to Francesco Sforza: ‘I am at your service for whatever I can do. Dispose of me as you please. Commend me to his Excellency your father, and your brother Giovanni. With God’s help, I hope to do honour here both to myself and you; I say to you, because for your sake and in consequence of your recommendation his Lordship shows me great favour. He thinks of appointing me chief architect to the cathedral, which naturally meets with opposition, I being a stranger; but I hope they will yield to their lord’s desire.’[148] The goldsmith’s art, which in the preceding century had reached great perfection in Tuscan cities and was closely connected with sculpture, attained through niello-work to engraving on copperplate. The name of Maso Finiguerra, who executed the celebrated pyx for the Baptistery in 1452, is inseparable from the history of the Medicean splendour. For painting, whether in its general development or its particular productions, the period under consideration is less important than for the sister arts, at least as far as the Medici are concerned. The two greatest masters, in different lines, of the first half of the century, Masaccio and Fra Angelico, continued to adorn Florence with their works. The former, at his death in 1443, left unfinished the Brancacci chapel in San Pietro del Carmine, the high school of all later works of the kind. Unluckily, the fresco has perished in which he represented the consecration of the church in 1422, with a group of remarkable men of the time: Giovanni d’Averardo de’ Medici, Niccolò da Uzzano, Baccio Valori, Lorenzo Ridolfi, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Masolino da Panicale, and others. Fra Angelico decorated the chapter-house, corridors, and cells of the convent of San Marco with his wall-pictures, which represent religious art in its loveliest bloom, a free modification of the principles of Giotto’s school. He was busy here till Eugene IV. called him to Rome, where he painted the two chapels in the Vatican for this Pope and his successor, Nicolas V. He died in 1455. His greatest pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli, followed his master from Rome to Orvieto, and in 1459 painted the private chapel of the Medici, his most pleasing work. The ‘Adoration of the Angels’ is here represented amid a rich landscape, with choirs of angels, numerous spectators, and festive scenes, painted with a cheerful colouring that recalls Gentile da Fabriano. Later, when painting in San Gemignano and at Pisa, Gozzoli was still connected with the Medici, and in his first fresco in the Campo Santo, the ‘Curse of Ham,’ a group in the foreground represents the members of the family as he had known them in earlier years.