Opposite the church, on a house at the corner of the Borgo S. Croce and the Via de' Macci, is a della Robbia saint--one of many such mural works of art in Florence. Thus, at the corner of the Via Cavour and the Via de' Pucci, opposite the Riccardi palace, is a beautiful Madonna and Child by Donatello. In the Via Zannetti, which leads out of the Via Cerretani, is a very pretty example by Mino, a few houses on the right. These are sculpture. And everywhere in the older streets you may see shrines built into the wall: there is even one in the prison, in the Via dell' Agnolo, once the convent of the Murate, where Catherine de' Medici was imprisoned as a girl; but many of them are covered with glass which has been allowed to become black. A word or two on S. Egidio, the church of the great hospital of S. Maria Nuova, might round off this chapter, since it was Folco Portinari, Beatrice's father, who founded it. The hospital stands in a rather forlorn square a few steps from the Duomo, down the Via dell' Orivolo and then the first to the left; and it extends right through to the Via degli Alfani in cloisters and ramifications. The façade is in a state of decay, old frescoes peeling off it, but one picture has been enclosed for protection--a gay and busy scene of the consecration of the church by Pope Martin V. Within, it is a church of the poor, notable for its general florid comfort (comparatively) and Folco's gothic tomb. In the chancel is a pretty little tabernacle by Mino, which used to have a bronze door by Ghiberti, but has it no longer, and a very fine della Robbia Madonna and Child, probably by Andrea. Behind a grille, upstairs, sit the hospital nurses. In the adjoining cloisters--one of the high roads to the hospital proper--is the ancient statue of old Monna Tessa, Beatrice's nurse, and, in a niche, a pretty symbolical painting of Charity by that curious painter Giovanni di San Giovanni. It was in the hospital that the famous Van der Goes triptych used to hang. A tablet on a house opposite S. Egidio, a little to the right, states that it was there that Ghiberti made the Baptistery gates which Michelangelo considered fit to be the portals of Paradise. CHAPTER XIV The Bargello Plastic art--Blood-soaked stones--The faithful artists--Michelangelo--Italian custodians--The famous Davids--Michelangelo's tondo--Brutus--Benedetto da Rovezzano--Donatello's life-work--The S. George--Verrocchio--Ghiberti and Brunelleschi and the Baptistery doors--Benvenuto Cellini--John of Bologna--Antonio Pollaiuolo--Verrocchio again--Mino da Fiesole--The Florentine wealth of sculpture--Beautiful ladies--The della Robbias--South Kensington and the Louvre.