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These opened into the cellars which, no doubt, belonged to the fifteenth-century structure. There seemed to have once been a door and two or three steps to the ground, which rose very close to the southern end; but this had been walled up.
To the various sights of Rome must be due that sudden enlarging of style, that kind of new classicism, which distinguishes the work of fifteenth-century masters after their visit to the Eternal City, enabling Ghirlandaio, Signorelli, Perugino, and Botticelli to make the Sixtine Chapel, and even the finical Pinturicchio, the Vatican library, into centres of fresh influence for harmony and beauty.
The pulpit a fine specimen of fifteenth-century sculpture, carved by Benedetto da Maiano at the cost of Pietro Mellini, who presented it to the church is well worth close inspection; and close by, between the tombs of Lanzi and Leonardo Bruni, is a group in freestone, representing the Annunciation. This was one of the first of Donatello's works, and gave an earnest of his future genius.
The structure is of fifteenth-century date, but has been much restored, the only original figure on it being that of St. Amphibalus. Just beside the cross is the interesting little opening that leads into the Close, and in which is the entrance to St. Lawrence Church, of which nothing is visible from this point but the doorway, and the tower rising above the surrounding houses.
They had been brought out of the building and put in the sunshine. They were on the way to recovery; at least most of them were. I sat facing a triangular-shaped square, which was flanked on one of its faces by a row of shuttered private houses and on another by the principal church of the town, a fifteenth-century structure with outdoor shrines snuggled up under its eaves.
The honor of being the first of the fifteenth-century navigators to set foot upon either of the two American continents, indisputably belongs to John Cabot, on June 24, 1497. Who was next to make a continental landfall, and in the more southerly latitudes, is a question which lies between Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci. Markham scouts this claim. Winsor neither agrees nor dissents.
The eastern end of the church has been greatly modified as is clearly seen by the mixture of fifteenth-century styles, and not to the advantage of the ensemble. Byzantine pillars, and even horseshoe arches, mingle with Gothic elements. Of the chapels, the greater number are richly decorated, not only with sepulchres and sepulchral works, but with paintings, some of them by well-known masters.
These are they alone who have distinguished Florence by the histories that they have written. The pride of the citizen and a just sense of the value of history, together with sound remarks upon Venice and Milan, mingle curiously in this passage with the pedantry of a fifteenth-century scholar. Poggio's Historia Populi Florentini is given in the XXth volume of Muratori's collection.
Immense labour was often bestowed upon the mouldings of beams in these fifteenth-century houses. There was a very fine moulded beam in a farm-house in my own parish, but a recent restoration has, alas! covered it. We give some illustrations of the cornice mouldings of the Church House, Goudhurst, Kent, and of a fine Gothic door-head.
Fortunately there was a decent hotel, vaguely open in the upper town on the hill, with a view over the small tributary river Ornain, on which the capital city of the Meuse is built. One saw the Rhine-Marne Canal, too, and the picturesque roofs of old fifteenth-century houses, huddled together in lower Bar-le-Duc, shut in among the vine-draped valleys of Champagne.
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