and the founders of orders, distinguished by some emblem, and for greater certainty bearing their names inscribed around their nimbus, or upon the embroideries of their vestments.  Saint Dominick holds a branch of lilies and a book.  A sun forms the agrafe of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s mantle; Charlemagne, “l’empereur a la barbe fleurie,” is recognizable by his crown of fleur-de-lis.  Saint Nicholas, bishop of Myra, has by his side the three balls of gold, symbolic of the three purses which he gave to a poor gentleman to dower his three daughters whose beauty exposed them to dangers.  On the other side, throng King David, apostles, martyrs, Saint Peter the Dominican with his wounded head, Saint Laurence holding his gridiron, Saint Stephen with a palm in his hand, and Saint George armed from head to foot; then, in the foreground of the picture, is the charming group of saints of perfectly celestial grace:  the kneeling Magdalen offers her vase of perfumes; Saint Caecilia advances, crowned with roses; Saint Clara gleams through her veil, constellated with crosses and golden stars; Saint Catherine of Alexandria leans upon the wheel, the instrument of her execution, as calmly and peacefully as if it were a spinning-wheel; and Saint Agnes holds in her arms a little white lamb, the symbol of innocent purity.

[Illustration:  THE CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN.
        Fra Angelico.]

Fra Beato Angelico has given to these youthful saints a celestial and ideal beauty, whose type exists not upon this earth:  they are visible souls, rather than bodies, they are thoughts of human form enveloped in these chaste draperies of white, rose, and blue, sown with stars and embroidered, clothed as might be the happy spirits who rejoice in the eternal light of Paradise.  If there be paintings in Heaven, surely they must resemble those of Fra Angelico.

    Guide de l’Amateur au Musee du Louvre (Paris, 1882).

JUDITH

(SANDRO BOTTICELLI)

MAURICE HEWLETT

In the days when it was verging on a question whether a man could be at the same time a good Christian and an artist the chosen subjects of painting were significant of the approaching crisis—­those glaring moral contrasts in history which, for want of a happier term, we call dramatic.  Why this was so, whether Art took a hint from Politics, or had withdrawn her more intimate manifestations to await likelier times, is a question it were long to answer.  The subjects, at any rate, were such as the Greeks, with their surer instincts and saving grace of sanity in matters of this kind, either forbore to meddle with or treated as decoratively as they treated acanthus-wreaths.  To-day we call them “effective” subjects; we find they produce shocks and tremors; we think it braces us to shudder, and we think that Art is a kind of emotional pill; we measure it quantitatively,