nursing her little struggling son.  In 1421 he had taken the habit, and then Masaccio had come to the convent to paint in the Brancacci Chapel, and Fra Filippo watched him, helping him perhaps, certainly fired by his work, till he who had played in the streets of Florence decided that he must be a painter.  It is characteristic of his whole method that from the very beginning the cloister was too strait for him; he had the passion for seeing things, people, the life of the city, of strange cities too, for we hear of him vaguely in Naples, but soon in Florence again, where he painted in S. Ambrogio for the nuns the Coronation of the Virgin, now in the Accademia.  It was this picture which Cosimo came upon, and, finding the painter, took him into his house.  And truly, it was something very different from the holy work of Angelico, a painter Cosimo loved so well, that he found in that picture of the Coronation.  That Virgin, was she Queen of Angels or some Florentine girl?—­and then those angels, are they not the very children of the City of Flowers?  But Lippo was not content; he who had found the convent too narrow for him in his insatiable desire for life, was not likely to be content with any burgher’s palace.  Cosimo ordered pictures, Lippo laughed in the streets, so they locked him in, and he knotted the sheets of the bed together and let himself out of the window, and for days he lived in the streets.  So Cosimo let him alone, “labouring to keep him at his work by kindness,” understanding, perhaps that it was a child with whom he had to deal, a child full of the wayward impulses of children, the naive genius of youth, the happiness of all that;—­the passions, too, a passion, in Filippo’s case, for kisses.  He was never far from a girl’s arms; and then how he has painted them, shy, roguish, wanton daughters of Florence, with their laughing, obstinate, kicking babies, half laughing, half smiling, altogether serious too, while Lippo paints them with a kiss for payment.

He spent some months in Prato with his friend Fra Diamante, who had been his companion in novitiate.  The nuns of S. Margherita commissioned him to paint a picture for their high altar, and it was while at work there that he caught sight of Lucrezia Buti.  “Fra Filippo,” says Vasari, “having had a glance at the girl, who was very beautiful and graceful, so persuaded the nuns that he prevailed upon them to permit him to make a likeness of her for the figure of their Virgin.”  The picture, now in Paris, was finished, not before Filippo had fallen in love with Lucrezia and she with him, so that he led her away from the nuns; and on a certain day, when she had gone forth to do honour to the Cintola, he bore her from their keeping.  “Take us the foxes, the little foxes that spoil the vineyards; for our vineyards have tender grapes.”

Vasari tells us that Lucrezia never returned, but remained with Filippo, bearing him a son,—­that Filippino “who eventually became a most excellent and very famous painter like his father.”