alatestiano at Rimini, that
beautiful unfinished temple where the gods of Greece seem for once to
have come to the cradle of Jesus with something of the wonder of the
shepherds who left their flocks to worship Him, Leon Alberti has taken
as his model the arch of Augustus, that still, though broken, stands on
the verge of the city in the Flaminian Way; but as though aware at last
of the danger of any mere imitation of antiquity such as that, he has
here contrived to express the beauty of Roman things, just what he
himself had really felt concerning them, and has combined that very
happily with the work of the age that was just then passing away; thus,
as it were, creating for us one of the most perfect buildings of the
fifteenth century, very characteristic too, in its strange beauty, as of
the dead new risen. And then how subtly he has composed this beautiful
facade, so that somehow it really adds to the beauty of the Campanile,
with its rosy spire, in the background.

Within, the church is full of a sort of twilight, in which certainly
much of its spaciousness is lost; those chapels in the nave, for
instance, added by Vasari in the sixteenth century have certainly
spoiled it of much of its beauty. Built in the shape of a tau cross--a
Latin cross that is almost tau, in old days it was divided, where still
there is a step across the nave into two parts, one of which was
reserved for the friars, while the other was given to the people. There
is not much of interest in this part of the church: a crucifix over the
great door, attributed to Giotto; a fresco of the Holy Trinity, with
Madonna and St. John, by Masaccio, that rare strong master; the altar,
the fourth in the right aisle, dedicated to St. Thomas of
Canterbury,--almost nothing beside. It is in the south transept, where a
flight of steps leads to the Rucellai Chapel, that we came upon one of
the most beautiful and mysterious things in the city, the Madonna, so
long given to Cimabue, but now claimed for Duccio of Siena.[102]

Vasari describes for us very delightfully the triumph of this picture,
when, so great was the admiration of the people for it that "it was
carried in solemn procession, with the sound of trumpets and other
festal demonstrations, from the house of Cimabue to the church,--he
himself being highly rewarded and honoured for it"; while, as he goes on
to tell us, when Cimabue was painting it, in a garden as it happened
near the gate of S. Pietro, King