Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 1.djvu/203

Rh taken to Pistoja, and placed on the high altar of the church of San Francesco; this was considered a very fine work. Finally the two brothers returned to Siena, their native city, when Simon commenced a work of vast extent; this was a picture over the great gate of Camollia, representing the coronation of the Virgin, with an extraordinary number of figures, but he left it unfinished, being seized with heavy sickness, overcome by which, he departed from this life in the year 1345, to the great grief of the whole city, and more especially of his brother Lippo, who gave him honourable interment in San Francesco.

Lippo Memmi afterwards completed several works that Simon had begun. Among others was a Crucifixion of Jesus Christ, for the high altar of San Niccola in Ancona, in painting which Lippo imitated one that Simon had entirely completed for the chapter-house of Santo Spirito in Florence. And this is a work which merits a longer life than is likely to be granted to it, many fine attitudes and much animation being displayed in the figures both of soldiers and horses, the varied gestures of the former eloquently expressing their astonishment, and the perplexity of their doubts as to whether He whom they have just crucified were the Son of God or not. In the lower church of San Francesco in Assisi, Lippo Memmi likewise finished some figures which Simon had begun for the altar of St. Elizabeth, wdiich is close beside the door of entrance into the chapels. These were the Virgin with St. Louis king of France, and other saints, in all eight figures, half-lengths onljq but well drawn and extremely well coloured. In the great refectory of the convent of San Francesco, moreover, and on the upper part of the walls, Simon had commenced several small pictures, as also a crucifix in the manner of a tree of the Cross, but all were left unfinished, or rather merely designed, being traced with the pencil in a red colour on the wall, as may still be seen, and this mode of proceeding was the only cartoon which our old masters (for the greater rapidity in the execution of their frescoes) were wont to make. They first distributed the different portions of the work over the wall, tracing all they desired to do with