A lover of Plutarchian parallels and contrasts would swiftly pass from Don Lorenzo Monaco to Masaccio. But one may better understand the new movement by taking first men who gradually and normally accepted the new knowledge. Such are Fra Angelico and Masolino, who began as Gothic painters and ended as Renaissance masters. They show us better the average drift of the times than does so revolutionary a figure as Masaccio. [Illustration: FIG. 71. Lorenzo Monaco, Annunciation.—_Trinità._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 72. Fra Angelico. Annunciation and Adoration of the Magi.—_Museum of S. Marco._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 73. Fra Angelico. Coronation of the Virgin.—_Louvre._ ] Fra Angelico[30] was born in 1387 and at twenty entered the religious state as a Dominican at Fiesole. How soon Fra Giovanni, not yet nicknamed Angelico, became a painter we hardly know. But four little pictures designed to inclose in their frames relics of the saints may represent his beginnings. Three are at San Marco, Florence, one in Mrs. John L. Gardner’s collection at Boston. The Little Annunciation with an Adoration of the Magi, Figure 72, may represent the work. It is refined, tender, of jewel-like freshness of color, graceful in linear arrangement, at first sight wholly Sienese in inspiration, and directly dependent on Lorenzo Monaco. A kind of veracity under the richness of the expression marks the work as after all straightforward and Florentine. The date may be about 1425, Fra Angelico, being in his middle thirties, and in his art about a century behind the times. In his early Gothic manner he conceived some of his masterpieces, such as the Coronation of the Virgin, with its glimpse of a celestial cloud land; and the whimsically beautiful Last Judgment. Both are at the Museum of San Marco. One can believe the report of Vasari that each day Fra Angelico prayed before touching brush to such masterpieces. Such pictures have the hush and charm of a celestial dreamland, a meditative beauty quite un-Florentine. [Illustration: FIG. 74. Fra Angelico. Madonna dei Linaiuoli. Originally an outdoor tabernacle.—_Museum of S. Marco._ ]