. Giovanni, on the way to Arezzo. He was
the son of a notary, Ser Giovanni di Simone Guidi, called della
Scheggia, and his first labours in art, Vasari tells us, were begun at
the time when Masolino was working at this chapel in the Carmine. He had
evidently been much impressed by the work of Donato, and, indeed,
something of the realism of sculpture has passed into his work, in the
St. Peter Baptizing, for instance, where he who stands by the side of
the pool, awaiting his turn, has much of the reality of a statue. And
then with a magical sincerity Masaccio has understood the mere
discomfort of such a delay in the cool air, and a shiver seems about to
pass over that body, which is as real to us as any figure in the work of
Michelangelo. Or again, in the fresco of the Tribute Money, how real and
full of energy these people are,--the young man with his back to us, who
has been interrupted; Jesus Himself, who has just interposed; Peter, who
is protesting. How full of a real majesty is this composition, admirably
composed, too, and original even in that. Here, it might seem, we have
the end of merely decorative painting, the beginning of realism, of the
effect of reality, and it is therefore with surprise we see so facile a
master as Filippino Lippi set to finish work of such elemental and
tremendous genius. How pretty his work seems beside these realities.

Coming out into the Piazza again, and turning to the left down Via S.
Frediano, you come almost at once, on the right, to the Church of S.
Frediano in Castello. You may enter it from Lung' Arno, but it would
scarcely be worth a visit, for it is a late seventeenth-century
building, save that in the convent may still be found the cell of S.
Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi; for it was this convent that the Carmelite
nuns exchanged with the Cistercians for the house in Via di Pinti,
called to-day S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi, where Perugino painted his
beautiful fresco of the Crucifixion.

Just across the way is the Mercato di S. Frediano and the suppressed
monastery of the Camaldolese, now a school; and by this way you come to
Porta S. Frediano, by which Charles VIII of France entered Florence and
Rinaldo degli Albizzi left it. The whole of this quarter is given up to
the poor and to the Madonna of the street corner, for here her children
dwell, the outcasts and refuse of civilisation who work that we may
live. It is always with reluctance, in spite of the children that I come