ody of S.
Zenobio lay here. In those days, and until the last years of the
eleventh century, S. Lorenzo stood without the walls, and when Cosimo
came back to Florence, the old church, which had fallen into decay, was
already being rebuilt, Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici, with others, having
given the work to Brunellesco. Filippo Brunellesco, however, had got no
farther, it seems, than the Sagrestia Vecchia when he died, while
Antonio Manetti, who succeeded him as architect, changed somewhat his
design. The church was consecrated at last in 1461, some three years
before the death of Cosimo, who lies before the high altar.

It is really as the resting-place of the Medici that we have come to
consider S. Lorenzo, for here lie not only Giovanni di Bicci and
Piccarda, the parents of Cosimo Pater Patriae, and Cosimo himself, but
Piero and Giovanni his sons, while in the new sacristy lie Giuliano and
Lorenzo il Magnifico his grandsons, and their namesakes Giuliano Duc de
Nemours and Lorenzo Due d'Urbino; and in the Cappella dei Principi,
built in 1604 by Matteo Nigetti, lie the Grand Dukes from Cosimo I to
Cosimo III, the rulers of Florence and Tuscany from the sixteenth to the
beginning of the eighteenth centuries.

The church itself is in the form of a Latin cross, consisting of nave
and aisles and transepts, the nave being covered with a flat coffered
ceiling, though the aisles are vaulted. Along the aisles are square
chapels, scarcely more than recesses, and above the great doors is a
chapel supported by pillars, a design of Michelangelo, who was to have
built the facade for Leo X, but, after infinite thought and work in the
marble mountains, the Pope bade him abandon it in 1519. For many years a
single pillar, the only one that ever came to Florence of all those hewn
for the church in Pietrasanta, lay forlorn in the Piazza.

Those chapels that flank the aisles have to-day but little interest for
us, here and there a picture or a piece of sculpture, but nothing that
will keep us for more than a moment from the chapels of the transept,
the work of Desiderio da Settignano, of Verrocchio, and, above all, of
Donatello. It is all unaware to the tomb of this the greatest sculptor,
and in many ways the most typical artist, Florence ever produced, that
we come, when, standing in front of the high altar, we read the
inscription on that simple slab of stone which marks the tomb of Cosimo
Vecchio; for Donatello lies in the same vault