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