The fresco at the steps, by Sebastiano Mainardi, inscribed _S. Geminianus Silviaci Populi Gubernator_, is a masterpiece of municipal sentiment. The Saint sits enthroned as bishop, while the three local worthies kneel before him to receive his blessing; Mattia Lupi, the bald-headed poet with his crown of laurel, who wrote in Latin verse the annals of the town and died in 1468; Domenico Mainardi, a noble-looking, grey-haired ecclesiastic, a distinguished canonist, who lectured at Bologna, Florence and Siena, was chaplain to Pope Martin V., and died in 1422; Nello de' Cetti, a writer on civil law who died in 1430. The fresco is dated 1487. The heads are fine, almost worthy of Ghirlandaio, but they have been somewhat restored. Below it lies Fra Domenico Strambi, "Parisian Doctor," the patron of Benozzo and Pollaiuolo, who died in the following year. In the chapel to the left of the choir is the Nativity of Mary, a curiously archaic picture by Tamagni, and in the chapel to the right are two frescoes representing her birth and death, ascribed to Bartolo di Fredi. The frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli in the choir, begun for Fra Domenico Strambi in 1463 and finished in 1465, are among the supreme achievements of Florentine painting in the third quarter of the Quattrocento. They set forth the chief events in the life of St Augustine, partly drawn from the _Confessions_. The first fresco, in which the little Augustine is taken to school by his parents, Patritius and Monica, is admirable for the freshness and naiveté with which the whole comedy of school-life, past and present, is treated. The drastic methods adopted by the schoolmaster in dealing with the little idler are specially referred to in the _Confessions_, where Augustine seems to remember his floggings with a curious sense of injury and injustice.[192] In the next (partly obliterated), we have his admission to the University of Carthage at the age of nineteen--that season of lawless loves and Manichaean errors so inimitably described at the beginning of the third Book. On the window wall, much damaged and restored, are St Monica praying for him, his crossing the sea and arrival in Italy. Next, we see him teaching philosophy and rhetoric in Rome, the usual composition of the lecturer and his pupils which we find elsewhere in the art of the fifteenth century, with those splendid portrait heads that make the modern student realise the wonderful intellectual vigour of these Florentines of the Renaissance. Then comes the journey from Rome to Milan, whither Augustine is sent by the Roman prefect Symmachus, in answer to the Milanese request for a teacher of rhetoric; even so might young Pico della Mirandola have looked when he first came to Florence. This somewhat, indeed, recalls the style of the Procession of the Magi in the Palazzo Riccardi, but is naturally in a more chastened style. Above, two white-robed, green-winged Angels bear a scroll in honour of