in a doorway
looking sideways up the street, a mother nursing her little struggling
son. In 1421 he had taken the habit, and then Masaccio had come to the
convent to paint in the Brancacci Chapel, and Fra Filippo watched him,
helping him perhaps, certainly fired by his work, till he who had played
in the streets of Florence decided that he must be a painter. It is
characteristic of his whole method that from the very beginning the
cloister was too strait for him; he had the passion for seeing things,
people, the life of the city, of strange cities too, for we hear of him
vaguely in Naples, but soon in Florence again, where he painted in S.
Ambrogio for the nuns the Coronation of the Virgin, now in the
Accademia. It was this picture which Cosimo came upon, and, finding the
painter, took him into his house. And truly, it was something very
different from the holy work of Angelico, a painter Cosimo loved so
well, that he found in that picture of the Coronation. That Virgin, was
she Queen of Angels or some Florentine girl?--and then those angels, are
they not the very children of the City of Flowers? But Lippo was not
content; he who had found the convent too narrow for him in his
insatiable desire for life, was not likely to be content with any
burgher's palace. Cosimo ordered pictures, Lippo laughed in the streets,
so they locked him in, and he knotted the sheets of the bed together and
let himself out of the window, and for days he lived in the streets. So
Cosimo let him alone, "labouring to keep him at his work by kindness,"
understanding, perhaps that it was a child with whom he had to deal, a
child full of the wayward impulses of children, the naive genius of
youth, the happiness of all that;--the passions, too, a passion, in
Filippo's case, for kisses. He was never far from a girl's arms; and
then how he has painted them, shy, roguish, wanton daughters of
Florence, with their laughing, obstinate, kicking babies, half laughing,
half smiling, altogether serious too, while Lippo paints them with a
kiss for payment.

He spent some months in Prato with his friend Fra Diamante, who had been
his companion in novitiate. The nuns of S. Margherita commissioned him
to paint a picture for their high altar, and it was while at work there
that he caught sight of Lucrezia Buti. "Fra Filippo," says Vasari,
"having had a glance at the girl, who was very beautiful and graceful,
so persuaded the nuns that he prevailed upon them to per