that that room is vowed to silence. In the chapter
house is the large Crucifixion by the same gentle hand, his greatest
work in Florence, and very fine and true in character. Beneath it
are portraits of seventeen famous Dominicans with S. Dominic in
the midst. Note the girl with the scroll in the right--how gay and
light the colouring. Upstairs, in the cells, and pre-eminently in the
passage, where his best known Annunciation is to be seen, Angelico is
at his best. In each cell is a little fresco reminding the brother
of the life of Christ--and of those by Angelico it may be said that
each is as simple as it can be and as sweet: easy lines, easy colours,
with the very spirit of holiness shining out. I think perhaps that the
Coronation of the Virgin in the ninth cell, reproduced in this volume,
is my favourite, as it is of many persons; but the Annunciation in the
third, the two Maries at the Sepulchre in the eighth, and the Child
in the Stable in the fifth, are ever memorable too. In the cell set
apart for Cosimo de' Medici, No. 38, which the officials point out,
is an Adoration of the Magi, painted there at Cosimo's express wish,
that he might be reminded of the humility proper to rulers; and here
we get one of the infrequent glimpses of this best and wisest of the
Medici, for a portrait of him adorns it, with a wrong death-date on it.

Here also is a sensitive terra-cotta bust of S. Antonio, Cosimo's
friend and another pride of the monastery: the monk who was also
Archbishop of Florence until his death, and whom we saw, in stone, in
a niche under the Uffizi. His cell was the thirty-first cell, opposite
the entrance. This benign old man, who has one of the kindest faces
of his time, which was often introduced into pictures, was appointed
to the see at the suggestion of Fra Angelico, to whom Pope Eugenius
(who consecrated the new S. Marco in 1442 and occupied Cosimo de'
Medici's cell on his visit) had offered it; but the painter declined
and put forward Antonio in his stead. Antonio Pierozzi, whose destiny
it was to occupy this high post, to be a confidant of Cosimo de'
Medici, and ultimately, in 1523, to be enrolled among the saints,
was born at Florence in 1389. According to Butler, from the cradle
"Antonino" or "Little Antony," as the Florentines affectionately
called him, had "no inclination but to piety," and was an enemy even
as an infant "both to sloth and to the amusements of children". As
a schoolboy his only p