Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/92

68 two subjects, the Duomo, Baptistery and leaning Tower are all introduced. Antonio Veneziano executed several other works in the Cathedral, and remained at Pisa till August 1387, after which we lose sight of him, and are left to believe Vasari's assertion, that he became so much interested in chemical experiments, that in his old age he abandoned painting for the study of medicine. But he was a master of considerable power, and as the pupil of Agnolo Gaddi and the master of Starnina, he forms an important link in the development of Florentine art.

Yet two more Giottesque masters were employed in the Campo Santo during the last years of the fourteenth century: Pietro di Puccio, of Orvieto—who painted four frescoes of the Creation, the Fall of Man, Death of Abel, and the Deluge, on the North wall, in the year 1390—and Spinello Aretino. In his attempt to represent the work of Creation, Puccio shows himself an inferior artist, as much influenced by Sienese as Giottesque tradition, and quite unable to draw nude forms correctly, but not without considerable gifts of poetic invention, which find their happiest expression in the fruit-trees and singing-birds, the marble fountains and terraces of the Garden of Eden. Spinello was a more popular and prolific artist, who painted the five frescoes of the legend of the warrior Saints, Efeso and Potito on the South wall, within the space of seven months, and received 1032 lire for his work in March 1392. Born at Arezzo about 1433, and sprung from a family of goldsmiths, he became a scholar of Jacopo da Casentino, and painted an immense number of frescoes in Florence and Arezzo during the course of his long life. His delight in