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Updated: May 6, 2025
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.
The bell of the Duomo was ringing, the shops were mostly closed, and all Florence was out in the streets, it being the Festa of the Befana, one of the greatest of all the ever-recurring festas of Florence. Street urchins were parading the thoroughfares with horns and wildly shouting, and there was an exchange of presents on every hand.
It was pleasant also to find that memory had played no tricks and that the rarest things of an earlier year were as rare as ever. To enumerate ,these felicities would take a great deal of space; for I never had been more struck with the mere quantity of brilliant Florentine work. Even giving up the Duomo and Santa Croce to Mr.
An imposing tribunal, hung with crimson satin embroidered with gold mulberry leaves and berries, was erected for the occasion on the piazza at the doors of the Duomo, and here, after attending high mass, Lodovico Sforza was solemnly proclaimed Duke of Milan, Count of Pavia and Angera, by the grace of God and the will of his Cesarean Majesty, Maximilian, Emperor-elect and chief of the Holy Roman Empire.
"An escape of prisoners," said Lorenzo Tornabuoni, as he and his party turned round just against the steps of the Duomo, and saw a prisoner rushing by them. "The people are not content with having emptied the Bargello the other day. If there is no other authority in sight they must fall on the sbirri and secure freedom to thieves. Ah! there is a French soldier: that is more serious."
Arnolfo, the architect of the Duomo, was the first builder here, till later Giotto was appointed. The church itself is in the form of a tau cross, the eastern end on both sides of the choir consisting of twelve chapels scarcely less deep than the choir and tiny apse, itself a chapel of St. Anthony.
He is honourably known in the history of Tuscan sculpture by his reliefs upon the façade of the Duomo at Modena, describing episodes in the life of S. Gemignano, by the romantically charming reliefs in marble, with terracotta settings, on the Oratory of S. Bernardino at Perugia, and by a large amount of excellent surface-work in stone upon the chapels of S. Francesco at Rimini.
And truly one cannot but marvel as one sees, in the bearing of the body of that Saint by the clergy to the Duomo, certain priests who are singing, for in their gestures, in the actions of their persons, and in all their movements, as they chant diverse parts, they bear a marvellous resemblance to a choir of singers; and in that scene, so it is said, is the portrait of the Bavarian.
I endeavoured to make up my mind to forget it all and return to England and to my work at Francis and Goldsmith's but all to no avail. My duty, I felt, was to leave no stone unturned until I had discovered whether Gabrielle Engledue had died from natural causes, or as a result of foul play. The pale, tragic face of the girl I had encountered in the Duomo haunted me.
It was a striking contrast to see this relic of the past standing in the middle of a crowded thoroughfare and surrounded by all the brilliance and display of modern trade. Once fairly out of the city we took the road to Pavia, along the banks of the canal, just as the rising sun gilded the marble spire of the Duomo.
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