the difficulties that may be urged against this. It is no doubt much simpler to call upon contractors to tender to supply articles just when they are wanted than to go into the details necessary to have them made in workshops in which the number of workers fluctuates. Then there is the question of patterns of articles to be made, and if these are decided on without any reference to the capabilities of prison labour it is likely enough that the precise article required could not be produced in a prison; but a little good will would get over this difficulty if it were once accepted and recognised as an obligation to find work for prisoners. Difficulties of much the same kind have presented themselves as regards the construction of public works by convict labour; but this I know, that when once prejudices of this sort have been surmounted the officers of the Government departments which are carrying on the public works find that there are many countervailing advantages in having at their disposal a large amount of unpaid labour, and those who were opponents have often become the strongest supporters of this mode of employing convicts.

The upshot of the considerations I have brought forward is, I believe, incontrovertibly this: that however desirable industrial labour for prisoners may be from a moral point of view, it is impossible to apply it to more than a small proportion of those sentenced to imprisonment, both on account of the law applicable to prisons and on account of the shortness of the sentences of the large majority; that it is a delusion and a costly one to imagine that mechanical labour such as the tread-wheel can be made to produce the moral advantages of industrial labour by connecting it with milling machinery or other like method; that the advantage of industrial labour in local prisons, considered as enabling them to find employment in discharge, is considerably overrated, and that it is only in a very limited degree that crime arises from want of employment; that prisoners under the longer sentences may with facility and advantage be employed on industrial work so far as the law allows, providing consumers can be found for the work they produce; that the Government itself, considered as a whole, is the most appropriate consumer of such articles, and that prisons should therefore be looked at as Government workshops, for the inmates of which other Government departments should as a matter of duty and obligation be required to find employment.

E. F. Du CANE.

1896

FRA FILIPPO LIPPI

I AM not ashamed to confess that, in my earlier days, I refused to believe that a Carmelite friar could have been the father even of a very celebrated son by a Carmelite nun. I thought it unlikely that a Carmelite friar who had transgressed the rules of his order should have remained a dignitary of the Church. But I have since learned that the lax morality conspicuous in the age of the Borgias was not less apparent a century earlier; and, painful as the fact may be, I cannot but admit that, amongst the religious artists of the Florentine revival, there were as many disreputable men as there were men of respectable lives.

What pains me most is to think that the art of Fra Filippo, the loose fish and seducer of holy women, looks almost as pure, and is often quite as lovely, as that of Fra Giovanni Angelico of Fiesole. We must therefore learn to count the moral qualities as part and parcel of the charm which is so inexpressibly attractive in Angelico at the same time that we endeavour to forget that the candour of Fra Filippo's angels is not the reflex of any similar quality in that painter.

No contrast is more striking than that which is afforded by the lives of the two Florentine friars who equally acquired fame and large practice in art in the fifteenth century without having any one feeling in common.

Belonging to different monastic communities, they both laboured inside and outside the edifices in which their vocation took them to live; each of them was a popular and finished craftsman. In one respect they differed greatly: one was a pattern of good conduct; the other a notorious example of corruption and foulness.

Fra Angelico, who was born in 1387, was a Dominican; Fra Filippo, born about 1405, was a Carmelite. Their pictures were of the same class: altar pieces or frescoes, Madonnas or illustrations of saintly legends. Their patrons were amongst the highest ranks of the aristocracy of Florence. Both reaped wealth and renown, and it was no doubt because they were so equal in their success that I felt so much inclined to doubt whether it could be true that the Dominican was a saint and the Carmelite a demon; though, when I

went so far as to try to clear Fra Filippo of a crime which seemed to contrast too strongly with the duties usually inculcated by the Church to be founded on reliable evidence, I was soon constrained to admit that I was mistaken in believing that a friar could not commit a most serious offence against morality without meeting with instant condemnation.

It now appears that Fra Filippo's career was marked, not only by offences against morality, but by breaches of the criminal law as administered in his time at Florence; yet that, in spite of the stain on his character, which was quite public, he kept his station as a painter, earned a competence, and was hardly less successful professionally than Angelico, who was acknowledged to have led the

most blameless of lives.

Vasari seems to have felt that there was something unfair in the distribution of rewards to Angelico and Lippi. He contrasts their lives in a few sentences, observing that never was a churchman more devoted than the Dominican to the service of God, the benefit of the world or duty towards his neighbour, or one of such great and varied gifts, whose habits were so simple, whose thoughts were so pure, and whose piety was so conspicuous. He might have had wealth and enjoyed dignities; but he scorned them all, dying, as he had lived, friar.

a poor

Fra Filippo enjoyed both honours and riches. He, too, was by nature gifted. But he was neither simple nor virtuous nor pious, and he was mostly prosperous without deserving to be so.

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The fact is, adds the historian, men do not acquire fame because they are honest, or fail because they are dishonest. It is important only that they should excel in the profession they have selected. Honest men who excel do not fail to enjoy honours and wealth but their reward is as nothing in comparison with that which may accrue to one who has no moral quality of any kind to boast of. An honest man of ordinary parts, who falls into dishonest ways and has the ill fortune to be detected, generally receives condign punishment. A talented man of lax morality guilty of a similar offence, will be considered, in virtue of his gifts, as not having sinned. Not only is he not punished, but compassion is felt for him and justice itself deals mildly with his offence, even though he has but a shadow of honesty to recommend him.

Shall I confess that I was at first greatly distressed to learn that Fra Filippo, a Carmelite friar and an ordained priest, had a son who afterwards became a painter almost as celebrated as his father? I did all I could to rehabilitate his memory; but as evidence came piecemeal out of the dusty repositories of the Florentine archives, and I had to acknowledge that Fra Filippo was not only a man of dissolute life, but an offender against the ordinary laws which regulate the conduct of individuals, I was soon forced to look a-field

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and inquire how it was that a man who had gone through his experiences should not only have remained unpunished, but found unusual indulgence, and had the fortune at last to captivate a patron of high station who caused his memory to be preserved in the splendid polish of a marble monument.

Fra Giovanni Angelico lived to be prior of the Dominican monastery of Fiesole; Fra Filippo died in harness whilst painting the frescoes of the choir vaulting in the cathedral of Spoleto. Some difference in their education may explain why one should have been good and the other bad.

There was no doubt a better chance for a friar who settled down to his profession after taking vows at twenty-one than for one who was thrown as an orphan into a religious order at a tender age. Angelico, who learnt painting as a boy amongst laymen, went through his novitiate and took the cowl in the full responsibility of his manhood. Lippi, the child of penniless parents, was thrust into the convent of the Carmine when hardly more than eight years old. It may be that the Dominicans were more strict as an order than the Carmelites of that time. The Dominicans were on their good behaviour at the opening of the fifteenth century. They were involved in quarrels with the Archbishop of Florence, which ended in their withdrawal to Foligno. The Carmelites were not in similar straits, but the strictness of their discipline may have been impaired during the rebuilding of their monastery in the first twenty years of the century, and there may have been some laxity in the rules, which allowed children to be taken in, either because they were waifs and strays, or because parents found it cheaper to pay the convent fees than to rear their progeny themselves. The Carmelites of Florence took in boys; the Carmelites of Prato girls. It was a Carmelite confessor from Florence who had charge of the souls of the nuns at Prato. It was as chaplain to the convent of Prato that Fra Filippo ran away with the Carmelite nun who became the mother of Filippino Lippi. At Florence, as he grew up in the cloisters of the Carmine, Fra Filippo was thrown into the company of the painters who were engaged to decorate the interior of the new edifice, and, instead of learning his grammar and preparing for his examinations, the boy probably adopted the manners of free and easy artists, who initiated him into the life of a layman. At all events, whilst Angelico was going through the severe discipline of a strict monastery at Fiesole, Filippo breathed quite another atmosphere, and when at last he left the Carmine and faced the world as a professional painter, he fell easily a prey to disorder, whilst accidents soon occurred which made him thoroughly acquainted with the seamy side of human nature.

It is not unnatural to assume that, even amongst friars, a bad one may here and there have leavened the main body which included a majority of honest and reputable persons. Yet when I look into the

story of Fra Filippo and weigh all the circumstances which left their impress on his career, I find reason to be surprised that there were any good friars to counterbalance by their virtues the vices of the bad ones. I discover that morality was not prized as it should have been even in that age; that immorality was not very thoroughly reproved; and that offences of that kind were very frequently condoned. It may be said, indeed, that the ways of the fifteenth century were not unlike those of the nineteenth. But that is another matter altogether.

In the literature of the sixteenth century there are passages which illustrate the status of painters of the monastic orders as well as that of artist laymen. Churchmen and painters were always intimately connected, because art was traditionally at the service of ecclesiastical corporations, and the best customers of painters were pious people. But the religious orders were not without perception of the advantages which might accrue from the education and enrolment of artists amongst their members; and hence, no doubt, the career of Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo, Lorenzo Monaco, and Fra Bartolommeo. But clever as the orders were in recruiting painters, they never succeeded in keeping up an absolute exclusiveness. Either the monk took a layman for his apprentice, as Angelico took Benozzo Gozzoli, or he entered into partnership with a guildsman, as Fra Bartolommeo did with Mariotto Albertinelli; or the chiefs of orders allowed the friars to leave their monasteries and practise beyond the discipline of the cloister. Under these circumstances it might well happen-and it certainly happened in the case of Fra Filippo-that churchmen mixed in the world with laymen, whose liberty they shared, whether more to the detriment of the Church or to that of the public it is difficult to say. In most cases, as Leonardo da Vinci is reported to have observed, the profession of art was enabled to prosper and thrive; and honour was done to painting independently of the painter's worth.

It has not been usually credited that Fra Filippo was captured by a Moorish pirate, as Vasari relates. But I have discovered that there is more foundation for the story than has been hitherto assigned to it since Vasari's time. I find that the history of Fra Filippo's career was a common subject of conversation in the painting rooms of the great masters of the sixteenth century; and Bandello the novelist actually tells it in one of the tales in which his hero is Leonardo da Vinci. According to this version, Fra Filippo was the son of Tommaso Lippi, who lived at Florence in the fourteenth century and died leaving him in charge of his mother. The boy at that time was but eight years old, and the widow was so poor that, instead of rearing her child, she gave him in charge to the brethren of the Carmine, who took the necessary steps to educate him. The fraticello, instead of learning to read, began to practise sketching; a