was himself living he resuscitated two boys.  The one was a ward of his own; the second was an ordinary Florentine, for whom the same modest boon was craved by his sorrowing parents.  It is one of these scenes of resuscitation which Ghiberti has designed in bronze, while Ridolfo Ghirlandaio painted it in a picture in the Uffizi.  We shall see S. Zenobius again in the fresco by Ridolfo’s father, the great Ghirlandaio, in the Palazzo Vecchio; while the portrait on the first pillar of the left aisle, as one enters the cathedral is of Zenobius too.

The date of the Pazzi Conspiracy was 1478.  A few years later the same building witnessed the extraordinary effects of Savonarola’s oratory, when such was the terrible picture he drew of the fate of unregenerate sinners that his listeners’ hair was said actually to rise with fright.  Savonarola came towards the end of the Renaissance, to give it its death-blow.  By contrast there is a tablet on the right wall of the cathedral in honour of one who did much to bring about the paganism and sophistication against which the impassioned reformer uttered his fiercest denunciations:  Marsilio Ficino (1433-1491), the neo-Platonist protege of Cosimo de’ Medici, and friend both of Piero de’ Medici and Lorenzo.  To explain Marsilio’s influence it is necessary to recede a little into history.  In 1439 Cosimo de’ Medici succeeded in transferring the scene of the Great Council of the Church to Florence.  At this conference representatives of the Western Church, centred in Rome, met those of the Eastern Church, centred in Constantinople, which was still Christian, for the purpose of discussing various matters, not the least of which was the protection of the Eastern Church against the Infidel.  Not only was Constantinople continually threatened by the Turks, and in need of arms as well as sympathy, but the two branches of the Church were at enmity over a number of points.  It was as much to heal these differences as to seek temporal aid that the Emperor John Palaeologus, the Patriarch of Constantinople, and a vast concourse of nobles, priests, and Greek scholars, arrived in Italy, and, after sojourning at Venice and Ferrara, moved on to Florence at the invitation of Cosimo.  The Emperor resided in the Peruzzi palace, now no more, near S. Croce; the Patriarch of Constantinople lodged (and as it chanced, died, for he was very old) at the Ferrantini palace, now the Casa Vernaccia, in the Borgo Pinti; while Pope Eugenius was at the convent attached to S. Maria Novella.  The meetings of the Council were held where we now stand—­in the cathedral, whose dome had just been placed upon it all ready for them.