The church itself, striped tiger-like in black and white marble, was constructed from the designs of three Dominican friars, Fra Ristoro da Campi, Fra Sisto, and Fra Giovanni da Campi. Fra Giovanni was a scholar or imitator of Arnolfo di Cambio, and the two former were the architects who restored the Ponte alla Carraia and the Ponte Santa Trinità after their destruction in 1269. The façade (with the exception of the lower part, which belongs to the fourteenth century) was designed by Leo Battista Alberti, whose friends the Rucellai were the chief benefactors of this church; the lovely but completely restored pointed arcades on the right, with niches for tombs and armorial bearings, were designed by Brunelleschi. On the left, though in part reduced to vile usage, there is a bit comparatively less altered. The interior was completed soon after the middle of the fourteenth century, when Fra Jacopo Passavanti--the author of that model of pure Tuscan prose, _Lo Specchio della vera Penitenza_--was Prior of the convent. The campanile is said to have been designed by another Dominican, Fra Jacopo Talenti, the probable architect of the so-called Spanish Chapel in the cloisters on the left of the church, of which more presently. During the great siege of Florence the mantle of Savonarola seemed to have fallen upon the heroic Prior of Santa Maria Novella, Fra Benedetto da Foiano. When the news of the alliance between Pope and Emperor came to Florence, while all Bologna was in festa for the coronation of the Emperor, Varchi tells us that Fra Benedetto delivered a great sermon in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, which was thrown open to all who would come to hear; in which sermon he proved from passages in the Old and New Testaments that Florence would be delivered from all dangers, and then enjoy perpetual perfect felicity in the liberty she so desired. With such grace and eloquence did he speak, that the vast audience was moved to tears and to joy by turns. At the end, "with ineffable gestures and words," he gave to the Gonfaloniere, Raffaello Girolami, a standard upon one side of which was a Christ victorious over the hostile soldiery, and upon the other the red Cross of the Florentine Commune, saying: _Cum hoc et in hoc vinces._ After the capitulation Malatesta Baglioni seized the friar and sent him to Rome, where he was slowly starved to death in the dungeon of Sant' Angelo.