It was characteristic of the man that on his return to his native city and before he took the picture he had painted to the Palace of the Medici, he went to the church in Florence at which he was accustomed to pray, and returned thanks for the happy termination of his travels. Then he was instructed by the Medici family to finish the portrait, so that it might stand for Santa Galla Placidia, the Empress whose famous tomb may be seen in Ravenna to this day, and, indeed, is one of the show-places of that quaint old city. Dolci then painted a very charming picture reproduced in these pages, the sleeping St. John with St. Zacharias and St. Elizabeth, and following the painting of this picture is associated the great misfortune of a life that had hitherto been pleasant and peaceful. The religious feelings that had been with him since the days when he was a little boy busily instructing his schoolfellows to turn from profane to sacred thoughts now degenerated into melancholy, and Dolci suffered from the true melancholia which baffles physicians to-day, and was then, of course, quite beyond the reach of palliative or cure. He could not speak without deep sighs; he was convinced that he had lost all his ability as a painter, and that the world had no more use for him. His wife, who gave up much of her time and attention to him, suffered in health from the premature birth of a child, and then Baldinucci, who wrote the little biography of the artist that was printed in Florence in the early 'eighties, and is the foundation of our knowledge of the artist's life, took the painter away from Florence to the country to the house of one Domenico Valdinotti. This man, an artist, had one or two pictures in his studio commissioned for wealthy patrons. He took up a palette with colours mixed, and gave it to Dolci, commanding him in sternest tones to finish a veil on one of the pictures of the Virgin. The painter obeyed, and succeeded so well in his task that all the doubt and fear that had clouded his life for the greater part of a year vanished in an hour, and he returned to Florence with a perfectly healthy mind to finish the Santa Galla Placidia, and one or two altar-pieces, including one for the Church of San Francesco.