hearts life’s heat hath rayed. 
  Thus from thy dying I now learn to die,
     Dear father mine!  In thought I see thy place,
     Where earth but rarely lets men climb the sky.
  Not, as some deem, is death the worst disgrace
     For one whose last day brings him to the first,
     The next eternal throne to God’s by grace. 
  There by God’s grace I trust that thou art nursed,
     And hope to find thee, If but my cold heart
     High reason draw from earthly slime accursed.

CHAPTER X

I

The collegiate church of S. Lorenzo at Florence had long been associated with the Medicean family, who were its most distinguished benefactors, Giovanni d’Averardo de’ Medici, together with the heads of six other Florentine houses, caused it to be rebuilt at the beginning of the fifteenth century.  He took upon himself the entire costs of the sacristy and one chapel; it was also owing to his suggestion that Filippo Brunelleschi, in the year 1421, designed the church and cloister as they now appear.  When he died, Giovanni was buried in its precincts, while his son Cosimo de’ Medici, the father of his country, continued these benevolences, and bestowed a capital of 40,000 golden florins on the Chapter.  He too was buried in the church, a simple monument in the sacristy being erected to his memory.  Lorenzo the Magnificent followed in due course, and found his last resting-place at S. Lorenzo.

We have seen in a previous chapter how and when Leo X. conceived the idea of adding a chapel which should serve as mausoleum for several members of the Medicean family at S. Lorenzo, and how Clement determined to lodge the famous Medicean library in a hall erected over the west side of the cloister.  Both of these undertakings, as well as the construction of a facade for the front of the church, were assigned to Michelangelo.  The ground plan of the monumental chapel corresponds to Brunelleschi’s sacristy, and is generally known as the Sagrestia Nuova.  Internally Buonarroti altered its decorative panellings, and elevated the vaulting of the roof into a more ambitious cupola.  This portion of the edifice was executed in the rough during his residence at Florence.  The facade was never begun in earnest, and remains unfinished.  The library was constructed according to his designs, and may be taken, on the whole, as a genuine specimen of his style in architecture.

The books which Clement lodged there were the priceless manuscripts brought together by Cosimo de’ Medici in the first enthusiasm of the Revival, at that critical moment when the decay of the Eastern Empire transferred the wrecks of Greek literature from Constantinople to Italy.  Cosimo built a room to hold them in the Convent of S. Marco, which Flavio Biondo styled the first library opened for the use of scholars.  Lorenzo the Magnificent enriched the collection with