he Brancacci
chapel is especially interesting from the direct and unquestionable
effect which it is known to have had upon younger painters. Here
Raphael and Michel Angelo, in their youth, and Benvenuto Cellini
passed many hours, copying and recopying what were then the first
masterpieces of painting, the traces of which study are distinctly
visible in their later productions; and here, too, according to
Cellini, the famous punch in the nose befell Buonarotti, by which his
well-known physiognomy acquired its marked peculiarity. Torregiani,
painter and sculptor of secondary importance, but a bully of the first
class,--a man who was in the habit of knocking about the artists whom
he could not equal, and of breaking both their models and their
heads,--had been accustomed to copy in the Brancacci chapel, among the
rest. He had been much annoyed, according to his own account, by
Michel Angelo's habit of laughing at the efforts of artists inferior
in skill to himself, and had determined to punish him. One day,
Buonarotti came into the chapel as usual, and whistled and sneered at
a copy which Torregiani was making. The aggrieved artist, a man of
large proportions, very truculent of aspect, with a loud voice and a
savage frown, sprang upon his critic, and dealt him such a blow upon
the nose, that the bone and cartilage yielded under his hand,
according to his own account, as if they had been made of
dough,--_"come se fosse stato un cialdone."_ This was when both
were very young men; but Torregiani, when relating the story many
years afterwards, always congratulated himself that Buonarotti would
bear the mark of the blow all his life. It may be added, that the
bully met a hard fate afterwards. Having executed a statue in Spain
for a grandee, he was very much outraged by receiving only thirty
scudi as his reward, and accordingly smashed the statue to pieces with
a sledge-hammer. In revenge, the Spaniard accused him of heresy, so
that the unlucky artist was condemned to the flames by the
Inquisition, and only escaped that horrible death by starving himself
in prison before the execution.

VII.

SANTA TRINITA.

In the chapel of the Sassetti, in this church, is a good set of
frescos by Dominic Ghirlandaio, representing passages from the life of
Saint Francis. They are not so masterly as his compositions in the
Santa Maria Novella. Moreover, they are badly placed, badly lighted,
and badly injured. They are in a northwestern co