In 1896, a Scottish insurance magnate named Evan MacKenzie set himself to erecting a massive “medieval” castle on a glorious site overlooking the Mediterranean, hard by the outskirts of Genoa. For this extravagant client, a gifted young Florentine architect named Gino Coppedè concocted a huge turreted, crenellated, and rusticated fantasy that, to this day, remains a masterpiece of fin de siècle historicism run amok. As the final jewel in MacKenzie’s baronial crown, Coppedè designed a chapel and commissioned for its walls some suitably religious frescoes. Executed by the brilliant Russian copyist, and later restorer, Lockoff, these decorations paraphrase and mimic the one primitive (Roman Catholic) artist with whom the presumably low-church MacKenzie would have felt comfortable: Fra Angelico. The choice is not surprising: by the end of the nineteenth century, the “beatification” of the celebrated Dominican friar-painter had reached its apogee. And this was not due to having been “rediscovered”—not, certainly, in the way other great European artists of the past, such as Vermeer, Botticelli, and El Greco, were beginning to re-emerge from obscurity just at this time.

Fra Angelico’s given name was Guido; the addition of the prefix “Fra” occurred when the painter became a Dominican friar, known as Fra Giovanni, in the early 1420s. The “angelic” appellation was acquired posthumously, by 1469, only a scant two decades after the artist’s death. “Fra Angelico,” as he was invariably called thereafter, was never to be absent in later historical accounts of Italian art. Vasari goes to great lengths