Close by, without the chapel, is a very beautiful monument the school of Niccolo Pisano; passing this and entering the great door of the Sacristy, we come into a corridor and thence into the Sacristy itself, which Vasari covered with whitewash.  Built in the fourteenth century, it is divided into two parts by a grating of exquisitely wrought iron of the same period.  Behind this grating is the Rinuccini chapel, painted in fresco by a pupil of Taddeo Gaddi, Giovanni da Milano, in whose work we may discern, in spite of the rigid convention of his master, something sincere, a lightness and grace and even perhaps a certain reliance on Nature, which the authority of Giotto had spoiled for Taddeo himself.  It is the stories of the Blessed Virgin and of St. Mary Magdalen that he has set himself to tell, with an infinite detail that a little confuses his really fine and sincere work.  Repainted though they be, something of their original beauty may still be found there, their simplicity and homely realism.

At the end of the corridor is the chapel which Cosimo de’ Medici, Pater Patriae caused Michelozzo to build for his delight.  Over the altar is one of the loveliest works of the della Robbia school, a Madonna and Child, between St. Anthony of Padua, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, St. John Baptist, St. Laurence, St. Louis of Toulouse, and St. Francis; while on the wall is a later work of the same school, after a work by Verrocchio, where Madonna holds her Son in her arms; and opposite is another work by a Tuscan sculptor, a Tabernacle, by Mino da Fiesole (1431-1484), who certainly has loved the gracious marbles of Desiderio da Settignano.  The picture of the Coronation of the Virgin beside this Tabernacle, once the altar-piece of the Baroncelli Chapel, a genuine work of Giotto’s, as it is thought, is tender in feeling and magnificent in arrangement and composition.  Full of a grave earnestness and full of ardent life,—­mark the eagerness of those clouds of Saints,—­it is worthy of the painter of the tribune of the Lower Church at Assisi.

Returning now to the church itself, we begin our examination of those twelve chapels, which with the choir form the eastern end of S. Croce.  The first three chapels have little interest, but the two nearest the choir, Cappella Peruzzi and Cappella Bardi, were both painted in fresco by Giotto, his work there being among the best of his paintings.

The Peruzzi Chapel was built by the powerful family that name, who had already done much for S. Croce, when about 1307 they employed Giotto to decorate these walls with frescoes of the story of St. John Baptist and St. John the Divine.  In 1714, the new Vasari tells us,[105] and, indeed, we may read as much on the floor of the chapel itself, Bartolommeo di Simone Peruzzi caused the place to be restored, and it was then, as we may suppose, that the work of Giotto was covered with whitewash.  It was in 1841 that the Dance of Herodias was discovered, and the whitewash not very carefully, perhaps, removed, and by 1863 the rest of the frescoes here were brought to light.  In their original brightness they formed probably “the finest series of frescoes which Giotto ever produced”; but the hand of the restorer has spoiled them utterly, so that only the shadow of their former beauty remains, amid much that is hard or unpleasing.