The interior was thus not quite finished, when Boccaccio's seven maidens met here on a Wednesday morning in early spring in that terrible year of pestilence, 1348; yet we may readily picture to ourselves the scene described in the introduction to the _Decameron_; the empty church; the girls in their dark mourning garb, after hearing Mass, seated together in a side chapel and gradually passing from telling their beads to discussing more mundane matters; and then, no sooner do three members of the other sex appear upon the scenes than a sudden gleam of gladness lights up their faces, and even the plague itself is forgotten. One of them, indeed, blushed; "she became all crimson in the face through modesty," says Boccaccio, "because there was one of their number who was beloved by one of these youths;" but afterwards found no difficulty in rivalling the others in the impropriety of her talk. Entering the western portal, we find ourselves in a nave of rather large proportions, somewhat dark but not without a glow from the stained glass windows--adapted above all for preaching. As in Santa Croce, it is cut across by a line of chapels, thus giving the whole a T shape, and what represents the apse is merely a deeper and taller recess behind the high altar. There is nothing much to interest us here in the nave or aisles, save, by the side of the central door, one of the very few extant works of Masaccio, a fresco representing the Blessed Trinity adored by the Madonna and St. John, with two kneeling donors--portraits of which no amount of restoration can altogether destroy the truth and grandeur. The Annunciation, on the opposite side of the door, is a mediocre fresco of the fourteenth century. The Crucifix above is one of several works of the kind ascribed to Giotto. It will be best to take the chapels at the end of the nave and in the transepts in the order into which they fall, as illustrating the development of Florentine art. On the right a flight of steps leads up into the Rucellai chapel where, half concealed in darkness, hangs the famous picture once supposed to mark the very birthday of Florentine painting. That Cimabue really painted a glorious Madonna for this church, which was worshipped by a king and hailed with acclamation by a rejoicing people, is to be most firmly and devoutly held. Unfortunately, it seems highly probable that this picture is not Cimabue's Madonna. It is decidedly Sienese in character, and, as there is documentary evidence that Duccio of Siena painted a Madonna for Santa Maria Novella, and as the attendant Angels are in all respects similar to those in Duccio's authenticated works, the picture is probably his. It deserves all veneration, nevertheless, for it is a noble picture in the truest sense of the word. In the same chapel is the monument of the Dominican nun, the Beata Villana, by Bernardo Rossellino.