The declining century produced only one robust painter in Siena, the mysterious Barna whose damaged frescoes of the Passion we see in the Collegiate Church of San Gemignano. The forms are those of Simone Martini, the compositions even more sparse than his, denuded of all accessories, and powerfully impressive for this reason. The mood is brusque and tragic, with nothing of Sienese sweetness. Barna seems a kind of provincial Giotto misplaced and unrealized in the Sienese country. In the fresco of the Transfiguration, Figure 56, he rises to sublimity. Fra Angelico will merely repeat him in San Marco sixty years later. Vasari tells us that Barna died from a fall from his painting scaffold in 1381, and that he was then young. If so, his originality was tremendous, for he cleared away ruthlessly all the delightful but trivial stage furniture so diligently collected by Duccio and the Lorenzetti. Modern criticism ascribes to him several panels, and I venture to add to the list the simple and stately Marriage of St. Catherine in the Boston Museum of Art. Certainly it is one of the most serious creations of the period. The type of the Christ and the concise and characterful arrangement seem to mark it as a fine Barna. The base is interesting, representing the composing of a blood feud, and Miracles of St. Michael and St. Margaret. While the simple pattern continues the tradition of Simone, Barna avoids Simone’s linear grace-notes. The finical element of the predecessor yields to a kind of realism. Barna is really the critic of the Sienese school. He silently insists that one may be decorative without too much artifice, and dramatic without overtaxing the stage carpenter, a very solitary and elevated spirit, to whom full justice has not yet been done. [Illustration: FIG. 57. The Three Living and Three Dead, detail from the Lorenzettian fresco, The Triumph of Death.—_Campo Santo, Pisa._ ]