FRA GIOVANNI DA FIESOLE had spent the years which other youths wasted on stormy pleasures in acquiring the art of miniature painting, and its sacred representations took such hold of his feelings, that, abjuring the world, he assumed the habit of St. Dominic. But finding that his art, far from interfering with the holy sentiments which a tender conscience considered as inseparable from his new profession, tended directly to spiritualise them, the neophyte continued to exercise it; and upon settling himself in the convent of S. Marco, he extended his style to fresco, ever adhering to those pure forms of celestial bliss which no one before or since has equalled. It is related of him that, regarding his painting in the light of a God-gift, he never sat down to exercise it without offering up orisons for divine influence, nor did he assume his palette until he felt these answered by a glow of holy inspiration. His pencil thus literally embodied the language of prayer; his compositions were the result of long contemplation on mystic revelations; his Madonnas borrowed their sweet and sinless expression from ecstatic visions; the passion of our Saviour was conceived by him in tearful penitence, and executed with sobs and sighs. Deeming the forms he thus predicted to proceed from supernatural dictation, he never would alter or retouch them; and though his works are generally brought to the highest attainable finish, the impress of their first conception remains unchanged. To the unimaginative materialism of the present day, these sentences may seem idle absurdities, but they illustrate the character of Fra Giovanni, and no painter ever so thoroughly instilled his character into his works. Those who have not had the good fortune to see any of these cannot form an idea of the infantine simplicity, the immaculate countenances, the unimpassioned pathos apparent in his figures, nor of the transparent delicacy of his flesh-tints, and the gay and cheerful colouring which he introduces into the details, without injury to the angelic grace of the whole. These qualities procured for their author the epithet of Angelico; his personal virtues were acknowledged by an offer of the see of Fiesole, which his humility declined and by the posthumous honour of beatification; his paintings, to borrow the words of Vasari, elevated the utmost perfection to the ideal of art, by improving without abandoning its original type; and, in the characteristic language of Michael Angelo, he must have studied in heaven the faces which he depicted on earth.[136] [Footnote 136: Such testimony, from artists so antipathic to his practice, is a curious tribute at once to his merit and influence.]