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 priorship of S. Marco, which he declined as being unworthy, but recommended Antonio, “the good archbishop".—­That practically is his whole life.  As to his character, let Vasari tell us.  “He would often say that whosoever practised art needed a quiet life and freedom from care, and he who occupies himself with the things of Christ ought always to be with Christ. . . .  Some say that Fra Giovanni never took up his brush without first making a prayer. . . .  He never made a crucifix when the tears did not course down his cheeks.”  The one curious thing—­to me—­about Fra Angelico is that he has not been canonized.  If ever a son of the Church toiled for her honour and for the happiness of mankind it was he.

There are examples of Fra Angelico’s work elsewhere in Florence; the large picture in Room I of this gallery; the large altar-piece at the Uffizi, with certain others; the series of mural paintings in the cells of S. Marco; and his pictures will be found not only elsewhere in Florence and Italy but in the chief galleries of the world; for he was very assiduous.  We have an excellent example at the National Gallery, No. 663; but this little room gives us the artist and rhapsodist most completely.  In looking at his pictures, three things in particular strike the mind:  the skill with which he composed them; his mastery of light; and—­and here he is unique—­the pleasure he must have had in painting them.  All seem to have been play; he enjoyed the toil exactly as a child enjoys the labour of building a house with toy bricks.  Nor, one feels, could he be depressed.