gold. The effect, when these pictures, some of them very large, were new
and freshly gilded, must have been exceedingly brilliant, and much
resembling, on an immensely larger scale, the rich illuminations in an
old monkish missal. In fact, we have not now, in pictorial ornament,
anything at all comparable to what their splendor must have been. I was
most struck with a picture, by Fabriana Gentile, of the Adoration of the
Magi, where the faces and figures have a great deal of life and action,
and even grace, and where the jewelled crowns, the rich embroidered
robes, and cloth of gold, and all the magnificence of the three kings,
are represented with the vividness of the real thing: a gold sword-hilt,
for instance, or a pair of gold spurs, being actually embossed on the
picture. The effect is very powerful, and though produced in what modern
painters would pronounce an unjustifiable way, there is yet pictorial art
enough to reconcile it to the spectator's mind. Certainly, the people of
the Middle Ages knew better than ourselves what is magnificence, and how
to produce it; and what a glorious work must that have been, both in its
mere sheen of burnished gold, and in its illuminating art, which shines
thus through the gloom of perhaps four centuries.

Fra Angelico is a man much admired by those who have a taste for
Pre-Raphaelite painters; and, though I take little or no pleasure in his
works, I can see that there is great delicacy of execution in his heads,
and that generally he produces such a Christ, and such a Virgin, and such
saints, as he could not have foreseen, except in a pure and holy
imagination, nor have wrought out without saying a prayer between every
two touches of his brush. I might come to like him, in time, if I
thought it worth while; but it is enough to have an outside perception of
his kind and degree of merit, and so to let him pass into the garret of
oblivion, where many things as good, or better, are piled away, that our
own age may not stumble over them. Perugino is the first painter whose