etness of the night; but of those who are weary. Born to a
wealthy Florentine merchant, Andrea di Messer Lapo by name, little Vanna
went her ways with the children, yet with a sort of naive sincerity
after all, so that when she heard Saint Catherine praised or Saint
Francis, she believed it and wished to be of that company; but the
world, full of glamour and laughter in those days, and now too, caught
her by the waist and bore her away, in the person of a noble youth of
the Benintendi, who loved her well enough; yet it was love she loved
rather than her husband; and life calling sweetly enough down the long
narrow streets, she followed, yes, till she was a little weary. So she
would question her beauty, and, looking in her glass, see not herself
but the demon love that possessed her; and again in another mirror she
found a devil, she said, like a faun prick-eared and with goat's feet,
peering at her with frightening eyes. So she stripped off her fair gay
dresses, and took instead the rough hair-shirt, and came at evening
across the Piazza to confess in S. Maria Novella; and gave herself to
the poor, and forgot the sun till weary she fled away. Her grandson, as
it is said, built this tomb to her memory, and they wrote above, Beata
Villana.

It is always with reluctance, I think, that one leaves that dim chapel
of the Rucellai, and yet how many wonderful things await us in the
church. In the second chapel of the transept, the Chapel of Filippo
Strozzi, who is buried behind the altar, Filippino Lippi, the son of Fra
Lippo, the pupil of Botticelli, has painted certain frescoes,--a little
bewildering in their crowded beauty, it is true, but how good after all
in their liveliness, their light and shadow, the pleasant, eager faces
of the women--where St. John raises Drusiana from the grave, or St.
Philip drives out the Dragon of Hierapolis; while above St. John is
martyred, and St. Philip too. But it is in the choir behind the high
altar, where for so long the scaffolding has prevented our sight, that
we come upon the simple serious work of Domencio Ghirlandajo, whom all
the critics have scorned. Born in 1449, the pupil of Alessio
Baldovinetti, Ghirlandajo is not a great painter perhaps, but rather a
craftsman, a craftsman with a wonderful power of observation, of noting
truly the life of his time. He seems to have asked of art rather truth
than beauty. Almost wholly, perhaps, without the temperament of an
artist, his success