Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/90

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THE GIOTTESCHI
[1330-

settled at Pisa about 1346, and was elected a member of the Great Council in 1358, to paint the history of Job on the south wall of the Campo Santo. These six subjects, which were long ascribed to Giotto, are the most damaged of the whole series, but the remaining fragments show considerable inventive faculty and power of expression. Especially striking is the vision of the Court of Heaven, with Christ encircled by a rosy cloud that floats over a landscape of rocks and sea, and Satan, as a horned fiend with bat's wings, pleading his cause. The contrast between the condition of Job in his prosperity, feasting among his friends, and surrounded by flocks and servants, and the bereft and lonely state to which he is reduced in the day of affliction, is finely brought out; and the towers and domes of a mediæval city rise picturesquely in the background of the double subject.

The next Giottesque master who worked in the Campo Santo was Andrea da Firenze, the painter, according to Cavalcaselle, of the Spanish Chapel. On the 13th October 1377, this artist received 529 lire and 10 soldi as a final instalment of the sum due to him for three frescoes of the story of the Pisan Saint, Ranieri, which he painted on the upper part of the South wall. Andrea was evidently an artist of some repute, but these scenes in which the conversion of the Saint and his pilgrimage to the Holy Land are set forth, display the same conventional types and feeble and ineffective composition that we find in the frescoes of the Spanish Chapel, without having the interest of the subjects there represented. When the upper course of San Ranieri's life was finished, Andrea left Pisa, to execute other works in Florence; and after