that at your leisure, afterwards, if you like. What it is important for
you to know here, in the Spanish Chapel, is only this much that
follows:--There were certainly two persons once called Gaddi, both
rather stupid in religious matters and high art; but one of them, I
don't know or care which, a true decorative painter of the most
exquisite skill, a perfect architect, an amiable person, and a great
lover of pretty domestic life. Vasari says this was the father, Taddeo.
He built the Ponte Vecchio; and the old stones of it--which if you ever
look at anything on the Ponte Vecchio but the shops, you may still see
(above those wooden pent-houses) with the Florentine shield--were so
laid by him that they are unshaken to this day.

He painted an exquisite series of frescos at Assisi from the Life of
Christ; in which,--just to show you what the man's nature is,--when the
Madonna has given Christ into Simeon's arms, she can't help holding out
her own arms to him, and saying, (visibly,) "Won't you come back to
mamma?" The child laughs his answer--"I love _you_, mamma; but I'm
quite happy just now."

Well; he, or he and his son together, painted these four quarters of
the roof of the Spanish Chapel. They were very probably much retouched
afterwards by Antonio Veneziano, or whomsoever Messrs. Crowe and
Cavalcasella please; but that architecture in the descent of the Holy
Ghost is by the man who painted the north transept of Assisi, and there
need be no more talk about the matter,--for you never catch a restorer
doing his old architecture right again. And farther, the ornamentation
of the vaulting ribs _is_ by the man who painted the Entombment,
No. 31 in the Galerie des Grands Tableaux, in the catalogue of the
Academy for 1874. Whether that picture is Taddeo Gaddi's or not, as
stated in the catalogue, I do not know; but I know the vaulting ribs of