and shadow, the pleasant, eager faces of the women—­where St. John raises Drusiana from the grave, or St. Philip drives out the Dragon of Hierapolis; while above St. John is martyred, and St. Philip too.  But it is in the choir behind the high altar, where for so long the scaffolding has prevented our sight, that we come upon the simple serious work of Domencio Ghirlandajo, whom all the critics have scorned.  Born in 1449, the pupil of Alessio Baldovinetti, Ghirlandajo is not a great painter perhaps, but rather a craftsman, a craftsman with a wonderful power of observation, of noting truly the life of his time.  He seems to have asked of art rather truth than beauty.  Almost wholly, perhaps, without the temperament of an artist, his success lies in his gift for expressing not beauty but the life of his time, the fifteenth century in Florence, which lives still in all his work.  Consider, then, the bright facile mediocre work of Benozzo Gozzoli, not at its best, in the Campo Santo of Pisa, remember how in the dark chapel of the Medici palace he lights up the place almost as with a smile, in the gay cavalcade that winds among the hills.  There is much fancy there, much observation too; here a portrait, there a gallant fair head, and the flowers by the wayside.  Well, it is in much the same way that Ghirlandajo has painted here in the choir of S. Maria Novella.  He has seen the fashions, he has noted the pretty faces of the women, he has watched the naive homely life of the Medici ladies, for instance, and has painted not his dreams about Madonna, but his dreams of Vanna Tornabuoni, of Clarice de’ Medici, and the rest.  And he was right; almost without exception his frescoes are the most interesting and living work left in Florence.  He has understood or divined that one cannot represent exactly that which no longer exists; and it is to represent something with exactitude that he is at work.  So he contents himself very happily with painting the very soul of his century.  It is a true and sincere art this realistic, unimpassioned, impersonal work of Ghirlandajo’s, and in its result, for us at any rate, it has a certain largeness and splendour.  Consider this “Birth of the Virgin.”  It is full of life and homely observation.  You see the tidy dusted room where St. Anne is lying on the bed, already, as in truth she was, past her youth, but another painter would have forgotten it.  She is just a careful Florentine housewife, thrifty too, not flurried by her illness, for she has placed by her bedside, all ready for her need, two pomegranates and some water.  Then, again, they are going to wash the little Mary.  She lies quite happily sucking her fingers in the arms of her nurse, the basin is in the middle of the floor, a servant has just come in briskly, no doubt as St. Anne has always insisted, and pours the water quickly into the vessel.  It is not difficult to find all sorts of faults, of course, as the critics have not hesitated to do.  That perspective, for instance, how good it is: