, with a bronze figure of a famous Franciscan, Francesco
Sansoni da Brescia.

Next the sacristy. Italian priests apparently have no resentment
against inquisitive foreigners who are led into their dressing-rooms
while sumptuous and significant vestments are being donned; but I must
confess to feeling it for them, and if my impressions of the S. Croce
sacristy are meagre and confused it is because of a certain delicacy
that I experienced in intruding upon their rites. For on both occasions
when I visited the sacristy there were several priests either robing
or disrobing. Apart from a natural disinclination to invade privacy,
I am so poor a Roman Catholic as to be in some doubt as to whether one
has a right to be so near such a mystery at all. But I recollect that
in this sacristy are treasures of wood and iron--the most beautiful
intarsia wainscotting I ever saw, by Giovanni di Michele, with a frieze
of wolves and foliage, and fourteenth-century iron gates to the little
chapel, pure Gothic in design, with a little rose window at the top,
delicate beyond words: all which things once again turn the thoughts
to this wonderful Italy of the fourteenth and fifteenth century,
when not even the best was good enough for those who built churches,
but something miraculous was demanded from every craftsman.

At the end of the passage in which the sacristy is situated is the
exquisite little Cappella Medici, which Michelozzo, the architect of
S. Marco and the Palazzo Medici, and for a while Donatello's partner,
built for his friend Cosimo de' Medici, who though a Dominican in his
cell at S. Marco was a Franciscan here, but by being equally a patron
dissociated himself from partisanship. Three treasures in particular
does this little temple hold: Giotto's "Coronation of the Virgin"; the
della Robbia altar relief, and Mino da Fiesole's tabernacle. Giotto's
picture, which is signed, once stood as altar-piece in the Baroncelli
chapel of the church proper. In addition to the beautiful della
Robbia altar-piece, so happy and holy--which Alfred Branconi boldly
calls Luca--there is over the door Christ between two angels,
a lovely example of the same art. For a subtler, more modern and
less religious mind, we have but to turn to the tabernacle by Mino,
every inch of which is exquisite.

On the same wall is a curious thing. In the eighteen-sixties died
a Signor Lombardi, who owned certain reliefs which he believed to
be Donatello's. When hi