The Via delle Belle Donne–most poetically named of Florentine streets–leads hence into the Piazza di Santa Maria Novella. On the way, where five roads meet, is the Croce al Trebbio, with symbols of the four Evangelists below the Crucifix. It marks the site of one of St Peter Martyr's fiercest triumphs over the Paterini, one of those "marvellous works" for which Savonarola, in his last address to his friars, complains that the Florentines had been so ungrateful towards his Order. But the story of the Dominicans of Santa Maria Novella is not one of persecution, but of peace-making. They played at times as noble a part in mediæval Florence as their brethren of San Marco were to do in the early Renaissance; and later, during the great siege, they took up the work of Fra Girolamo, and inspired the people to their last heroic defence of the Republic.
Opposite Santa Maria Novella is the Loggia di San Paolo, designed by Brunelleschi, and erected in 1451, shortly after his death. The coloured terracotta reliefs, by Andrea della Robbia, include two fine portraits of governors of the hospital (not of the Della Robbia themselves, as frequently stated). The relief in a lunette over the door on the right, representing the meeting of St Francis and St Dominic, is one of Andrea's best works:–
"L'un fu tutto serafico in ardore,
l'altro per sapienza in terra fue
di cherubica luce uno splendore.
Dell'un dirò, però che d'ambedue
si dice l'un pregiando, qual ch'uom prende,
perchè ad un fine fur l'opere sue."[51]
In 1212, three years before the murder of Buondelmonte, the first band of Franciscans had come to Florence, sent thither by St Francis himself from Assisi. A few years later, at the invitation of a Florentine merchant Diodato, who had built a chapel and house as an act of restitution, St Dominic, from Bologna, sent the Blessed John of Salerno with twelve friars to occupy this mission at Ripoli, about three miles beyond where now stands the Gate of S. Niccolò. Thence they extended their apostolic labours into the city, and when St Dominic came, at the end of 1219, they had already made progress. Finally they moved into the city–first to San Pancrazio, and at length settled at Santa Maria tra le Vigne, a little church then outside the walls, where B. Giovanni was installed by the Pope's legate and the bishop in 1221. Before the church, in the present piazza, St Peter Martyr, the "hammer of the heretics," fought the Paterini with both spiritual and material arms. At last, the growth of the order requiring larger room, on St Luke's day, 1278, Cardinal Latino de' Frangipani laid here the first stone of Santa Maria Novella.
Where once the little church of Our Lady among the Vines stood outside the second circuit of the city's walls, rises now the finest Italian Gothic church in Florence. Less than a year after it had been commenced, the same Dominican cardinal who had laid the first stone summoned a mass meeting in the Piazza, and succeeded in patching up a temporary peace between Guelfs and Ghibellines, and among the Guelf magnates themselves, 1279. This Cardinal Latino left a memory revered in Florence, and Fra Angelico, in the picture now in our National Gallery, placed him among the glorified saints attending upon the resurrection of Our Lord. Some twenty years later, in November 1301, a parliament was held within the still unfinished church, at which another Papal peacemaker, the infamous Charles of Valois, in the presence of the Priors of the Republic, the Podestà and the Captain, the bishop and chief citizens, received the balìa to guard Florence and pacify the Guelfs, and swore on the faith of the son of a king to preserve the city in peace and prosperity. We have seen how he kept his word. Santa Maria Novella, in 1304, was the centre of the sincere and devoted attempts made by Boniface's successor, the sainted Benedict XI., to heal the wounds of Florence; attempts in which, throughout Italy, the Dominicans were his "angels of peace," as he called his missioners. When the Republic finally fell into the hands of Cosimo dei Medici in 1434, the exiled Pope Eugenius IV. was staying in the adjoining monastery; it was here that he made his unsuccessful attempt to mediate, and heard the bitter farewell words of Rinaldo degli Albizzi: "I blame myself most of all, because I believed that you, who had been hunted out of your own country, could keep me in mine."
IN THE GREEN CLOISTERS, S. MARIA NOVELLA