Sano needs few words. He took nothing from his master but certain formal patterns, fine gilding and blithe colors. He repeats himself tediously, there are over fifty of his panels in the Siena Academy alone, yet is so genuine and unpretending that one forgets his lack of delicacy and insight. A little Coronation of the Virgin, at New Haven, may sufficiently represent his decorative phase. It is a nosegay of fair colors on burnished gold. In narrative painting he is Lorenzettian without the _finesse_ of his master. At least he helped prolong a lovely tradition beyond its natural term, and that is his chief merit. “A famous painter and a man wholly dedicated to God”—(_Pictor famosus et homo lotus deditus Deo_)—we read in his death notice. Siena knew how to appreciate a traditionalist. [Illustration: FIG. 62. Giovanni di Paolo. Young St. John Baptist goes to the Desert.—_Formerly Charles Butler Coll., London._ ] Giovanni di Paolo, on the contrary, suffered not from deficient originality but from its excess. He selects restlessly from the older pictures. You will find pure Duccian figures in his paintings of the fifties. He studies the sparse decorative perfections of Simone Martini and exaggerates their nervousness. He drives expression into caricature, seeks strength in distortion, was the post-impressionist of his day. His extravagance is unpleasing in his larger pieces, but is piquant enough in his numerous small panels. One of a pair in English private possession shows the Youthful St. John jauntily setting off for the desert, with a quite cubistic treatment, Figure 62, of the lines of the fields. The motive is still more ingeniously employed in one of a remarkable set of pictures belonging to Mr. Martin Ryerson of Chicago. Giovanni’s predilection for distortion and grimace is shown in The Baptism of Christ, a pendant to the story of the youthful John, both being parts of one predella. [Illustration: FIG. 63. Matteo di Giovanni. Saint Barbara with Saints.—_S. Domenico._ ] Giovanni died in 1482 at the advanced age of seventy-nine, having faithfully preserved the old Gothic tradition while making it a vehicle of his own resolute eccentricity. [Illustration: FIG. 64. Matteo di Giovanni. Massacre of the Innocents. ]