winged cherubs, even as they may be seen to this day in
the pictures of Perugino, seemed, on the eve of San Giovanni, to have
brought their piece of the heavens down into the narrow streets, and to
pass slowly through them; and, more wonderful still, saints of gigantic
size, with attendant angels, might be seen, not seated, but moving in a
slow mysterious manner along the streets, like a procession of colossal
figures come down from the high domes and tribunes of the churches. The
clouds were made of good woven stuff, the saints and cherubs were
unglorified mortals supported by firm bars, and those mysterious giants
were really men of very steady brain, balancing themselves on stilts,
and enlarged, like Greek tragedians, by huge masks and stuffed
shoulders; but he was a miserably unimaginative Florentine who thought
only of that--nay, somewhat impious, for in the images of sacred things
was there not some of the virtue of sacred things themselves? And if,
after that, there came a company of merry black demons well armed with
claws and thongs, and other implements of sport, ready to perform
impromptu farces of bastinadoing and clothes-tearing, why, that was the
demons' way of keeping a vigil, and they, too, might have descended from
the domes and the tribunes. The Tuscan mind slipped from the devout to
the burlesque, as readily as water round an angle; and the saints had
already had their turn, had gone their way, and made their due pause
before the gates of San Giovanni, to do him honour on the eve of his
_festa_. And on the morrow, the great day thus ushered in, it was
fitting that the tributary symbols paid to Florence by all its dependent
cities, districts, and villages, whether conquered, protected, or of
immemorial possession, should be offered at the shrine of San Giovanni
in the old octagonal church, once the cathedral and now the baptistery,
where every Florentine had had the sign of the Cross made with the
anointing chrism on his brow; that all the city, from the white-haired
man to the stripling, and from the matron to the lisping child, should
be clothed in its best to do honour to the great day, and see the great
sight; and that again, when the sun was sloping and the streets were
cool, there should be the glorious race or Corso, when the unsaddled
horses, clothed in rich trappings, should ran right across the city,
from the Porta al Prato on the north-west, through the Mercato Vecchio,
to the Porta Santa