Bl. Fra Angelico

Fra Angelico was baptised Guido and was born at Vicchio di Mugello, near Florence, at the end of the 1300s. He and his brother Benedetto joined the Dominican friars at Fiesole. The brothers began as illuminators, painters of the pictures and decorated letters in handwritten books such as missals and choir books.

Fra Angelico went on to paint for churches in Florence and across Tuscany, and in St Peter's and the Vatican palaces for Popes Eugene IV and Nicholas V. His best-known works are the frescoes (paintings made on wet plaster) in the convent of San Marco in Florence. He believed that to paint Christ well a painter had to live like Christ, and the art historian Vasari wrote that he prayed before he painted.

He died in Rome in 1455 at the convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, where he is buried. Soon after his death people began calling him "Beato Angelico", the blessed angelic one. John Paul II named him patron of artists in 1984.

John Paul II beatified Fra Angelico in 1982 by equipollent (equivalent) beatification, which formally recognised his long-standing cult without the usual process.

Beatification allows public veneration, usually in a particular region or religious family. Canonization extends it to the whole Church.