Chap. I. PARRI SPINELLT. 27 tizia Civile” at Arezzo. This was one of a numerous class of votive pictures intended to honour the Virgin Mary, who was supposed to have interceded for the people of Arezzo; and she is represented guarded by two angels in flight above her, in a cloak of such amplitude that beneath it the people of the city, a pope and a cardinal find refuge. At the sides, S.S. Gregory and Donato stand erect; and the whole is inclosed in a painted frame, embellished in pinnacles with four allegorical virtues in dead colour. Beneath, a damaged view of the city completes a picture which cari catures the defects of Parri. An altarpiece from the same church, representing the same subject with S.S. Lauren- tino and Pergentino 1 at the sides, and resting on a pre- della in four parts containing scenes from the lives of the two saints, is a less defective, but still unpleasant work of the master now in the “Palazzo della Communita”. In an upper story of this building again, a fresco of the cruci fixion with S. John and the Virgin in the dislocated attitudes peculiar to Parri, is preserved. In S. l^rancesco, he painted the last supper 2 in a less exaggerated style reminiscent of the works of Bicci. It may therefore be one of Parri’s early productions as yet comparatively untainted with his later failings. The S. Christopher in the “Chiesa dell’ Oblata,” which is said to be inscribed: “Hoc opus factum fuit anno Domini MCCCCXLIV die IV. mensis Decembris,” has been for some time invisible under a hoarding, the church having been occupied as a barrack. Italy is unfortunately full of such frescos as these, time having spared the bad in many more cases than the good. But it is unnecessary to expend any further trouble in a search for frescos or pictures like those of Parri, who is below the Gerini in talent and infe rior even to Cenni of Volterra. Without a reminiscence of Spinello’s style, although it is on record that father and son painted together at Sienna in the early part of the fifteenth century, Parri imitates the movements and draperies of Lorenzo Monaco. He may therefore have known that master. But if he studied under Lorenzo Ghiberti and Maso- lino 3 which is improbable, he gained little profit by it, and merely imitated, in the fifteenth, the bad example which Tom- maso Pisano had already set to the sculptors of the four teenth century. Parri’s portrait was painted by Marco di Montepulciano 1 Vas. Vol. II. p. 152. entrance and in part damaged. 2 The fresco is to the loft of the 3 Vas. Vol. III. p. 144.