Close to Giotto’s Chapel stands the great, and to an English eye, singular church of the Eremitani. It has a very broad nave of immense length, unbroken by aisles, and roofed with one of the cusped roofs already noticed at Verona, in which the real construction is (with the exception of the tie-beams) entirely concealed by boarding on the under side; this boarding being generally arranged in a succession of large cusps or curves; the effect here is, I think, very heavy and unsatisfactory, but we must bear in mind that the span is prodigious, and the pitch of the roof very flat. The chancel and an aisle on either side of it open into the east end of the nave with three arches, and look so small as to be more like mere recesses than important integral parts of the plan. There are in this church a great many frescoes and paintings of much interest--among which are some by Mantegna in a chapel on the south side of the nave which are worthy of careful study as being, probably beyond almost any other wall paintings which exist, an evidence of the fact that interest in treatment of subject, drawing and design of consummate excellence, perspective and decorative colouring of the walls, may all be included in a fresco without interference with the wall surface, or indulgence in tricks of chiaroscuro, without which no painter now seems willing to do his work. Yet if Mantegna cheerfully accepted such rules for his wall-painting, would it be beneath modern painters to do the same for theirs, and could they ask for a better teacher or guide than this consummate artist? Less interesting to the artist than these works of Mantegna are the paintings in the apse executed by Guarienti in the middle of the fourteenth century. Here are figures of the planets: the Sun, Moon, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter, each with allegorical figures, male and female, of the Seven Ages of Man influenced by the planets.[26] At the west end of the nave is a great painted Rood, one of those curiously shaped crosses meant to receive a painting of the Crucifixion instead of a carved figure, and cut round with quaintly carved and crisped indentations, of which so many examples remain, though they are generally found now in picture galleries. This no doubt stood originally on a Rood beam, where one sees such a Rood represented in one of the wall paintings in the upper church of S. Francis at Assisi.