Painted for the chapel in Cosimo de' Medici's palace, this picture was transferred to the Uffizi Gallery from the Royal store-rooms in 1776. More, perhaps, than in any other work by the master, the whole arrangement of the picture and the management of the planes reveal the influence of the relief sculpture by Donatello and his followers. It is particularly akin in spirit to the art of Rossellino. The landscape seen through a window opening behind the heads of the Madonna and the Infant Saviour, as well as the laughing angel in the foreground, are entirely new conceptions in Florentine painting. That the picture must have been much admired by Filippo Lippi's contemporaries is proved by the innumerable slightly modified versions of it which were produced by the next generation of Florentine painters.] What was the end of Lippi's romance? There are no contemporary records to throw clear light upon it. In Milanesi's edition of Vasari it is stated that Pope Eugene granted the monk a special dispensation to marry Lucrezia. If any such dispensation ever was granted, it must have been by Pius II., and not by Eugene. Under any circumstances, it seems very improbable that Fra Filippo, as we learn from the same source, should have refused to avail himself of this permission to legalise his union, because "he preferred to continue living the sort of life that pleased him." He was then a man of considerable age, near the end of his life, and past the times for "sowing his wild oats." The papal dispensation, if actually given, must have been sought for, in which case Filippo would presumably have availed himself of it; or, if granted on the Pope's own initiative, could not have been lightly set aside by a humble member of the Church, who was largely dependent on the emoluments accruing from his clerical appointments. The mere fact that Lucrezia's features are to be recognised in the friar's latest works, the frescoes in the Cathedral of Spoleto, tends to prove that the old man's affection was not transferred to different quarters; and Vasari's suggestion that his death was due to the libertinism of his conduct, which led to his being poisoned by certain relatives of a woman with whom he had become entangled, may be dismissed as a fable.