The Coronation of the Virgin (1290) is like a litany of the saints and of the Virgin herself, chanted in antiphon, ending in the simpler splendour of Magnificat, sung to some Gregorian tone full of gold, of faint blues as of a far-away sky, of pale rose-colours as of roses fading on an altar in the sunlight, and the candles of white are more spotless than the lily is.  Amidst a glory of angels, the piping voices of children, she in whose name all the flowers are hidden is crowned Queen of Angels by the Prince of Life.  This marvellous dead picture lived once in S. Maria Nuova; its predelle have been torn away from it, but may be found here, nevertheless, in the Birth of St. John Baptist (1162) and the Spozalizio (1178).

It is to a painter less mystical, but not less visionary, that we come in the work of Paolo Uccello, the great “Battle” (52), of which two variants exist, one in the Louvre, the other, the most beautiful of the three, in the National Gallery.  It is, as some have thought, a picture of the Battle of S. Egidio, where Braccio da Montone made Carlo Malatesta and his nephew Galeotto prisoners in 1416.  Splendid as it is, something has been lost to us by restoration.  Paola Uccello, the friend of Donatello and of Brunellesco, was all his life devoted to the study of perspective.  Many marvellous drawings in which he traced that baffling vista, of which he was wont to exclaim when, labouring far into the night, his wife poor soul, would entreat him to take rest and sleep:  “Ah, what a delightful thing is this perspective.”  And then, much beautiful work of his has perished.  It was on this art he staked his life.  “What have you there that you are shutting up so close?” Donatello said to him one day when he found him alone at work on the Christ and St. Thomas, which he had been commissioned to paint over the door of the church dedicated to that saint in the Mercato Vecchio.  “Thou shalt see it some day,—­let that suffice thee,” Uccello answered.  “And it chanced,” says Vasari, “that Donato was in the Mercato Vecchio buying fruit one morning when he saw Paolo Uccello, who was uncovering his picture.”  Saluting him courteously, therefore, his opinion was instantly demanded by Paolo, who was anxiously curious to know what he would say of the work.  But when Donato had examined it very minutely, he turned to Paolo and said:  “Why, Paolo, thou art uncovering thy picture just at the very time when thou shouldst be shutting it up from the sight of all.”  These words wounded Paolo so grievously that he would no more leave his house, but shut himself up, devoting himself only the more to the study of perspective, which kept him in poverty and depression to the day of his death.