San Marco is one of the simplest of places and of all the first courtyards in sacred Florence, it tends to have the most charming, patchy effort at spring flowers. 

It also has what for me has been one of my holy trees for nearly thirty years: a great pine, sited with no care for symmetry, skew to the garden but all the greater for that.  One supposes - I would never dare to know the truth which could as so often be such a disappointment - that it was a gift from a bird and that all of a sudden as it had grown there came the day nobody had the ghastliness to cut it down.  Since that mercy it has emerged as one of the greatest trees in town.

Given that this is the church of Beato Angelico it is appropriate that there should be flowers and so natural a tree, without too heavy a hand of design... His devotion to the carpet of mortal flowers on which our lives unfurl has no gentler smile upon his lips in all our art, as he takes his finest brush for the deepest worship.

We visit the Library, scene of the arrest of Savonarola; we visit one by one the humble cells of the monks, richer than millionaires as they snored in the shelter of an Angelico fresco; we visit the old refectory and the most serene dramatc paintings of our civilisation; we may wander by the other passages and catch strange little courtyards and disinterested precarious pots of flowers on upper ledges; but the parasol that casts the benediction of its shade and love upon us is that tree, so tall it takes our eyes to the sky, so fitted within the courtyard that it holds us to the holiness of the flowers or scrawny grass beneath.

It proposes a counterpoint against the care of the arches, a cross-beat to the calm of the human effort at concentration and balance.  The devout will hear Bach, we Nietzscheans hear Beethoven... or even...?

Perhaps the pioneer humanist saint?  

As I sketched the tree I found I had to sketch the man of nature, the most modern, the most timeless of the followers of the Nazarene.  Hopeless to add to a tradition that has faltered since - Donatello?  Or that culminates in - Wagner's Gurnemanz?

What is one to do?  Some well-meaning chap with a shaved head, like an Islington designer?  Oh dear.

Then an idea came to me: he turned his head.  The crucial thing is that he heard, he looked and he loved where others merely trample.  He turned.  A closed eye opened.  A shoulder became an open heart.  There is a tide of sensuality here that has not been mapped.  Maybe that will take me somewhere...