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This church was established in 1894 with twenty-five members, and has had a good growth. They open the baptistery every Lord's day night, and very frequently have occasion to use it. There were fifty-three baptisms last year, and twenty-one others were added to the membership of the church.
Apollinare in Classe, two remarkable full-length figures from the ancient baptistery, the representation of the Saviour as the "Good Shepherd" in the celebrated mausoleum of the Empress Galla Placidia, and the portraits of the Apostles in the private chapel of the Cardinal.
As a youth he attempted everything, being of a pertinacious and inquiring mind, and he was also a great debater and student of Dante; and, taking to sculpture, he was one of those who, as we shall see in a later chapter, competed for the commission for the Baptistery gates. It was indeed his failure in that competition which decided him to concentrate on architecture.
Thus, for instance, in the architecture which Niccola was occupied upon, when a boy, under his Byzantine master. Here is the door of the Baptistery at Pisa, again by Mr. Severn delightfully enlarged for us from a photograph. The general idea of it is a square-headed opening in a solid wall, faced by an arch carried on shafts.
Within are two figures, a crowned woman holding a book, and a mitred male figure, probably intended for the Virgin and Valaresso himself. The baptistery is an hexagonal building with niches in each side within, vaulted without ribs in wagon divisions, and with four windows above the niches. Altars stand in two niches, a confessional-box in another, and through the remaining three there are doors.
The son of a lawyer named Alighieri, Dante was born in 1265, but whether or not in this Casa Dante is an open question, and it was in the Baptistery that he received the name of Durante, afterwards abbreviated to Dante Durante meaning enduring, and Dante giving.
We disposed of the old house in Williamstown, and got the new house roofed in 1867. We also repaired the house at Crittenden, getting it in nice order, and putting in a baptistery. For the year 1868, the church at Crittenden wanted all my time, and I gave up the church at Williamstown, devoting all my energies to the one church.
I opened the door, and found myself in a marvellous passage, along whose sides were many divinities wrought in a mosaic, not less beautiful than the mosaic in the Baptistery at Ravenna, but of a less severe beauty; the predominant colour of each divinity, which was surely a symbolic colour, being repeated in the lamps that hung from the ceiling, a curiously-scented lamp before every divinity.
The entrance of the Duomo being just across the piazza, I went in there after leaving the Baptistery, and was struck anew for this is the third or fourth visit with the dim grandeur of the interior, lighted as it is almost exclusively by painted windows, which seem to me worth all the variegated marbles and rich cabinet-work of St. Peter's.
Coming back to the Cathedral, the remarkably picturesque little circular Lavatory Tower standing on late Norman open arches is noticeable in its shadowy seclusion among the lofty walls of the choir chapels. This is generally known as the Baptistery, but the name only began to be used when the font Bishop Warner presented to the Cathedral was placed there.
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