mented surface curves away and upward,
brick buttresses appear constantly, but always with the courses of brick
laid slanting to the earth's level, and perpendicular to the thrust of
the dome. Every possible effect of light and obscurity makes the strange
vistas yet more weird, and, now and then, there is a feeling of standing
upon the vast, rounding slope of some planet that shines at one's feet,
then gradually falls away into the surrounding blackness.

The famous "oaken chain" of Vasari's life of Brunelleschi is there,
bolted together in successive beams. Last of all, a long, straight
staircase, straight because without turn to right or left, curves upward
like an unradiant, bowed Valhalla-bridge to a great burst of daylight,
and the climber is upon the top of the dome.

He is as completely cut off from the immediately surrounding earth as
upon a cloud girdled mountain, for the dome swells so vastly below that
the piazza can not be seen about transept or choir, and not one of the
apsidal domes shows a tile of its covering, while the nave, that huge
and tremendous nave of Santa Maria, looks but a narrow, and a distant
roof. At one's back, the marble of the lantern is handsome and creamy in
color, but battered and broken; its interior is curious--a narrow funnel
of marble, little wider than a man's body, set with irons on either
side, is the only ladder, so that the climb up is a close squeeze. There
is a familiar something gone from the surroundings, and that something
is soon remembered to be Dante's baptistery, which does not exist from
Brunelleschi's dome, being blotted out by the facade of Santa Maria. One
hundred feet below, showing its upper and richer portion gloriously from
this novel point of view, is what from the piazza is the soaring bell
tower, the Campanile of Giotto.

ARNOLFO, GIOTTO, BRUNELLESCHI[33]

BY MRS. OLIPHANT

Arnolfo, sometimes called di Cambio and sometimes di Lapi, was the first
of the group of Cathedral builders in Florence. Who Arnolfo was seems to
be scarcely known, tho few architects after him have left greater works
or more evidence of power. His first authentic appearance in history is
among the band of workmen engaged upon the pulpit in the Duomo at Siena,
as pupil or journeyman of Niccolo Pisano, the great reviver of the art
of sculpture--when he becomes visible in company with a certain Lapo,
who is sometimes called his father (as by Vasari) and sometimes his
instructo