may be seen in
the said book, in a portrait from the life, a figure in a short coat
with puffed sleeves.

DON LORENZO MONACO

LIFE OF DON LORENZO MONACO

OF THE ANGELI IN FLORENCE, PAINTER

For a good and religious person, I believe, there must be great
contentment in having ready to his hand some honourable exercise,
whether that of letters, or of music, or of painting, or of any other
liberal or mechanical arts, such as are not blameworthy, but rather
useful and helpful to other men; for the reason that after the divine
offices the time passes honourably with the delight that is taken in the
sweet labours of these pleasant exercises. And to this it may be added
that not only is he esteemed and held in price by others the while that
he lives, provided that they be not envious and malign, but that he is
also honoured after death by all men, by reason of his works and of the
good name that he leaves to those who survive him. And in truth one who
spends his time in this manner, lives in quiet contemplation and without
being molested by those ambitious desires which are almost always seen,
to their shame and loss, in the idle and unoccupied, who are for the
most part ignorant. And even if it comes about that our virtuous man is
sometimes smitten by the malign, so powerful is the force of virtue that
time covers up and buries the malice of the wicked, and the virtuous
man, throughout the ages that follow, remains ever famous and
illustrious.

Don Lorenzo, then, a painter of Florence, was a monk of the Order of
Camaldoli in the Monastery of the Angeli, which monastery was founded in
the year 1294 by Fra Guittone d'Arezzo, of the Militant Order of the
Virgin Mother of Jesus Christ, or rather, as the monks of that Order
were vulgarly called, of the Joyous Friars; and he applied himself in
his earliest years to design and to painting with so great zeal, that he
was afterwards deservedly numbered among the best of the age in that
exercise. The first works of this painter-monk, who held to the manner
of Taddeo Gaddi and his disciples, were in his Monastery of the Angeli,
where, among many other things, he painted the panel of the high-altar,
which is still seen to-day in their church, and which was completely
finished, as it may be seen from letters written below on the ornament,
in the year 1413, when it was set in place. On a panel, likewise, which
was in the Monastery of S. Benedetto, of the same Order of C