"By the death of his father," continues Vasari, "he was left a friendless orphan at the age of two years, his mother having also died shortly after his birth. The child was for some time under the care of a certain Mona Lapaccia, his aunt, the sister of his father, who brought him up with great difficulty till he had attained his eighth year, when, being no longer able to support the burden of his maintenance, she placed him in the convent of the Carmelites." Since, however, an income-tax return, discovered by Milanesi, proves Mona Antonia, Filippo's mother, to have been still alive in 1427, and apparently in tolerably comfortable circumstances, this account of Filippo's sad childhood must be relegated to the sphere of fiction. Destined for the Church, he was presumably at the age of eight placed with the Carmelites to be prepared for his vocation. That he showed no inclination for book-learning and "manifested the utmost dullness and incapacity in letters," and that he preferred to daub his and the other boys' books with caricatures, need not be doubted, for his extant letters prove him to have been strikingly illiterate even for his days. Nor is Filippo the only artist who evinced an early inclination for the artistic profession in this manner. [Illustration: PLATE III.--THE VISION OF ST. BERNARD (In the National Gallery, London) The Vision of St. Bernard, although at present the mere ghost of a picture from which almost every vestige of the original colour has faded away, is an important landmark in Fra Filippo's life, as it is one of the few works about which we have definite dates. It is mentioned by Vasari as being one of two pictures intended to be placed over doors in the Palazzo della Signoria, Florence. A contemporary record states, that on May 16, 1447, Fra Filippo received 40 lire for having painted "the figure of the Virgin and of St. Bernard." The companion picture, which represented the "Annunciation," has disappeared.] And now Vasari loses himself in a tangle of incorrect and contradictory assertions. First, that the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine had "then" just been finished by Masaccio, and so delighted the young Carmelite that he "frequented it daily for his recreation," and so completely absorbed Masaccio's style "that many affirmed the spirit of Masaccio to have entered the body of Fra Filippo." At this period he painted several frescoes in the Carmine, and one in _terra verde_ in the cloister of that church. As a result of the high praise bestowed upon him for these early efforts, "he formed his resolution at the age of seventeen, and boldly threw off the clerical habit."