Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 1.djvu/294

280 which was founded in the year 1294, by Fra Guittone d’Arezzo, who belonged to the order (military as well as religious) of the Virgin Mother of Jesus, or, as the monks of that order are vulgarly called, the Joyous Friars (Frati Gaudenti). In his earliest years Lorenzo devoted himself with so much zeal to the arts of design and painting, that he was afterwards deservedly enumerated among the best of the age in that vocation. The first works of this painter-monk, who adhered to the manner of Taddeo Gaddi and his disciples, were executed in his own monastery of the Angeli, where, in addition to many other pictures, he painted that of the High Altar, which is still to be seen in their church, and was finished, as we learn from letters written on the lower part of the framework, in the year 1413, when it was placed where it still remains. Don Lorenzo then painted a Coronation of the Virgin in a picture which was in the monastery of San Benedetto, outside the gate of Pinti. This monastery likewise belonged to the order of the Camaldolines, and was destroyed at the siege of Florence, in 1529. He had also previously selected the same subject for the picture of his own church of the Angeli. The picture painted for San Benedetto is now in the first cloister of the aforesaid monastery of the Angeli, in the chapel of the Alberti, on the right hand.