e by the approach of bliss ever hungered for, but never expected,
hearing that it is she who is the beloved; and the angel is the knight's
squire, excited at the message he has to carry, but terrified at the
sight of the woman to whom he must carry it, panting with the weight of
another man's love, and learning, as he draws his breath to say those
words, what love is himself.

The absence of individual invention, implying the absence of individual
dramatic realisation, strikes one more than anywhere in the works of
Angelico; and most of all in his frescoes of the cells of St. Mark's.
For, while these are evidently less cared for as art, indeed scarcely
intended, in their hasty execution, to be considered as paintings at
all, they are more strictly religious in intention than any other of
Angelico's works; indeed, perhaps, of all paintings in the world, the
most exclusively devoted to a religious object. They are, in fact, so
many pages of Scripture stuck up, like texts in a waiting-room, in the
cells of the convent: an adjunct to the actual written or printed Bible
of each monk. For this reason we expect them to possess what belongs so
completely to the German engravers of Duerer's school, the very essential
of illustrative art--imaginative realisation of the scenes, an attempt
to seize the attention and fill it with the subject. This is by no means
the case: for Angelico, although a saint, was a man of the fifteenth
century, and, despite all his obvious efforts, he was not a real follower
of Giotto. What impressiveness of actual artistic arrangement these
frescoes really possess, is due, I think, to no imaginative effort
of the artist, but to the exigencies of the place; as any similar
impressiveness is due in Signorelli's Annunciation to the quality of his
form, and in Botticelli's Annunciation to the pervading character of his
heads and gestures. These pale angels and St. Dominicks and Magdalens,
these diaphanous, dazzling Christs and Virgins of Angelico's, shining
out of the dark corner of the cell made darker, deeper, by the dark
green or inky purple ground on which they are painted, are less the
spiritual conception of the painter than the accidental result of the
darkness of the place, where lines must be simple and colours light, if
anything is to be visible. For in the more important frescoes in the
corridors and chapter-room, where the light is better, there is a return
to Angelico's hackneyed vapid pinks and b