. The builders of Florence . k buttresslighted by a rose window in stone. This stair was probably theprivate access to the garden of which Acciaiuoli wrote, and wemay see a trace of the garden itself in the hollow turf ricreatorio,cut at no great distance in the slope beneath. Beyond the prin-cipal Piazza lie the church and clausura; the latter expandingbehind the church ?to form the great cloister. Here the fourvaulted arcades in front of the cells are of later date, as their style THE CERTOSA OF THE VAL DEMA 167 and decoration sufficiently show, but we may still notice the wayin which the ce
. The builders of Florence . k buttresslighted by a rose window in stone. This stair was probably theprivate access to the garden of which Acciaiuoli wrote, and wemay see a trace of the garden itself in the hollow turf ricreatorio,cut at no great distance in the slope beneath. Beyond the prin-cipal Piazza lie the church and clausura; the latter expandingbehind the church ?to form the great cloister. Here the fourvaulted arcades in front of the cells are of later date, as their style THE CERTOSA OF THE VAL DEMA 167 and decoration sufficiently show, but we may still notice the wayin which the cells themselves, though they have lost their primitivecharacter, crowd outwards against the fortress walls, which atmore than one point they fairly occupy. As one looks obliquelyto the north-east, for example, along the west wall, the outbuild-ings of the cells so confuse their lines with those of the wall itselfas to recall fairly the earlier type of castello; to which indeed thewhole Certosa was a kind of belated I \tfricl°w of (gll in (erto/Ov, Passing from the general type to its treatment here in detail, wefind, as is natural, that the style of the Certosa, where what isoriginal can be separated from later additions, is just the FlorentineGothic of the later fourteenth century. In the Acciaiuoli—nowcalled the Popes—lodging almost everything visible is compara-tively recent; but on the upper floor some vaults still lift theircrowns through the pavement to show that the low Baroque ceilingof the great saloon beneath is a later addition, and that here the 168 THE BUILDERS OF FLORENCE Founder might have enjoyed just that ample magnificence of space,spread under soaring arches, which his soul desired. Theopposite block has been less altered, and the vaulting, with itsGothic ribs and carved keystones, still remains as an open exampleof what the whole must once have been. But it is, naturally, in the Church of the Certosa, with itsadjoining chapels, that the build
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