It so happens that many of the discreditable incidents of the friar's life, recorded by Vasari, have been confirmed by documentary evidence. There is not a shadow of doubt that Fra Filippo did abduct the nun Lucrezia Buti from her convent; that Filippino Lippi was the offspring of this illicit union; and that the Frate subsequently did not avail himself of the special papal dispensation to wed the nun. There is also abundant proof to show that Fra Filippo, in spite of the high esteem in which he was held as an artist, and which caused him to be entrusted with many a remunerative commission, was for ever in financial straits, was involved in many vexatious law cases, attempted to cheat his own assistants, and had no hesitation to break faith with his patrons. But all this does not affect his art. To read sensuality into his types of womanhood can only be the result of prejudice, of approaching his pictures in the light of the knowledge gathered from the pages of the chroniclers. Worldly he is compared with the pure, exalted spirituality of the Dominican Fra Angelico, but only in so far as he belonged already to the new era which had discovered, and revelled in, the visible beauty of this world of ours, whilst Fra Angelico, his contemporary, still belongs to the earlier age that looked to the empyrean for all true happiness. The art of both masters is planted in Gothic soil, though it bore different fruit, that of Fra Angelico being still essentially Gothic, though often tinged with a Renaissance flavour, whilst that of Fra Filippo has all the richness and fullness of the Renaissance, of which he was one of the great initiators. That such conceptions as the Virgin in National Gallery "Annunciation," or the lovely Madonna in the _tondo_ at the Palazzo Pitti, and many other authentic works by the master, are lacking in spirituality of expression, cannot be seriously maintained by anybody who approaches these pictures with an open mind and judges the artist by his achievement, not by his manner of life. Even Mr. Berenson, the most authoritative modern critic of Italian art, denies Fra Filippo a "profound sense of either material or spiritual significance--the essential qualifications of the real artist," although he admits in the same essay[1] that "his real place is with the genre painters, only his genre _was that of the soul_, as that of others--of Benozzo Gozzoli, for example--was of the body." Browning, with the true poet's intuition, states the case of Fra Filippo more clearly than the vast majority of professional critics from Vasari to the present day, when he makes the friar exclaim: "... Now is this sense, I ask? A fine way to paint soul, by painting body So ill, the eye can't stop there, must go further And can't fare worse!... * * * * *