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I leave the white and crumbling Piazza, its old marble well, its beggars, its sick, and its meadow-fresh border of Delia Robbia planting, and stray up the Via del Ceppo towards the ramparts. High at a barred window a brown mother with a brown dependent baby smiles down upon my wayfaring.
A passing good painter in the time of Don Lorenzo was Antonio Vite of Pistoia, who, besides many other works as it has been said in the Life of Starnina painted, in the Palace of the Ceppo at Prato, the life of Francesco di Marco, founder of that holy place.
And if we see here the first impulse of the Gothic, the Romantic spirit, in Italian art, as in Niccolò's work we have seen the classic inspiration, it is the far result of these panels that we may discover in the terra-cotta frieze on the vestibule of the Ospedale del Ceppo.
And then the Virgin, full of Grace, but a shy girl in her teens for all that, hides her hot cheeks and cries her little wild heart to quietness. Some of it is in Albertinelli's fine picture, but not all. And now cross the Piazza and come down the steep incline by the Palazzo Commune, turn to the left, and behold the crown of Pistoja, the Spedale del Ceppo.
Andrea, Giovanni, Luca II. and Girolamo came and conjured in turn, and their wallflowers sprouted from the limewashed sides. I fancy myself out in the patched Piazzo del Ceppo as I write, looking again on the pleasant quietness of it all. It is a grey day with thunder smouldering somewhere in the hills, close and heavy.
Among the very best works of the later Robbian school may be cited the frieze upon the façade of the Ospedale del Ceppo at Pistoja, representing in varied colour, and with graceful vivacity, the Seven Acts of Mercy. Date about 1525. He calls himself Agostinus Florentine Lapicida on his façade of the Oratory of S. Bernardino.
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