Fra Angelico is a man much admired by those who have a taste for
Pre-Raphaelite painters; and, though I take little or no pleasure in his
works, I can see that there is great delicacy of execution in his heads,
and that generally he produces such a Christ, and such a Virgin, and such
saints, as he could not have foreseen, except in a pure and holy
imagination, nor have wrought out without saying a prayer between every
two touches of his brush. I might come to like him, in time, if I
thought it worth while; but it is enough to have an outside perception of
his kind and degree of merit, and so to let him pass into the garret of
oblivion, where many things as good, or better, are piled away, that our
own age may not stumble over them. Perugino is the first painter whose
works seem really worth preserving for the genuine merit that is in them,
apart from any quaintness and curiosity of an ancient and new-born art.
Probably his religion was more genuine than Raphael's, and therefore the
Virgin often revealed herself to him in a loftier and sweeter face of
divine womanhood than all the genius of Raphael could produce.
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