Fra Angelico Dies in Rome

1455

The Dominican friar and painter whose luminous frescoes at San Marco in Florence had married medieval piety to Renaissance technique with unearthly grace died in Rome while decorating a Vatican chapel for Pope Nicholas V. His epitaph praised him as both a supreme painter and a genuinely humble monk. The Catholic Church would eventually beatify him, making him the patron saint of artists. No other painter has been so formally honored by Rome.