no. The indomitable persistence of the face! Is it any
wonder that, impossible as his dream appeared, he had his way with
Florence at last--yes, and with himself too? As you stand at the corner
of Via del Proconsolo, and, looking upward, see that immense dome
soaring into the sky over that church of marble, something of the joy
and confidence and beauty that were immortal in him come to you too from
his work. Like Columbus, he conquered a New World. His schemes, which
the best architects in Europe laughed at, were treated with scorn by the
Consiglio, yet he persuaded them at last. In 1418 he made his designs,
and the people, as now, were called upon to vote. Two years went by, and
nothing was done; then in 1420 he was elected by the Opera to the post
of Provveditore della Cupola, but not alone, for Lorenzo Ghiberti and
Battista d'Antonio were elected with him. Still he persisted, and, as
the Florentines say, by pretending sickness and leaving the work to
Ghiberti, who knew nothing about it and could do nothing without him, in
1421 he won over the Consiglio. He began at once. What his agonies may
have been, what profound difficulties he discovered and conquered, we do
not know, but by 1434, when Eugenius IV was in Florence and the Duomo
was consecrated, his dome was finished, wanting only the lantern and the
ball. These he began in 1437, but died too soon to see, for the lantern
was not finished till 1458, and it was only in 1471 that Verrocchio cast
the bronze ball.[90]

Wandering round to the facade, finished in 1886, it is a careful
imitation of fifteenth-century work we see, saved from the mere routine
of just that, in its design at any rate, by the vote of the people, who,
against the opinion of all the artists in Florence at that time,
insisted on the cornice following the basilical form of the tower,
refusing to endorse the pointed "tricuspidal" design. It is not,
however, in such merely competent work as this that we shall find
ourselves interested, but rather in the beautiful door on the north
just before the transept, over which, in an almond-shaped glory, Madonna
gives her girdle to St. Thomas. Given now to Nanni di Banco, a sculptor
of the end of the fourteenth century, whom Vasari tells us was the pupil
of Donatello, it long passed as the work of Jacopo della Quercia.
Certainly one of the loveliest works of the early Renaissance, it is so
full of life and gracious movement, so natural and so noble, that
ever