The two organ galleries, facing each other and finished almost simultaneously (about 1440), are an utter contrast both in spirit and in execution. There is nothing specially angelic or devotional about Donatello's wonderful frieze of dancing genii, winged boys that might well have danced round Venus at Psyche's wedding-feast, but would have been out of place among the Angels who, as the old mystic puts it, "rejoiced exceedingly when the most Blessed Virgin entered the Heavenly City." The beauty of rhythmic movement, the joy of living and of being young, exultancy, _baldanza_--these are what they express for us. Luca della Robbia's boys and girls, singing together and playing musical instruments, have less exuberance and motion, but more grace and repose; they illustrate in ten high reliefs the verses of the psalm, _Laudate Dominum in sanctis ejus_, which is inscribed upon the Cantoria; and those that dance are more chastened in their joy, more in the spirit of David before the Ark. But all are as wrapt and absorbed in their music, as are Donatello's in their wild yet harmonious romp. In detail and considered separately, Luca's more perfectly finished groups, with their exquisite purity of line, are decidedly more lovely than Donatello's more roughly sketched, lower and flatter bas-reliefs; but, seen from a distance and raised from the ground, as they were originally intended, Donatello's are decidedly more effective as a whole. It is only of late years that the reliefs have been remounted and set up in the way we now see; and it is not quite certain whether their present arrangement, in all respects, exactly corresponds to what was originally intended by the masters. It was in this building, the Opera del Duomo, that Donatello at one time had his school and studio; and it was here, in the early years of the Cinquecento, that Michelangelo worked upon the shapeless mass of marble which became the gigantic David. [Illustration: CROSS OF THE FLORENTINE PEOPLE (FROM OLD HOUSE ON NORTH SIDE OF DUOMO)] [Illustration: ARMS OF THE MEDICI FROM THE BADIA AT FIESOLE.] CHAPTER IX. _The Palazzo Riccardi--San Lorenzo--San Marco._ Per molti, donna, anzi per mille amanti, creata fusti, e d'angelica forma. Or par che'n ciel si dorma, s'un sol s'appropria quel ch'è dato a tanti. (_Michelangelo Buonarroti_). The Via dei Martelli leads from the Baptistery into the Via Cavour, formerly the historical Via Larga. Here stands the great Palace of the Medici, now called the Palazzo Riccardi from the name of the family to whom the Grand Duke Ferdinand II. sold it in the seventeenth century.