s in some respects the finest of the "Prisoners".

The first statue on the right of the entrance of the Tribuna del David
is a group called "Genio Vittorioso". Here in the old man we see rock
actually turned to life; in the various "Prisoners" near we see life
emerging from rock; in the David we forget the rock altogether. One
wonders how Michelangelo went to work. Did the shape of the block
of marble influence him, or did he with his mind's eye, the Roentgen
rays of genius, see the figure within it, embedded in the midst, and
hew and chip until it disclosed? On the back of the fourth statue on
the left a monkish face has been incised: probably some visitor to the
studio. After looking at these originals and casts, and remembering
those other Michelangelo sculptures elsewhere in Florence--the tombs
of the Medici, the Brutus and the smaller David--turn to the bronze
head over the cast of Moses and reflect upon the author of it all:
the profoundly sorrowful eyes behind which so much power and ambition
and disappointment dwelt.

It is peculiarly interesting to walk out of the Michelangelo gallery
into the little room containing the Fra Angelicos: to pass from a great
melancholy saturnine sculptor, the victim of the caprice of princes
temporal and spiritual, his eyes troubled with world knowledge and
world weariness, to the child-like celebrant of the joy of simple faith
who painted these gay and happy pictures. Fra Angelico--the sweetest
of all the Florentine painters--was a monk of Fiesole, whose real name
was Guido Petri da Mugello, but becoming a Dominican he called himself
Giovanni, and now through the sanctity and happiness of his brush is
for all time Beato Angelico. He was born in 1390, nearly sixty years
after Giotto's death, when Chaucer was fifty, and Richard II on the
English throne. His early years were spent in exile from Fiesole,
the brothers having come into difficulties with the Archbishop,
but by 1418 he was again at Fiesole, and when in 1436 Cosimo de'
Medici, returned from exile at Venice, set his friend Michelozzo
upon building the convent of S. Marco, Fra Angelico was fetched from
Fiesole to decorate the walls. There, and here, in the Accademia, are
his chief works assembled; but he worked also at Fiesole, at Cortona,
and at Rome, where he painted frescoes in the chapel of Nicholas V in
the Vatican and where he died, aged sixty-eight, and was buried. It
was while at Rome that the Pope offered him the