In Rome the painter's feeling for natural beauty reaches the height of its expression, indeed one feels that every department of his work is at its best and highest there. After his departure from the Eternal City, the frescoes finished, and himself on the shady side of his sixtieth year, the intervening centuries descend like a cloud, blotting out the greater part of the record. The cloud lifts for a moment to show us "Beato" Angelico, Prior of the Dominican Monastery at Fiesole, to which more than forty years ago he had claimed admission as a novice, and then he is back again in Rome in the chief convent of his order, Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. There the light that had burned so brilliantly for nearly half a century, illuminating the most alluring aspects of the Christian faith, paled and went out. The body was laid to rest in the convent Church, near the tomb of St. Catherine, and it is said that the epitaph was composed by the Pope. Thereafter the order of St. Dominic produced no great personality until it gave to the world a man of very different stamp in Fra Girolamo Savonarola. V A RETROSPECT In art as in music and literature the path of the innovator is beset by difficulties, and if, among all the movements that claim our attention to-day, that of the Renaissance in fifteenth-century Italy is the most fascinating, it is because the difficulties were conquered so brilliantly. The century seemed to breed a race of men that enjoyed the inestimable advantage of knowing what they wanted, and were determined to succeed. It did not matter that the paths they trod were new. Each man had mapped out a line of development for himself and went strenuously along his chosen road, quite certain that he would find the goal of his ambition at the journey's end. Curiously enough when the paths were those of conquest there was always a road leading from them to patronage of the arts. This may be because art in those days was largely devoted to the service of the Church, and when a man had acquired all that theft or conquest could give him, and realised that he could not hope to wage successful war upon time, he began to think of his latter days. Few men of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries could approach death with confidence, and they sought to put something to their credit against the Day of Judgment. To beautify religious houses, to build houses for Holy Brotherhoods, these were the simplest and most obvious ways of placating the Recording Angel, and to the uneasiness of rich and unscrupulous men the Church owes not a few of her most remarkable monuments. Moreover, even the tyrants wished to have some enduring memorial. Cosimo di Medici, who gave San Lorenzo and San Marco to Florence, remarked to his historian Bisticci, "Fifty years will not pass before we are driven out of Florence, but these buildings will remain." After all we can forget and forgive the superstition and