the Duomo is the
baptistery, which at first served as a church, a sort of octagonal
temple surmounted by a cupola, built, doubtless, after the model of the
Pantheon of Rome, and which, according to the testimony of a
contemporary bishop, already in the eighth century projected upward the
pompous rotundities of its imperial forms. Here, then, in the most
barbarous epoch of the Middle Ages, is a prolongation, a renewal, or, at
least, an imitation of Roman architecture. You enter, and find that the
decoration is not all Gothic; a circle of Corinthian columns of precious
marbles with, above these, a circle of smaller columns surmounted by
loftier arcades, and, on the vault, a legion of saints, and angels
peopling the entire space, gathering in four rows around a grand, dull,
meager, melancholy Byzantine Christ. On these three superposed stories
the three gradual distortions of antique art appear; but, distorted or
intact, it is always antique art. A significant feature, this,
throughout the history of Italy; she did not become Germanic. In the
tenth century the degraded Roman still subsisted distinct and intact
side by side with the proud barbarian....

Sculpture, which, once before under Nicholas of Pisa, had anticipated
painting, again anticipated it in the fifteenth century; these very
doors of the baptistery enable one to see with what sudden perfection
and brilliancy. Three men then appeared, Brunelleschi, the architect of
the Duomo, Donatello, who decorated the Campanile with statues, and
Ghiberti, who cast the two gates of the baptistery, all three friends
and rivals, all three having commenced with the goldsmith's art and a
study of the living model, and all three passionately devoted to the
antique; Brunelleschi drawing and measuring Roman monuments, Donatello
at Rome copying statues and bas-reliefs and Ghiberti importing from
Greece torsos, vases and heads which he restored, imitated and
worshiped.

AN ASCENT OF THE GREAT DOME[32]

BY MR. AND MRS. EDWIN H. BLASHFIELD

The traveler who, turning his back to the gates of Ghiberti, passes, for
the first time, under the glittering new mosaics and through the main
doors of Santa Maria Del Fiore experiences a sensation. He leaves behind
him the facade, dazzling in its patterns of black and white marble, all
laced with sculpture, he enters to dim, bare vastness--surely, never was
bleaker lining to a splendid exterior. Across a floor that seems
unending, he ma