For her Cimabue wrought,
who infused Byzantine formalism with a suggestion of nature and feeling;
for her the Pisani, who divined at least, if they could not conjure with
it, the secret of Greek supremacy in sculpture; for her the marvellous
boy Ghiberti proved that unity of composition and grace of figure and
drapery were never beyond the reach of genius;[3] for her Brunelleschi
curved the dome which Michel Angelo hung in air on St. Peter's; for her
Giotto reared the bell-tower graceful as an Horatian ode in marble; and
the great triumvirate of Italian poetry, good sense, and culture called
her mother. There is no modern city about which cluster so many elevating
associations, none in which the past is so contemporary with us in
unchanged buildings and undisturbed monuments. The house of Dante is
still shown; children still receive baptism at the font (_il mio bel San
Giovanni_) where he was christened before the acorn dropped that was to
grow into a keel for Columbus; and an inscribed stone marks the spot
where he used to sit and watch the slow blocks swing up to complete the
master-thought of Arnolfo. In the convent of St. Mark hard by lived and
labored Beato Angelico, the saint of Christian art, and Fra Bartolommeo,
who taught Raphael dignity. From the same walls Savonarola went forth to
his triumphs, short-lived almost as the crackle of his martyrdom.
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