“beautiful San Giovanni,” has walked.  Over the altar is a gigantic and primitive Christ in mosaic, more splendid than spiritual.  The mosaics in the recesses of the clerestory—­grey and white—­are the most soft and lovely of all.  I believe the Baptistery is the most restful place in Florence; and this is rather odd considering that it is all marble and mosaic patterns.  But its shape is very soothing, and age has given it a quality of its own, and there is just that touch of barbarism about it such as one gets in Byzantine buildings to lend it a peculiar character here.

The most notable sculpture in the Baptistery is the tomb of the ex-Pope John XXIII, whose licentiousness was such that there was nothing for it but to depose and imprison him.  He had, however, much money, and on his liberation he settled in Florence, presented a true finger of John the Baptist to the Baptistery, and arranged in return for his bones to repose in that sanctuary.  One of his executors was that Niccolo da Uzzano, the head of the noble faction in the city, whose coloured bust by Donatello is in the Bargello.  The tomb is exceedingly fine, the work of Donatello and his partner Michelozzo, who were engaged to make it by Giovanni de’ Medici, the ex-pontiff’s friend, and the father of the great Cosimo.  The design is all Donatello’s, and his the recumbent cleric, lying very naturally, hardly as if dead at all, a little on one side, so that his face is seen nearly full; the three figures beneath are Michelozzo’s; but Donatello probably carved the seated angels who display the scroll which bears the dead Pope’s name.  The Madonna and Child above are by Donatello’s assistant, Pagno di Lapo Portigiani, a pretty relief by whom we saw in the Museum of the Cathedral.  Being in red stone, and very dusty, like Ghiberti’s doors (which want the hose regularly), the lines of the tomb are much impaired.  Donatello is also represented here by a Mary Magdalene in wood, on an altar at the left of the entrance door, very powerful and poignant.

In the ordinary way, when visitors to Florence speak of the Baptistery doors they mean those opposite the Duomo, and when they go to the Bargello and look at the designs made by Ghiberti and Brunelleschi in competition, they think that the competition was for those.  But that is wrong.  Ghiberti won his spurs with the doors on the north side, at which comparatively few persons look.  The famous doors opposite the Duomo were commissioned many years later, when his genius was acknowledged and when he had become so accomplished as to do what he liked with his medium.  Before, however, coming to Ghiberti, we ought to look at the work of an early predecessor but for whom there might have been no Ghiberti at all; for while Ghiberti was at work with his assistants on these north doors, between 1403 and 1424, the place which they occupy was filled by those executed seventy years earlier by Andrea Pisano (1270-1348), possibly from Giotto’s