[29] This is the scene in his life most often reproduced by the predecessors of Giotto. The unknown artist who (before 1236) decorated the nave of the Lower Church of Assisi gives five frescos to the history of Jesus and five to the life of St. Francis. Upon the latter he represents: 1, the renunciation of the paternal inheritance; 2, Francis upholding the Lateran church; 3, the sermon to the birds; 4, the stigmata; 5, the funeral. This work, unhappily very badly lighted, and about half of it destroyed at the time of the construction of the chapels of the nave, ought to be engraved before it completely disappears. The history of art in the time of Giunta Pisano is still too much enveloped in obscurity for us to neglect such a source of information. M. Thode (_Franz von Assisi und die Anfaenge der Kunst_, Berlin, 1885, 8vo. illust.) and the Rev. Father Fratini (_Storia della Basilica d'Assisi_, Prato, 1882, 8vo) are much too brief so far as these frescos are concerned. [30] It is needless to say that I do not claim that Francis was the only initiator of this movement, still less that he was its creator; he was its most inspired singer, and that may suffice for his glory. If Italy was awakened it was because her sleep was not so sound as in the tenth century; the mosaics of the facade of the Cathedral of Spoleto (the Christ between the Virgin and St. John) already belong to the new art. Still, the victory was so little final that the mural paintings of St. Lawrence without the walls and of the Quattro Coronate, which are subsequent to it by half a score of years, relapse into a coarse Byzantinism. See also those of the Baptistery of Florence. [31] Hence the more or less subtile explanations with which they adorn these incidents.--As to the part of animals in thirteenth century legends consult Caesar von Heisterbach, Strange's edition, t. ii., pp. 257 ff. [32] 1 Cel., 80-83.