instruments, while two others are at her feet following her in her
flight; below, three saints, with St. Michael, stand disconsolate. In
the Pieta, painted much earlier, where the dead Christ lies on His
Mother's knees, while an angel holds the head of the Prince of Life on
his shoulders, and Mary Magdalen weeps at his feet, and two saints, St.
John and St. Joseph, perhaps, watch beside Him, there might seem to be
little to hold us or to interest us at all; the picture is really
without life, just because everything is so unreal, and if we gather any
emotion there, it will come to us from the soft sky, full of air and
light, that we see through a splendid archway, or from a tiny glimpse of
the valley that peeps from behind Madonna's robe. And surely it was in
this valley, on a little hill, that, as we may see in another picture
here, Christ knelt; yes, in the garden of the world, while the disciples
slept, and the angel brought Him the bitter cup. Not far away is
Jerusalem, and certain Roman soldiers and the priests; but it is not
these dream-like figures that attract us, but the world that remains
amid all interior changes still the same, and, for once in his work,
those tired men, really wearied out, who sleep so profoundly while
Christ prays. In the Crucifixion all the glamour, the religious
impression that, in Perugino's work at least, space the infinite heaven
of Italy, the largeness of her evening earth, make on one, is wanting,
and we find instead a mere insistence upon the subject. The world is
dark under the eclipsed sun and moon, and the figures are full of
affectation. Painted for the convent of St. Jerome, it was necessary to
include that saint and his lion, that strangely pathetic and sentimental
beast, so full of embarrassment, that looks at one so wearily from many
an old picture in the galleries of the world. If something of that
clairvoyance which created his best work is wanting here, it has
vanished altogether in that Deposition which Filippino Lippi finished,
and instead of a lovely dream of heaven and earth, one finds a laboured
picture full of feats of painting, of cleverness, and calculated
arrangement. This soft Umbrian world of dreamy landscape, which we find
in Perugino's pictures, is like a clearer vision of the land we already
descry far off with Fra Angelico, where his angels sing and his saints
dance for gladness.

It is a different and a more real life that you see in the work of Fra
Lippo