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’8 EARLY CHRISTIAN ART. Ciiap. I. more Siennese than Florentine by falling into capricious or fantastic exaggeration. One seldom misses a stamp of force, stern character, or boldness of attitude in his figures; but though true in movement and expression they are often defective in the total of the proportions. He does not go into the detail of the form of the human frame, but neglects the extremities and articulations, so that the action is broken or incomplete; and his personages tread too often on an oblique not on a horizontal plane. He drew freely and easily, sometimes carelessly. His draperies have breadth and an easy sweep, and clothe his figures with perfect fitness. His hardy ease of hand results in breadth of light and shade. Spinello, in a word, had many of the qualities of Giotto, combined with some Siennese character, which we find to some extent already in his master Jacopo. His colour has the gaiety of the latter, whilst his defects of design are those common to Agnolo Gaddi. Yet Agnolo had more severity and was more firmly attached to pure Giottesque maxims, and Spinello, compared with Giotto, is a bold decorator, careless of form and of detail. Were it not almost certain that the fresco in the lunette above the portal of the ex-Fraternita della Misericordia at Arezzo was executed by Jacopo di Casentino, 1 it should be assigned to Spinello’s early time. It might be considered in this case as his weakest effort. So little, however, of Spinello’s works at Arezzo has been preserved, and so few dates are recorded in his life by Vasari, that it is difficult to follow his progress. Still one may assume that he proceeded with Jacopo di Casentino to Florence, where he painted, about 1348, the choir of S. Maria Maggiore for Filippo Cappelli, two chapels in the Carmine, 2 1 See antea. 2 At the Carmine, says Vasari, he painted the chapel of S.S. Ja copo and Giovanni Evangelista, when the wife of Zebedee asks Christ to give seats in Paradise to her sons, when Zebedee, James and John, leave their nets, in an other chapel scenes from the life of the Virgin (Vol. II. p. 186—7).
