The altar in the chapel of the Vibi and Baglioni families is a lovely bit of Mino da Fiesole's work. Vasari accuses this sweet-souled sculptor of a lack of originality--of a desire to copy the sentiment of his master (Desiderio da Settignano) rather than to draw straight for himself from the sources of nature. Be this as it may in the case of Mino's portraits of people, those of his flowers in this particular piece of work are strangely realistic. We think he must himself have gathered and bound the garlands which hang from the narrow frieze, and in doing so he took for models the sharpest and the prickliest fruits and leaves of autumn: hazel nuts and tiny fir cones, their points just tipped with gold. The halos, too, on the angels' heads, their wings, and the details of the architecture are all picked out with gold. White, clean, and flat and fair is Mino's altar-piece in the Baglioni chapel. How different from the blood-stained hands and hearts of those same men who came to tell their beads here and be buried. Long after other details in the church have been forgotten, its choir will remain a haunting vision of excessive beauty. Every inch of it is worked with exquisite care and finish, for the monks spared no pains or money, either in its construction or its decoration. Although a piece of the purest Renaissance fancy, it does not clash with the lines of the older basilica, and the two little pulpits of pietra serena, with their rich gilding, the organ lofts and the rather rococo frescoes on the ceiling, seem only to harmonise the meeting of the different styles of building. Raphael is said to have designed the stalls, but there is no sort of document to prove this. "Because our choir is the work of a genius, it does not follow that that genius should be Raphael ... genius is not the possession of one sole person," pleads M. Cassinese. Raphael died in 1520, the present stalls were not finished till 1535, and they are probably almost entirely the work of Stefano da Bergamo and the men and boys whom the Bergamasque employed. Some few may be of an earlier date, for we know that the choir was begun in 1524, and that the work was interrupted by the same terrible pestilence as that which killed Perugino. In 1532, Stefano da Bergamo undertook the work of the choir. He worked steadily, and the monks of S. Pietro kept the most accurate account of what they paid him, and of how many measures of flour and pence they gave the men and boys whom he employed. Little is known of the life of Stefano da Bergamo; we do not even know from whom he learned his art, but M. Cassinese rightly concludes that he drew his inspiration from the divine Raphael, since his designs are purely Raphaelesque. The carving is unequal, and some of the stalls are infinitely lovelier than others. Note the ninth on the right of the choir: a mother and three children encircled by a heavy garland of fruit and flowers, and under them a child, with flying hair, playing with snakes.