t
which seen from the top of the Campanile is the straightest thing in
Florence, running like a ruled line from the Duomo to the valley of
the Mugnone. Upstairs are modern painters: but upstairs I have never
been. It is the ground-floor rooms that are so memorable, containing
as they do a small but very choice collection of pictures illustrating
the growth of Italian art, with particular emphasis on Florentine
art; the best assemblage of the work of Fra Angelico that exists;
and a large gallery given up to Michelangelo's sculpture: originals
and casts. The principal magnets that draw people here, no doubt,
are the Fra Angelicos and Botticelli's "Primavera"; but in five at
least of the rooms there is not an uninteresting picture, while the
collection is so small that one can study it without fatigue--no
little matter after the crowded Uffizi and Pitti.

It is a simple matter to choose in such a book as this the best
place in which to tell something of the life-story of, say, Giotto
and Brunelleschi and the della Robbias; for at a certain point their
genius is found concentrated--Donatello's and the della Robbias'
in the Bargello and those others at the Duomo and Campanile. But
with Michelangelo it is different, he is so distributed over the
city--his gigantic David here, the Medici tombs at S. Lorenzo, his
fortifications at S. Miniato, his tomb at S. Croce, while there remains
his house as a natural focus of all his activities. I have, however,
chosen the Medici chapel as the spot best suited for his biography,
and therefore will here dwell only on the originals that are preserved
about the David. The David himself, superb and confident, is the
first thing you see in entering the doors of the gallery. He stands
at the end, white and glorious, with his eyes steadfastly measuring
his antagonist and calculating upon what will be his next move if the
sling misdirects the stone. Of the objection to the statue as being
not representative of the Biblical figure I have said something in the
chapter on the Bargello, where several Davids come under review. Yet,
after all that can be said against its dramatic fitness, the statue
remains an impressive and majestic yet strangely human thing. There
it is--a sign of what a little Italian sculptor with a broken nose
could fashion with his mallet and chisel from a mass of marble four
hundred and more years ago.

Its history is curious. In 1501, when Michelangelo was twenty-six
and had