iano, and others, is so well painted, that one cannot imagine it
possible ever to see a work executed with greater diligence, or little
figures more delicate or better conceived than these are.

In S. Domenico da Fiesole, likewise, he painted the panel of the
high-altar, which has been retouched by other masters and injured,
perchance because it appeared to be spoiling. But the predella and the
Ciborium of the Sacrament have remained in better preservation; and the
innumerable little figures that are to be seen there, in a Celestial
Glory, are so beautiful, that they appear truly to belong to Paradise,
nor can any man who approaches them ever have his fill of gazing on
them. In a chapel of the same church is a panel by his hand, containing
the Annunciation of Our Lady by the Angel Gabriel, with features in
profile, so devout, so delicate, and so well executed, that they appear
truly to have been made rather in Paradise than by the hand of man; and
in the landscape at the back are Adam and Eve, because of whom the
Redeemer was born from the Virgin. In the predella, also, there are some
very beautiful little scenes.

But superior to all the other works that Fra Giovanni made, and the one
wherein he surpassed himself and gave supreme proof of his talent and of
his knowledge of art, was a panel that is beside the door of the same
church, on the left hand as one enters, wherein Jesus Christ is crowning
Our Lady in the midst of a choir of angels and among an infinite
multitude of saints, both male and female, so many in number, so well
wrought, and with such variety in the attitudes and in the expressions
of the heads, that incredible pleasure and sweetness are felt in gazing
at them; nay, one is persuaded that those blessed spirits cannot look
otherwise in Heaven, or, to speak more exactly, could not if they had
bodies; for not only are all these saints, both male and female, full of
life and sweet and delicate in expression, but the whole colouring of
that work appears to be by the hand of a saint or an angel like
themselves; wherefore it was with very good reason that this excellent
monk was ever called Fra Giovanni Angelico. Moreover, the stories of the
Madonna and of S. Dominic in the predella are divine in their own kind;
and I, for one, can declare with truth that I never see this work
without thinking it something new, and that I never leave it sated.

In the Chapel of the Nunziata in Florence which Piero di Cosimo d