so elevated and
responsible a station--Eugenius, and not (as stated by Vasari) his
successor Nicholas V., must have been the pope who sent the invitation
and made the offer to Fra Giovanni, for Nicholas only succeeded in
1447. The whole statement lacks authentication, though in itself
credible enough. Certain it is that Angelico was staying in Rome in
the first half of 1447; and he painted in the Vatican the Cappella del
Sacramento, which was afterwards demolished by Paul III. In June
1447 he proceeded to Orvieto, to paint in the Cappella Nuova of the
cathedral, with the co-operation of his pupil Benozzo Gozzoli. He
afterwards returned to Rome to paint the chapel of Nicholas V. In
this capital he died in 1455, and he lies buried in the church of the
Minerva.

According to all the accounts which have reached us, few men on
whom the distinction of beatification has been conferred could
have deserved it more nobly than Fra Giovanni. He led a holy and
self-denying life, shunning all advancement, and was a brother to
the poor; no man ever saw him angered. He painted with unceasing
diligence, treating none but sacred subjects; he never retouched
or altered his work, probably with a religious feeling that such as
divine providence allowed the thing to come, such it should remain. He
was wont to say that he who illustrates the acts of Christ should
be with Christ. It is averred that he never handled a brush without
fervent prayer and he wept when he painted a Crucifixion. The Last
Judgment and the Annunciation were two of the subjects he most
frequently treated.

Bearing in mind the details already given as to the dates of Fra
Giovanni's sojournings in various localities, the reader will be able
to trace approximately the sequence of the works which we now proceed
to name as among his most important productions. In Florence, in the
convent of S. Marco (now converted into a national museum), a series
of frescoes, beginning towards 1443; in the first cloister is the
Crucifixion with St. Dominic kneeling; and the same treatment recurs on
a wall near the dormitory; in the chapterhouse is a third Crucifixion,
with the Virgin swooning, a composition of twenty life-sized
figures--the red background, which has a strange and harsh effect, is
the misdoing of some restorer; an "Annunciation," the figures of about
three-fourths of life-size, in a dormitory; in the adjoining passage,
the "Virgin enthroned," with four saints; on the wall