whole scene had been arranged for the sake of her portrait;
and, indeed it is a portrait, for the richly dressed visitor is Ginevra
de' Benci, who stands too in the fresco of the Birth of St. John. Again
in the fresco of the angel appearing to Zacharias in the Temple, there
are some thirty portraits of famous Florentines, painted with much
patience, and no doubt with an extraordinary truth of likeness. In the
left corner you may see Marsilio Ficino dressed as a priest; Gentile de'
Becchi turns to him, while Cristoforo Landini in a red cloak stands by,
and Angelo Poliziano lifts up his hands.

Does one ever regret, I wonder, after looking at these realistic
fifteenth-century works, that the frescoes of Orcagna--for he painted
the whole choir--were destroyed in a storm, it is said, in 1358.
Fragments of his work, however, we are told, remained for more than a
hundred years, till, indeed, Ghirlandajo was employed to replace them.
We find his work, however, sadly damaged it is true, and really his
perhaps only in outline, in the Strozzi chapel here, the lofty chapel
of north transept, where he has painted on the wall facing the entrance
the Last Judgment, while to the left you may see Paradise, to the right
the Inferno. The pupil of Giotto and of Andrea Pisano, Orcagna is the
most important artist of his time, the one vital link in the chain that
unites Masolino with Giotto. He was a universal artist, practising as an
architect and goldsmith no less than as a painter. In the Last Judgment
in this chapel he seems not only to have absorbed the whole art of his
time, but to have advanced it; for to the grandeur and force of his work
he added a certain visionary loveliness that most surely already
foretells Beato Angelico. If in the Paradise and the Inferno we are less
moved by the greatness of his achievement, we remind ourselves how
terribly they have suffered from damp, from neglect, from the restorer.
In the altar-piece itself we have perhaps the only "intact painting" of
his remaining to us, and splendid as it is in colour and form, it lacks
something of the rhythm of the frescoes that like some slow and solemn
chant fill the chapel with their sincere unforgetable music.

As you pass, beckoned by a friar, into the half-ruined cloisters below
S. Maria Novella, you come on your right into a little alley of tombs,
behind which, on the wall, you may find two bits of fresco by Giotto,
the Meeting of S. Joachim and S. Anna at th