Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE BLESSED MOTHER. There is one place in Florence which, to those who love the products and the history of art, must be forever dear. It is the Rucellai Chapel in the great Church of Santa Maria Novella. You reach it by a stairway ascending from the general level of the church to a deep recess made by the southern transept; and there, dim and remote, confronts you the Madonna of Cimabue. There it has been, so grave and calm and sweet, for six hundred and nine years. Upon what scenes, upon what men, it has looked down, through all these centuries! We may be sure that every one of the great painters of Florence has confronted it,— Michel Angelo and Raphael and Leonardo and Botticelli and Del Sarto and Fra Bartolomeo, and others,— coming from afar to see the wonder. We may be also sure that it has felt the waves of air vibrating to the stroke of Savonarola's mighty speech. Nor can we doubt that somewhere in the procession which brought the picture with flags and trumpets and acclaim from the painter's studio to the church, in 1280, there was a boy of fourteen summers, already brooding upon strange, mysterious things, whose name was Dante Alighieri. What gives this picture so much interest and importance is not, however, its great age, nor the high companionship it has enjoyed, but the fact that the historians of art have agreed to date from it the beginning of the modern art of painting. It was the first appreciable departure from the stiffness of the Byzantine school, its wooden lifelessness. I doubt if any of you would think it very beautiful. It is not so in comparison with many later works. To understand why it drove Florence wild with admiration, you must compare it with the things that went before ; and, even if it were a hundred times less beautiful, as the beginning of a ...