"On the Umbrian mountains, by Assisi, slept, in the peace of Heaven, St. Francis, who left such sweet odour of sanctity in the middle ages. Round his tomb assembled, from every part of Christendom, pilgrims to pay their vows. With their offertories there was erected over his grave a magnificent temple, which became the point of concourse to all painters animated by Christian feeling, who thus displayed their gratitude to the Almighty for their endowment of genius, who in that solitude laid in a new store of inspiration, and who, after leaving on these walls a testimony of their powers, returned home joyful and enriched. Cimabue, among the first that raised a holy war against the Byzantine mannerism,[*120] there painted the most beautiful of his Madonnas; his pupil, the shepherd of Bondone, there traced those simple histories which established his superiority; thither sped the artists of Siena, Perugia, Arezzo, and the best of the Florentines,--the beatified Fiesole, of angelic life and works, Benozzo Gozzoli, Orcagna, Perugino, and, finally, Raffaele, the greatest of painters. [Footnote *120: Cimabue raising a holy war against Byzantine mannerism is an amusing spectacle. All we know of him was that his pupil was a great painter. Whether or no he painted at Assisi it is impossible to say.] "Thus was there formed in the shadow of that sanctuary a truly Christian school, which sought its types of beauty in the heavens; or, when it laid the scene of its compositions here below, selected their subjects from the sainted ones of the earth. Its delight was to represent, now the Virgin-Mother kneeling before her Son, or seated caressing or holding him up for the veneration of patriarchs and saints; now the life of Christ, his preaching, his sufferings, his triumph; or, again, to embody the touching legends told in these simple times, or the martyrs crucified by early tyrants, or an anchorite's devotion in a lonely cave, or some beatified soul borne away on seraph's wings; or a religious procession, the miracle of a preacher, the solemnity of a sacrament: but ever, images of solace and of hope, cherubs singing and making melody, maidens contemplating with smiles the opening heavens, the scenes begun on earth but continued far beyond the clouds, where the Madonna and the Saviour are seen, radiant with serene exultation, beholding the concourse of suppliant faithful beneath."