Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 1.djvu/270

256 painter by nature herself, that when still but a youth, and almost without any teaching, he had acquired more than many, long practised under the discipline of the best masters, are able to obtain. Nay, what is still more, having contracted an intimacy with Jacopo di Casentino, when that artist was painting in Arezzo, and having acquired some little practice from his instructions, Spinello, before he had reached the age of twenty, was a better master, even at that early period, than J acopo himself, who was already an old painter. Thus, beginning to acquire the name of a good artist, Spinello was employed by Messer Dardano Acciaiuoli, who, having caused the church of San Niccolo to be erected in the Via della Scala, behind Santa Maria Novella, for the papal councils, and having buried his brother the bishop therein, had the whole painted in fresco by Spinello. The subject chosen was the life of San Niccolo, Bishop of Bari, and the master completed it in the year 1334, having worked on it continuously during two years. In this undertaking Spinello acquitted himself so well, both as to colour and design, that the work had maintained itself, even to our own days, in excellent preservation; the expression of the faces, as well as the colour, retaining all its beauty, when the paintings were in great part destroyed by fire. Certain inconsiderate persons had thoughtlessly filled the church with straw, using it as a barn, when the building took fire, as we have said. Moved by the fame of this work, Messer Barone Capelli, a citizen of Florence, commissioned Spinello to paint various stories in fresco in the principal chapel of Santa Maria Maggiore. The subjects were taken from the life of the Virgin, with some others from that of Sant’ Antonio, the abbot, near to which was also painted the consecration of that very ancient church, a ceremony which had been performed by Pope Pascal, the second of that name. This work, also, Spinello