Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 1.djvu/280

266 This work being completed, Spinello returned to Arezzo, having received great kindness from the general and his monks, and being moreover very largely rewarded. But he did not long remain in Arezzo, the city being then much disturbed by the Guelphic and Ghibelline parties, and having been recently sacked. Spinello therefore proceeded with his family, including his son Parri, who was also a painter, to Florence, where he had many relations and friends. Here Spinello painted a tabernacle, principally for his amusement; the subject of the work, now half-ruined, is the Annunciation; the tabernacle stands on the Roman road, without the gate of San Piero Gattolini, where you turn to go to Pozzolatico: this master also executed other pictures in another tabernacle near the hostelry of Galluzzo.

Spinello was thence invited to Pisa, for the purpose of finishing the decoration of certain spaces left unoccupied in the Campo Santo, beneath those wherein the life of San Ranieri had been depicted; these he connected with those painted by Giotto, Simon of Siena, and Antonio Veneziano, by the delineation of six stories in fresco, taken from the lives of San Petito and Sant’ Epiro. In the first of these the painter has chosen the moment when Sant Epiro, then a youth, is presented by his mother to the Emperor Diocletian; he is further seen when appointed by the emperor to command