Fra Angelico

Fra Angelico spent his whole working life inside the Dominican order, and it shaped everything he painted. Born Guido di Pietro around 1395 near Fiesole, he joined the convent of San Domenico there by 1423, taking the name Fra Giovanni; "Angelico," meaning angelic, was a nickname attached to him after his death for the luminous devotional quality of his work.

His major achievement came at the convent of San Marco in Florence, rebuilt in the 1440s with funding from the Medici banker Cosimo de' Medici. Angelico and his workshop covered its corridors and some fifty individual friars' cells with frescoes, each one sized and placed to match the cell's bed and window, meant to be seen by a single friar at prayer rather than by any public audience.

He never rose above the rank of ordinary friar and continued painting commissions in Rome for popes Eugene IV and Nicholas V into his final years, dying there in 1455. In 1982 Pope John Paul II beatified him, and two years later named him the patron of Catholic artists.