The name of the novice was Lucrezia Buti, and, struck by the grace and beauty of this young woman, the artist begged that she might be allowed to pose for him for the picture, and the request was granted. It may indeed have been diplomacy on the part of the abbess; for it is not unlikely that Lucrezia, who had no vocation whatsoever for conventual life, had proved herself refractory, and that the convent authorities saw a chance of getting rid of her, which they could not do by returning her to her family, because she had been consigned to them against her will by a stepbrother, anxious to get rid of her care and expense. In any event, the friar Lippi fell in love with her and she with him. Profiting by the crowd and confusion attendant on the festival of the Madonna of the Girdle, which is celebrated in Prato on the first of May, Fra Filippo carried off Lucrezia, appealed to his patron, Cosimo de’ Medici, and through the latter’s intercession received from the Pope, Pius II., a special brief, absolving both himself and the novice from their ecclesiastical vows and granting them dispensation to marry. He and Lucrezia had two children; their son, Filippino Lippi, more than rivaling his father’s fame as a painter. The Madonna that Fra Filippo painted for the convent may still be seen in Prato, and there are other pictures in which Lucrezia’s lovely face is discernible. THE TWO WIVES OF RUBENS [Illustration: PETER PAUL RUBENS, BY HIMSELF _In Windsor Castle, England._] [Illustration: HELENA FOURMENT, BY RUBENS] Rubens was so happy with his first wife, Isabella Brandt, who died after eighteen years of blissful married life with him, that he could not endure the loneliness of being a widower, but four years after Isabella’s death took as his second wife Helena Fourment. This marriage proved to be as happy as the first; although he was already fifty-three and she barely sixteen. Their union was blessed with five handsome children; so that his declining years found him surrounded by youth and beauty, and with a splendid young wife as comrade. [Illustration: HELENA FOURMENT, BY RUBENS _A portrait of the artist’s second wife and two of their children, hanging in the Louvre, Paris._]