The Theater: The Bearers of Gifts

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For Beauty includes three conditions: wholeness . . . harmony . . . and radiance.

—St. Thomas Aquinas

As the year declines towards its end, man, as far back as history records, has always hungered for imagery, the warm glow of fire, a reassuring star of hope. In the Christian world, the great theme around which this yearning centers is the story of the Nativity. No subject in Western art has had more enduring appeal for the hearts and minds of men. From the West's earliest known painting of the Madonna and Child (TIME, May 16) through the passionate, attenuated figures of El Greco and Grünewald to such diverse moderns as Gauguin and Matisse, the elemental yet intimate scene of mother and newborn son has filled men with awe and rejoicing. To celebrate this event, artists have enriched the story with regal Byzantine mosaics, the glories of Chartres' medieval stained glass, with enamels, jewels, oils and frescoes. To the Nativity the greatest artists in Western history have, like the Scriptured Magi, traveled afar to bring their most precious Twelfth Night gifts.

The one painter who more than any other possessed an artist's radiant vision of the Nativity, as valid in its harmony and joyous quietude for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as it is today, was a Dominican priest who died in Rome just 500 years ago this year. Even in his lifetime, his fellow monks felt the touch of his genius, awarded him the title of "The Angelic"—Fra Angelico.

Within the Cowl. For all his fame and popularity, there are few more elusive personalities in art than Fra Angelico. So completely did the man and artist live within his monastic cowl and robe, effacing himself within the disciplines of monastic life, that his early life, training and personality are only guesswork. He left no written record of his own. His biographer, Painter-Historian Giorgio Vasari, wrote nearly a century after Fra Angelico's death.

Vasari's principal sources were a pious Dominican eulogy and the memories of an ancient monk, Fra Eustachio. with whom Vasari often gossiped at Florence's convent of San Marco. From such accounts, Vasari drew the picture of Fra Angelico as a painter who "never took up his brush without first making a prayer. He never made a crucifix when the tears did not course down his cheeks . . ." Some later historians have doubted this picture of Fra Angelico in a state of religious ecstasy. The evidence in his painting points far more to a man who was the soul of patience and mildness, but calm, even cool, in temperament. Probably English Art Historian John Pope-Hennessy comes closest to the mark: "For all the translucent surface of his paintings, for all his rapturous pleasure in the natural world, there lay concealed, within Angelico's artistic personality, a Puritan faithful to his own intransigent ideal of reformed religious art."

From the Summit. In Fra Angelico the man, the monk and the artist were as one. Sharing both in the final, full flowering of the Middle Ages and the first springlike surge of the Renaissance, Fra Angelico stood at a summit during one of those rare moments of equilibrium between epochs.