Feast Day: February 18th | Religious Brother, Artist, Dominican| Patronage: Artists
Now we know him as Blessed Fra Angelico. “Blessed” because he has been beatified, though not yet canonized. “Fra”, a shortened version of “frater”, Latin for “brother”, the title for a mendicant friar. “Angelico”, a nickname given him for his devotion to God and attentiveness to his brothers in the order. But he had been baptized just Guido.
We know little about his family, but Guido was born in 1395 not too far from Florence Italy. He must have expressed an artistic bent from a young age because by the time he was 17 he had already joined an artistic guild in his hometown and was soon hired for a few projects at the Church of St. Stefano del Ponte. We don’t know what twists and turns led him from his paintbrushes in that Church to his joining the Dominican order, but 1423 he has taken the religious name Fra Giovanni (often surnamed “de Fiesole” distinguishing him from all the other Friar John’s throughout the order.)
Following the Lord always asks us to sacrifice our own will for God’s will. Did Guido struggle to make that sacrifice? Florence was booming with artists and painters – it was the epicenter of the budding renaissance movement! What would it cost him to become a religious? Would he lose himself, lose his joy, lose his gift? Yet didn’t Jesus speak directly to everyone wrestling with such questions: “what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?” (Luke 9:25) Jesus knows a key truth about us: freedom is not found in blindly following our desires! Were we to acquire for ourselves the entire world, were we to unrestrainedly follow our urges and instincts, were we to do whatever we wanted … we would not find ourselves free, but enslaved.
And so Guido entered the Dominicans. He chose to trust God’s will above even his own. And soon he discovered that in following God, though we must entrust our freedom and future to Him, He does not leave out of His plan anything that is authentically ours, authentically good. There, in the Dominican convent, Fra Giovanni was asked to assist in illuminating manuscripts. Of the few pages we have of his, filled first with the words of scripture and prayer, the images that he weaves around and among those sacred letters leap from the page. We see not only his skill, but his love in carefully imagining the scene. The color, the lightness, the joy, the balance that pervades so many of his frescoes is visible in the tiny scene of the Annunciation crafted within the first “R”.
He would go on to paint that scene – the Annunciation – many more times. Every single one is different. Each shows that he had returned again in his prayer and heart to the place where Mary said “yes” and God was conceived. He also took up anew the person for whom he was painting. When illustrating that manuscript, he uses exquisitely small brushstrokes to give features to Mary, Gabriel, and God, to let the reader come face to face with them. When painting for the altarpiece for a church in his hometown, the scene is vivid, exquisite, colorful, and tender. He uses perspective and light to captivate anyone who would look upon it, and places to the side Adam and Eve in their rejection of God’s plan. And when painting for a simple lay brother in his own monastery, the scene is reminiscent of the choir where that friar lived and prayed and welcomed the Lord into his own heart.
Our talents, gifts, joys, and desires are also places to encounter the Lord, and help others to encounter Him. The question is whether we will entrust those parts of ourselves to God’s will?
– Fr. Dominic Rankin routinely looks for freedom and fulfillment in the wrong places. Once again, the saints remind us that it is found only in God.