The painting represents Virgil in a sitting attitude ready to write, with his face turned upwards as invoking the Muse. Æneas, in martial vest and attitude, stands before him, and pointing to his sword, alludes to the subject of the Æneis, "Arma Virumque." A shepherd and a husbandman, symbols of the Pastorals and Georgics, placed somewhat lower, listen to the theme; whilst Servius draws a transparent curtain, to denote his labours in unveiling the beauties and removing the obscurities of the poet. In this miniature, the originality of conception, the beauty and harmony of colour, the varied and appropriate drapery, are, however, balanced by rudeness of design, vulgarity of character, and deformed extremities. It was a barbarous singularity of Simone, promiscuously to admit different proportions on the same plane: to flank or cross figures of natural size with figures a third less than nature. Lippo, or Filippo Memmi, was the relative, scholar, and imitator, of Simone: assisted by his designs, Lippo often executed works, which, had he not marked them with his name, would be ascribed to the master: when left to his own invention, he rose in nothing above mediocrity, but in colour. Sometimes they were partners in the same picture, as in that at S. Ansano di Castel Vecchio, at Sienna; sometimes the second finished what the first began, as in some works at Ancona and Assisi; and at Sienna there remains still something entirely executed by Lippo. Simone co-operated in the works of S. Maria Novella with Taddeo Gaddi, who, with his son, Angelo Gaddi, left a number of pupils, imitators through him of Giotto, inferior to both, not much distinguished by tradition, and less favoured by time. Of Jacopo di Casentino, the most conspicuous, what vestiges remain in the church of Orsanmichele at Florence, are in conformity with the style of Taddeo; barriers soon overleaped by the vivid fancy of his scholar, Spinello the Aretine, whom his own conception of a demon is said to have terrified into insanity and death. His son, Parri Spinelli, with barbarous incongruities of line, possessed exquisite colour; and his pupil, Lorenzo di Bicci, has been compared to Vasari, for the number, dispatch, and opinion of his works. Antonio, surnamed Veneziano, whether he were a Venetian or a Florentine, is, against evidence of dates and style, supposed to have been a pupil of Angelo Gaddi, and to have educated Paolo Uccello, the first master of perspective, and Gherardo Starnina, an artist of gay style, whose relics live still a chapel of Sta. Croce. They are numbered among the last productions of Giotto's expiring epoch, and the verge of the fourteenth century, in which we have still to mark, though pupils of some other school, the family of Orcagna; Bernardo, a painter; Jacopo, a sculptor; but chiefly Andrea, conspicuous for writing, painting, sculpture, and architecture, in a degree little inferior to Giotto himself. Architects date from him the abolition of the acute