The Pope Eugenius, compelled by the quarrels of the great houses in Rome to leave the Eternal City, came to Florence and saw Fra Angelico's work there, and this visit paved the way for the painter's sojourn in Rome in the last years of his life. Like so many of his contemporaries, Eugenius could find time amid the distractions of a stormy and difficult existence to keep a well-trained eye upon the artistic developments going on around him, and he did but wait for peace and opportunity to show himself as keen a patron of art as that "terrible pontiff," Julius della Rovere, for whom Michelangelo was to work in the Sistine Chapel. [Illustration: PLATE VI.--DETAIL FROM THE CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN This is a detail from one of the pictures that have excited a great deal of criticism. Professor Douglas calls the work "the last and greatest of Fra Angelico's glorified miniatures." In the work as it stands in the Uffizi to-day, Christ is seen placing a jewel in the Virgin's crown. Right and left stretches the Angelic choir, below there is a great gathering of saints.] To realise the life that the painter saw around him in the days when the Dominican brotherhood first went to San Marco, it is necessary to turn to some historian of Florence in an endeavour to recall the splendour and stateliness of the city's life. The limits of space forbid any attempt, however modest, to picture Florence in detail as it was in those days, though the subject could scarcely be more tempting to the pen. The pomp and circumstance of life were not passed over by the painter, whose extraordinary receptivity found so much more in Florence than in Fiesole for its exercise. Some echo, however, subdued to convent walls, lingers in the city to-day where San Marco preserves its great painter's reputation, and tells us that he was not indifferent to the sights and sounds beyond its gates.