lms into
Jerusalem, while the people strew the way with branches. Or again he
will tell us of Paradise, beneath whose towers, in a garden of wild
flowers, the saints dance with the angels, crowned with garlands, in the
light that streams through the gates of heaven from the throne of God.

How may we rightly speak of such a man, who in his simplicity has seen
angels on the hills of Tuscany, the flowers and trees of our world
scattered in heaven? Truly his master is unknown, for, as perhaps he was
too simple to say, St. Luke taught him in an idle hour, after the vision
of the Annunciation, when he was tired of writing the Magnificat of
Mary: and Angelico was his only pupil. That such things as these could
come out of the cloister is not so marvellous as that, since they grew
there, we should have suppressed the convents and turned the friars
away. For just as the lily of art towered first and broke into blossom
on the grave of St. Francis, so here in the convent of S. Marco of the
Dominicans was one who for the first time seems to have seen the world,
the very byways and hills of Tuscany, and dreamed of them as heaven.

It was another friar who was, as it were, to people that world, a little
more human perhaps, a little less than Paradise, which Angelico had
seen; to people it at least with children, little laughing rascals from
the street corner, caught with a soldo and turned into angels. Another
friar, but how different. The story, so romantic, so full of laughter
and tears, that Vasari has told us of Fra Lippo Lippi, is one of his
best known pages; I shall not tell it again. Four little panels painted
by him are here in this room, beside the work of Fra Angelico. While not
far away you come upon two splendid studies by Perugino of two monks of
the Vallombrosa, Dom Biagio Milanesi and Dom Baldassare, the finest
portraits he ever painted, and in some sort his most living work.[118]
Four other works by Perugino may also be found here,--the Assumption of
the Blessed Virgin, a Pieta, and the Agony in the Garden in the Sala di
Perugino, a Crucifixion in the Sala di Botticelli. The Assumption was
painted at Vallombrosa late in the year 1500, and is a fine piece of
work in Perugino's more mannered style. Above, God the Father, in a
glory of cherubim with a worshipping angel on either side, blesses
Madonna, who in mid-heaven gazes upward, seated on a cloud, in a
mandorla of cherubs, surrounded by four angels playing musical