acristy, we come into a corridor and thence into the Sacristy itself,
which Vasari covered with whitewash. Built in the fourteenth century, it
is divided into two parts by a grating of exquisitely wrought iron of
the same period. Behind this grating is the Rinuccini chapel, painted in
fresco by a pupil of Taddeo Gaddi, Giovanni da Milano, in whose work we
may discern, in spite of the rigid convention of his master, something
sincere, a lightness and grace and even perhaps a certain reliance on
Nature, which the authority of Giotto had spoiled for Taddeo himself. It
is the stories of the Blessed Virgin and of St. Mary Magdalen that he
has set himself to tell, with an infinite detail that a little confuses
his really fine and sincere work. Repainted though they be, something of
their original beauty may still be found there, their simplicity and
homely realism.

At the end of the corridor is the chapel which Cosimo de' Medici, Pater
Patriae caused Michelozzo to build for his delight. Over the altar is
one of the loveliest works of the della Robbia school, a Madonna and
Child, between St. Anthony of Padua, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, St. John
Baptist, St. Laurence, St. Louis of Toulouse, and St. Francis; while on
the wall is a later work of the same school, after a work by Verrocchio,
where Madonna holds her Son in her arms; and opposite is another work by
a Tuscan sculptor, a Tabernacle, by Mino da Fiesole (1431-1484), who
certainly has loved the gracious marbles of Desiderio da Settignano. The
picture of the Coronation of the Virgin beside this Tabernacle, once the
altar-piece of the Baroncelli Chapel, a genuine work of Giotto's, as it
is thought, is tender in feeling and magnificent in arrangement and
composition. Full of a grave earnestness and full of ardent life,--mark
the eagerness of those clouds of Saints,--it is worthy of the painter of
the tribune of the Lower Church at Assisi.

Returning now to the church itself, we begin our examination of those
twelve chapels, which with the choir form the eastern end of S. Croce.
The first three chapels have little interest, but the two nearest the
choir, Cappella Peruzzi and Cappella Bardi, were both painted in fresco
by Giotto, his work there being among the best of his paintings.

The Peruzzi Chapel was built by the powerful family that name, who had
already done much for S. Croce, when about 1307 they employed Giotto to
decorate these walls with frescoes of the story of S