FOOTNOTES: 

[86] I give this story for what it is worth.  So far as I know, however, the font was placed in its present position in 1658, more than a hundred years after the church was roofed in.  It may, however, have occupied another position before that.

[87] See p. 82.

[88] To compare an Italian church with a French cathedral would be to compare two altogether different things, a fault in logic, and in criticism the unforgivable sin; for a work of art must be judged in its own category, and praised only for its own qualities, and blamed only for its own defects.

[89] Cf. Donatello, by Lord Balcarres:  Duckworth, 1903, p. 12.

[90] Not the ball we see now, which was struck by lightning and hurled into the street in 1492.  Verrocchio’s was rather smaller than the present ball.

[91] See Crowe and Cavalcaselle, History of Painting in Italy:  London, 1903, p. 116, note 4.

[92] See pp. 283-289.

XIII.  FLORENCE

OR SAN MICHELE

Or San Michele, S. Michele in Orto, was till the middle of the thirteenth century a little church belonging, as it is said, to the Cistercians, who certainly claimed the patronage of it.  About 1260, however, the Commune of Florence began to dispute this right with the Order, and at last pulled down the church, building there, thirty years later, a loggia of brick, after a design by Arnolfo di Cambio, according to Vasari, who tells us that it was covered with a simple roof and that the piers were of brick.  This loggia was the corn-market of the city, a shelter, too, for the contadini who came to show their samples and to talk, gossip, and chaffer, as they do everywhere in Italy even to-day.  And, as was the custom, they made a shrine of Madonna there, hanging on one of the brick pillars a picture (tavola) of Madonna that, as it is said, was the work of Ugolino da Siena.  This shrine soon became famous for the miracles Madonna wrought there.  “On July 3rd,” says Giovanni Villani, writing of the year 1292, “great and manifest miracles began to be shown forth in the city of Florence by a figure of Saint Mary which was painted on a pilaster of the loggia of S. Michele d’Orto, where the corn was sold:  the sick were healed, the deformed were made straight, and those who were possessed of devils were delivered from them in numbers.”  In the previous year the Compagnia di Or San Michele, called the Laudesi, had been established, and this Company, putting the fame of the miracles to good use, grew rich, much to the disgust of the Friars Minor and the Dominicans.  “The Preaching Friars and the Friars Minor likewise,” says Villani, “through envy or some other cause, would put no faith in that image, whereby they fell into great infamy with the people.  But so greatly grew the fame of these miracles and the merits of Our Lady, that pilgrims flocked thither from all Tuscany for her festas, bringing divers waxen images because of the wonders, so that a great part of the loggia in front of and around Madonna was filled.”  Cavalcanti, too, speaks of Madonna di Or San Michele, likening her to his Lady, in a sonnet which scandalised Guido Orlandi—­