e Golden Gate, and the Birth
of the Virgin. On your left you pass into the Chiostro Verde, where
Paolo Uccello has painted scenes from the Old Testament in a sort of
green monotone, for once without enthusiasm. Above you and around you
rises the old convent and the great tower; there, in the far corner,
perhaps a friar plays with a little cat, here a pigeon flutters under
the arches about the little ruined space of grass, the meagre grass of
the south, where now and then the shadow of a white cloud passes over
the city, whither who knows. For a moment in that silent place you
wonder why you have come, you feel half inclined to go back into the
church, when shyly the friar comes towards you, and, leading you round
the cloister, enters the Cappellina degli Spagnuoli.

How much has been written in praise of the frescoes in the Spanish
chapel of S. Maria Novella, where Eleonora of Toledo, the wife of Grand
Duke Cosimo, used to hear Mass; yet how disappointing they are. In so
simple a building, some great artist, you might think, in listening to
Ruskin, had really expressed himself, his thoughts about Faith and the
triumph of the Church. But the work which we find there is the work of
mediocrities, poor craftsmen too, the pupils and imitators of the
Sienese and Florentine schools of their time, having nothing in common
with the excellent work of Taddeo Gaddi, the beautiful work of Simone
Martini of Siena. These figures, so pretty and so ineffectual, which
have been labelled here the Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas, there the
Triumph of the Church, have no existence for us as painting; they have
passed into literature, and in the pages of Ruskin have found a new
beauty that for the first time has given them some semblance of life.

FOOTNOTES:

[102] Mysterious no longer. For in the autumn of 1907 the chapel was
destroyed by fools and the Madonna--just an old panel picture after
all--set up in the cold daylight (1908).

[103] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _op. cit._ vol. i, 187.

XVII. FLORENCE

S. CROCE

The Piazza di S. Croce, in which stands the great Franciscan church of
Florence, is still almost as it was in the sixteenth century when the
Palazzo del Borgo on the southern side was painted in fresco by the
facile brush of Passignano; but whatever charm so old and storied a
place might have had for us, for here Giuliano de' Medici fought in a
tournament under the eyes of La Bella Simonetta, and here, too, the
Giuoc