Similar was the path taken by Guido di Pietro, who later became Fra’ Giovanni da Fiesole and is known today as Beato Angelico: at first he was a distinctly late Gothic painter, trained in the examples of Gherardo Starnina and Lorenzo Monaco, but on coming into contact with Masaccio his art changed radically, and he was able to merge the vigorous plasticism of Masaccio’s matrix (as well as the application in painting of scientific perspective) with the delicacy of colorism and elegance that are typically late Gothic.
Similar was the path taken by Guido di Pietro, who later became Fra’ Giovanni da Fiesole and is known today as Beato Angelico: at first he was a distinctly late Gothic painter, trained in the examples of Gherardo Starnina and Lorenzo Monaco, but on coming into contact with Masaccio his art changed radically, and he was able to merge the vigorous plasticism of Masaccio’s matrix (as well as the application in painting of scientific perspective) with the delicacy of colorism and elegance that are typically late Gothic. What’s more, Beato Angelico also posed himself as an innovator of iconographies that had been entrenched for centuries: it was he, for example, who eliminated the gold background from polyptychs, as can be seen in the San Marco Altarpiece (c. 1440, Florence, Museo Nazionale di San Marco).