He joined the Dominican order when he was twenty and was ordered as a priest in the convent S. Domenico in Fiesole; from 1435 to 1443 he decorated with frescoes the cloister and the cells of the convent S. Marco in Florence; in 1445 he was in Rome, busy in the decoration of a chapel that was destroyed in the seventeenth century; in 1447 he begun the frescoes of the chapel of S. Brizio in Orvieto's dome; when he returned to Rome he frescoed (1448) the storie dei santi Serafino e Lorenzo in the Vatican chapel that, by the name of the commissioner Niccolò V, was called niccolina (iter 9), after a three year permanence (1449-1452) in Fiesole, prior of that Dominican convent, he returned to Rome, where he died. In a time when the medieval mysticism was about to give in to a naturalistic and laical conception of life and art, Angelico saw in painting a weapon at the service of God and of the Dominican Order; fro him, a persuaded Thomist, the bare capacity of knowing the natural truth and of creating beautiful works on the basis of precise scientific knowledge could not be placed as foundation of art; he could of course accept the humanistic ideas of a geometrical organization of space, but only because he recognized in the perspective researches of his contemporary fellow artists a suitable mean to express his God glorifying message. From these preliminary remarks it must not be deduced that his painting was the product of an naïve, albeit very inspired, primitivism; the late-gothic experiences of Lorenzo Monaco and Gentile da Fabriano had certainly contributed to his formation as had the influence of the miniaturists' school which flourished in S. Maria degli Angeli's convent; but the contacts with the great innovators of the Renaissance' architecture and sculpture, from Ghiberti to Brunelleschi to Donatello, the refined elegance in Masolino's painting and the new demands on order and constructivism imposed by Masaccio: in sum, all of the profound revolution which took place in Florentine art in the early years of the fifteenth century was sifted by Angelico through the filter of a fervent religiosity that was capable of finding in the splendor of colors flooded with light the mean to express itself with candid yet most expert effectiveness.

In the small tabernacles of S. Marco's museum, and particularly in the Madonna della Stella, Angelico 's art already appears fully shaped in its crystalline purity of conception and in the vivid splendor of color; later, the paintings of larger proportion – from the Tabernacolo dei Linaioli (1433) to the Giudizio Universale (Florence, S. Marco), from the Incoronazione della Vergine (Louvre) to the Deposizione dalla Croce (S. Marco) – and S. Marco's cycle of frescoes (1438-1447) are composed in rhythms that are more architectonically regular while the shapes acquire a greater physical evidence; the frescoes of the Cappella Niccolina, finally, represent the tendency to achieve a more sustained monumentality, although they do not attain the intensity of expression of previous works. Other works: Annunciazione (Cortona); Madonna "di Annalena" (S. Marco); Armadio degli Argenti (S. Marco); Decapitazione dei SS. Cosma e Damiano (Louvre); among S. Marco's frescoes, the Trasfigurazione , the Cristo deriso , the Noli me tangere and the two Annunciazioni .