Fontane, with the mysterious blood-red bird that drank his blood. Another scene shows the Pope Symmachus (A.D. 498) disinterring the bodies of the two Saints, and his vow of building S. John Lateran, and the last scene shows his consecration of that church. It is interesting to mark the Comacine influence in the drawing. The towers are Lombard towers, and the buildings all have round apses. The people who are not ecclesiastic or saints seem to be Longobardic, with reddish tunics, leather-thonged sandals, and long hair. As for the lions, which lie waiting before the cross of St. Peter, they are in the precise form of the crouching lions beneath a Comacine arch. The drawing of other beasts shows that the artists were less accustomed to them than to their traditional lions. [Illustration: INTERIOR OF CHURCH OF SAN PIERO A GRADO NEAR PISA, WITH FRESCOES OF THE 9TH CENTURY. _See page 270._] If it be true that these frescoes, like the ones beneath San Clemente, were really of the ninth or tenth centuries, and if they were by native artists, this would place Pisa far before Siena in the history of art, and Merzario would be wrong when he asserts that there was no school of art in Pisa before the cathedral was begun. The state of art in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries strongly inclines me to place these Byzantino-naturalistic paintings, according to legend, in the ninth century--that is, before the fall of art, which took place during the times of German invasion and feudal oppression after Charlemagne. Certainly Cimabue, who is called the "Father of Tuscan Art," could not have painted them, though in the revival of his time he may have studied them, as earlier works of his guild, for we have documental evidence of his connection as a _Magister_ with the Pisan Lodge. The first great painter of that lodge was Giunta di Pisa, sometimes written _Magister Juncte_. He was the son of a still older painter, Guidotto dal Colle, who was a Master in A.D. 1202, and lived till 1255.[201] We give a facsimile of an old print showing two of his paintings, one a figure from the fall of Simon Magus, in the church of St. Francis at Assisi; another a St. John from an ancient crucifix in S. M. degli Angeli at Assisi. The Byzantine style in Cimabue's painting may be traced to the influence of Giunta, of whom an ancient writer, Padre Angeli, when speaking of his paintings at Assisi, says--"that though his teachers were Greeks, yet he learned his art in Italy, about A.D. 1210."[202] This is a proof of the connection of Eastern artists with the Western architects. Giunta, who became a _Magister_ in 1210, preceded Giotto by a century, in the frescoes of St. Francis of Assisi, where among other things he painted a crucifix with Frate Elias kneeling at the foot. Brother Elias was a scholar of St. Francis, and contemporary with Giunta himself, who has inscribed on his crucifix--