same modest boon was craved by his sorrowing parents. It is one of
these scenes of resuscitation which Ghiberti has designed in bronze,
while Ridolfo Ghirlandaio painted it in a picture in the Uffizi. We
shall see S. Zenobius again in the fresco by Ridolfo's father, the
great Ghirlandaio, in the Palazzo Vecchio; while the portrait on the
first pillar of the left aisle, as one enters the cathedral is of
Zenobius too.

The date of the Pazzi Conspiracy was 1478. A few years later the
same building witnessed the extraordinary effects of Savonarola's
oratory, when such was the terrible picture he drew of the fate of
unregenerate sinners that his listeners' hair was said actually to
rise with fright. Savonarola came towards the end of the Renaissance,
to give it its death-blow. By contrast there is a tablet on the right
wall of the cathedral in honour of one who did much to bring about the
paganism and sophistication against which the impassioned reformer
uttered his fiercest denunciations: Marsilio Ficino (1433-1491),
the neo-Platonist protege of Cosimo de' Medici, and friend both
of Piero de' Medici and Lorenzo. To explain Marsilio's influence
it is necessary to recede a little into history. In 1439 Cosimo de'
Medici succeeded in transferring the scene of the Great Council of the
Church to Florence. At this conference representatives of the Western
Church, centred in Rome, met those of the Eastern Church, centred
in Constantinople, which was still Christian, for the purpose of
discussing various matters, not the least of which was the protection
of the Eastern Church against the Infidel. Not only was Constantinople
continually threatened by the Turks, and in need of arms as well
as sympathy, but the two branches of the Church were at enmity over
a number of points. It was as much to heal these differences as to
seek temporal aid that the Emperor John Palaeologus, the Patriarch
of Constantinople, and a vast concourse of nobles, priests, and
Greek scholars, arrived in Italy, and, after sojourning at Venice
and Ferrara, moved on to Florence at the invitation of Cosimo. The
Emperor resided in the Peruzzi palace, now no more, near S. Croce;
the Patriarch of Constantinople lodged (and as it chanced, died, for
he was very old) at the Ferrantini palace, now the Casa Vernaccia,
in the Borgo Pinti; while Pope Eugenius was at the convent attached
to S. Maria Novella. The meetings of the Council were held where we
now stand--in the ca