and
sculpture will be found in the great transept, that makes of the church
a cross of light, a temple of the sun. Here, amid many works of that
time given to Fra Lippo Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, Donatello, and
others, in the south transept there is a Madonna with the family of de'
Nerli by Filippino Lippi, and in the Capponi Chapel a fine portrait of
Neri Capponi, while in the next chapel Perugino's Vision of St. Bernard,
now in Berlin, used to stand. Here, too, is a Statue of St. Sebastian,
nearly always invisible, said to be from the hand of Donatello; in the
choir is a Madonna enthroned by Lorenzo di Credi. The sacristy is
beautiful, built by Giovanni da Sangallo, and the cloisters now spoiled
are the work of Ammanati. And then, here Niccolo Niccoli is buried, that
great book-collector and humanist; while the barbarians are represented,
if only by the passing figure of Martin Luther, not then forsworn, who
is said to have preached here on his way to Rome. It is strange to think
that these beautiful pillars have heard his rough eloquence, an
eloquence that was so soon to destroy the spirit that had conceived
them.

Close by in Piazza S. Spirito is Palazzo Guadagni, built for Ranieri Dei
at the end of the fifteenth century by Cronaca. It was not, however,
till 1684 that the Guadagni family came into possession of it. Bernardo
Guadagni, it will be remembered, was Gonfaloniere of Justice when Cosimo
de' Medici was expelled the city in 1433. Passing this palace and
turning to the right into Via Mazzetta, you pass at the corner the
Church of S. Felice, which has been so often a refuge,--for at first the
Sylvestrians had it, and held it till the fourteenth century, when it
passed to the Camaldolese, from whom it passed again to a congregation
of Dominican nuns and became a sort of refuge for women who had fled
away from their husbands. Within, you may find a few old pictures, a
Giottesque Crucifixion, and a Madonna and Saints, a fifteenth-century
work. Then, turning into Via Romana, you come, past the gardens of S.
Piero in Gattolino, to the Porta Romana, the great gate of the Via
Romana, the way to Rome, and before you is the Hill of Gardens, and
behind you is the garden of the Pitti Palace, Giardino di Boboli, and
farther still, across Via Romana, the Giardino Torrigiani.

The Boboli Gardens, with their alley ways of ilex, their cypresses and
broken statues, their forgotten fountains, are full of sadness--