In the same year, as soon as he had entered upon his new duties, the Abbess of Sta. Margherita commissioned the new chaplain to paint an altarpiece for the high altar of the convent church. This afforded Fra Filippo a welcome opportunity for carrying out what must have been a carefully and cunningly devised scheme. He begged the Abbess to allow Lucrezia Buti, "who was exceedingly beautiful and graceful," to sit for the head of the Madonna; and, having obtained this favour, presumably did not fail to advance his cause. His clerical habit and the great difference of age between the monk and the nun--he was then about fifty, and Lucrezia twenty-one--may have helped to disarm suspicion: they did not prevent the young nun from taking the fatal step which was bound to bring disgrace and dishonour upon her; which, indeed, was accounted a crime, for Lucrezia was not, as Vasari has it, "either a novice or a boarder," but one of the eight "choral and professed nuns" who formed the establishment of Santa Margherita. [Illustration: PLATE VI.--THE VIRGIN AND CHILD (In the Pitti Palace, Florence) Painted at Prato, soon after the abduction of Lucrezia Buti by the amorous monk, the central group of this _tondo_ may be reasonably assumed to portray Lucrezia and Filippo Lippi. The incidents in the background, which have been a source of inspiration for many succeeding artists, including Raphael himself, who echoes the figure of the basket-carrying woman in his "Incendio del Borgo," depict the birth of Mary, and the meeting of St. Anne and Joachim. The motif of the Birth of the Virgin is in reality a convenient excuse for the painting of a charmingly rendered scene of Florentine domestic life. The distribution of light and the harmonising of the strong colour-notes are managed with consummate skill.] The plot came to a successful issue on the 1st of May 1456, during the celebration of the feast of the Madonna della Cintola--Our Lady of the Girdle. On that day it was the custom to exhibit at the Cathedral a sacred relic, purporting to be the miraculous girdle given to St. Thomas by the Virgin, who appeared to him after her death. That day was one of the rare occasions when the nuns of Sta. Margherita left the precincts of their convent to join the worshippers in the Duomo. On May 1, 1456, there were eight nuns who set out to pray before the sacred girdle--but seven only returned to the convent. Lucrezia Buti had been carried off by her monkish lover to his house; and if any attempts were made to induce her to return, either to Sta. Margherita, or to her relatives in Florence, she lent a deaf ear to these appeals. Vasari relates that "the father of Lucrezia was so grievously afflicted thereat, that he never more recovered his cheerfulness, and made every possible effort to regain his child." This, of course, is pure invention, since Francesco Buti had been mouldering in his grave for six years when the abduction took place.