From these observations on the style of Benozzo Gozzoli it will be seen that in the evolution of Renaissance culture he may be compared with the romantic poets for whom the cheerfulness of nature and the joy that comes to men from living in a many-coloured world of inexhaustible delight were sufficient sources of inspiration.  It should be mentioned lastly that he enjoyed the patronage and friendship of the Medicean princes.

Another painter favoured by the Medici was Fra Filippo Lippi, whose life and art-work were alike the deviation of a pleasure-loving temperament from its natural sphere into the service of the Church.  Left an orphan at the age of two years, he was brought up by an aunt, who placed him, as a boy of eight, in the convent of the Carmine at Florence.  For monastic duties he had no vocation, and the irregularities of his behaviour caused scandal even in that age of cynical indulgence.  It can scarcely be doubted that the schism between his practice and profession served to debase and vulgarise a genius of fine imaginative quality, while the uncongenial work of decorating choirs and painting altar-pieces limed the wings of his swift spirit with the dulness of routine that savoured of hypocrisy.  Bound down to sacred subjects, he was too apt to make angels out of street-urchins, and to paint the portraits of his peasant-loves for Virgins.[179] His delicate sense of natural beauty gave peculiar charm to this false treatment of religious themes.  Nothing, for example, can be more attractive than the rows of angels bearing lilies in his “Coronation of the Virgin;"[180] and yet, when we regard them closely, we find that they have no celestial quality of form or feature.  Their grace is earthly, and the spirit breathed upon the picture is the loveliness of colour, quiet and yet glowing—­blending delicate blues and greens with whiteness purged of glare.  The beauties as well as the defects of such compositions make us regret that Fra Filippo never found a more congenial sphere for his imagination.  As a painter of subjects half-humorous and half-pathetic, or as the illustrator of romantic stories, we fancy that he might have won fame rivalled only by the greatest colourists.  One such picture it was granted him to paint, and this is his masterpiece.  In the prime of life he was commissioned to decorate the choir of the cathedral at Prato with the legends of S. John Baptist and S. Stephen.  All of these frescoes are noteworthy for their firm grasp upon reality in the portraits of Florentine worthies, and for the harmonious disposition of the groups; but the scene of Salome dancing before Herod is the best for its poetic feeling.  Her movement across the floor before the tyrant and his guests at table, the quaint fluttering of her drapery, the well-bred admiration of the spectators, their horror when she brings the Baptist’s head to Herodias, and the weak face of the half-remorseful Herod are expressed with a dramatic power that shows the genius of a poet painter.  And even more lovely than Salome are a pair of girls locked in each other’s arms close by Herodias on the dais.  A natural and spontaneous melody, not only in the suggested movements of this scene, but also in the colouring, choice of form, and treatment of drapery, makes it one of the most musical of pictures ever painted.