e Lamb and Cross are painted
on a medallion, the four Evangelists enthroned with their symbols and
the four Doctors of the Church, a subject common everywhere and
especially so in Ravenna. These works have suffered very greatly from
restoration, but they seem indeed to be the work of the master in so
far as the design is concerned, all surely that is left after the
repaintings that have befallen them.

[Footnote 2: See _supra_, pp. 175 _et seq_.]

The mosaic pavements of 1213, representing scenes from the third
crusade, in the chapel to the left of the choir should be noted.

We must not leave S. Giovanni Evangelista without a look at the great
tower of the eleventh century which overshadows it. It might seem to
be contemporary with the greater Torre Comunale in the Via Tredici
Giugno as the street is now absurdly named. Nor should any one omit to
visit the Casa Polentana near Porta Ursicina and the Casa Traversari
in the Via S. Vitale, grand old thirteenth-century houses that speak
to us, not certainly of Ravenna's great days, but of a greater day
than ours, and one, too, in which the most tragic of Italians wandered
up and down these windy ways eating his heart out for Florence. Indeed
Dante consumes all our thoughts in mediaeval Ravenna.

There is a tale told by Franco Sacchetti that I will set down here,
for it expresses what in part we must all feel, and what in the
confusion of philosophy at the end of the Middle Age was felt far more
keenly by men who visited this strange city.

"Maestro Antonio of Ferrara was a man of very great parts, almost a
poet, and as entertaining as a jester, but he was very vicious and
sinful. Being in Ravenna during the time that Messer Bernardino of
Polenta held the lordship, it chanced that this Messer Antonio, who
was a very great gambler, had been gambling one day and had lost
nearly all he possessed. Being in despair, he entered the church of
the Friars Minor, where there is the tomb which holds the body of the
Florentine poet Dante, and having seen an antique Crucifix half-burned
and smoked by the great number of lights placed around it, and finding
just then many candles lighted there, he immediately went and took all
the tapers and candles which were burning there and going to the tomb
of Dante he placed them before it saying, 'Take them, for thou art far
more worthy of them than it is.' The people beholding this and
marvelling greatly said, 'What doth this man?' And they a