Another of the altar-pieces (_cf._ 579, above), which aimed at giving the whole story of some subject, and thus recall the time when sacred pictures were (as it has been put) a kind of "Scripture _Graphic_." In the _predella_ pictures (580_b_) are, on the left, (1) St. John distributing alms and baptizing, (2) his vision of Revelation in the island of Patmos, (3) his escape from the cauldron of boiling oil; and then, as the subject of the principal picture, his ascension to heaven, for, "according to the Greek legend, St. John died without pain or change, and immediately rose again in bodily form and ascended into heaven to rejoin Christ and the Virgin." In the central picture, Mr. Gilbert finds "a glimpse of true landscape feeling in the brown platform of rock, carefully gradated in aerial perspective, in the colouring, coarse though it be, and especially in the long dark sea-line beyond" (_Landscape in Art_, p. 184). In the other small pictures and in the pilasters are various saints, and immediately over the central picture are (1) the gates of hell cast down, (2) Christ risen from the dead, (3) the donor of the picture and his family, being presented by the two St. Johns. Of the _cuspidi_, or upper pictures (580a), the centre piece is a symbolic representation of the Trinity (seen best on a large scale in 727); at the sides are the Virgin and the Angel of the Annunciation, divided as explained under 1139. 581. A GROUP OF SAINTS. _Spinello Aretino_ (Tuscan: about 1333-1410). _See also_ (p. xix) Spinello di Luca Spinelli is commonly called Spinello Aretino, from Arezzo, his native town. As is the case with most of the early Tuscan painters, he is seen to greater advantage in his frescoes than in his panel pictures. Some fragments of frescoes by him are in our Gallery (1216). Important frescoes may be seen in the sacristy of S. Miniato above Florence (the life of St. Benedict); in the Campo Santo at Pisa (the histories of SS. Efeso and Potito); and in the Palazzo Pubblico at Siena (scenes in the life of Pope Alexander III.). Spinello "represents the spirit of Giotto at the close of the fourteenth century better than any other painter of the time." He belonged to a family of goldsmiths. It is interesting to note on an altar-piece executed by him for Monte Oliveto (now in the Gallery of Siena), that the names of the carver and gilder of the frame are inscribed as conspicuously as that of Spinello the painter of the picture. He was the pupil of Jacopo di Casentino. Certainly not an adequate, and perhaps not an authentic, specimen of the master. The saints are St. John the Baptist, St. John the Evangelist, and St. James the Greater. 582. THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI. _Fra Angelico_ (Florentine: 1387-1455). _See_ 663.