silk and placed her on an altar, in which lay hidden the promise of spring.  Then Ridolfo Ghirlandajo painted a fresco over the west door, of Madonna with her Girdle, and indeed they did all they knew in honour of their treasure:  so that Mino da Fiesole and Rossellino made a pulpit and set it there in the nave, and there, too, you may see Madonna giving her Girdle to St. Thomas, and St. Stephen, the boy martyr, stoned to death, and other remembrances.  In the south transept Benedetto da Maiano carved a Madonna and Child, while his brothers carved a Pieta; but it is not such work as this which calls you to the Duomo to-day, but certainly the Girdle itself, which, however, you can only see on certain occasions.[135] And then there is the work of those two children, Fra Lippo Lippi and the little girl who ran away from her convent for love of him, Lucrezia Buti; for though it was Lippo Lippi who painted, it was Lucrezia who served him for model, and since with him painting, for the first time perhaps, came to need life to inspire it, Lucrezia has her part in his work which it would be ungenerous to ignore.

Filippo Lippi was born in 1406 in a by-street of Florence called Ardiglione, behind the convent of the Carmelites, where he painted his first frescoes.  His mother, poor soul, died in giving him life, and his father died too before he was three years old.  For some time he lived in the care of a certain Mona Lapaccia, his aunt, who hardly brought him up till he was eight years old, when, as Vasari tells us, no longer able to support the burden of his maintenance, she took him to the Carmelites, who promised to make a friar of him.  Florence was at the moment of its all too brief spring, in which painting and sculpture were to grow almost like flowers at every street corner, with a delicate beauty that is characteristic of wild flowers, which yet are hardy enough in reality.  Reality, it is just that which is so touching in the work of this naive, observant painter, whose work has much of the beauty of a folk-song, one of those rispetti which on every Tuscan hill you may hear any summer day above the song of the cicale.  He went about, like the child he was his whole life long, looking at things out of curiosity, and remembering them for love.  His adventures, those marvellous adventures of his childhood so carefully related by Vasari,—­his capture by pirates on the beach of Ancona, his sojourn in Barbary, his escape hardly won by the astonishment of his art, are tales which, whether true or not, have a real value for us because they are indicative of his life, his view of the world:  his life was in itself so daring, so delightful an adventure, that nothing that could have happened to him can seem marvellous beside it.  For he has for the first time in Italy seen the things we have seen, and loved them:  the children at the street corner, the flowers by the wayside, the girls grouped in a doorway looking sideways up the street, a mother