of hospitality over the door of the wayfarers’ room, where Christ is being welcomed by two Dominicans in the way that Dominicans (as contrasted with scoundrelly Franciscans) would of course welcome Him.  In this Ospizio are three reliquaries which Fra Angelico painted for S. Maria Novella, now preserved here in a glass case.  They represent the Madonna della Stella, the Coronation of the Virgin, and the Adoration of the Magi.  All are in Angelico’s happiest manner, with plenty of gold; and the predella of the Coronation is the prettiest thing possible, with its blue saints gathered about a blue Mary and Joseph, who bend over the Baby.

The Madonna della Stella is the picture which was stolen in 1911, but quickly recovered.  It is part of the strange complexity of this world that it should equally contain artists such as Fra Angelico and thieves such as those who planned and carried out this robbery:  nominally custodians of the museum.  To repeat one of Vasari’s sentences:  “Some say that he never took up his brush without first making a prayer"....

The “Peter” with his finger to his lips, over the sacristy, is reminding the monks 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