Pope-Hennessy, 1974, challenges the assumption of many nineteenth-century commentators that Angelico was a naive and imitative painter:
What cannot be denied is that a golden thread of faith runs through this work. There is no painter whose images are more exactly calculated to encourage meditation and to foster those moral values which lie at the centre of the spiritual life. ( Pope-Hennessy, Fra Angelico, p. 3)
Pope-Hennessy's use of the word meditation is significant. The word might be translated as 'contemplatio' or even, in Ruskinian language, 'theoria', the rigorous and informed thinking about works of art which formed an important part of the humanist agenda of the Medici, and was also grounded in Thomist and Dominican principles.
Pope-Hennessy continues:
If all this be conceded the fact remains that Fra Angelico, in conventional lay terms, and for reasons largely unrelated to the devotional content of his work, was a great artist. The factor of exact aesthetic calculation is present in his paintings from the start, and if we compare his early and late altarpieces, the differences between them prove to be greater than those between the early and late works of any other Early Renaissance painter. The concept of pictorial space and the means by which it is established, the structure of the figures, the system of illumination, the interpretative content, one and all have been transformed. ( Pope-Hennessy, Fra Angelico, p. 3)
Pope-Hennessy rejects the suggestion that Angelico in simple-minded devotion merely imitated 'more adventurous minds':
The evidence of style is in the opposite sense, that Angelico was in the van of progress, and that the nature of his innovations was determined by the purposes his paintings were intended to perform. ( Pope-Hennessy, Fra Angelico, p. 3)
Many of Ruskin 's readers - and Ruskin himself - read Murray's Handbook of Painting in Italy. In it Kugler calls Angelico 'childlike' but much of what he writes reads as if it is based on the equation between simple-minded passivity and devotion which Ruskin seeks to challenge.