Thus in 1485 he contracted with Francesco Sassetti to do a chapel in the Trinità with Stories of St. Francis. Sassetti was confidential treasurer for Lorenzo the Magnificent, about the most important financial position in the world at the moment; a selfmade and ambitious man. He had tried in vain to get a finer chapel in a bigger church, but the patrician vested interests prevented. Still the chapel to the right of the Choir of the Trinità was no mean place, this Vallombrosan foundation being one of the oldest in Florence. Ghirlandaio took special pains with the frescoes, studying with intelligence Giotto’s famous versions of the stories at Santa Croce. He is most nearly monumental where he follows Giotto, as in the Death of St. Francis, but he also shows surprising felicities of his own. The scene where Pope Honorius III constitutes St. Francis and his fellows a monastic order, is remarkable for not only fine incidental portraiture, but for a nobility of space composition faintly anticipating Raphael. One scarcely realizes the subject as such. All the dramatic features with which Giotto emphasized the eagerness of the saint, the humility of his companions, the professional dignity of the Pope and the half-veiled hostility of the papal court are absent. One’s eyes go over the group to the familiar grandiose prospect of the Piazza della Signoria at Florence, and one feels that never till now has he rightly apprehended its amplitude and splendor. Then there are sharp pleasant surprises. At the left is the ugly and fascinating figure of Lorenzo de’ Medici and behind him the gross apparition of Francesco Sassetti himself. And in front there are people coming up from a lower level, only their heads and shoulders emerging. The swarthy man who leads is Angelo Poliziano, greatest of humanistic poets, tutor of Lorenzo’s sons. And the boys are these gifted children destined to be popes, and granddukes. The combination of great spaciousness and centrality with casual unexpected graces is so piquant and original, that I suppose Ghirlandaio may have hit upon it almost accidentally, owing to the inevitable relations of his Gothic lunette to the architectural forms in the fresco. In any case Ghirlandaio never again did anything as impressive. It is his greatest hymn of praise to the Florence that he so dearly loved. [Illustration: FIG. 124. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Adoration of the Magi.—_Innocenti._ ]