Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 1.djvu/276

262 which was outside their city. This they dedicated to St. Stephen, and here Spinello painted a great number of figures and stories with infinite diligence, and with so much care as to the colouring, that they had remained fresh and in excellent preservation, even to our own days, when they were destroyed, only a few years since. But, besides the stories of San Stefano, which were in figures larger than life, there was another remarkable work in that place; this was a St. Joseph, in the story of the Adoration of the Magi, whose delight, as he watches the kings while they open their treasures and offer them to the Divine Child, is expressed with a truth and beauty all but miraculous. In the same church was a Virgin presenting a rose to the infant Christ, which being ever considered a most beautiful figure, as it really is, was held in so much reverence by the Aretines that when the church of St. Stephen was thrown down, they caused that part of the wall to be cut out, without regarding the difficulty or expense, and having ingeniously bound and secured it, they bore it into the city and placed it in a small church, to the end that it might continue to receive the honour and devotion which had ever been paid to it. Nor need this occasion surprise, since it was one of the peculiarities of Spinello, and a thing natural to him, to give an air of simple and graceful modesty to his figures, which imparts to them an expression of piety and holiness; insomuch that the saints of this master—but more particularly his figures of the Virgin—have a certain sanctity about them, and breathe a kind of divinity, by which men are moved to hold them in the highest veneration. A proof of this may be seen, not only in the Madonna here described, but also in the Virgin which is at the corner of the Albergotti § in that on the outer wall of the capitular church in the Seteria, and in the one which stands on the side of the canal.