eways on the
burnished leaves and red fruit of the orange trees, and casting shadows
from olive branches on the furrows of a new-ploughed field. Along the road
journey Joseph and Mary and the infant Christ, so that you may call this
little landscape a "Flight into Egypt," if you choose. Gentile, with all
his Umbrian pietism, was a painter for whom the fair sights of the earth
had exquisite value. The rich costumes of the Eastern kings, their train
of servants, their hawks and horses, hounds and monkeys, are painted by
him with scrupulous fidelity; and nothing can be more true to nature than
the wild flowers he has copied in the framework of this picture. Yet we
perceive that, though he felt in his own way the naturalistic impulse of
the age, he had scarcely anything in common with masters like Uccello or
Verocchio.

Still less had Fra Angelico. Of all the painters of this period he most
successfully resisted the persuasions of the Renaissance, and perfected an
art that owed little to sympathy with the external world. He thought it a
sin to study or to imitate the naked form, and his most beautiful faces
seem copied from angels seen in visions, not from any sons of men. While
the artists around him were absorbed in mastering the laws of geometry and
anatomy, Fra Angelico sought to express the inner life of the adoring
soul. Only just so much of realism, whether in the drawing of the body and
its drapery, or in the landscape background, as seemed necessary for
suggesting the emotion or for setting forth the story, found its way into
his pictures. The message they convey might have been told almost as
perfectly upon the lute or viol. His world is a strange one--a world not
of hills and fields and flowers and men of flesh and blood, but one where
the people are embodied ecstasies, the colours tints from evening clouds
or apocalyptic jewels, the scenery a flood of light or a background of
illuminated gold. His mystic gardens, where the ransomed souls embrace,
and dance with angels on the lawns outside the City of the Lamb, are such
as were never trodden by the foot of man in any paradise of earth.

Criticism has a hard task in attempting to discern the merit of the
several painters of this time. It is clear that we must look not to Fra
Angelico but to Masaccio for the progressive forces that were carrying art
forward to complete accomplishment. Yet the charm of Masaccio is as
nothing in comparison with that which holds us sp