Or it is the story of our Lord he tells us:  how in the evening Mary set out from Nazareth mounted on a mule, her little son in her arms, Joseph following afoot, with a pipkin for the fire in the wilderness, and a fiasco of wine lest they be thirsty, a great stick over his shoulder for the difficult way, and a cloak too, for our Lady.  Or it is the Annunciation he shows us:  how in the dawn of that day of days, his bright wings still tremulous with flight, Gabriel fell like a snowflake in the garden, in the silence of the cypresses between two little loggias, light and fair, where Madonna was praying; far and far away in the faint clear sky the Dove hovers, that is the Spirit of God, the Desire of all Nations.  Or it is Hosanna he sings, when Christ rides under the stripped palms into Jerusalem, while the people strew the way with branches.  Or again he will tell us of Paradise, beneath whose towers, in a garden of wild flowers, the saints dance with the angels, crowned with garlands, in the light that streams through the gates of heaven from the throne of God.

How may we rightly speak of such a man, who in his simplicity has seen angels on the hills of Tuscany, the flowers and trees of our world scattered in heaven?  Truly his master is unknown, for, as perhaps he was too simple to say, St. Luke taught him in an idle hour, after the vision of the Annunciation, when he was tired of writing the Magnificat of Mary:  and Angelico was his only pupil.  That such things as these could come out of the cloister is not so marvellous as that, since they grew there, we should have suppressed the convents and turned the friars away.  For just as the lily of art towered first and broke into blossom on the grave of St. Francis, so here in the convent of S. Marco of the Dominicans was one who for the first time seems to have seen the world, the very byways and hills of Tuscany, and dreamed of them as heaven.

It was another friar who was, as it were, to people that world, a little more human perhaps, a little less than Paradise, which Angelico had seen; to people it at least with children, little laughing rascals from the street corner, caught with a soldo and turned into angels.  Another friar, but how different.  The story, so romantic, so full of laughter and tears, that Vasari has told us of Fra Lippo Lippi, is one of his best known pages; I shall not tell it again.  Four little panels painted by him are here in this room, beside the work of Fra Angelico.  While not far away you come upon two splendid studies by Perugino of two monks of the Vallombrosa, Dom Biagio Milanesi and Dom Baldassare, the finest portraits he ever painted, and in some sort his most living work.[118] Four other works by Perugino may also be found here,—­the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, a Pieta, and the Agony in the Garden in the Sala di Perugino, a Crucifixion in the Sala di Botticelli.  The Assumption was painted at Vallombrosa late in the year 1500, and is