may further be said that
the limitations he imposed would have been fatal to the free development
of art if they had been observed.

Several painters, besides Fra Baccio, submitted to Savonarola's influence.
Among these the most distinguished were the pure and gentle Lorenzo di
Credi and Sandro Botticelli, who, after the great preacher's death, is
said to have abandoned painting. Neither Lorenzo di Credi nor Fra Baccio
possessed a portion of the prophet's fiery spirit. Had that but found
expression in their cloistral pictures, one of the most peculiar and
characteristic flowers of art the world has ever known, would then have
bloomed in Florence. The mantle of Savonarola, however, if it fell upon
any painter, fell on Michael Angelo, and we must seek an echo of the
friar's thunders in the Sistine Chapel. Fra Bartolommeo was too tender and
too timid. The sublimities of tragic passion lay beyond his scope. Though
I have ventured to call him the painter of adoration, he did not feel even
this movement of the soul with the intensity of Fra Angelico. In the
person of S. Dominic kneeling beneath the cross Fra Angelico painted
worship as an ecstasy, wherein the soul goes forth with love and pain and
yearning beyond any power of words or tears or music to express what it
would utter. To these heights of the ascetic ideal Fra Bartolommeo never
soared. His sobriety bordered upon the prosaic.

We have now reached the great age of the Italian Renaissance, the age in
which, not counting for the moment Venice, four arch-angelic natures
gathered up all that had been hitherto achieved in art since the days of
Pisano and Giotto, adding such celestial illumination from the sunlight of
their inborn genius that in them the world for ever sees what art can do.
Lionardo da Vinci was born in Valdarno in 1452, and died in France in
1519. Michael Angelo Buonarroti was born at Caprese, in the Casentino, in
1475, and died at Borne in 1564, having outlived the lives of his great
peers by nearly half a century. Raphael Santi was born at Urbino in 1483,
and died in Rome in 1520. Antonio Allegri was born at Correggio in 1494,
and died there in 1534. To these four men, each in his own degree and
according to his own peculiar quality of mind, the fulness of the
Renaissance, in its power and freedom, was revealed. They entered the
inner shrine, where dwelt the spirit of their age, and bore to the world
without the message each of them had heard. In their