Zenobins, now a somewhat misty figure, is the first
great Florentine of hisuxy, and an impressive personage
in Florentine art. We dimly discern in him an ideal
bishop and father of his people ; a man of great aus-
terity and boundless charity, almost an earlier Anton-
inns. Perhaps the fact that some of the intervening
Florentine fauBhops were anything but edifying, has
made these two----almost at the beginning and end of
the Middle Ages — ^stand forth in a somewhat ideal
light. He appears to have lived a monastic life out-
side the walls in a small church on the site of the
present San Lorenzo, with two young ecclesiastics,
trained by him and St Ambrose, Eugenius and Cres-
centius. They died before him and are commonly
united with him by the painters. Here he was fre-
quently visited by St Ambrose — here he dispensed
his charities and worked his miracles (according to
the legend, he had a special gift of raising children
to life) — here at length he died in the odour of
sanctity, a.o. 424. The beautiful legend of his trans-
lation should be familiar to every student of Italian
painting. I give it in the words of a monkish writer
of the fourteenth century : —

"About five years aiter he had been buried, there
was made bishop one named Andrew, and this holy
10



People and Commune of Florence

bishop summoned a great chapter of bishops and ckrics,
and said in the chapter that it was meet to bear the
body of St Zenobius to the Cathedral Church of San
Salvatore ; and so it was ordained. Wherefore^ on the
26th of January, he caused him to be unboried and
borne to the Church of San Salvatore by four bishops ;
and these bishops bearing the body of St Zenobius
were so pressed upon by the people that they fell near
an elm, the which was close unto the Church of St
John the Baptist ; and when they fell, the case where
the body of St Zenobius lay was broken, so that the
body touched the elm, and gradually, as the elm was
touched, it brought forth flowers and leaves, and lasted
all that year with the flowers and leaves. The people,
seeing the miracle, broke up all the elm, and with
devotion carried the branches away. 