the ground of his inaptitude for so elevated and responsible a station—­Eugenius, and not (as stated by Vasari) his successor Nicholas V., must have been the pope who sent the invitation and made the offer to Fra Giovanni, for Nicholas only succeeded in 1447.  The whole statement lacks authentication, though in itself credible enough.  Certain it is that Angelico was staying in Rome in the first half of 1447; and he painted in the Vatican the Cappella del Sacramento, which was afterwards demolished by Paul III.  In June 1447 he proceeded to Orvieto, to paint in the Cappella Nuova of the cathedral, with the co-operation of his pupil Benozzo Gozzoli.  He afterwards returned to Rome to paint the chapel of Nicholas V. In this capital he died in 1455, and he lies buried in the church of the Minerva.

According to all the accounts which have reached us, few men on whom the distinction of beatification has been conferred could have deserved it more nobly than Fra Giovanni.  He led a holy and self-denying life, shunning all advancement, and was a brother to the poor; no man ever saw him angered.  He painted with unceasing diligence, treating none but sacred subjects; he never retouched or altered his work, probably with a religious feeling that such as divine providence allowed the thing to come, such it should remain.  He was wont to say that he who illustrates the acts of Christ should be with Christ.  It is averred that he never handled a brush without fervent prayer and he wept when he painted a Crucifixion.  The Last Judgment and the Annunciation were two of the subjects he most frequently treated.

Bearing in mind the details already given as to the dates of Fra Giovanni’s sojournings in various localities, the reader will be able to trace approximately the sequence of the works which we now proceed to name as among his most important productions.  In Florence, in the convent of S. Marco (now converted into a national museum), a series of frescoes, beginning towards 1443; in the first cloister is the Crucifixion with St. Dominic kneeling; and the same treatment recurs on a wall near the dormitory; in the chapterhouse is a third Crucifixion, with the Virgin swooning, a composition of twenty life-sized figures—­the red background, which has a strange and harsh effect, is the misdoing of some restorer; an “Annunciation,” the figures of about three-fourths of life-size, in a dormitory; in the adjoining passage, the “Virgin enthroned,” with four saints; on the wall of a cell, the “Coronation of the Virgin,” with Saints Paul, Thomas Aquinas, Benedict, Dominic, Francis and Peter Martyr; two Dominicans welcoming Jesus, habited as a pilgrim; an “Adoration of the Magi”; the “Marys at the Sepulchre.”  All these works are later than the altarpiece which Angelico painted (as before mentioned) for the choir connected with this convent, and which is now in the academy of Florence; it represents the Virgin with Saints Cosmas and Damian (the patrons of the Medici