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You pass the Church of S. Maria a Ripa just before you enter the city by the beautiful Porta Pisana, but though you may find some delightful works of della Robbia ware there, especially a S. Lucia, it is in the Collegiata di S. Andrea in the lovely Piazza Farinata degli Uberti, that most of the works have been gathered in some of the rooms of the old college.
This grandeur was, however, fully regained in the last work of the master, painted in 1523, the very year of his death "The Coronation of the Virgin," in the Collegiata of Foiano, a small town near Sinalunga. The Virgin, in red robes and greenish-blue mantle, with fair hair, kneels before Christ, who places the crown on her head.
The attraction of S. Quirico is its gem-like little collegiata, a Lombard church of the ninth century, with carved portals of the thirteenth. It is built of golden travertine; some details in brown sandstone. The western and southern portals have pillars resting on the backs of lions. On the western side these pillars are four slender columns, linked by snake-like ligatures.
Some fine della Robbia fragments and a beautiful relief of the Madonna and Child by Mino da Fiesole are among the rest of the treasures of the Collegiata, where you may find much that is merely old or curious.
John made in 1477 for the Opera, a relief of the Adoration of the Shepherds, another of Madonna in an almond-shaped glory of cherubim, and, last of all, the splendid busts of Matteo Palmieri and Francesco Sassetti; but his masterpiece in pure sculpture is the S. Sebastian in the Collegiata at Empoli, a fair and youthful figure without the affectation and languor that were so soon to fall upon him.
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