Lorenzo di Credi, Mariotto Albertinelli, Piero di Cosimo and Luca della Robbia were buried here. Two of the best pictures that the church contained--a Coronation of the Madonna ascribed to Orcagna and the famous Assumption said by Vasari to have been painted by Botticelli for Matteo Palmieri (which was supposed to inculcate heretical neoplatonic doctrines concerning the human soul and the Angels in the spheres), are now in the National Gallery of London. It was in this Piazza that the conspirators resolved to assassinate Maso degli Albizzi. Their spies watched him leave his palace, walk leisurely towards the church and then enter an apothecary's shop, close to San Piero. They hurried off to tell their associates, but when the would-be assassins arrived on the scene, they found that Maso had given them the slip and left the shop. Turning down the Via del Mercatino and back to the Badia along the Via Pandolfini, we pass the palace which once belonged to Francesco Valori, Savonarola's formidable adherent. Here it was on that terrible Palm Sunday, 1498, when Hell broke loose, as Landucci puts it, that Valori's wife was shot dead at a window, while her husband in the street below, on his way to answer the summons of the Signoria, was murdered near San Procolo by the kinsmen of the men whom he had sent to the scaffold. The Badia shares with the Baptistery and San Miniato the distinction of being the only Florentine churches mentioned by Dante. In Cacciaguida's days it was close to the old Roman wall; from its campanile even in Dante's time, Florence still "took tierce and nones "; and, at the sound of its bells, the craftsmen of the Arts went to and from their work. Originally founded by the Countess Willa in the tenth century, the Badia di San Stefano (as it was called) that Dante and Boccaccio knew was the work of Arnolfo di Cambio; but it was entirely rebuilt in the seventeenth century, with consequent destruction of priceless frescoes by Giotto and Masaccio. The present graceful campanile is of the fourteenth century. The relief in the lunette over the chief door, rather in the manner of Andrea della Robbia, is by Benedetto Buglione. In the left transept is the monument by Mino da Fiesole of Willa's son Hugo, Margrave of Tuscany, who died on St. Thomas' day, 1006. Dante calls him the great baron; his anniversary was solemnly celebrated here, and he was supposed to have conferred knighthood and nobility upon the Della Bella and other Florentine families. "Each one," says Cacciaguida, "who beareth aught of the fair arms of the great baron, whose name and worth the festival of Thomas keepeth living, from him derived knighthood and privilege" (_Paradiso_ xvi.). In a chapel to the left of this monument is Filippino Lippi's picture of the Madonna appearing to St. Bernard, painted in 1480, one of the most beautiful renderings of an exceedingly poetical subject. For Dante, Bernard is _colui