Fra Angelico - The San Marco Altarpiece

Fra Angelico, San Marco Altarpiece (1438-43), tempera on wood, San Marco Museum, Florence

Among the most vivid recollections of my early Catholic School education are of the macabre stories told to us by our nun-teachers about martyrs. Each year’s classroom was dedicated to a particular saint whose statue was displayed there as a way to focus our attention on their lives lived in the faith. Not all were martyrs of course (St Francis’ story was equally compelling and the otherness of the dark-skinned St Martin de Porres was beguiling to a largely all-white class cohort), but inevitably, the sheer blood-and guts sensationalist accounts were the ones that fascinated me the most. At the same time, our local church was dedicated to Our Lady, and her imagined presence was another constant of my upbringing. Although long-since lapsed as a Catholic, I still find myself drawn to the depictions of saints and to the early Renaissance period when the currency of their narratives was ubiquitous. Fra Angelico’s conceptions I find particularly absorbing.

 In the top corners of this symbolically replete and compositionally inspired fifteenth-century altarpiece, a pair of heavy gold brocade curtains are drawn back to reveal its foremost figures at its centre: the Virgin Mary with a relatively large and naked infant Jesus sat on her knee. The lower half of the work shows us a phalanx of saints standing in parallel rows either side of them, adopting a variety of attitudes but whose linearly aligned recession funnels our gaze towards the centre to encourage our focus on the divinity of mother and child. Meanwhile, two figures are shown kneeling on a Turkish carpet in the foreground. The rug’s foreshortened shape and the rectangularity of its pattern function in the same way as those lined up saints, drawing us into the depth and source of the subjects’ magnetic power.

Saint Cosmas on the left has his head tilted and angled towards the viewer. His expression is as unassumingly rapt as it is supplicatory, as he gestures towards the apparition on his left, as if he might be saying to us ‘I beg you, please, acknowledge this wondrous blessedness in front of your very eyes’. With his left hand held over his heart he conveys the depth of his feeling. Directly opposite him and likewise kneeling, is his twin brother, Saint Damian, leading by example as he is already in full adoration mode. He faces away from us but up towards the exalted Madonna and baby. This pair of martyred saints, Cosmas and Damian, were renowned in their time as physicians who worked pro bono and who refused to renounce their faith even after they were tortured by their Roman persecutors. They were adopted by the Medicis, the wealthy de facto rulers of Florence, as their patron saints. So, their inclusion by the artist followed the commissioning of this work by Cosimo de’ Medici the Elder, undertaken with the rebuilding of the San Marco church, a project which he funded in support of the Dominican order. Scholars have identified the figure of Cosmas in the painting as also bearing an obvious likeness to Cosimo himself.

The three figures standing on the left behind Cosimo represent firstly St Lawrence, also looking towards the viewer and wearing a red star-patterned tunic; the colour signals his martyrdom (unspeakably, he was griddled to death), and its stars, the light of his faith. Next comes Saint John the Evangelist, author of the eponymous gospel which, in its red binding, he holds humbly in his left hand. And then the fork-bearded and widow-peaked St Mark, writer of another one of the gospels and holding open another book, likely to be his own self-penned work. Each of these figures also hold a quill pen in their right hands, to remind us of their teaching and literary roles.

On the far right beside Damian and dressed as two darkly caped Dominicans (Fra Angelico’s own order) and one Franciscan, all suitably tonsured, stand three more saints. Saint Dominic, founder of the Dominican order faces towards us holding a lily, a symbol of his purity. Saint Francis of Assisi, the mystic and famed embracer of poverty, stands in the middle and Saint Peter the Martyr, notoriously murdered by a group of Cathars, a sect he had preached against, is on the far right, the axe wound that killed him still visibly bleeding from the top of his head. Each of these six saints double as depictions of other members of the Medici family. A group of eight angels, four each side of Mary and Jesus, are in attendance and in sacra conversazione (sacred conversation), and are posed just as if they were courtiers in a royal palace. The colour consonance between the blue and red gowns of the most prominent angels and Mary’s own clothes is suggestive of a sorority, a devotional audience exemplifying beatific virtue.

The infant Jesus has his right hand raised in benediction while in the other he holds aloft, with otherworldly effortlessness, a dark orb. This represents the earth cast into shadowy sinfulness, and the messiah’s anticipated light-bearing and sin-redeeming dominion over it. More importantly we are reminded of what will befall Christ in adulthood in the process of delivering salvation when we cast our eyes to the foot of the work. There sits a pictorial representation of his temporal fate, where he is portrayed as crucified on the cross with his grieving mother standing below and with St John, the ‘beloved disciple’, also again in attendance.  

Fra Angelico, San Marco Altarpiece (detail), 1438-43, tempera on wood, San Marco Museum, Florence

Blood streams down from the hanging body to pool on the mound below in front of which a skull points off to the side, desolately. This picture-within-a-picture is made to look like a real gilded object, a so-called pax that the priest officiating at mass and standing in front of this altarpiece might kiss as part of the ceremony. By using this piece of visual illusion, the artist underlines the viewer’s multi-layered separation from the enthroned and evanescent domain of the figures in the main painting, but he also loops in a narrative prediction and reinforces the central message of the eucharist.

The upper half of the painting shows us a range of what would look today like specimen trees in an arboretum. These include cypresses and other firs as well as palms and fruit trees, all indicative of the fecund abundance in the paradisiacal realm. Another reading is that the forestry represents a Hortus conclusus (enclosed garden), an allegory of the immaculate conception. Between the trees we can glimpse a hilly landscape and a dark sea and above these a fair weather-clouded sky.

Mary’s throne is set within an arched and shell-topped apse, its pilasters decorated by Corinthian capitals. An elaborate classical entablature surmounts them, embellished with vines. As with the carpet in the foreground, this middle ground structure is shown in convincing linear perspective, the sides of its topmost projection receding towards the trees behind.

Above the niche and behind the curtains, suspended in two symmetrical loops, hangs a festoon of pink, red and white roses. Set against the blue sky, this is another Marian symbol. Like the beads on a rosary (the word ‘rosary’ comes from the Latin rosarium or garland of roses), these flowers act like an enjoinder to prayer, reminders to the devout that it remains an article of faith to hail Mary. At another level, they act as momento mori, reminders that life on earth, as represented by the fragility and ephemerality of flowers, is brief, certainly when compared to the divine and eternal principal subjects of this painting.

The infant’s halo is rendered with a red cruciform cross, its colour and shape another link to the theme of the pax below in which it is repeated. The three arms in each one is a reference to the Holy Trinity of the godhead. Here lies the fundamental mystery of immanence that the painting explores. Christ was the ‘fruit’ of Mary’s womb and represents an embodiment of both humanity and divinity. He is pictured as an infant, but his future is already known. He lives not just in the present incarnation but in all that ever was and might ever be, including the lives and deaths of the saints whose faith was unshaken and in whom the holy spirit remains eternally indwelling.