A courageous voice was raised about thin time at
Bologna, advising the sale of the skull of St. Dominic to the King of
Spain, and the application of the money to some useful public object.
But those who had the least reverence of all for the relics were the
Florentines. Between the decision to honour their saint, St. Zanobi,
with a new sarcophagus and the final execution of the project by
Ghiberti, ten years elapsed (1432-42) and then it only happened by
chance, because the master had executed a smaller order of the same
kind with great skill (1428).
Perhaps through being tricked by a cunning Neapolitan abbess (1352),
who sent them a spurious arm of the patroness of the Cathedral, Santa
Reparata, made of wood and plaster, they began to get tired of relics.
Or perhaps it would be truer to say that their aesthetic sense turned
them away in disgust from dismembered corpses and mouldy clothes. Or
perhaps their feeling was rather due to that sense of glory which
thought Dante and Petrarch worthier of a splendid grave than all the
twelve apostles put together. It is probable that throughout Italy,
apart from Venice and from Rome, the condition of which latter city was
exceptional, the worship of relics had long been giving way to the
adoration of the Madonna, at all events to a greater extent than
elsewhere in Europe; and in this fact lies indirect evidence of an
early development of the aesthetic sense.
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