pupil of Angelico; but it is a work of the fifteenth century
by some master of the Florentine school that chiefly delights us. For
there you may see Madonna, her sweet, ambiguous face neither happy nor
sad, with the Prince of Life in her lap, while on the one side stand S.
Sebastian and St. John Baptist, and on the other perhaps S. Jacopo and
S. Roch. Below the donors kneel a man and his wife and little daughter,
while in the predella you see our Lord's birth, baptism, and
condemnation. Altogether lovely, in that eager yet dry manner, a little
uncertain of its own dainty humanism, this picture alone is worth the
journey to S. Miniato. Yet how much else remains--a tomb attributed to
Donatello in this very chapel, a lovely terra-cotta of the Annunciation
given to Giovanni della Robbia, and indeed, not to speak of S. Francesco
with its spaciousness and delicate light, and the Palazzo Comunale, with
its frescoed Sala del Consiglio, there is S. Miniato itself, full of
flowers and the wind. Like a city of a dream, at dawn she rises out of
the mists of the valley pure and beautiful upon her winding hills that
look both north and south; cool at midday and very still, hushed from
all sounds, she sleeps in the sun, while her old tower tells the slow,
languorous hours; golden at evening, the sunset ebbs through her streets
to the far-away sea, till she sinks like some rosy lily into the night
that for her is full of familiar silences peopled by splendid dreams.
Then there come to her shadows innumerable--Otto I, Federigo Barbarossa,
Federigo II, poor blinded Piero della Vigna, singing his songs, and
those that we have forgotten. The ruined dream of Germany, the Holy
Roman Empire, the resurrection of the Latin race--she has seen them all
rise, and two of them she helped to shatter for ever. It is not only in
her golden book that she may read of splendour and victory, but in the
sleeping valley and the whisper of her olives, the simple song of the
husbandman among the corn, the Italian voices in the vineyard at dawn:
let her sleep after the old hatred, hushed by this homely music.

FOOTNOTES:

[83] See p. 107.

[84] "Io son colui che tenni ambo le chiavi
Del cuor di Federigo e che le volsi
Serrando e disserando si soavi
Che dal segreto suo quasi ogni uom tolsi."

IX. EMPOLI, MONTELUPO, LASTRA, SIGNA

It is but four miles down the hillside and through the valley along Via
Pisana to Empoli in the plai