f Italy. The museum contains much that, in
its removal here or dilapidation, has lost nearly all its interest. The
beautiful fresco of St. Eustace, said to be the work of Andrea Castagno,
is yet full of delight, while here and there amid these old crucifixes,
tabernacles, and frescoes, by pupils of Giotto long forgotten, something
will charm you by its sincerity or naive beauty, so that you will
forget, if only for a moment, the destruction that has befallen all
around you; the convent that once housed S. Bernardino of Siena, now
noisy with conscripts, the library housed in another convent, Dominican
once, that like this has become a museum and public monument of
vandalism and rapacity.

FOOTNOTES:

[104] Cf. Crowe and Gavalcaselle, _op. cit._ vol. ii. p. 124.

[105] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _op. cit._ vol. ii. p. 77.

[106] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _op. cit._ vol. ii. p. 81.

[107] _Mornings in Florence_, by John Ruskin.

XVIII. FLORENCE

S. LORENZO

Something of the eager, restless desire for beauty, for antique beauty,
so characteristic of the fifteenth century--for the security and
strength of just that, may be found in S. Lorenzo and S. Spirito, those
two churches which we owe to the genius of Brunellesco, and in them we
seem to find the negation, as it were, of the puritan spirit, of all
that the Convent of S. Marco had come to mean: as though when, one day
at dawn, the peasants ploughing in some little valley in the hills, had
come upon the gleaming white body of the witch Venus, in burning the
precious statue which had lain so long in the earth, they had not been
able altogether to destroy the spirit, free at last, which in the cool
twilight had escaped them to wander about the city. It is the spirit of
Rome you come upon in S. Lorenzo, the old Rome of the Basilicas, that
were but half Christian after all, and, still in ruin, seem to remember
the Gods.

A church has stood where S. Lorenzo stands certainly since pagan times,
for at the beginning of the fourth century, one Giuliana, who had three
daughters but no son, vowed a church to St. Laurence if he would grant
her a son; and a son being born to her she founded S. Lorenzo, and
called the child Laurence for praise. St. Ambrose is said to have come
from Milan to consecrate the place, bringing with him certain relics,
the bones of S. Agnola and S. Vitale, victims of the pagans which he had
found in Bologna; while for sixty years, till 490, the b