till some pictures he was painting for him should be finished;[73] and
on this particular night he has found the confinement intolerable. He
has whipped his bed clothes into a rope, scrambled down from his window,
and run after a girlish face which laughingly invited him from the
street; and was about to return from the equivocal neighbourhood into
which the fun had led him, when his monkish dress caught the attention
of the guard, and he was captured and called to account. He proceeds to
give a sketch of his life and opinions, which supplies a fair excuse for
the escapade. The facts he relates are, including this one, historical.

Fra Lippo Lippi had no vocation for the priesthood. He was enticed into
a Carmelite convent when a half-starved orphan of eight years old, ready
to subscribe to any arrangement which promised him enough to eat. There
he developed an extraordinary talent for drawing; and the Prior, glad to
turn it to account, gave him the cloisters and the church to paint. But
the rising artist had received his earliest inspirations in the streets.
His first practice had been gained in scrawling faces in his copybooks,
and expanding the notes of his musical texts into figures with arms and
legs. His conceptions were not sufficiently spiritual to satisfy the
Prior's ideal of Christian art. The men and women he painted were all
true to life. The simpler brethren were delighted as they recognized
each familar type. But the authorities looked grave at so much obtruding
of the flesh; and the Prior clearly laid down his theory that painting
was meant to inspire religious thoughts, and not to stifle them; and
must therefore show no more of the human body than was needed to image
forth the soul.

Fra Lippo Lippi comments freely and quaintly on the absurdity of showing
soul by means of bodies so ill-painted that no one can bear to dwell
upon them, as on the fallacy involved in all contempt for the earthly