Originally the choir screen of Albi was painted in colors. While the accessories indicate that the Italian Renaissance was obtaining headway in France, the images derive from the short, overdraped Franco-Flamand figures of Dijon. Perhaps the stonecutters who made Albi's choir wall came direct from Cluny, where a late-Gothic chapel, on which had worked Abbot Jacques d'Amboise, was adorned with prophets and apostles, each with his suitable text. On the inner wall of Albi's choir screen are sculptured homely but charming little angels, and the twelve apostles holding scrolls inscribed with phrases of the _Crédo_. Old Testament personages, who only heralded the Messiah, were not admitted to the _sanctum sanctorum_; the vestibule was their proper place. Prosper Mérimée called Albi's screen "a splendid folly before which one is ashamed to be wise." Inside and out it is exuberant with sculpture, though its extravagant caprices do not stifle a very real religious feeling in the images. Such a profusion of delicate ornament led the modern critic to suspect that the choir wall was modeled in cement, not chiseled in stone, but when a Sorbonne geologist analyzed the substance it was found to be a fine-grained white stone that grows harder with time. Everywhere in St. Cecilia's cathedral is fragile loveliness set side by side, as an afterthought, with stern forcefulness. Bishop Louis II d'Amboise brought from Italy a group of artists to paint the panels of Albi's cyclopean vaulting, and the work accomplished by those men of northern Italy, from 1509 to 1512, remains the most splendid color decoration of the Middle Ages in France. Michael Angelo was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling in those same years. Languedoc produced another superb array of color, the windows of Auch Cathedral,[236] and we must not forget that the greatest of all Renaissance glassworkers, the friar who filled Arezzo with glory, was a Midi Frenchman.