r and the shock of speared warriors,
Spinello communicated something of this fiery spirit even to his saints.
The monks of Samminiato near Florence employed him in 1388 to paint their
newly-finished sacristy with the legend of S. Benedict. In the execution
of this task Spinello displayed his usual grandeur and vigour, treating
the grey-robed brethren of Monte Cassino like veritable champions of a
militant Church. When he died in 1410, it might have been truly said that
the flame of the torch kindled by Giotto was at last extinguished.

The student of history cannot but notice with surprise that a city famed
like Siena for its vanity, its factious quarrels, and its delicate
living, should have produced an almost passionately ardent art of
piety.[159] The same reflections are suggested at Perugia, torn by the
savage feuds of the Oddi and Baglioni, at warfare with Assisi, reduced to
exhaustion by the discords of jealous parties, yet memorable in the
history of painting as the head-quarters of the pietistic Umbrian school.
The contradiction is, however, in both cases more apparent than real. The
people both of Siena and Perugia were highly impressible and emotional,
quick to obey the promptings of their passion, whether it took the form of
hatred or of love, of spiritual fervour or of carnal violence. Yielding at
one moment to the preachings of S. Bernardino, at another to the
persuasions of Grifonetto degli Baglioni, the Perugians won the character
of being fiends or angels according to the temper of their leaders; while
Siena might boast with equal right of having given birth to S. Catherine
and nurtured Beccadelli. The religious feeling was a passion with them on
a par with all the other movements of their quick and mobile temperament:
it needed ecstatic art for its interpretation. What was cold and sober
would not satisfy the men of these two cities. The Florentines, more
justly balanced, less abandoned to the frenzies of impassioned impulse,
less capable of feeling the rapt exaltation of the devotee, expressed
themselves in art distinguished for its intellectual power, its sanity,
its scientific industry, its adequacy to average human needs. Therefore,
Florentine influences determined the course of painting in Central Italy.
Therefore Giotto, who represented the Florentine genius in the fourteenth
century, set his stamp upon the Lorenzetti. The mystic painters of Umbria
and Siena have their high and honoured place in the