Certain vestiges of the oldest church remain:  you may see a sarcophagus, one of those which, before Arnolfo covered the church with marble, stood without and held the ashes of some of the greater families.  But the most beautiful thing here is the tomb that Donatello made for Baldassare Cossa, pirate, condottiere, and anti-pope, who, deposed by the Council of Constance (1414), came to Florence, and, as ever, was kindly received by the people.  It stands beside the north door.  On a marble couch supported by lions, the gilt bronze statue of this prince of adventurers, who grasped the very chair of St. Peter as booty, lies, his brow still troubled, his mouth set firm as though plotting new conquests even in the grave.  Below, on the tomb itself, two winged angiolini hold the great scroll on which we read the name of the dead man, Johannes Quondam Papa XXIII:  to which inscription Martin V, Cossa’s successful rival at Constance, is said to have taken exception; but the Medici who had built the tomb answered in Pilate’s words to the Pharisees, “What I have written, I have written.”  The three marble figures in niches at the base may be by Michelozzo, who worked with Donatello, or possibly by Pagano di Lapo, as the Madonna above the tomb almost certainly is.

Coming up once more into the Piazza from that mysterious dim church, dim with the centuries of the history of the city, you come upon two porphyry columns beside the eastern door.  They are the gift of Pisa[87] when her ships returned from the Balearic Islands to Florence, who had defended their city from the Lucchesi.  The column with the branch of olive in bronze upon it to the north of the Baptistery reminds us of the miracle performed by the body of S. Zenobio in 490.  Borne to burial in S. Reparata, the bier is said to have touched a dead olive tree standing on this spot, which immediately put forth leaves:  the column commemorates this miracle.  So in Florence they remind us of the gods.

In turning now to the Duomo we come to one of the great buildings of the world.  Standing on the site of the old church of S. Salvatore, of S. Reparata, it is a building of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, begun in 1298 from the designs of Arnolfo; and it is dedicated to S. Maria del Fiore.  Coming to us without the wonderful romantic interest, the mysticism and exaltation of such a church as Notre Dame d’Amiens, without the more resolute and heroic appeal of such a stronghold as the Cathedral of Durham, it is more human than either, the work of a man who, as it were, would thank God that he was alive and glad in the world.  And it will never bring us delight if we ask of it all the consummate mystery, awe, and magic of the great Gothic churches of the North.  The Tuscans certainly have never understood the Christian religion as we have contrived to do in Northern Europe.  It came to them really as a sort of divine explanation of a paganism which entranced but bewildered them.