In the cells of the convent, Fra Angelico and his helpers painted no less than forty-three frescoes. These were intended for the private devotions of the brother occupying the cell, and the subjects were probably chosen not by Fra Angelico himself, but by his cloister mates. The best are conceived like the frescoes of the lower story. The background is just a veiled sky, there are no accessories, the figures loom in an indefinite space. Majestic is the Transfiguration, Figure 78, very lovely the Coronation of the Virgin. The angelic painter draws the maximum effect from the simplest patterns and briefest means. There is the measured and simple dignity of the early Christian mosaics with a warmer and more personal feeling. Fra Angelico, when he wishes, can be elaborately realistic. He is so in the garden scene where the Risen Christ gently rebuffs the Magdalen, in the crowded Adoration of the Magi, which tradition assigns to Cosimo de’ Medici’s cell, and in the Annunciation, Figure 79, in the corridor with its graceful Renaissance _loggia_. In this more circumstantial vein, Fra Angelico is delightful, but I think below his best. In all the frescoes at S. Marco, however, Fra Angelico appears as a wholly Florentine figure with an art based at once on the study of nature and on an understanding admiration for the masterpieces of Giotto and Orcagna. [Illustration: FIG. 78. Fra Angelico. Transfiguration, fresco in a cell at _S. Marco_. ] Something of his mediævalism, of his Sienese manner, persists in the numerous little predella panels, such as those telling delightfully the story of the doctor saints, Cosmo and Damian, and the series with the life of Christ which adorned the doors of the plate lockers of the Church of S. Marco. With their fully developed pictorialism, their careful regard for the minor realisms of setting, these little pictures are the prelude to his last phase at Rome. They are also the last Florentine pictures that observe those traditional iconographical forms which had persisted for four centuries. [Illustration: FIG. 79. Fra Angelico. Annunciation. Fresco.—_San Marco._ ]