It was the Augustinian Hermits who, coming to Florence about 1260, bought a vineyard close to where Via Maggio, an abbreviation of Via Maggiore, now is, from the Vellati family.  Here they built a monastery and a church, and dedicated them to the Santo Spirito, so that when the city was divided into quartieri this Sestiere d’Oltrarno became Quartiere di S. Spirito.  In 1397, as it is said, they determined to rebuild the place on a bigger scale, and to this end appointed Brunellesco their architect.  The church was begun in 1433, and was burned down in 1471, during the Easter celebrations, which were particularly splendid in that year owing to the visit of Galeazzo Maria Sforza.  It was rebuilt, however, in the next twenty years from the designs of Brunellesco, and is to-day the most beautiful fifteenth-century church in Florence, full of light and sweetness, very spacious, too, and with a certain fortunate colour about it that gives it an air of cheerfulness and serenity beyond anything of the kind to be found in the Duomo or S. Lorenzo.  And then, the Florentines have been content to leave it alone,—­at any rate, so far as the unfinished facade is concerned.  It is in the form of a Latin cross, and suggests even yet in some happy way the very genius of the Latin people in its temperance and delight in the sun and the day.  The convent, it is true, has been desecrated, and is now a barracks; most of the altars have been robbed of their treasures; but the church itself remains to us a very precious possession from that fifteenth century, which in Italy certainly was so fortunate, so perfect a dawn of a day that was a little disappointing, and at evening so disastrous.

Of the works of art remaining in the nave, that spacious nave where one could wander all day long, only the copy of Michelangelo’s Pieta in St. Peter’s will, I think, detain us for more than a moment.  What is left to us of that far-away flower-like beauty of fifteenth-century painting and sculpture will be found in the great transept, that makes of the church a cross of light, a temple of the sun.  Here, amid many works of that time given to Fra Lippo Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, Donatello, and others, in the south transept there is a Madonna with the family of de’ Nerli by Filippino Lippi, and in the Capponi Chapel a fine portrait of Neri Capponi, while in the next chapel Perugino’s Vision of St. Bernard, now in Berlin, used to stand.  Here, too, is a Statue of St. Sebastian, nearly always invisible, said to be from the hand of Donatello; in the choir is a Madonna enthroned by Lorenzo di Credi.  The sacristy is beautiful, built by Giovanni da Sangallo, and the cloisters now spoiled are the work of Ammanati.  And then, here Niccolo Niccoli is buried, that great book-collector and humanist; while the barbarians are represented, if only by the passing figure of Martin Luther, not then forsworn, who is said to have preached here on his way to Rome.  It is strange to think that these beautiful pillars have heard his rough eloquence, an eloquence that was so soon to destroy the spirit that had conceived them.