is perfect, far beyond
painting in its tenderness and symbolic value. I speak of course
of the Madonnas and altar-pieces. When the della Robbias worked for
the open air--as in the facade of the Children's Hospital, or at the
Certosa, or in the Loggia di San Paolo, opposite S. Maria Novella,
where one may see the beautiful meeting of S. Francis and S. Dominic,
by Andrea--they seem, in Italy, to have fitness enough; but it would
not do to transplant any of these reliefs to an English facade. There
was once, I might add, in Florence a Via della Robbia, but it is now
the Via Nazionale. I suppose this injustice to the great potters came
about in the eighteen-sixties, when popular political enthusiasm led
to every kind of similar re-naming.

In the room leading out of the second della Robbia room is a collection
of vestments and brocades bequeathed by Baron Giulio Franchetti, where
you may see, dating from as far back as the sixth century, designs
that for beauty and splendour and durability put to shame most of the
stuffs now woven; but the top floor of the Museo Archeologico in the
Via della Colonna is the chief home in Florence of such treasures.

There are other beautiful things in the Bargello of which I have said
nothing--a gallery of mediaeval bells most exquisitely designed, from
famous steeples; cases of carved ivory; and many of such treasures as
one sees at the Cluny in Paris. But it is for its courtyard and for the
Renaissance sculpture that one goes to the Bargello, and returns again
and again to the Bargello, and it is for these that one remembers it.

On returning to London the first duty of every one who has drunk
deep of delight in the Bargello is to visit that too much neglected
treasure-house of our own, the Victoria and Albert Museum at South
Kensington. There may be nothing at South Kensington as fine as the
Bargello's finest, but it is a priceless collection and is superior
to the Bargello in one respect at any rate, for it has a relief
attributed to Leonardo. Here also is an adorable Madonna and laughing
Child, beyond anything in Florence for sheer gaiety if not mischief,
which the South Kensington authorities call a Rossellino but Herr
Bode a Desiderio da Settignano. The room is rich too in Donatello
and in Verrocchio, and altogether it makes a perfect footnote to the
Bargello. It also has within call learned gentlemen who can give
intimate information about the exhibits, which the Bargello badly
la