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Updated: June 26, 2025
Faithful, not in these days of fear only, but hitherto in all her life, and afterwards forever. After you have seen it enough, look also for a little while at Angelico's Marriage and Death of the Virgin, in the same room; you may afterwards associate the three pictures always together in your mind. And, looking at nothing else to-day in the Uffizi, let us go back to Giotto's chapel.
But Donald has seen his Lord hanging upon the Cross for him, and the New Jerusalem descending like a bride adorned for her husband more plainly than if Perugino's great Crucifixion, with the kneeling saints, and Angelico's Outer Court of Heaven, with the dancing angels, had been hung in our little Free Kirk.
But best of all I like the Flight into Egypt, in No. 235. It is when one looks at Fra Angelico that one understands how wise were the Old Masters to seek their inspiration in the life of Christ. One cannot imagine Fra Angelico's existence in a pagan country. Look, in No. 236, at the six radiant and rapturous angels clustering above the manger. Was there ever anything prettier?
In any case the search must be a long one. No, I must set aside that scheme, which for the present is impracticable. "What I ought to do I know very well; I ought to put the article into shape on Angelico's picture in the Louvre. I promised the paper at least four months ago to the magazine which clamours for it every morning by letter. It is disgraceful!
Meanwhile there is a silence in the celestial company, through which the still voice of the praying heart is heard, a silence corresponding to the hushed mood of the worshipper. The children are accustomed to the holy place; therefore their attitudes are both reverent and natural. They are more earthly than Fra Angelico's melodists, and yet they are not precisely of human lineage.
His interest is neither in the untempered goodness of Angelico's saints, nor the untempered evil of Orcagna's Inferno; but with men and women, in their mixed and uncertain condition, always attractive, clothed sometimes by passion with a character of loveliness and energy, but saddened perpetually by the shadow upon them of the great things from which they shrink.
The frescoes of St. Mark's, at Florence, have a peculiar significance to the spectator familiar with Fra Angelico's life. One of the most pathetic and beautiful tragedies in modern literature is that which a Danish poet elaborated from Correggio's artist career.
And in Angelico's rooms there is a little, modest Annunciation by one of his school No. 256 which shows what a good influence he was, and to which the eye returns and returns.
One beautiful and splendid picture, the Descent from the Cross, alas! repainted, stands near Gentile's Adoration, among several later pictures, of which certainly the loveliest is a gentle and serene work by Domenico Ghirlandajo, an Adoration of the Shepherds; but the greater part of Angelico's work to be found here is in another room.
In one of Fra Angelico's pictures, a representation of the Last Judgment, he has tried his saintly hand at making devils indeed, and showing them busily at work, tormenting the poor, damned souls in fifty ghastly ways.
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