PUTTING ART (back) IN ITS PLACE

This “spilling out” of the action into the space of the viewer is exactly the effect of the big scenes up on the middle register of the San Brizio Chapel, when, for example, a hell-bent figure tries to sneak out of the frame of the painting onto the ledge, only to be yanked back by the hair by a guardian demon. 

The people subject to the fiery blasts of the angels of destruction at the End of the World try to escape from the fictive space into the actual space of the chapel. 

But the angel’s wings overlap the painted ribs of the vaulting, placing her in “our space.” Her gesture includes those in the chapel; the painting on the wall becomes a permeable membrane between this world and the next.

The scene frescoed immediately above the altar depicts a little boy being raised to new life through the intercession of Saint Francis.  The carefully rendered background of this scene is obviously and exactly that of the street in front of the church, with façade of the church itself on the right, Santa Trinità bridge straight ahead, the Palazzo Spini Feroni on the left (now home of the Ferragamo fashion family), from a window in which the little boy is falling.

Another example is found in the cells of the dormitory in Monastery San Marco, where the painters in Fra Angelico’s workshop have included figures in Dominican habit in the paintings on the walls.

The gestures and attitudes of the friars in the paintings model the demeanor of devotion for the friars living in the cells. In fact, one scholar [William Hood] has pointed out a precise correlation between the various postures of prayer depicted in the cell frescoes and the nine “modes of prayer” described in an illustrated manual of prayer—De modo Orandi—based on Saint Dominic’s own practice.