The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Fra Angelico · the one fresco, scored as one work · buon fresco with some secco finishing, a wide horizontal field, with its painted inscription of two lines below · the angel Gabriel and Mary under a loggia of slender columns, a fenced garden at the left · on the wall facing the head of the stairs to the upper dormitory corridor of the Dominican convent of San Marco, Florence · painted by the friar and his shop, usually dated about 1440 to 1445, a span not settled · scored as it now stands in situ, in the convent that has been a state museum since the suppression of 1866
Mode
Devotional wall painting for a community under a rule; the Annunciation reduced to its architecture and two bodies, with a greeting asked of the viewer
Mythos
The messenger and the virgin at a threshold; the enclosed garden, the closed room, the word received at a door
Phase
The first instant of the incarnation, given as a held stillness; painted about 1440 to 1445, a span not settled
Presentation
Fresco on the stair wall, wide and horizontal; two figures under a loggia, a garden, a cell window, and two lines of Latin below
Register
Quiet and even throughout; pale colour, a sourceless light, no passage louder than another
Scale
Two figures, one building, one garden, and the stair that leads to them
Governing Proposition
At the head of a convent stair a friar painted the Annunciation with almost everything the subject usually carries taken out: no gold, no dove, no rays, no Father in the sky. What is left is a loggia whose columns answer the cloister below, a fenced garden, a cell with a barred window, and two figures inclining to each other in plain light. The wager of the fresco is that the event can be given whole by subtraction, and that a wall met on foot by men under a rule can ask to be greeted rather than adored, so that the friar who climbs the stairs enters the scene’s architecture and completes it with a word.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence was rebuilt by Michelozzo for Cosimo de’ Medici, for a house of reformed Observant friars. Its painter was one of them: Guido di Pietro, who took the name Fra Giovanni da Fiesole and is known as Fra Angelico. With his shop he painted frescoes through the convent, the cells of the upper dormitory among them, and, on the wall facing the head of the stairs to the dormitory corridor, an Annunciation. It is usually dated about 1440 to 1445; some date it later, toward 1450, and the span is not settled. Nothing here depends on it.
The fresco is the one work scored. It is painted in buon fresco with some secco finishing, in a wide horizontal field, and below it runs a painted inscription of two lines. It is scored as it now stands, in situ, on the wall it was made for. The other frescoes of the convent, among them the smaller Annunciation in the third cell, are context and are not scored; so are the painter’s Annunciation altarpiece at Cortona and the Annunciation in the Prado, which are other works on the same subject.
A friar going up to his cell climbed toward this wall. He saw it first from below, then level, at the turn of the stair, one body at a time and on foot. The image was made for that approach, and for a man whose day was ordered by the Ave. When the convent was suppressed in 1866 it became a state museum, and the wall has been in public view since; the stair is climbed now by visitors, and the fresco still meets them as it met the friars.
Movement II
The subject usually arrives with its apparatus. In the gilded Annunciations of the International Gothic the field is crowded and the gold is everywhere; in the painter’s own Cortona panel, of about 1433 to 1434, there is gold, and the angel’s words are written in the air between the figures. On the San Marco wall there is no gold ground, no dove, no descending rays and no God the Father in the sky. The field is pale and nearly bare.
What is left is required. The loggia places the event in a building like the one the friar is standing in, and its slender columns answer the columns of Michelozzo’s cloister below. The fenced garden is the enclosed garden and the outside from which the angel has come. The barred window behind Mary is the cell, and it is the only opening onto anything beyond the room. The inscription turns the picture into an instruction. Asked what could go without loss, the fresco has already answered: it has taken it away. What gives a little is the left bay and the garden strip, lighter in charge than the right, and the lower band of floor, which carries little.
The plainness has a source. The new Florentine geometry of Brunelleschi and Masaccio had been proven on other walls, and here it is put to contemplative use, not civic or dramatic. The turn from gold to a whitewashed field is real and personal, but it was made in a house whose rule asked for poverty, for a patron and a community that wanted exactly this. It was a wager placed inside the community that asked for it, not against a public, and the stake was modest. That is the measure the fresco is held to, and it is why the departure, though real, stops short of the summit’s bar.
Movement III
The picture reads from outside to inside. At the far left is a garden, dark green, with trees, closed by a fence: the hortus conclusus of the Song of Songs, the enclosed garden that is a figure of the Virgin. Then the loggia, open and pale, where the two figures are; one column stands between them. Then, behind Mary, the room, closed by a small barred window in its back wall. Garden, loggia and cell are one sequence, and the angel has come along it from the outside in.
The archetype is not evoked here; it is built. The threshold between outside and inside is load-bearing: the columns divide the angel’s space from Mary’s, and it is crossed by nothing but the inclination of the two bodies. The closed garden and the barred window both state enclosure, the one in nature and the other in the building, and the enclosed body is the subject of both. And the building is the friars’ own. The loggia is a convent loggia, the room is a friar’s cell, and the man on the stair enters the architecture of the scene as he climbs. The myth is made to stand in the actual convent.
One law governs the whole: measure, stillness, an even light. The dense garden at the left and the bare window at the right are the two most distant elements in the picture, and they obey the same rule of enclosure under the same light. The angel’s wings, striped in bands of colour, and Mary’s plain robe are held in one key of pale colour. The range is narrow, a single moment, two figures, one building and one garden, and the coherence rests on how complete the law is, not on how much it covers.
Movement IV
Mary sits on a plain stool, her arms folded across her breast, leaning forward toward the angel. Gabriel bends toward her, his arms folded too. Neither speaks in the picture. The event is shown as two persons inclining to each other in a shared silence: the word received rather than proclaimed, and consent given as a posture of the body.
For the men who climbed these stairs that posture was a description of their own life. They had vowed obedience; they lived in cells; they said the Ave. The fresco makes visible what that life was to be, a cell, a closed garden, a message received in plain light, assent given with the body, and it does so through image alone. What it discloses is a doctrine and a rule already held, made clear rather than found, and the disclosure is charged for that; but it can be stated, and it holds.
The making is the restraint. The colour is laid in pale, luminous fields that keep their key across the wall; the drapery is modelled in broad, quiet planes; the faces are drawn with economy; the architecture is built with a sure hand in the new perspective, and the light falls from no visible source, the same everywhere. A heavier hand would break the meaning. The drawing does not satisfy every strict eye, and the share of the shop in the painting is not certain; the command of fresco colour, light and perspective is of a high order all the same.
Movement V
Below the picture, two lines of Latin are painted on the wall: “Virginis intactae cum veneris ante figuram / praetereundo cave ne sileatur Ave”
In substance: when you come before the figure of the inviolate Virgin, take care as you pass that the Ave is not left unsaid. The image does not ask to be venerated. It asks to be greeted, by a body passing on the stair, and the greeting it asks for is the angel’s own.
That is what the form knows. As a panel on an altar the Annunciation would face a congregation; as a fresco on the stair wall it meets one man at a time, rising, and ends in a word he says. The matte surface of fresco, taking in the light with no gloss and no gold, is the poverty the image teaches. Part of this knowledge is in the siting, which the form uses rather than makes; the rest is in the painting, an architecture inside an architecture. More than a century of study has returned to the San Marco walls, to the friars’ devotions, to Dominican writing on prayer and gesture, to the question of the shop’s hand, and to the painter as a painter of thought.
Its reach is real and diffuse. It stands behind a long line of quiet loggia Annunciations, and in the nineteenth century the Nazarenes and the English Pre-Raphaelite circle took the painter as a model of purity; Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini answers him, though not this fresco alone. The fresco has been restored, and a wall painting has the fragility of its wall. But after about five hundred and eighty years both figures, the loggia, the garden and the two lines of Latin stand on the wall they were painted for, and the stair still leads up to them.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is the fresco’s own method. The painter has already removed what the subject usually carries: the gold ground, the dove, the descending rays, God the Father in the sky. What is left is required. The loggia places the event in a building like the one the friar stands in, its columns answering Michelozzo’s cloister below. The fenced garden is the hortus conclusus and the outside the angel has come from. The barred window behind Mary is the cell, and the only opening onto anything beyond. The inscription turns the image into an instruction to a passing body. No part is idle. Held below 9.0 because the left bay and the garden strip carry less charge than the right, and the lower band of floor carries little.
Score: 8.8 / 10
What the fresco discloses is a meaning, not a mood: assent as a posture. Mary sits on a plain stool, arms folded across her breast, leaning toward the angel, and the angel bends toward her, so that the event is two persons inclining to each other in a shared silence, the word received rather than proclaimed. Placed at the head of the dormitory stairs for men vowed to obedience and whose day was ordered by the Ave, it makes visible what the friar’s life was to be: a cell, a closed garden, a message received in plain light, consent given with the body. That can be stated, and it holds. Held below the gate because it discloses a given doctrine and a given rule of life, clarified rather than uncovered.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The elevation is quiet and unbroken: not grandeur or terror but a stilled beauty that rises from the whole field at once. The pale rose and grey of the loggia, the angel’s wings striped in bands of colour, the dark green of the garden, and a cool light that falls the same everywhere hold one height across the surface. There is no flat passage, so the frequency is complete, and the height is renewed with each passage up the stairs, which is part of the design. The height itself is not of the first rank. Nothing overwhelms the viewer, the scale is not vast, and the figures are modest against the architecture. Scored high in the band of beauty, below the elevations that overwhelm.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The Annunciation is among the deepest patterns Christian art holds: the messenger, the virgin, the threshold between outside and inside, the word made flesh at a door. Here the pattern is built into the structure. The garden at the left is fenced, the enclosed garden of the Song of Songs; the room behind Mary closes with a barred window, the cell and the enclosed body; the columns divide the angel’s space from hers, so that the threshold is load-bearing, crossed only by the inclination of the two bodies. And the archetype is folded into the building: the loggia is a convent loggia, the room is a friar’s cell, and the friar on the stairs enters the scene. Held below 9.0 because it builds an inherited pattern with great clarity rather than opening a new depth in it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The departure is real: from the gilded, crowded Annunciations of the International Gothic, and from the painter’s own Cortona panel of about 1433 to 1434, with its gold and its words written in the air, to a bare field, a loggia in perspective, no gold and almost no attribute. It takes the new Florentine geometry of Brunelleschi and Masaccio and puts it to contemplative use rather than civic or dramatic use. The cost is the question. The turn toward austerity was made in a house of reformed Observant friars whose rule asked for poverty, and the patron and the setting asked for exactly this: a wager inside a community that wanted it, not against a public. The perspective was already proven. The turn is substantial and the stake modest.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Substitute another form and the work loses what it knows. As a panel on an altar it would face a congregation and ask to be venerated. As a fresco on the stair wall it meets one body at a time, on foot and rising, and asks to be greeted in passing, which the inscription says outright. The matte surface of fresco, taking in the light with no gloss and no gold, is the poverty the image teaches. Its scale is set to the stair and the corridor, the figures seen first from below and then level. The form is the instrument of the knowledge: a rule of life made as an architecture inside an architecture. Held below 9.0 because part of this knowledge lies in the siting, which the form uses rather than creates.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The evidence is good. The San Marco frescoes have sustained more than a century of serious study: their place in the friars’ devotional practice, their relation to Dominican writing on prayer and gesture, the question of the shop’s hand, and the reading of the painter as a painter of thought rather than a naive one. On return the image yields more than its simplicity promises: the painted columns beside the real ones, Mary’s folded arms against the angel’s, the barred window, the garden fence, and a light without a source that is the same light as the Ave. Charged because its depth is of one kind, contemplative and doctrinal, and because much of the study it has drawn is of the convent cycle as a whole.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The field is Florentine sacred painting of the mid fifteenth century. The intrinsic force is high: the fresco shows that the new perspective and a new plainness could serve a meditative image, and that a sacred subject could be stripped almost to its architecture and two bodies and lose nothing. The discount: it sums up a direction more than it redirects its field, and much of its reach is the painter’s in general. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it stands behind the long line of quiet loggia Annunciations; in the nineteenth century the Nazarenes and the English Pre-Raphaelite circle took the painter as a model of purity, Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini answering him, though not this fresco alone. Its presence on cards and covers is fame, not reach.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about five hundred and eighty years. Form: whole. Both figures, the loggia, the garden and the inscription stand and read on the wall the fresco was painted for. Presence: continuous, in view in a working convent until the suppression of 1866 and in a public museum since, an image known across the world; fame earns a tenth at most and is not where the figure rests. Fabric: the fresco has been restored, the extent of loss and retouching is not stated here, and a wall painting has the fragility of its wall. Nothing that carries the meaning is lost. Placed in the lower half of the band for a form whole across centuries, by the restoration and the exposure, not at its top.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Command of fresco of a high order. The colour is laid in pale, luminous fields that keep one key across the whole wall; the angel’s wings are banded in stripes of colour; the drapery of both figures is modelled in broad, quiet planes; the faces are drawn with economy. The architecture is built with a sure grasp of the new perspective, and the light is unified and without a source. At the highest marks the making is load-bearing, and here it is: the restraint is the craft, and a heavier hand would break the meaning. Held below 9.0 by what a strict reading of the drawing asks of it, and by the shop’s share in the painting, which is not certain; above it stand the greatest fresco painters of the century.
Score: 8.9 / 10
One law governs the whole: measure, stillness, an even light. Take the two most distant elements, the dense dark garden at the left with its fence and trees, and the bare cell window at the right. Both obey the same rule of enclosure and fall under the same light. The angel’s coloured wings and Mary’s plain robe, the most ornamental and the plainest passages, are held in one key of pale colour. The Latin below, which addresses the viewer, obeys the law of the image, which addresses the viewer by placing him in its architecture. The range is not wide, one moment, two figures, one building, one garden, so the figure rests on how complete the law is, not on its breadth. Narrowness is not coherence, and the axis is held at 9.0 for that reason.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Held in one structure: the sacred, the incarnation at its first instant; the natural order, in the garden; the built world and its order, in the loggia and the convent; the rule of a community, in the stair, the inscription and the friar’s life; and a consciousness at the moment of consent. They are integrated, not listed: the garden, the loggia and the cell are one sequence from outside to inside. What holds the axis lowest is what two figures in a moment cannot hold: history beyond the sacred, the family, labour, the state, the crowd. It stands above Lamentation over the Dead Christ at 7.0 and just below The Starry Night at 7.4, raised by the way it takes its place, and the life lived there, into the image.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.0, The Made at 8.9, and The Inevitable and The Living Form at 8.8. A form whole after nearly six centuries on the wall it was painted for; one law of measure, stillness and even light from the dark garden to the bare cell window; a command of fresco in which the restraint is the craft; a subject from which everything idle has been removed; and a form that meets one body at a time on the stair and asks to be greeted.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: the sacred, the garden, the convent, a rule of life and a consciousness at the moment of consent are held in one sequence, and history beyond the sacred, the family, labour, the state and the crowd are absent from two figures in a moment. Above it, The Swerve at 8.0: a real turn from gold to a bare field, made inside a community that asked for it, on a perspective already proven. Then Pressure on Tradition at 8.2, the summation of a direction rather than its redirection, and The Unconcealment at 8.4, a doctrine and a rule of life made clear rather than found.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.3 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short, a doctrine and a rule of life clarified rather than uncovered; Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 falls three tenths short, a summation more than a redirection; and The Swerve at 8.0 falls five tenths short, a turn made inside the community that asked for it. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest of the eleven axes it covers is The Swerve at 8.0, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. The twelve sum to 102.4, an average of 8.53 that displays 8.5; the aggregate stands below 9.0 in any case, and the fresco is placed in the Canonical tier on its standing.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the fresco as an image and as a site, scored as the one fresco: The Annunciation, by Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietro, Fra Giovanni da Fiesole) and his shop, buon fresco with some secco finishing, on the wall facing the head of the stairs to the upper dormitory corridor of the convent of San Marco, Florence, usually dated about 1440 to 1445, with some dating it later, toward 1450; the span is not settled and nothing here rests on it. It is scored as it now stands in situ, with its painted inscription. The other San Marco frescoes, among them the Annunciation in the third cell, the Cortona Annunciation of about 1433 to 1434 and the Annunciation in the Prado are other works and are not scored; Michelozzo’s rebuilding of the convent for Cosimo de’ Medici is the setting. The convent became a state museum after its suppression in 1866. The fresco has been restored; the dates and extent of the work, and the loss and retouching it found or left, are weighed on The Imperishable only and not stated. The share of the shop is not certain. The inscription is quoted in its usual transcription, with its sense in English beneath; no other words are quoted. Brunelleschi and Masaccio enter as the geometry the fresco inherits, and Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini as a later answer to the painter in general; neither is credited on any axis beyond what is said. Matters that could not be verified are not given, among them the fresco’s dimensions, the number of the loggia’s arches, the presence or absence of a book and a lily, the year the museum opened, whether the fresco has ever been moved from its wall, the share of secco work, the construction of the perspective in relation to the stair, particular faults of drawing and scale, the names of scholars of the convent cycle, and the names of the painter’s followers in Florence.