CHAPTER VI.
S.Lorenzo and Michelangelo A forlorn facade--The church of the Medici--Cosimo's parents' tomb--Donatello's cantoria and pulpits--Brunelleschi's sacristy--Donatello again--The palace of the dead Grand Dukes--Costly intarsia--Michelangelo's sacristy--A weary Titan's life--The victim of capricious pontiffs--The Medici tombs--Mementi mori--The Casa Buonarroti--Brunelleschi's cloisters--A model library.
Architecturally S.Lorenzo does not attract as S.Croce and S.Maria Novella do; but certain treasures of sculpture make it unique.

Yet it is a cool scene of noble grey arches, and the ceiling is very happily picked out with gold and colour.

Savonarola preached some of his most important sermons here; here Lorenzo the Magnificent was married.
The facade has never yet been finished: it is just ragged brickwork waiting for its marble, and likely to wait, although such expenditure on marble is going on within a few yards of it as makes one gasp.

Not very far away, in the Via Ghibellina, is a house which contains some rough plans by a master hand for this facade, drawn some four hundred years ago--the hand of none other than Michelangelo, whose scheme was to make it not only a wonder of architecture but a wonder also of statuary, the facade having many niches, each to be filled with a sacred figure.

But Michelangelo always dreamed on a scale utterly disproportionate to the foolish little span of life allotted to us and the S.Lorenzo facade was never even begun.
The piazza which these untidy bricks overlook is now given up to stalls and is the centre of the cheap clothing district.