The interior is very dark indeed--so dark that the mosaics, which Dante must in part have looked upon, would need a very bright day to be visible. At present they are almost completely concealed by the scaffolding of the restorers.[38] Over the whole church preside the two Saints whom an earlier Florentine worshipper of Mars could least have comprehended--the Baptist and the Magdalene. And the spirit of Dante haunts it as he does no other Florentine building--_il mio bel San Giovanni_, he lovingly calls it. "In your ancient Baptistery," his ancestor tells him in the fifteenth Canto of the _Paradiso_, "I became at once a Christian and Cacciaguida." And, indeed, the same holds true of countless generations of Florentines--among them the keenest intellects and most subtle hands that the world has known--all baptised here. But it has memories of another kind. The shameful penance of oblation to St. John--if Boccaccio's tale be true, and if the letter ascribed to Dante is authentic--was rejected by him; but many another Florentine, with bare feet and lighted candle, has entered here as a prisoner in penitential garb. The present font--although of early date--was placed here in the seventeenth century, to replace the very famous one which played so large a part in Dante's thoughts. Here had he been baptised--here, in one of the most pathetic passages of the _Paradiso_, did he yearn, before death came, to take the laurel crown:-- [38] The earliest of these mosaics are those in the tribune, executed originally by a certain Fra Jacopo in the year 1225; those in the dome are in part ascribed to Dante's contemporary, Andrea Tafi. Se mai continga che il poema sacro, al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra, sì che m'ha fatto per più anni macro, vinca la crudeltà, che fuor mi serra del bello ovil, dov'io dormii agnello, nimico ai lupi che gli danno guerra; con altra voce omai, con altro vello ritornerò poeta, ed in sul fonte del mio battesmo prenderò il cappello; però che nella Fede, che fa conte l'anime a Dio, quivi entra' io.[39] [39] Should it e'er come to pass that the sacred poem to which both heaven and earth so have set hand, that it hath made me lean through many a year, should overcome the cruelty which doth bar me forth from the fair sheepfold wherein I used to sleep, a lamb, foe to the wolves which war upon it; with changed voice now, and with changed fleece shall I return, a poet, and at the font of my baptism shall I assume the chaplet; because into the Faith which maketh souls known of God, 'twas there I entered. --Par. xxv. 1-11, _Wicksteed's translation_.