bequests, donations and inheritances left to them became so considerable that they amounted to one-third of the entire wealth of Arezzo. The same happened in 1383, which was also a year of severe plague. Spinello then being of the company, often undertook to visit the infirm, bury the dead, and perform other like pious duties which the best citizens have always undertaken and still do in that city. In order to leave a memorial of this in his paintings, he painted for the company on the wall of the church of S. Laurentino and Pergentino, a Madonna with her mantle open in front, and beneath her the people of Arezzo, comprising portraits of many of the earliest members of the fraternity, drawn from life, with wallets round their necks and a wooden hammer in their hands, like those with which they knocked at the doors to ask alms. Similarly, in the company of the Annunciation he painted the large tabernacle which is outside the church, and part of a portico which is opposite it, and the picture of the company, which is an Annunciation, in tempera. The picture which is now in the church of the nuns of S. Giusto, where a little Christ, who is at His mother's neck, is espousing St Catherine, with six small scenes in little figures of the acts of that saint, is also a work of Spinello and much admired. Being afterwards invited to the famous abbey of Camaldoli in Casentino in the year 1361, he painted for the hermits of that place the picture of the high altar, which was taken away in the year 1539, when the entire church was rebuilt and Giorgio Vasari did a new picture, painting the principal chapel of the abbey all in fresco, the transept of the church in fresco and two pictures. Summoned thence to Florence by D. Jacopo d'Arezzo, Abbot of S. Miniato in Monte of the order of Monte Oliveto, Spinello painted the vaulting and four walls of the sacristy of that monastery, besides the picture of the altar, all in tempera, with many stories of the life of St Benedict, executed with much skill and a great vivacity in the colouring, learned by him by means of long practice and continual labour, with study and diligence, such as are necessary to every one who wishes to acquire an art perfectly. After these things the said abbot left Florence and received the direction of the monastery of S. Bernardo of the same order, in his native land, at the very time when it was almost entirely completed on the land granted by the Aretines, on the site of the Colosseum. Here the abbot induced Spinello to paint in fresco two chapels which are beside the principal chapel, and two others, one on either side of the door leading to the choir in the screen of the church. In one of the two, next the principal chapel, is an Annunciation in fresco, made with the greatest diligence, and on a wall beside it, is the Madonna ascending the steps of the Temple, accompanied by Joachim and Anna; in the other chapel is a Crucifix with the Madonna and St John