[Illustration:  THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS

By Domenico Ghirlandajo, Accademia

Anderson]

No work that we possess of the fourteenth century, save Giotto’s, prepares us for the frescoes of Masolino:  they must be sought in the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine.  But of the work of Masaccio his pupil, though his best work remains in the same place, there may be found here in the Accademia an early altarpiece of Madonna and Child with St. Anne (Sala III, No. 70).  Born in 1401, dying when he was but twenty-seven years of age, he recreated for himself that reality in painting which it had been the chief business of Giotto to discover.  Influenced by Donatello, his work is almost as immediate as that of sculpture.  Impressive and full of an energy that seems to be life itself, his figures have almost the sense of reality.  “I feel,” says Mr. Berenson, “that I could touch every figure, that it would yield a definite resistance ... that I could walk round it.”  There follow Paolo Uccello, whose work will be found in the Uffizi, and Andrea del Castagno, who painted the equestrian portrait of Niccolo da Tolentino in the Duomo, and the frescoes in S. Apollonia.

Thus we come really into the midst of the fifteenth century, to the work of Fra Angelico, Fra Lippo Lippi, and Botticelli, which we have loved so much.

It is really the Middle Age, quite expressed for once, by one who, standing a little way off perhaps, could almost scorn it, that we come upon in Gentile da Fabriano’s picture, on an easel here, of the Adoration of the Shepherds.  It is one of the loveliest of all early Umbrian pictures, full of a new kind of happiness that is about to discover the world.  And if with Gentile we seem to look back on the Middle Age from the very dawn of the Renaissance, it is the Renaissance itself, the most simple and divine work it achieved in its earliest and best days, that we see in the work of Fra Angelico.  One beautiful and splendid picture, the Descent from the Cross, alas! repainted, stands near Gentile’s Adoration, among several later pictures, of which certainly the loveliest is a gentle and serene work by Domenico Ghirlandajo, an Adoration of the Shepherds; but the greater part of Angelico’s work to be found here is in another room.  There, in many little pictures, you may see the world as Paradise, the very garden where God talked with Adam.  Or he will tell us the story of S. Cosmas and S. Damian, those good saints who despised gold, so that with their brethren they were cast into a furnace, but the beautiful bright flames curled and leaped away from them as at the breath of God, licking feverishly at the persecutors, who with iron forks try to thrust the faggots nearer, while one hides from the heat of the fire behind his shield, and another, already dead, is consumed by the flames.  Above in a gallery of marble, decked with beautiful rugs and hangings of needlework, the sultan looks on astonished amid his courtiers.