and energetic as in Fra Lippo Lippi, fanciful as in
Botticelli--but still, always realism, in the sense of using nature
directly, without any distinct effort at illusion, the figures mostly
taken from life, and generally disposed in one plane, the details
minute, the landscapes faithful rather than suggestive.

The lives of those men were all typical of the times in which they
lived, and especially the life of the holy man we call Beato Angelico,
of saintly memory, that of the fiery lay brother, Filippo Lippi, whose
astounding talents all but redeemed his little less surprising sins--and
lastly that of Andrea Mantegna.

The first two stand out in tremendous contrast as contemporaries--the
realist of the Soul, and the realist of the Flesh, the Saint and the
Sinner, the Ascetic and the Sensualist.

Beato Angelico--of his many names, it is easier to call him by the one
we know best--was born in 1387. At that time the influence of the Empire
in Italy was ended, and that of the Popes was small. The Emperors and
the Popes had in fact contended for the control of municipal rights in
the free Italian cities; with the disappearance of those rights under
the Italian despots the cause of contention was gone, as well as the
partial liberty which had given it existence. The whole country was cut
up into principalities owned and ruled by tyrants. Dante had been dead
about sixty years, and the great imperial idea which he had developed in
his poem had totally failed. The theoretical rights of man, as usual in
the world's history, had gone down before the practical strength of
individuals, whose success tended, again, to call into activity other
individuals, to the general exaltation of talent for the general
oppression of mediocrity. In other words, that condition had been
produced which is most favourable to genius, because everything between
genius and brute strength had been reduced to slavery in the social
scale. The power to take and hold, on the one hand, and the power to
conceive and execute great works on the other, were as necessary to each
other as supply and demand; and all moral worth became a matter of
detail compared with success.

In such a state of the world, a man of creative genius who chanced to be
a saint was an anomaly; there was no fit place for him but a monastery,
and no field for his powers but that of Sacred Art. It was as natural
that Angelico should turn monk as that Lippo Lippi, who had been made
half