adored by them. Doubtful, indeed, if any of these men would have subscribed to the doctrine that he rides fastest who rides alone.

Lucrezia Buti, who was the wife of Fra Filippo Lippi, must not be confused with the Lucrezia Fedi (fay´-dee) whom Andrea married. Moreover, the circumstances under which Fra Filippo wooed and won his Lucrezia were far more romantic. He was a man whose great talent manifested itself early in life, and, although he had been put in a monastery because his relatives were too poor to educate him, his evident genius for art earned him many liberties. In fact, he was decidedly gay, and the hero of numerous escapades, the most famous of which has been immortalized by Browning, who found in the two Italian artists, Andrea and Lippo, subjects for two of his finest poems.

DETAIL OF THE VIRGIN AND CHILD BY FRA FILIPPO LIPPI

Lucrezia Buti was the model for the Virgin.

FRA FILIPPO LIPPI

The adventure of which Browning writes occurred upon the triumphant return to Florence of Cosimo de’ Medici (med´-e-chee) and his patronage of Fra Filippo. Cosimo, frequently annoyed by the friar’s loose habits, and despairing of his ever finishing an important picture that he had commissioned him to paint, caused him to be locked up in a room of the Medici Palace. Fra Filippo stood this for a few days. Then one night, wearying of his confinement, he escaped. The friar’s own pleading in Browning’s poem tells the story:

Notwithstanding his conduct, so out of keeping with his cloth, he was appointed chaplain to the nuns of the convent of Santa Margherita (mahr´-gare-ee-tah) in Prato (prah´-to) and commissioned by the abbess to paint a picture of the Madonna for the altar of the convent church. It chanced that there was in the nunnery a novice to whom convent life was just as ill suited as monastic life would have been to Fra Filippo had he been obliged to abide by its tenets.

FILIPPO AND LUCREZIA BUTI

The name of the novice was Lucrezia Buti, and, struck by the grace and beauty of this young woman, the artist begged that she might be allowed to pose for him for the picture, and the request was granted. It may indeed have been diplomacy on the part of the abbess; for it is not unlikely that Lucrezia, who had no vocation whatsoever for conventual life, had proved herself refractory, and that the convent authorities saw a chance of getting rid of her, which they could not do by returning her to her family, because she had been consigned to them against her will by a stepbrother, anxious to get rid of her care and expense. In any event,