man should pray, without
self-consciousness and not without self-respect. He is without
sentiment; he believes in largeness, grandeur, splendour, and sincerity;
and he has known the gods for three thousand years.

What, then, we are to look for in entering such a church as S. Maria del
Fiore is, above all, a noble spaciousness and the beauty of just
that.[88]

The splendour and nobility of S. Maria del Fiore from without are
evident, it might seem, to even the most prejudiced observer; but
within, I think, the beauty is perhaps less easily perceived.

One comes through the west doors out of the sunshine of the Piazza into
an immense nave, and the light is that of an olive garden,--yes, just
that sparkling, golden, dancing shadow of a day of spring in an old
olive grove not far from the sea. In this delicate and fragile light the
beauty and spaciousness of the church are softened and simplified. You
do not reason any longer, you accept it at once as a thing complete and
perfect. Complete and perfect--yet surely spoiled a little by the
gallery that dwarfs the arches and seems to introduce a useless detail
into what till then must have been so simple. One soon forgets so small
a thing in the immensity and solemnity of the whole, that seems to come
to one with the assurance of the sky or of the hills, really without an
afterthought. And indeed I find there much of the strange simplicity of
natural things that move us we know not why: the autumn fields of which
Alberti speaks, the far hills at evening, the valleys that in an hour
will make us both glad and sorry, as the sun shines or the clouds gather
or the wind sings on the hills. Not a church to think in as St. Peter's
is, but a place where one may pray, said Pius IX when he first saw S.
Maria del Fiore: and certainly it has that in common with the earth,
that you may be glad in it as well as sorry. It is not a museum of the
arts; it is not a pantheon like Westminster Abbey or S. Croce; it is the
beautiful house where God and man may meet and walk in the shadow.

Yet little though there be to interest the curious, Giovanni Acuto, that
Englishman Sir John Hawkwood of the White Company, one of the first of
the Condottieri, the deliverer of Pisa, "the first real general of
modern times," is buried here. You may see his equestrian portrait by
Paolo Uccello over the north-west doorway in his habit as he lived.
Having fought against the Republic and died in its service, he