or the life and charm
which they possess are perhaps Benedetto's finest work. In the beautiful
niches below he has set some delightful statuettes, representing Faith,
Hope, Charity, Fortitude, and Justice.

Passing now into the south transept, we come to the great chapel of the
Blessed Sacrament, with its spoiled frescoes of the stories of St. John
Baptist, St. John the Divine, St. Nicholas and St. Anthony; while here,
too, is the tomb of the Duchess of Albany, who was the wife of the Young
Pretender, and who loved Alfieri the poet, whose monument, as we have
seen, she caused Canova to make.

The south transept ends in the Baroncelli Chapel, which "between the
close of December 1332 and the first days of August 1338," Taddeo Gaddi
painted in fresco.[104] Giotto died in 1337, and Taddeo, who had served
under him, seems to have been content to carry on his practice without
bringing any originality of his own to the work. What Taddeo could
assimilate of Giotto's manner he most patiently reproduced, so that his
work, never anything but a sort of imitation, threatens to overwhelm in
its own mediocrity much of the achievement of his master. The beautiful
and sincere work of Giotto in him degenerates into a mannerism, a
mannerism that the people of his own day seem to have appreciated quite
as much as the living work of Giotto himself. Taddeo, trained by his
master in the Giottesque manner, became its most patient champion, and
practising an art that was in his hands little better than a craft, he
finds himself understood, and when Giotto is not available very
naturally takes his place. Here in S. Croce, a church in which Giotto
himself had worked, we find Taddeo's work everywhere: over the door of
the Sacristy he painted Christ and the Doctors; in the Cappella di S.
Andrea, the stories of St. Peter and St. Andrew; in the Bellaci chapel,
too, and above all in this the chapel of the Baroncelli family. But when
Giotto, being long dead, other and newer painters arose, Taddeo's work,
out of fashion at last, suffered the oblivion of whitewash, sharing this
fate with some of the best work in Italy: so that there is to-day but
little left of it in S. Croce save these frescoes, where he has painted,
not without a certain vigour and almost a gift for composition, the
story of the Blessed Virgin.

Close by, without the chapel, is a very beautiful monument the school
of Niccolo Pisano; passing this and entering the great door of the
S