Fra Angelico (c. 1400-55) is one of the most popular artists of the early Italian Renaissance. In his own lifetime churches and cathedrals competed for his work, and the style he evolved has come to be regarded as the natural language of religious painting. For more than a century the popular image of an angel has been that of an angel by Fra Angelico. Perhaps his best known work is the series of fresco decorations in the convent of San Marco in Florence, where Angelico was a friar. These paintings tell the story of the life of Christ as vividly and movingly today as they must have done over five hundred years ago. The powerful simplicity of the forms, the treatment of light and the subtlety of colour testify both to Fra Angelico's personal religious conviction and to his awareness of recent developments in Florentine art.