harsh gaudiness which disfigures so much of the late fifteenth century work of the French and Flemish manuscript painters. _Italian ornament._ The special style of ornament used by Don Silvestro survived in Italian illumination for nearly a century and a half. In Italy realistic forms of fruit and flowers, such as were painted with such taste and skill by the northern miniaturists, were scarcely ever used. All through the fifteenth century, alike in the manuscripts of the Florentine, Sienese and Venetian schools, the same purely conventional forms of foliage were used, with great curling leaves, alternately blue and red, lighted up by the jewel-like studs and bosses of burnished gold. _The monk Don Lorenzo._ According to Vasari, the same Camaldolese Monastery produced another manuscript illuminator whose skill was hardly inferior to that of Don Silvestro. This was Don Lorenzo, who appears to have been born about 1370, and to have died about 1425[179]. Examples of his skill, also in the form of large choir-books, are preserved in the Laurentian library at Florence; they are rich with miniatures of great beauty, and, like Don Silvestro's paintings, show a lavish expenditure of time and patience in the exquisite minuteness with which they are finished. Vasari tells us that his hand also was preserved as a sacred relic in the treasury of Santa Maria degli Angeli. _Visit of Leo X._ In later times Pope Leo X., who, like other members of the Medici family, was an enthusiastic lover of illuminated manuscripts, when on a visit to the Monastery, desired to carry away to the Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome some of these choir-books by the hand of Don Lorenzo[180]. _Dominican painters._ The Dominican Convent of San Marco in Florence, where the famous Florentine painter Fra Beato Angelico[181] was a Friar, possesses, or till quite recently did possess, a magnificent collection of choir-books richly illuminated with miniatures by various members of the Convent. Some of these are said to have been painted by Fra Angelico himself, others by a brother of his who was a Friar in the same Convent[182]. The records of the Dominican Convent at Fiesole, where Fra Angelico was born, show that he was working there as a painter of illuminated manuscripts in the year 1407 and for some time subsequently. _Fra Angelico's style._ It is noticeable that Fra Angelico's style, even when painting a colossal mural fresco, was essentially that of the manuscript illuminator. He is utterly unrealistic in drawing and still more so in colour; he deals with no possible effects of light and shade, but paints all his figures glowing with the most brilliant effects of gold and colour, in a style far earlier than that of his own date, and with certain technical peculiarities which, as a rule, are to be found only in the illuminations of manuscripts[183]. _MSS. of northern Italy._ _Renaissance in Italy._