s in praise of the sun, the moon, and the stars,
and had a great love for every living thing. The birds were said to
have flocked around him because they loved him, and we read that he
talked to them and called them his 'little sisters.' An old writer
tells this story in good faith:

When St. Francis spake words to them, the birds began all of them to
open their beaks and spread their wings and reverently bend their heads
down to the ground, and by their acts and by their songs did show that
the holy Father gave them joy exceeding great.

Wherever he preached he made converts who 'married Holy Poverty,' as
St. Francis expressed it, gave up everything they had, and lived his
preaching and roaming life. St. Francis himself had no idea of forming
a monastic order. He wished to live a holy life in the world and show
others how to do the same, and for years he and his companions worked
among the poor, earning their daily bread when they could, and when
they could not, begging for it. Gradually, however, ambition stirred
in the hearts of some of the followers of Francis, and against the
will of their leader they made themselves into the Order of Franciscan
Friars, collected gifts of money, and began to build churches and
monastic buildings. At first the buildings were said to belong to the
Pope, who allowed the Franciscans to use them, since they might not
own property; but after the death of St. Francis, the Order built
churches throughout the length and breadth of Italy, not of marble
and mosaic but of brick, since brick was cheaper; but the brick walls
were plastered, and upon the wet plaster there were painted scenes
from the life of St. Francis, side by side with the old Christian and
saintly legends. This sudden demand for painted churches with
paintings of new subjects, stirred the painters of the day to alter
their old style. When an artist was asked to paint a large picture
of St. Francis preaching to the birds, he had to look at real birds
and he had to study a real man in the attitude of preaching. There
was no scene that had ever been painted from the life of Christ or
of any saint in which a man preached to a bird, so that the artist
was driven to paint from nature instead of copying former pictures.

Let us now read what a painter who lived in the sixteenth century,
Vasari by name, wrote about the rise of painting in his native city.
Some learned people nowadays say that Vasari was wrong in many of the
storie