It was, however, not till nearly the middle of the fourteenth century that Italy produced many illuminated manuscripts of any remarkable beauty. Those executed under the immediate influence of Giotto, between 1300 and about 1340, were not as a rule to be compared to the illuminations of northern Europe either for decorative value or for minute beauty of detail. By the middle of the fourteenth century, however, the illuminator's art in Italy, and especially in Florence, had reached a very high degree of excellence. [Illustration: Fig. 48. Miniature of St George and the Dragon from a _Missal_, illuminated about 1330 to 1340 by a painter of the school of Giotto.] _Monastic painters._ _Don Silvestro._ Vasari, in his life of Don Lorenzo Monaco[176], mentions a Camaldolese monk of the Monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli near Florence, who, about the year 1350, wrote and illuminated a number of magnificent choir-books for his monastery, which were very highly valued; so much so that after the death of the monk, whose name was Don Silvestro, his hand was preserved in a shrine as a sacred relic of the dead monk's piety and skill[177]. Some of Don Silvestro's manuscripts are now preserved in the Laurentian library in Florence, and a number of miniatures cut out of his choir-books were acquired by W. Young Ottley[178]. _MSS. of Don Silvestro._ _Methods of decoration._ The existing works of Don Silvestro show that the enthusiasm of his fellow monks was not exaggerated. The miniatures are noble in style, finished with the most exquisitely minute touch, splendidly brilliant in colour, and in every way masterpieces of the illuminator's art. These choir-books are of enormous size, being intended to be placed on the central choir lectern so that the whole body of monks standing round could chant the _antiphonalia_ from the same book, and the initials are proportionately large to the size of the page. Thus some of the figures of Saints which fill the central spaces of the large initials are as much as from six to seven inches in height, and yet they are painted with the minute detail of an ordinary sized miniature. The grounds of these splendid figures are usually of burnished gold, decorated by incised tooling of diapers or scroll-work; and the floreated borders, which surround the letters and form marginal ornaments to the pages, consist of nobly designed conventional foliage in vermilion, ultramarine and other fine pigments, relieved and lighted up by bosses of burnished gold thickly sprinkled among the sumptuous coloured foliage. Tooled and burnished gold is also used largely for the decoration of the dresses of the figures, their crowns, jewelled ornaments and the apparels and orphreys of their vestments. The whole effect is magnificent in the extreme, and yet, in spite of the dazzling brilliance of the gold and colours, the whole effect is perfectly harmonious and free from the