A Bishop Saint by Fra Angelico

This is A Bishop Saint, painted around 1425 by Fra Angelico. It lives at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The man holding the brush was not just a painter. He was a Dominican friar who would be beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1982 and declared the patron saint of artists two years later.

Look first at the raised hand. Every knuckle, the pressure of the fingers in the blessing gesture, it is modeled from life, not a formula. Then look at the gold background. It is real gold leaf, tooled by hand into the gesso beneath. In a fifteenth-century church lit by candles, this panel would have glowed.

Fra Angelico was born Guido di Pietro around 1395 in Tuscany. He entered the Dominican order as a young man and took the name Fra Giovanni. The name we know him by now, Angelico, came after his death, because his contemporaries believed only a man touched by angels could paint like this. He worked for Cosimo de' Medici in Florence, for Popes Eugene IV and Nicholas V in Rome, and for his own brothers in the convent of San Marco, where he painted frescoes on the walls of the cells where the friars slept. He never painted a secular subject in his life. The story, passed down through centuries, is that he painted on his knees, never retouching a completed work because he believed it was already divinely guided.

When you stand in front of this small panel, you are standing where a friar stood six hundred years ago, trying to make holiness visible with ground pigment and egg yolk. He thought that painting Christ was a way of being with Christ. The gravity in this bishop's face is something he understood from the inside.