plaits of hair shines a dull red light, and in their wings and on the Madonna's gown are mauve and russet shades like the colours of autumnal oaks.... "To this day," says Mr Ruskin, "among all the Mater Dolorosas of Christianity, Cimabue's at Assisi is the noblest; nor did any painter after him add one link to the chain of thought with which he summed the creation of the earth, and preached its redemption." St. Francis has not been forgotten in this fresco, but Cimabue having given all his art to make the Virgin and her choir of angels beautiful, his figure is not quite one's idea of the ethereal Umbrian preacher, and his being there at all spoils the symmetry of the grouping. It is not improbable that the figure of St. Clare stood on the other side, and was erased when the Chapel of Sta. Maria Maddalena was built, and the ornamental border painted round this fresco, which cut off part of the wings of the two angels on the left of the Virgin. Vasari vaguely tells us of some frescoes from the lives of Jesus Christ and of St. Francis, painted by Cimabue in the Lower Church, and later writers have thought these must have been destroyed to make room for Giotto's work. If paintings were there at all they were more likely to have been the work of inferior artists, for it seems improbable that Giotto, coming to Assisi for the first time when he was quite a youth, should destroy any work of his master, who was still alive, in order to substitute his own early efforts. THE UPPER CHURCH Not only was the Upper Church essentially fitted for fresco painting, but it required an elaborate scheme of decoration, just as a setting, however perfect, needs a gem to complete it; and it almost seems as though "Jacopo" had stayed his hand, with the intention that here, at least, architecture should be subservient to wall decoration, and had foreseen the need of large spaces to be covered with paintings, as brightly coloured, as clear, and as closely set together as are the colours upon a butterfly's wings. "It was here, in the Upper Church of Assisi," says Mr Roger Fry, "that the Italian genius first attained to self-expression in the language of monumental painting, a language which no other European nation, except the Greeks, has ever mastered." But the question as to who were the predecessors of Giotto, and when exactly they came, can never, we think, be answered; for the time is not far off when these splendid ruins of early art will have totally faded away, or, what is infinitely worse, be covered with still thicker layers of paint than the "restorer" has already laid upon them. [Illustration: LOOKING THROUGH THE DOORS OF THE UPPER CHURCH TOWARDS THE PORTA S. GIACOMO AND THE CASTLE]