Far better is an exquisite little picture in his very best manner, a work which hangs in the apartment De' Piccoli Quadri. This is a Judgment Day, and a cheerful painting of its class. There is an old conceit, very cleverly carried out through the whole composition, of representing all the just made perfect as actually converted into little children. Kings with crowns, popes, bishops, cardinals in hats and mitres, monks cowled and robed in conventual habiliments, are all philandering together through gardens of amaranth and asphodel towards the Grecian portico of heaven; and all these fortunate personages, whether monarchs, priests, fine ladies, or beggars, are depicted with perfectly infantine faces. To do this well lay exactly in the quaint, delicate nature of the angelic Frater; and this portion of the picture is most exquisitely handled. The other moiety, where devils with rabbits' ears, tiger faces, and monkeys' tails, are forking over the damned into frying-pans, while Satan devours them as fast as cooked, is common-place and vulgar. At the same time, it is certain that the whole composition shows much poetry of invention and delicacy of finish. Andrew Castagno's Magdalen, like Donatello's Wooden Statue of the same penitent in the Baptistery, seems a female Robinson Crusoe,--hirsute, cadaverous, fleshless, uncombed and uncomely,--certainly a more edifying spectacle than the voluptuous, Titianesque exhibitions of fair frailty which became the fashion afterwards. Of Gentile da Fabriano, a very rare master, there hangs an Adoration of the Magi, marked May, 1423. One always feels grateful to such of the _Quattrocentisti_ as enlarged the sphere of artistic action, by going out of the conventional circle of holy families, nativities, and entombments. There is a dash about Gentile, a fresh, cavalier-like gentility, quite surprising, and altogether his own. A showy, flippant frivolity in several of the figures enlivens and refreshes us with its mundane sparkle and energy. One of the three kings, in particular,--a young, well-dressed, vivacious, _goguenard_-looking personage, with a very glittering pair of spurs, which his groom is just unbuckling, while another holds a highly bedizened war-horse, who is throwing up his head, showing all his teeth, and crying ha, ha, with all his might,--has a very dramatic effect. Of the Lippo Lippis, the Lorenzo di Credis, the Ghirlandaios, the Peruginos, and the other great masters of the fifteenth century, of whom are many masterpieces in this collection, there shall, for the present, not a word be said.