We next find Masolino, after an interval of more than ten years, decorating the Baptistery at Castiglione d’Olona for his old patron, Cardinal Branda. The date is 1435. By this time Masolino had learned a good deal, but had hardly assimilated his new attainments. Whether as decoration or as story-telling, the stories of St. John the Baptist are at once confused and pretentious, with little to recommend them save the loveliness of their Gothic color, the prettiness of the heads, and certain vivacious and well-observed gestures. In the great fresco of the Baptism of Christ, Figure 82, the incidental nudes are so carefully anatomized that they distract from the general effect, while the deep river valley unhappily draws the eye away from the figures in the foreground. A similarly pictorially inept use of foreshortened Renaissance colonnades appears in the opposite fresco depicting the Feast of Herod and the delivery of the head of St. John to Herodias. If it were not for the physical discomfort of travelling to the end of those interminable colonnades and returning to note what is happening nearby in them, these stories themselves would seem vivacious and well-conceived, the female heads attractive, the color gay and pleasing. The method of composition is still Lorenzettian and the modern architectural features inorganic. [Illustration: FIG. 83. Masolino. St. Catherine disputing with the Pagan Doctors. Fresco.—_S. Clemente, Rome._ ] A few years later Masolino was swept to Rome by the great wave of rebuilding and redecorating which accompanied Pope Martin V’s return from Avignon. There in the Chapel of the Sacrament, in the venerable Basilica of S. Clemente, which had formerly been Cardinal Branda’s titular Church, Masolino achieved his maturest work. Completely repainted, we may still see the legends of St. Catherine, and a finely theatrical Calvary by Masolino, and as well legends of St. Ambrose by a follower of Masaccio. Here Masolino’s gift as a story-teller is at its best. He has learned to subordinate his accessories, and the childlike character of his themes enlists his talent in its most engaging aspect. Such a fresco as St. Catherine urging the mysteries of the faith before the Roman doctors, Figure 83, is well-felt and skilfully composed, and withal most flimsily drawn. It is incredible that a man who could do the Tabitha in the Brancacci Chapel at forty should have relapsed to this level at fifty-five. The evidence of the armor[32] worn by the horsemen in the Calvary proves that that fresco, and presumably the entire decoration of the chapel, cannot be earlier than 1440, while of course it cannot be later than Masolino’s own death in 1447.