murderer,[114] and in the left aisle is
the chapel, built in 1461 by Antonio Rossellino, where the young
Cardinal Jacopo of Portugal lies in one of the loveliest of all Tuscan
tombs, and there Luca della Robbia has placed some of his most charming
terracottas, and Alessio Baldovinetti has painted in fresco. In all
Tuscany there is nothing more lovely than that tomb carved in 1467 by
Antonio Rossellino for the body of the young Cardinal, but twenty-six
years old when he died, "having lived in the flesh as though he were
freed from it, an Angel rather than a man." Over the beautiful
sarcophagus, on a bed beside which two boy angels wait, the young
Cardinal sleeps, his delicate hands folded at rest at last. Above, two
angels kneel, about to give him the crown of glory which fadeth not
away, and Madonna, borne from heaven by the children, comes with her Son
to welcome him home. There, in the most characteristic work of the
fifteenth century, you find man still thinking about death, not as a
trance out of which we shall awaken to some terrible remembrance, but as
sleep, a sweet and fragile slumber, that has something of the drooping
of the flowers about it, in a certain touching beauty and regret that is
never bitter, but, like the ending of a song or the close of a fair day
of spring, that rightly, though not without sadness, passes into
silence, into night, in which shine only the eternal stars.

It is strange that of all the difficult hills of Italy, it is the steep
way hither from Porto S. Niccola, of old, in truth Via Crucis, that
comes into Dante's mind when, in the Twelfth Purgatorio, he sees the
ascent to the second cornice, where is purged the sin of envy. Something
of the immense sadness of that terrible hill seems to linger to-day
about the Monti alle Croci: it is truly a hill of the dead, over which
hovers, pointing the way, some angel

"la creatura bella
Bianco vestita, e nella faccia quale
Per tremolando mattutina Stella."

The Convent of S. Salvatore--S. Francesco al Monte, as it was called of
old--was built in 1480 after a design by Cronaca. Hesitating among the
cypresses on the verge of the olives gardens, Michelangelo called it La
bella Villanella, and truly in its warm simplicity and shy loveliness it
is just that, a beautiful peasant girl among the vines in a garden of
olives. But she has been stripped of her treasures, her trinkets of
silver, her pretty gold chains, her gown of taf