The paintings of the Florentine artist and Dominican monk Fra or “Beato” Angelico “the Blessed Angelic Painter” (1390/95-1455) convey the complexity of man’s experience of God – in all its richness, awe, and humility.

Learning from his great contemporary Masaccio, Fra Angelico weighted his figures to the earth, encompassed them in perspectival space, and gave them psychological depth. His illusionistic pictures, like the works of Jan van Eyck, convey light, air, and atmosphere. They are precise, ordered, and clear, as those of Piero. Yet Fra Angelico’s pictures feel very different from those of his contemporaries with their pursuit of naturalism; rather, they feel wondrously conceived, as if in the heart and mind of a mystic or a child. They are at once charming, humble, and ecstatic. Even when they depict martyrdom and death, they express, above all else, tenderness and spiritual beauty.

Fra Angelico’s magic is powerfully evident in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current retrospective of the artist – the first ever at an American venue, featuring nearly 75 paintings, drawings, and manuscript illuminations by Fra Angelico, as well as approximately 45 works by his assistants and followers. The glorious grouping of deeply spiritual works is a kaleidoscopic garden of earthly delights where splendor and novelty abound.

Fra Angelico’s forms are layered with multiple colors, and they glisten with spider web-thin strands of white, blue, and gold that make them quiver as if shuddering with devotion. Each figure lights the paintings like a candle: Luminous bodies radiate like halos and sing like choirs. Yet it is the figures’ grace, as well as their lightness of step and otherworldly calm, that hold the pictures together.

In “The Virgin of Humility” (c. 1436-38), with intimations of Bellini and Raphael, fluid lines snake like vines, and blue swells and pools across her body in grand, dreamy sweeps that are as enveloping as sleep and as natural as rushing water. In “The Dormition and Assumption of the Virgin” (c. 1433-34), pinks, limes, and blues are chalky and velvety yet hot and glossy, as if they had been polished to a state of ecstasy. Every taffy-like form rushes upward, as if higher and higher in key, toward a crescendo at the pinnacle of the painting, only to be quelled by the swirling gold and blue of Christ’s body.

Born Guido di Pietro, the painter took the name Fra Giovanni when he entered the convent of San Domenico in Fiesole somewhere between 1419 and 1422. His works were in high demand and his pre-eminence as a painter went basically unrivaled until Florence met with the innovations of Masaccio, who died at just 27 in 1428. Fra Angelico incorporated Masaccio’s natural play of light and shadow over modeled form, but he did so discernibly. Masaccio’s innovations strengthened and anchored his own love of delicately decorative surfaces and various textures; like earth to Fra Angelico’s heaven, they expanded his range and set those opposite qualities in beautiful tension with one another.

The Met’s show is a chronological survey of Fra Angelico’s small works and includes a number of new attributions. Not every work on view is sublime. More important, none of Fra Angelico’s complete large altarpieces (which are too big to be safely transported) are included in the Met’s exhibition (and, of course, none of his masterful frescos from the Convento di San Marco in Florence could travel to New York). The absence of those larger paintings and frescos does diminish the artist, robs him of some of his breadth. He expended great efforts in considering each of his works’ scale, placement, and purpose, approached each painting differently. This does not come through at the Met – how could it? – and only makes you want to plan a return to Florence as soon as possible.

The show begins with 17 works from the first decade of his career, including illuminated letters and small paintings the artist may have worked on while he was an assistant to Lorenzo Monaco. From there, we see a grouping of small paintings of saints, angels, and of the Virgin, as well as illuminated scrolls attributed to Fra Angelico and collaborators.

It is in the 1420s that the exhibition really begins to purr. Among the showstoppers are “Virgin and Child Enthroned” (c. 1420), in which the nude Christ child, protected within the canopy of the Virgin’s lap, reaches for a bunch of grapes, a symbol of the Eucharist. Also of note is “The Virgin and Child, With Five Angels” (c. 1426-27), an exotic picture in which the glistening angels, pressed into the gold leaf steps, play instruments, and the towering Virgin is rooted to and dropped down into the throne. The very late “Virgin and Child” (c. 1445-48), beautifully serene yet plain, is a strangely toy- or doll-like depiction of mother and child.

In two cases the exhibition reunites the ancillary works of two masterpieces: the “Santa Lucia Altarpiece” (c. 1429-30) and “The High Altarpiece from San Marco” (1440-42). The grouping of 10 pieces that surrounded the first includes its complete predella – “The Burial of the Virgin and the Reception of Her Soul in Heaven” from the Philadelphia Museum’s John G. Johnston collection is the extraordinary centerpiece. The nine panels that accompanied the work in San Marco include an exceptional three-part depiction of the lives of Sts. Cosmas and Damian. Seeing these paintings together (they are usually spread all over Europe and the United States) is one of the great achievements and thrills of this exhibition. The grouping also reminds us why we desire to see Fra Angelico’s works whole and in situ.

The last section of the exhibition is dedicated to five of Fra Angelico’s assistants and followers, including Battista di Biagio Sanguigni, Francesco Pesellino, Benozzo Gozzoli, and Zanobi Strozzi. Though not as transcendent as the best Fra Angelicos, their paintings and drawings, a show within the show, are well worth a look. If nothing else, they remind us, through comparison, of just how miraculous the works of Fra Angelico really are.

Fra Angelico was trained as a miniaturist before he entered the Dominican order, and, no matter how large and over-the-top his paintings became, his work never lost its sense of intimacy. It’s a delicacy and privacy that you generally encounter only in illuminated manuscripts – a reminder that the inward, meditative devoutness that was at the center of his religious calling was also at the center of his craft. Fra Angelico conveyed in his pictures the extremely private inwardness of devotion, and he also allowed for that inwardness to become public.

Part of the magic of this show is how beautifully it displays a monk from Fiesole’s ability to transform the essential and innermost qualities of faith into a communal and celebratory agent of inspiration, without robbing faith of its sense of privacy and mystery.

Until January 29 (1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).