Colder spirits, as is often the case, more readily found the right way. And the discovery was made at Rome where the sculptured columns, arches, and sarcophagi, the pagan wall paintings and the earliest Christian mosaics combined to continue the lesson of classic humanism. A remarkable family of decorators, the Cosmati; with such contemporaries as Jacopo Torriti and Filippo Rusuti begin very cautiously to free themselves from Byzantine trammels. But it was a painter, Pietro Cavallini,[5] who more fully grasped that glory that had been Rome. In 1291 he designed for the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere a Madonna and four stories of the Christ Child in mosaic. Here we glimpse a new pictorial form, Figure 6. Those Byzantine hooks and hatchings which were quite false to form give way to a reasonable structure in light and dark, the hair no longer wild and ropy, is disposed in sculpturesque locks, the draperies are no longer a cobweb pattern, but cast in broad and classic folds. All these improvements may be noted in more complete form in the frescoed Last Judgment which has recently been uncovered in the church of Santa Cecilia, Figure 7. Here the heads of Christ and the Apostles are well built in carefully graduated light and shade, while the draperies suggest Hellenistic statuary. But the renovation is on the whole cold and academic. Cavallini has not much more to say than the Byzantines, but that little he says with far greater gravity and truthfulness. He was a lucid and industrious but not a fine or strong spirit. His work later at Naples—in the Church of the Donna Regina, about 1310—shows that when he will express strong emotions he becomes merely hectic. Yet he recovered for Italian painting more than a hint of the choice naturalism of old Rome, and that is his sufficient glory. There is greater power and knowledge than his in the work of such contemporaries as the unknown painters of the frescoed heads of prophets in Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome and of the stories of Isaac in the Upper Church at Assisi.[6] These show a resolute and intelligent effort to draw in masses of light and shade, and as well an ambition to recover the gravity of the early Christian mosaics. It is no wonder that some critics ascribe such dramatic and superbly constructed frescoes as The Betrayal of Esau to young Giotto, Figure 8, but the art is too mature for any young artist. We have rather to do with a great personality of Roman training who broke the way for Giotto. Cavalcaselle suggests, I think rightly, that the Florentine, Gaddo Gaddi, may have done some of this work. But we are safe only in calling this great painter “The Isaac Master.”