Looking at Fra Angelico with eyes that the nineteenth century has trained, we speak of this early work as of less importance than what followed, but in so doing it is quite easy to speak or write as several of his critics have done in very unreasonable fashion. Certainly the artist, who in the last years of his life painted the picture of St. Lorenzo distributing alms, and the scenes in the life of St. Stephen, has travelled very far from the painter of the "Last Judgment" that may be seen in Florence; but, even in the early days of Cortona, Fra Angelico was a modern of the moderns. He was a man who worked and thought far in advance of his times, who had the wide outlook that we have learned to associate with all the Florentine artists of the Quattrocento, and he left the boundaries of the painter's art far wider than he found them. Doubtless many of his contemporaries found his work daring and even immoral in so far as it departed from the traditions that had satisfied his predecessors. He had an individuality that expressed itself in fashion unmistakable before he was thirty years of age, and developed steadily down to the last year of his life. Divorced by his calling from the cares and joys of other men, he responded with delight to the larger and more general aspects of life. Fra Angelico had a keen and eager eye for natural beauty; he seems to have gone to the countryside for all the inspiration that remained to seek when the sacred writings were laid aside. The maternal aspect with which he endowed the Madonna, who had hitherto been as stiff and formless as though carved out of wood, testifies to the artist's recognition of maternity as he saw it among the simple peasants his order served. He restored humanity to Mother and Child. The child-like Christ, no longer a doll but a real _bambino_, tells us how deeply the painter entered into the spirit of a life that the rules of his order forbade him to share. Just as some women who do not marry seem to keep for the world at large the measure of loving sympathy that would have been concentrated upon their children; so this painter monk, who had paid his vows to poverty, chastity, and obedience, could express upon his canvas the affection and the sentiment that would have been bestowed under other circumstances upon a chosen helpmate. Lacking the joys of healthy domesticity he turned to Nature with a loving eye and an intelligence that cannot be over-estimated and, if he knew hours wherein, manlike, he mourned for the life forbidden, the consolation was at hand. The Earth Mother consoled him. In his earliest canvases he expresses his love of flowers, the love of a child for the sights that make the earliest appeal to our sense of beauty. His angels are set in flowering fields, they carry blossoms that bloom in the fields beyond Cortona, and upon the hillside of Fiesole. Clearly the painter saw Paradise around him. Roses and pinks seem to be his favourite flowers, he paints them