It may represent hundreds of similar crosses that stood high in air on the rood beam before the chancel, in sight both of the preacher and his public. Somewhere about 1294, Cimabue was called to Assisi to decorate the church in which St. Francis was buried. His part was the choir and transepts of the upper church. In the cross vault he painted the four evangelists, on the walls he spread the stories of St. Peter and St. Paul, the legends of the Virgin scenes from the Apocalypse, the gigantic forms of the archangels and a Calvary, Figure 5, that is one of the most moving expressions of Christian art. Chipped and blackened, their lights become dark through chemical change, these wall paintings retain an immense power and veracity. The Byzantine forms gain a paradoxical solidity, like that of bronze. The convulsion of the figure of Christ is given back in the wild gestures of the mourning women and the terrified Jews. It is the moment of the earthquake and the opening of tombs; a cosmic terror and despair pervade the place. The work is hampered and rude but completely expressive. The sensitive Japanese critic and man of the world, Okakura Kakuzo, used to regard these sooty frescoes in the transepts of the Franciscan basilica as the high point of all European art, which should at least induce the tourist and the student to give a second look at these battered and fading masterpieces. Recently an inscribed date, 1296, has been discovered on the choir wall which settles a long vexed question of chronology. The upper part of the work in the transepts and choir must have been going on for some years earlier, and the entire decoration of the Upper Church should roughly be comprised between 1294 and 1300. Cimabue died about 1302 while working on the apsidal mosaic at Pisa, where the St. John is by his hand, Figure 2. He had brought life and passion into Italian painting, as his younger contemporary Giovanni Pisano had into Italian sculpture. Cimabue’s defect—that of a noble spirit—was the faith that the old pictorial form could contain the new surging emotions. [Illustration: FIG. 5. Cimabue. Calvary. Fresco.—_Upper Church, Assisi._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 6. Pietro Cavallini. Dormition of the Virgin. Mosaic.—_S. M. in Trastevere, Rome._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 7. Pietro Cavallini. Apostles, fresco, from Last Judgment.—_Santa Cecelia in Trastevere._ ]