to impair the vista as you stand by the western entrance: the floor
has no chairs; the great columns rise from it in the gloom as if they,
too, were rooted. The walls, too, are bare, save for a few tablets.

The history of the building is briefly this. The first cathedral of
Florence was the Baptistery, and S. John the Baptist is still the
patron saint of the city. Then in 1182 the cathedral was transferred
to S. Reparata, which stood on part of the site of the Duomo, and in
1294 the decision to rebuild S. Reparata magnificently was arrived
at, and Arnolfo di Cambio was instructed to draw up plans. Arnolfo,
whom we see not only on a tablet in the left aisle, in relief, with
his plan, but also more than life size, seated beside Brunelleschi
on the Palazzo de' Canonici on the south side of the cathedral,
facing the door, was then sixty-two and an architect of great
reputation. Born in 1232, he had studied under Niccolo Pisano, the
sculptor of the famous pulpit at Pisa (now in the museum there),
of that in the cathedral in Siena, and of the fountain at Perugia
(in all of which Arnolfo probably helped), and the designer of many
buildings all over Italy. Arnolfo's own unaided sculpture may be seen
at its best in the ciborium in S. Paolo Fuori le Mura in Rome; but
it is chiefly as an architect that he is now known. He had already
given Florence her extended walls and some of her most beautiful
buildings--the Or San Michele and the Badia--and simultaneously he
designed S. Croce and the Palazzo Vecchio. Vasari has it that Arnolfo
was assisted on the Duomo by Cimabue; but that is doubtful.

The foundations were consecrated in 1296 and the first stone laid
on September 8th, 1298, and no one was more interested in its early
progress than a young, grave lawyer who used to sit on a stone seat
on the south side and watch the builders, little thinking how soon