were undertaken. In 1411 an illustrious citizen, Nicolò Davanzati Bostichi, began the construction of the convent S. Michele of Doccia, near Fiesole, which, built against the dark background of the wooded hillside, can be seen far and wide. In 1416 the plan for the rebuilding of San Lorenzo was sketched out; in 1421 the great foundling hospital of the Innocents, with its beautiful portico on the Piazzi of the Annunziata, was begun; and twelve years later Sto. Spirito, the two latter after Brunellesco’s designs. Notwithstanding some defects, owing chiefly to the difficulty, imperfectly surmounted, of continuing the colonnade from the nave through the transept and choir, and to the unsuitability of the dome to this form, Sto. Spirito is the finest example of the independent adoption of the Roman basilica style for modern ecclesiastical architecture. Sta. Maria Novella was consecrated September 8, 1420, by Pope Martin V., for whom a part of the adjoining convent had been converted into a dwelling the year before. This was followed the next day by the consecration of Sta. Maria Nuova (Sant’Egidio) by Cardinal Antonio Correr, Bishop of Bologna, to which ceremony the frescoes refer with which Bicci di Lorenzo, who superintended the building, adorned the façade under the modern portico of the present day.
Filippo degli Scolari, who, under the name of Pippo Spano, had been influential in Hungary in the days of King Sigismund, ordered upon his death, in 1426, the construction, by Brunellesco, of a great central building for the Camaldolensians of the Angeli, but it went no further than a portion of the vast octagon, which was vulgarly called Il Castellaccio.[35] The Place of the Signory was still too small, and the wish to procure more space for the palace on the south side occasioned the demolition in 1410 of a side-aisle of San Piero Scheraggio. This church, after being gradually more and more mutilated, made way a century and a half later for the edifice of the Uffizi, by whom this quarter of the city, in which streets and houses were crowded together down to the river-side, was completely transformed.
The splendour and beauty of the public buildings necessarily influenced the construction of private dwellings. The narrow houses, lofty in proportion to their base, fell gradually into disuse, the more as the city, which had been considerably enlarged, afforded greater space. The beginning of the fifteenth century, which reached its climax in the Florentine palaces, turned the scale in this respect; but, as already remarked in the introduction, the mediæval traditions were here more faithfully adhered to than in ecclesiastical architecture. Moreover, a sense of timidity in passing certain limits existed in this case, which was connected with the circumstances of a free republic. This feeling has been recognised in Cosmo de’ Medici, and will be found again in Filippo Strozzi. We are reminded of the same fact even in the following century by the history of the Bartoline house on the Piazza Sta. Trinità, the door and window frames of which were considered unsuitable for a private dwelling, though they were soon to appear simple enough. In earlier times, too, there were large private houses, but their number appears to have been inconsiderable. In the first decade of the fifteenth century several were erected, which we still behold essentially in their original form. The house of Nicolò da Uzzano in Via de’ Bardi, already mentioned, built probably about 1420, is of large proportions, but perfectly plain, and without any sign of the modern spirit. The palace of the Bardi family in Via del Fosso indicates, both by its straight-sided façade and by the square courtyard with the antique arrangement of the columns, the innovations of the new style; while the broad, projecting, wooden roof and the plain windows recall an earlier time. On the Trinity bridge the houses of the Capponi and Gianfigliazzi retain something of the ancient style. In the seventeenth century the interior of the house of the Albizzi, the residence of Piero, Maso, Rinaldo, was rebuilt. This building is in the street named after them, in which palace follows palace, though the full effect is lost, owing to the narrow space. The exterior bears, however, decidedly the mark of time, which is still more the case with the neighbouring palace of the Alessandri.
The streets were mostly paved with flagstones (lastrico), even in the suburbs—a custom which gradually replaced the causeways of tiles (ammattonato) or of small stones (selciato); and when adopted in the smaller Tuscan towns contributed to give them a clean and well-to-do appearance. Even before the end of the thirteenth century this kind of pavement is said to have been used. The stones were procured from the hill of San Giorgio, adjoining the city on the left bank of the river, and the immediate neighbourhood, as well as from the quarries of Fiesole and Golfolina, already mentioned. For a long time the stones were left in their polygonal quarry form, until in recent times it was preferred to hew them square. The laborious and costly work required by a strong and perfectly uniform embankment to the sewers of the city would progress but slowly. It was placed under the careful superintendence of the commissariat officials (officiales grasciæ), to whom was especially entrusted the charge of those streets in which the Barbary-horse races took place.[36] The paving of the Place of the Annunziata—the centre of which remains, however, at the present day unpaved, like those of Sta. Maria Novella, San Marco, and others—was first undertaken, in 1421, by the Servite monks, who solicited subsidies for the purpose, in consideration of the crowds which thronged to the miraculous image in their church.
It is comprehensible that the noticeable revolution in architecture should likewise affect the sister arts. Here, however, we encounter in the first rank two artistic characters essentially differing from one another. With Lorenzo Ghiberti the influence of the school of Giotto is very perceptible, and in the reliefs, his master-pieces, he allows the picturesque principle to predominate to a certain extent, and with a careful calculation of the effect, which to some degree surpasses the ability or courage of the painter so active in his youth. The attitudes and drapery, however, of Ghiberti’s figures are in harmony with the spirit of antiquity which had inspired Nicolò Pisano more than a century and a half earlier. The full outbreak of realism in conception and form is displayed in the somewhat younger Donatello, who, unpoetical and less imaginative than Ghiberti, depends for models rather upon real, if even less beautiful, nature, than upon works of antiquity, of which, indeed, Rome afforded him but scanty and doubtful specimens. Both were goldsmiths, whose art had at that time reached a high degree of perfection, and was distinguished by the production of great works. It was the profession which Brunellesco had originally followed, and for centuries remained connected with that of the sculptor. In 1408 Ghiberti, then only twenty-two, received the commission for his first bronze door of the Baptistery, the completion of which required more than twenty years. In 1414 he executed the statue of St. John, and six years later that of St. Matthew, for two niches on the exterior of the ground-floor of Or San Michele, the sculptural adornment of which, at the cost of the guilds, had been determined upon in 1406. In 1424 the execution of the second door of the Baptistery was entrusted to him, which was finished twenty-eight years after, three years before his death. One work of less importance remains from the year 1428—the bronze chest executed for the brothers Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici for the reception of the relics belonging to the Camaldulensian convent of the Angeli.[37] In 1411 Donatello began the statue of St. Mark, which he produced, together with that of St. Peter, for Or San Michele; about 1420 he began the monument for Pope John XXIII.; and in 1427 he was commissioned by the Medici to execute the monument of Cardinal Rinaldo Brancacci for Naples. His most excellent work in respect to lightness and grace, and which is without a touch of the heaviness so often characteristic of him, is the statue of St. George for Or San Michele. The date of the production of this work can as little be determined as that of the excellent figures of the Prophets which adorn the niches on the belfry of Sta. Maria del Fiore.
In painting the spirit of realism gained the victory much more slowly, and to a far less extent. Even when this victory had been obtained in Florence, the softer feeling and typical form derived from Giotto prevailed in other parts of central and upper Italy in peculiar and flourishing schools. Not long before Masaccio had begun his frescoes in the Brancacci chapel in the Carmine, which was consecrated in 1422, the Camaldulensian Don Lorenzo had painted his beautiful pictures, which still represent the tendency of the previous century, although with a freshness and freedom far superior to the later Giottesque style. And Fra Angelico da Fiesole, who in 1407 entered the Dominican cloister of the little town whence he derived his name, remained his whole life long true to the tradition to which he has given the consecration of gentle poverty, pious fervency, religious sensibility, and at the same time, naïve simplicity. Not even Gentile da Fabriano, a son of the Anconite border, who was gifted with a more lively natural feeling and graceful freshness and serenity, and in 1421 had himself