Rome, St. Mark writes his Gospel, the Kings come to adore Jesus in
Bethlehem, and St. Mark is martyred. The whole is like some marvellous
introit for St. Mark's day, in which the name of Mary has passed by.

The Coronation of the Virgin (1290) is like a litany of the saints and
of the Virgin herself, chanted in antiphon, ending in the simpler
splendour of Magnificat, sung to some Gregorian tone full of gold, of
faint blues as of a far-away sky, of pale rose-colours as of roses
fading on an altar in the sunlight, and the candles of white are more
spotless than the lily is. Amidst a glory of angels, the piping voices
of children, she in whose name all the flowers are hidden is crowned
Queen of Angels by the Prince of Life. This marvellous dead picture
lived once in S. Maria Nuova; its predelle have been torn away from it,
but may be found here, nevertheless, in the Birth of St. John Baptist
(1162) and the Spozalizio (1178).

It is to a painter less mystical, but not less visionary, that we come
in the work of Paolo Uccello, the great "Battle" (52), of which two
variants exist, one in the Louvre, the other, the most beautiful of the
three, in the National Gallery. It is, as some have thought, a picture
of the Battle of S. Egidio, where Braccio da Montone made Carlo
Malatesta and his nephew Galeotto prisoners in 1416. Splendid as it is,
something has been lost to us by restoration. Paola Uccello, the friend
of Donatello and of Brunellesco, was all his life devoted to the study
of perspective. Many marvellous drawings in which he traced that
baffling vista, of which he was wont to exclaim when, labouring far into
the night, his wife poor soul, would entreat him to take rest and
sleep: "Ah, what a delightful thing is this perspective." And then, much
beautiful work of his has perished. It was on this art he staked his
life. "What have you there that you are shutting up so close?" Donatello
said to him one day when he found him alone at work on the Christ and
St. Thomas, which he had been commissioned to paint over the door of the
church dedicated to that saint in the Mercato Vecchio. "Thou shalt see
it some day,--let that suffice thee," Uccello answered. "And it
chanced," says Vasari, "that Donato was in the Mercato Vecchio buying
fruit one morning when he saw Paolo Uccello, who was uncovering his
picture." Saluting him courteously, therefore, his opinion was instantly
demanded by Paolo, who was anxiously curious to know wha