Fra Angelico has placed artists and laymen in his debt, and as far as the latter are concerned the cause is obvious enough. A certain conviction of the truth of every story he had to tell shines like a bright light through all his pictures; they are a force for the development and strengthening of belief. Even to-day one finds among the crowd of tourists that "does" San Marco in half-an-hour or more, a few visitors whose interest is of another kind, while there is no lack of admirers for the work to be seen in the Uffizi, though much of it belongs to the earliest part of the artist's life. So it happens that the pictures have a well-defined literary and spiritual value, and it is not surprising to think that the Church has granted posthumous honours to the man whose work has brought so much honour in its train. Artists acknowledge a great debt to the friar, but a debt of another kind. As Professor Langton Douglas has pointed out in his admirable and exhaustive work upon Fra Angelico, the friar, with his contemporaries, Hubert and Jan Van Eyck, are the fathers of modern landscape. The new movement was continued and developed by Verrocchio and Da Vinci on the one side, and by Perugino and Raphael on the other. Then again Fra Angelico made a definite movement towards portrait painting, by giving the likeness of some of his friends and patrons to saints and martyrs. This was yet another of the daring innovations that marked the opening of the Quattrocento and, to realise how much it stood for we must consider for a moment the comparative barrenness of modern art, which in the hands of its most popular artists has little or nothing that is new to say to us. Indeed it may be remarked with regret that great praise often attaches to the man who goes back to the fifteenth and sixteenth century, although a little reflection would enable every thoughtful person to see that an art, forced to fall back upon traditions of the past, is far from being in a flourishing condition.

The plates are printed by Bemrose & Sons, Ltd., Derby and London
The text at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh