hem,
with mixed feelings of admiration and pity. They were seldom lovable;
they were often despicable; but where they were great they were
very great indeed. A Latin inscription in the courtyard reminds the
traveller of the distinction which the house possesses, calling it
the home not only of princes but of knowledge herself and a treasury
of the arts. But Florence, although it bought the palace from the
Riccardi family a century and more ago, has never cared to give it
back its rightful name.

CHAPTER VI

S. Lorenzo and Michelangelo

A forlorn facade--The church of the Medici--Cosimo's
parents' tomb--Donatello's cantoria and pulpits--Brunelleschi's
sacristy--Donatello again--The palace of the dead Grand Dukes--Costly
intarsia--Michelangelo's sacristy--A weary Titan's life--The victim
of capricious pontiffs--The Medici tombs--Mementi mori--The Casa
Buonarroti--Brunelleschi's cloisters--A model library.

Architecturally S. Lorenzo does not attract as S. Croce and S. Maria
Novella do; but certain treasures of sculpture make it unique. Yet it
is a cool scene of noble grey arches, and the ceiling is very happily
picked out with gold and colour. Savonarola preached some of his most
important sermons here; here Lorenzo the Magnificent was married.

The facade has never yet been finished: it is just ragged brickwork
waiting for its marble, and likely to wait, although such expenditure
on marble is going on within a few yards of it as makes one gasp. Not
very far away, in the Via Ghibellina, is a house which contains some
rough plans by a master hand for this facade, drawn some four hundred
years ago--the hand of none other than Michelangelo, whose scheme
was to make it not only a wonder of architecture but a wonder also
of statuary, the facade having many niches, each to be filled with
a sacred figure. But Michelangelo always dreamed on a scale utterly
disproportionate to the foolish little span of life allotted to us
and the S. Lorenzo facade was never even begun.

The piazza which these untidy bricks overlook is now given up to stalls
and is the centre of the cheap clothing district. Looking diagonally
across it from the church one sees the great walls of the courtyard
of what is now the Riccardi palace, but was in the great days the
Medici palace; and at the corner, facing the Borgo S. Lorenzo, is
Giovanni delle Bande Nere, in stone, by the impossible Bandinelli,
looking at least twenty years older than he eve