adonna and Child, probably by
Andrea. Behind a grille, upstairs, sit the hospital nurses. In the
adjoining cloisters--one of the high roads to the hospital proper--is
the ancient statue of old Monna Tessa, Beatrice's nurse, and, in a
niche, a pretty symbolical painting of Charity by that curious painter
Giovanni di San Giovanni. It was in the hospital that the famous Van
der Goes triptych used to hang.

A tablet on a house opposite S. Egidio, a little to the right,
states that it was there that Ghiberti made the Baptistery gates
which Michelangelo considered fit to be the portals of Paradise.

CHAPTER XIV

The Bargello

Plastic art--Blood-soaked stones--The faithful
artists--Michelangelo--Italian custodians--The famous
Davids--Michelangelo's tondo--Brutus--Benedetto da
Rovezzano--Donatello's life-work--The S. George--Verrocchio--Ghiberti
and Brunelleschi and the Baptistery doors--Benvenuto Cellini--John of
Bologna--Antonio Pollaiuolo--Verrocchio again--Mino da Fiesole--The
Florentine wealth of sculpture--Beautiful ladies--The della
Robbias--South Kensington and the Louvre.

Before my last visit but one to Florence, plastic art was less
attractive to me than pictorial art. But now I am not sure. At
any rate when, here in England, I think of Florence, as so often
I do, I find myself visiting in imagination the Bargello before the
Uffizi. Pictures in any number can bewilder and dazzle as much as they
delight. The eye tires. And so, it is true, can a multiplicity of
antique statuary such as one finds at the Vatican or at the Louvre;
but a small collection of Renaissance work, so soft and human,
as at the Bargello, is not only joy-giving but refreshing too. The
soft contours soothe as well as enrapture the eye: the tenderness of
the Madonnas, the gentleness of the Florentine ladies and youths, as
Verrocchio and Mino da Fiesole, Donatello, and Pollaiuolo moulded them,
calm one where the perfection of Phidias and Praxiteles excites. Hence
the very special charm of the Bargello, whose plastic treasures are
comparatively few and picked, as against the heaped profusion of paint
in the Uffizi and the Pitti. It pairs off rather with the Accademia,
and has this further point in common with that choicest of galleries,
that Michelangelo's chisel is represented in both.

The Bargello is at the corner of the Via Ghibellina in the narrow
Via del Proconsolo--so narrow that if you take one step off the
pavement a tram may easi