Vasari especially commends the spirit with which he drew animals, and mentions a drawing in his own possession of a lion tearing a tree as of great merit. Thus Oderigi, the contemporary of Cimabue, and Franco, the pupil of Oderigi and contemporary of Giotto, appear to have been to the Art of Illumination what Cimabue and his pupil Giotto were to the Art of Painting,--the pupil in both cases infinitely excelling the master. To them succeeded, about the middle of the 14th century, a scarcely less celebrated pair--Don Jacopo Fiorentino, and Don Silvestro, both monks in the Camaldolese monastery, "degli Angeli," at Florence. The former, Baldinucci tells us, "improving, with infinite study, every moment not devoted to his monastic duties, acquired a style of writing greatly sought after for choral books." The latter, who was rather an artist than a scribe, enriched the productions of his friend with miniatures so beautiful, as to cause the books thus jointly produced to excite, at a later period, the special admiration of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and his son, the no less magnificent Leo X.[79] So proud were their brother-monks of the skill of Frati Jacopo and Silvestro, that after their death they preserved their two right hands as honoured relics. About a century later, the leading illuminators were Bartolomeo and Gherardo,--the former abbot of San Clemente, at Arrezzo, and the latter a Florentine painter and "miniatore," whom Vasari confounds with Attavante, a painter, engraver, and mosaicist. Of all the Italian artists who adopted the style of the illuminators, if they did not themselves illuminate, the most celebrated certainly are Fra Angelico da Fiesole[80] and Gentile da Fabriano. The majority of the works of both are little else than magnified miniatures of the highest merit. The school of Siennese illumination was scarcely less distinguished than that of Florence. M. Rio dwells with enthusiasm on the books of the Kaleffi and Leoni, still preserved in the Archivio delle Riformazioni, and especially on those decorated by Nicolo di Sozzo, in 1334. The greatest master of the school, Simone Memmi,[81] the intimate friend of Petrarch, was himself an illuminator of extraordinary excellence, as may be seen by the celebrated Virgil of the Ambrosian Library at Milan, which contains, amongst other beautiful miniatures by his hand, the fine portrait of Virgil, and a very remarkable allegorical figure of Poetry, quite equal in artistic merit to any of the artist's larger and better-known works in fresco or tempera.[82]