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Updated: May 27, 2025
Here and there are foliations and other exquisite tracery by pupils of Desiderio da Settignano. In the entrance lobby is a lavabo by Mino da Fiesole, with two little boys of the whitest and softest marble on it, which is worth study. And now we will return to the heart of Florence once more. The Badia and Dante
If I have helped to make it any less invisible to yourselves, let me ask you to pardon the somewhat querulous tone of my concluding remarks. Quis Desiderio . . .? Like Mr. Wilkie Collins, I, too, have been asked to lay some of my literary experiences before the readers of the Universal Review.
Of his beautiful tomb of Carlo Marsuppini in S. Croce I speak elsewhere: it is worthy of its fellows Bernardo Rosellino's tomb of Leonardo Bruni in the same church, and the tomb of the Cardinal of Portugal by Antonio Rossellino at S. Miniato. Desiderio has not the energy of Rossellino or the passionate ardour of Verrocchio. He searches for a quiet beauty full of serenity and delight.
The old leaven of sedition was at work, and disgruntled military chiefs found a willing leader in the minister of war, General Desiderio Arias, a chronic revolutionist from Monte Cristi, who had for years used the popularity of Jimenez as a cloak for his own aspirations. The president, aged and infirm, was unable to meet the situation with energy, and disinclined to adopt severe measures.
And without, before it, he has set, under a vaulted roof, a portico borne by columns, interrupted by a round arch. It is the earliest example, perhaps, of the new Renaissance architecture. Very fair and surprising it is with its frieze of angels' heads by Donatello, helped perhaps by Desiderio da Settignano.
Those chapels that flank the aisles have to-day but little interest for us, here and there a picture or a piece of sculpture, but nothing that will keep us for more than a moment from the chapels of the transept, the work of Desiderio da Settignano, of Verrocchio, and, above all, of Donatello.
The left pulpit is the finer, for it contains the "Crucifixion" and the "Deposition," which to me form the most striking of the panels. The other piece of sculpture in the church itself is a ciborium by Desiderio da Settignano, in the chapel at the end of the right transept an exquisite work by this rare and playful and distinguished hand.
The tomb and altar alike are splendid rather than beautiful: its late Renaissance sculptors, being far removed from Donatello, Mino, and Desiderio, the last of whom was one of the authors of the beautiful font in the adjoining Baptistery.
It was, however, not for the Benedictines but for the Augustinians that Cosimo rebuilt the place, giving them, indeed, one of the most beautiful convents in Italy, and one of the loveliest churches too, a great nave with a transept under a circular vaulting, while the façade is part really of the earlier building, older it may be than S. Miniato or the Baptistery itself, as we now see it; and there the pupils of Desiderio da Settignano have worked and Giovanni di S. Giovanni has painted, while Brunellesco is said to have designed the lectern in the sacristy.
Arabesques and masks and foliated patterns adorn the flat slabs. The recess of each niche is arched with a concave shell. The terminal busts are boldly modelled, and impose upon the eye. The whole is rich in detail, and, though somewhat arid in fanciful invention, it carries us back to the tradition of Florentine work by Mino da Fiesole and Desiderio da Settignano.
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