mmissions for statues of a more imposing
scale to be placed on the ill-fated facade of the Cathedral. All
beautiful within, the churches of Florence are singularly poor in
those rich facades which give such scope to the sculptor and
architect, conferring, as at Pisa, distinction on a whole town. The
churches of the Carmine, Santo Spirito and San Lorenzo are without
facades at all, presenting graceless and unfinished masonry in place
of what was intended by their founders. Elsewhere there are late and
florid facades alien to the spirit of the main building, while it has
been left to our own generation to complete Santa Croce and the
Cathedral. The latter, it is true, once had a facade, which, though
never finished, was ambitiously planned. A large section of it was,
however, erected in Donatello's time, but was removed for no reason
which can be adequately explained, except that on the occasion of a
royal marriage it was thought necessary to destroy what was contrived
in the _maniera tedesca_, substituting a sham painted affair which was
speedily ruined by the elements. The ethics of vandalism are indeed
strange and varied. In this case vanity was responsible. It was
superstition which led the Sienese, after incurring defeat by the
Florentines, to remove from their market-place the famous statue by
Lysippus which brought them ill-luck, and to bury it in Florentine
territory, so that their enemies might suffer instead. Ignorance
nearly induced a Pope to destroy the "Last Judgment" of Michael
Angelo, whose colossal statue of an earlier Pontiff, Julius II., was
broken up through political animosity. One wishes that in this last
case there had been some practical provision such as that inserted by
the House of Lords in the order for destroying the Italian Tombs at
Windsor in 1645, when they ordained that "they that buy the tombs
shall have liberty to transport them beyond the seas, for making the
best advantage of them." The vandalism which dispersed Donatello's
work could not even claim to be utilitarian, like that which so nearly
caused the destruction of the famous chapel by Benozzo Gozzoli in the
Riccardi Palace (for the purposes of a new staircase);[2] neither was
it caused by the exigencies of war, such as the demolition of the
Monastery of San Donato, a treasure-house of early painting, razed to
the ground by the Florentines when awaiting the siege of 1529. The
Cathedral facade was hastily removed, and only a fraction