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thirteenth century a priest found the chalice stained with Christ's
blood, is the beautiful altar by Mino da Fiesole. The church is full of
old frescoes by Cosimo Rosselli, Raffaellino del Garbo, and such, and is
worth a visit, if only for the work of Mino and the S. Sebastian of
Leonardo del Tasso.

It is to another desecrated Benedictine convent you come when, passing
through Via dei Pilastrati and turning into Via Farina, you come at last
in Via della Colonna to S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi. This too is now a
barracks and a school. It was not, however, the nuns who commissioned
Perugino to paint for them his masterpiece, the Crucifixion, in the
refectory, but some Cistercian monks who had acquired the convent in the
thirteenth century. Perugino was painting there in 1496. More than a
hundred years later, Pope Urban VIII, who had some nieces in the
Carmelite Convent on the other side Arno, persuaded the monks to
exchange their home for the Carmine. S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi, who
was born Lucrezia, had died in 1607, and later been canonised, so that
when the nuns moved here they renamed the place after her. The body of
S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi, however, no longer lies in this desecrated
convent, for the little nuns have carried it away to their new home in
Piazza Savonarola. There in that place, always so full of children,
certain Florentine ladies have nobly built a little church and quiet
house, where those who but for them might have been in the street may
still innocently pray to God.

There, in 1496, as I have said, Perugino finished the fresco of the
Crucifixion that he had begun some years before in the chapter-house of
the old S. Maria Maddalena. In almost perfect preservation still, this
fresco on the wall of that quiet and empty room is perhaps the most
perfect expression of the art of Perugino--those dreams of the country
and of certain ideal people he has seen there; Jesus and His disciples,
Madonna and Mary Magdalen, sweet, smiling, and tearful ghosts passing in
the sunshine, less real than the hills, all perhaps that the world was
able to bear by way of remembrance of those it had worshipped once, but
was beginning to forget. And here at last, in this fresco, the landscape
has really become of more importance than the people, who breathe there
so languidly. The Crucifixion has found something of the expressiveness,
the unction of a Christian hymn, something of the quiet beauty of the
Mass that