and the nice thoughtfulness that made the Child a real child, interested like a child in the bald head of the kneeling mage; while the predella is not to be excelled in its modest, tender beauty by any in Florence; and predellas, I may remark again, should never be overlooked, strong as the tendency is to miss them.  Many a painter has failed in the large space or made only a perfunctory success, but in the small has achieved real feeling.  Gentile’s Holy Family on its way to Egypt is never to be forgotten.  Not so radiant as Fra Angelico’s, in the room we have visited out of due course, but as charming in its own manner—­both in personages and landscape; while the city to which Joseph leads the donkey (again without reins) is the most perfect thing out of fairyland.

Ghirlandaio’s picture, which is the neighbour of Gentile’s, is as a whole nearer life and one of his most attractive works.  It is, I think, excelled only by his very similar Adoration of the Magi at the Spedale degli Innocenti, which, however, it is difficult to see; and it is far beyond the examples at the Uffizi, which are too hot.  Of the life of this artist, who was Michelangelo’s master, I shall speak in the chapter on S. Maria Novella.  This picture, which represents the Adoration of the Shepherds, was painted in 1485, when the artist was thirty-six.  It is essentially pleasant:  a religious picture on the sunny side.  The Child is the soul of babyish content, equally amused with its thumb and the homage it is receiving.  Close by is a goldfinch unafraid; in the distance is a citied valley, with a river winding in it; and down a neighbouring hill, on the top of which the shepherds feed their flocks, comes the imposing procession of the Magi.  Joseph is more than commonly perplexed, and the disparity between his own and his wife’s age, which the old masters agreed to make considerable, is more considerable than usual.

Both Gentile and Ghirlandaio chose a happy subject and made it happier; Fra Angelico (for the third screen picture) chose a melancholy subject and made it happy, not because that was his intention, but because he could not help it.  He had only one set of colours and one set of countenances, and since the colours were of the gayest and the countenances of the serenest, the result was bound to be peaceful and glad.  This picture is a large “Deposizione della Croce,” an altar-piece for S. Trinita.  There is such joy in the painting and light in the sky that a child would clap his hands at it all, and not least at the vermilion of the Redeemer’s blood.  Fra Angelico gave thought to every touch:  and his beatific holiness floods the work.  Each of these three great pictures, I may add, has its original frame.