of vandalism are indeed strange and varied.  In this case vanity was responsible.  It was superstition which led the Sienese, after incurring defeat by the Florentines, to remove from their market-place the famous statue by Lysippus which brought them ill-luck, and to bury it in Florentine territory, so that their enemies might suffer instead.  Ignorance nearly induced a Pope to destroy the “Last Judgment” of Michael Angelo, whose colossal statue of an earlier Pontiff, Julius II., was broken up through political animosity.  One wishes that in this last case there had been some practical provision such as that inserted by the House of Lords in the order for destroying the Italian Tombs at Windsor in 1645, when they ordained that “they that buy the tombs shall have liberty to transport them beyond the seas, for making the best advantage of them.”  The vandalism which dispersed Donatello’s work could not even claim to be utilitarian, like that which so nearly caused the destruction of the famous chapel by Benozzo Gozzoli in the Riccardi Palace (for the purposes of a new staircase);[2] neither was it caused by the exigencies of war, such as the demolition of the Monastery of San Donato, a treasure-house of early painting, razed to the ground by the Florentines when awaiting the siege of 1529.  The Cathedral facade was hastily removed, and only a fraction of the statuary has survived.  Two figures are in the Louvre; another has been recently presented to the Cathedral by the Duca di Sermoneta, himself a Caetani, of Boniface VIII., a portrait-statue even more remarkable than that of the same Pope at Bologna.  Four more figures from the old facade, now standing outside the Porta Romana of Florence, are misused and saddened relics.  They used to be the major prophets, but on translation were crowned with laurels, and now represent Homer, Virgil, Dante and Petrarch.  Other statues are preserved inside the Cathedral.  Before dealing with these it is necessary to point out how difficult it is to determine the authorship and identity of the surviving figures.  In the first place, our materials for reconstructing the design of the old facade are few.  There were various pictures, some of which in their turn have perished, where guidance might have been expected.  But the representations of the Cathedral in frescoes at San Marco, Santa Croce, the Misericordia and Santa Maria Novella help us but little.  Up to the eighteenth century there used to be a model in the Opera del Duomo:  this also has vanished, and we are compelled to make our deductions from a rather unsatisfactory drawing made by Bernardo Pocetti in the sixteenth century.  It shows the disposition of statuary so sketchily that we can only recognise a few of the figures.  But we have a perfect idea of the general style and aim of those who planned the facade, which would have far surpassed the rival frontispieces of Siena, Pisa and Orvieto.  We are met by a further difficulty in identifying the surviving statues from