's. Here, also, are three great Madonnas
painted by the Friar as altar pieces for convent churches; the Madonna
and Child surrounded by Angels and saints, while Cosmas and Damian,
the patrons of the Medici, kneel at her feet (281), was executed in
1438 for the high altar of San Marco, and, though now terribly
injured, was originally one of his best pictures; the Madonna and
Child, with two Angels and six saints, Peter Martyr, Cosmas and
Damian, Francis, Antony of Padua, and Louis of Toulouse (265), was
painted for the convent of the Osservanza near Mugello,--hence the
group of Franciscans on the left; the third (227), in which Cosmas and
Damian stand with St. Dominic on the right of the Madonna, and St.
Francis with Lawrence and John the Divine on her left, is an inferior
work from his hand.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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