otticelli, which we have loved so
much.

It is really the Middle Age, quite expressed for once, by one who,
standing a little way off perhaps, could almost scorn it, that we come
upon in Gentile da Fabriano's picture, on an easel here, of the
Adoration of the Shepherds. It is one of the loveliest of all early
Umbrian pictures, full of a new kind of happiness that is about to
discover the world. And if with Gentile we seem to look back on the
Middle Age from the very dawn of the Renaissance, it is the Renaissance
itself, the most simple and divine work it achieved in its earliest and
best days, that we see in the work of Fra Angelico. One beautiful and
splendid picture, the Descent from the Cross, alas! repainted, stands
near Gentile's Adoration, among several later pictures, of which
certainly the loveliest is a gentle and serene work by Domenico
Ghirlandajo, an Adoration of the Shepherds; but the greater part of
Angelico's work to be found here is in another room. There, in many
little pictures, you may see the world as Paradise, the very garden
where God talked with Adam. Or he will tell us the story of S. Cosmas
and S. Damian, those good saints who despised gold, so that with their
brethren they were cast into a furnace, but the beautiful bright flames
curled and leaped away from them as at the breath of God, licking
feverishly at the persecutors, who with iron forks try to thrust the
faggots nearer, while one hides from the heat of the fire behind his
shield, and another, already dead, is consumed by the flames. Above in a
gallery of marble, decked with beautiful rugs and hangings of
needlework, the sultan looks on astonished amid his courtiers. Or it is
the story of our Lord he tells us: how in the evening Mary set out from
Nazareth mounted on a mule, her little son in her arms, Joseph following
afoot, with a pipkin for the fire in the wilderness, and a _fiasco_ of
wine lest they be thirsty, a great stick over his shoulder for the
difficult way, and a cloak too, for our Lady. Or it is the Annunciation
he shows us: how in the dawn of that day of days, his bright wings still
tremulous with flight, Gabriel fell like a snowflake in the garden, in
the silence of the cypresses between two little loggias, light and fair,
where Madonna was praying; far and far away in the faint clear sky the
Dove hovers, that is the Spirit of God, the Desire of all Nations. Or it
is Hosanna he sings, when Christ rides under the stripped pa