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Chap. XXVII. ANGELICO’S STYLE. 567 artistic nutriment. He used Orcagna’s types after purifying and idealizing them. In truth, the slender and graceful proportion of the Strozzi figures, their decorous attitudes, their noble draperies, find their counterpart in Angelico, who expends on them an additional amount of exquisite taste, though he hardly rivals their grandeur or severity. Precision in the definition of form, design, is in both artists. Orcagna’s clear and luminous colour is in the works of Angelico, but a little flatter and less relieved by light and shade. Orcagna was more vigorously Giot- tesque, Angelico more sentimental, but nearer to an exquisite celestial ideal; and in this dreamy paradise, to which his art was subordinate, he revelled and was great. Not that he was without faults, but his feeling and in spiration supplied the absence of other things, and made that absence difficult to realize, except by diligent search. One might, indeed, almost suppose that his very defects were necessary to produce enjoyment of the qualities, so well do the means appear suited to the peculiar end in view. Fra Giovanni’s education is therefore clear. Ma- solino gave him the artistical and practical, Orcagna’s works acted on the peculiar bent of his mind; and, in his own genius, he found the inspiration which helped him to the result by the simplest and straightest path. In technical modes of proceeding, Angelico may be said to close the Giottesque period more properly than Masaccio. The reason is to be found in the education of the two great men. The education of Angelico was such that he remained equal during the whole of his career. In one point alone he altered, and that is in the subor dinate part of architectural distances. At Rome, where Angelico displayed all his powers, as Masaccio exhibited them at the Carmine, as Raphael at the Vatican, and Michel Angelo in the Sixtine chapel, the architecture is better than elsewhere. Fra Giovanni did not despise this branch of artistic delineation as the Giottesques did. In a fresco at the Vatican, in which S. Peter gives the com munion to S. Stephen, he produced a distance of buildings