ove the great gilded
statues breaks up the horizontal effect. The decoration of the
stone-work is not happy; the use of cold red and cold blue with gilt
bosses in relief does much to vulgarize, and there is constant sally in
small masses which belittles the general effect. It is evident that the
Sienese tendency to floridity is answerable for much of this, and that
having added some piece of big and bad decoration, the cornice of papal
head, for instance, they felt forced to do away with it or continue it
throughout.

But this fault and many others are forgotten when we examine the detail
with which later men have filled the church. Other Italian cathedrals
possess art-objects of a higher order; perhaps no other one is so rich
in these treasures. The great masters are disappointing here. Raphael,
as the co-laborer of Pinturicchio, is dainty, rather than great, and
Michelangelo passes unnoticed in the huge and coldly elaborate
altar-front of the Piccolomini. But Marrina, with his doors of the
library; Barili, with his marvelous casing of the choir-stalls;
Beccafumi, with his bronze and neillo--these are the artists whom one
wonders at; these wood-carvers and bronze-founders, creators of the
microcosmic detail of the Renaissance which had at last burst
triumphantly into Siena.

This treasure is cumulative, as we walk eastward from the main door,
where the pillars are a maze of scroll-work in deepest cutting, and by
the time we reach the choir the head fairly swims with the play of light
and color. We wander from point to point, we finger and caress the
lustrous stalls of Barili, and turn with a kind of confusion of vision
from panel to panel; above our heads the tabernacle of Vecchietta, the
lamp bearing angels of Beccafumi make spots of bituminous color, with
glittering high-lights, strangely emphasizing their modeling; from these
youths, who might be pages to some Roman prefect, the eye travels upward
still further, along the golden convolutions of the heavily stuccoed
pilasters to the huge, gilded cherubs' heads that frame the eastern
rose....

It is incredible that these frescoes are four hundred years old. Surely
Pinturicchio came down from his scaffolding but yesterday. This is how
the hardly dried plaster must have looked to pope and cardinal and
princes when the boards were removed, and when the very figures on these
walls--smart youths in tights and slashes, bright-robed scholars,
ecclesiastics caped in ermin