things, cared with all his heart and
soul for the work he had chosen to do. It seemed to him that painters
had always failed to make their pictures like living things. The
pictures they painted were flat, not round as a figure should be, and
very often the feet did not look as if they were standing on the ground
at all, but pointed downwards as if they were hanging in the air.

So he worked with light and shadow and careful drawing until the
figures he drew looked rounded instead of flat, and their feet were
planted firmly on the ground. His models were taken from the ordinary
Florentine youths whom he saw daily in the studio, but he drew them as
no one had drawn figures before. The buildings, too, he made to look
like real houses leading away into the distance, and not just like a
flat picture.

He painted many frescoes both in Florence and Rome, this Ugly Tom, but
at the time the people did not pay him much honour, for they thought
him just a great awkward fellow with his head always in the clouds.
Perhaps if he had lived longer fame and wealth would have come to him,
but he died when he was still a young man, and only a few realised how
great he was.

But in after years, one by one, all the great artists would come to
that little chapel of the Carmine there to learn their first lessons
from those life-like figures. Especially they would stand before the
fresco which shows St. Peter baptizing a crowd of people. And in that
fresco they would study more than all the figure of a boy who has just
come out of the water, shivering with cold, the most natural figure
that had ever been painted up to that time.

All things must be learnt little by little, and each new thing we know
is a step onwards. So this figure of the shivering boy marks a higher
step of the golden ladder of Art than any that had been touched before.
And this alone would have made the name of Masaccio worthy to be placed
upon the list of world's great painters.

FRA FILIPPO LIPPI

It was winter time in Florence. The tramontana, that keen wind which
blows from over the snow mountains, was sweeping down the narrow
streets, searching out every nook and corner with its icy breath. Men
flung their cloaks closer round them, and pulled their hats down over
their eyes, so that only the tips of their noses were left uncovered
for the wind to freeze. Women held their scaldinoes, little pots of hot
charcoal, closer under their shawls, and even the dogs had