Fra Lippo Lippi had no vocation for the priesthood.  He was enticed into a Carmelite convent when a half-starved orphan of eight years old, ready to subscribe to any arrangement which promised him enough to eat.  There he developed an extraordinary talent for drawing; and the Prior, glad to turn it to account, gave him the cloisters and the church to paint.  But the rising artist had received his earliest inspirations in the streets.  His first practice had been gained in scrawling faces in his copybooks, and expanding the notes of his musical texts into figures with arms and legs.  His conceptions were not sufficiently spiritual to satisfy the Prior’s ideal of Christian art.  The men and women he painted were all true to life.  The simpler brethren were delighted as they recognized each familar type.  But the authorities looked grave at so much obtruding of the flesh; and the Prior clearly laid down his theory that painting was meant to inspire religious thoughts, and not to stifle them; and must therefore show no more of the human body than was needed to image forth the soul.

Fra Lippo Lippi comments freely and quaintly on the absurdity of showing soul by means of bodies so ill-painted that no one can bear to dwell upon them, as on the fallacy involved in all contempt for the earthly life.  “He will never believe that the world, with all its life and beauty, is an unmeaning blank.  He is sure, ’it means intensely and means good.’  He is sure, too, that to reproduce what is beautiful in it is the mission of Art.  If anyone objects, that the world being God’s work, Art cannot improve on it, and the painter will best leave it alone:  he answers that some things are the better for being painted; because, as we are made, we love them best when we see them so.  The artist has lent his mind for us to see with.  That is what Art means; what God wills in giving it to us.”

Nevertheless (he continues) he rubbed out his men and women; and though now, with a Medici for his patron, he may paint as he likes, the old schooling sticks to him.[74] And he works away at his saints, till something comes to remind him that life is not a dream, and he kicks the traces, as he has done now.  He ends with a half-joking promise to make the Church a gainer through his misconduct (supposing that the secret has been kept from her), by a beautiful picture which he will paint by way of atonement.

This picture, which he describes very humorously, is that of the Coronation of the Virgin, now in the “Belle Arti” at Florence.[75]

ABT VOGLER is depicted at the moment when this composer of the last century has “been extemporizing on the musical instrument of his invention.”  His emotion has not yet subsided; and it is that of the inspired musician, to whom harmonized sound is as the opening of a heavenly world.  His touch upon the keys has been as potent to charm, as the utterance of that NAME which summoned into Solomon’s presence the creatures of Earth, Heaven, and Hell,