Knights of the Art | Page 9

years had passed by since Giotto lived and worked in
Florence, and in the same hilly country where he used to tend his sheep
another great painter was born.
Many other artists had come and gone, and had added their golden
links of beauty to the chain of Art which bound these years together.
Some day you will learn to know all their names and what they did. But
now we will only single out, here and there, a few of those names
which are perhaps greater than the rest. Just as on a clear night, when
we look up into the starlit sky, it would bewilder us to try and
remember all the stars, so we learn first to know those that are most
easily recognised--the Plough, or the Great Bear, as they shine with a
clear steady light against the background of a thousand lesser stars.
The name by which this second great painter is known is Fra Angelico,
but that was only the name he earned in later years. His baby name was
Guido, and his home was in a village close to where Giotto was born.
He was not a poor boy, and did not need to work in the fields or tend
the sheep on the hillside. Indeed, he might have soon become rich and
famous, for his wonderful talent for painting would have quickly
brought him honours and wealth if he had gone out into the world. But
instead of this, when he was a young man of twenty he made up his
mind to enter the convent at Fiesole, and to become a monk of the
Order of Saint Dominic.
Every brother, or frate, as he is called, who leaves the world and enters
the life of the convent is given a new name, and his old name is never
used again. So young Guido was called Fra Giovanni, or Brother John.
But it is not by that name that he is known best, but that of Fra
Angelico, or the angelic brother--a name which was given him

afterwards because of his pure and beautiful life, and the heavenly
pictures which he painted.
With all his great gifts in his hands, with all the years of youth and
pleasure stretching out green and fair before him, he said good-bye to
earthly joys, and chose rather to serve his Master Christ in the way he
thought was right.
The monks of St. Dominic were the great preachers of those days--men
who tried to make the world better by telling people what they ought to
do, and teaching them how to live honest and good lives. But there are
other ways of teaching people besides preaching, and the young monk
who spent his time bending over the illuminated prayer- book, seeing
with his dreamy eyes visions of saints and white-robed angels, was
preparing to be a greater teacher than them all. The words of the
preacher monks have passed away, and the world pays little heed to
them now, but the teaching of Fra Angelico, the silent lessons of his
wonderful pictures, are as fresh and clear to-day as they were in those
far-off years.
Great trouble was in store for the monks of the little convent at Fiesole,
which Fra Angelico and his brother Benedetto had entered. Fierce
struggles were going on in Italy between different religious parties, and
at one time the little band of preaching monks were obliged to leave
their peaceful home at Fiesole to seek shelter in other towns. But, as it
turned out, this was good fortune for the young painter-monk, for in
those hill towns of Umbria where the brothers sought refuge there were
pictures to be studied which delighted his eyes with their beauty, and
taught him many a lesson which he could never have learned on the
quiet slopes of Fiesole.
The hill towns of Italy are very much the same to-day as they were in
those days. Long winding roads lead upwards from the plain below to
the city gates, and there on the summit of the hill the little town is built.
The tall white houses cluster close together, and the overhanging eaves
seem almost to meet across the narrow paved streets, and always there
is the great square, with the church the centre of all.

It would be almost a day's journey to follow the white road that leads
down from Perugia across the plain to the little hill town of Assisi, and
many a spring morning saw the painter-monk setting out on the
convent donkey before sunrise and returning when the sun had set. He
would thread his way up between the olive-trees until he reached the
city gates, and pass into the little town without hindrance. For the
followers of St. Francis in