Francis, the Order built
churches throughout the length and breadth of Italy, not of marble
and mosaic but of brick, since brick was cheaper; but the brick walls
were plastered, and upon the wet plaster there were painted scenes
from the life of St. Francis, side by side with the old Christian and
saintly legends. This sudden demand for painted churches with
paintings of new subjects, stirred the painters of the day to alter
their old style. When an artist was asked to paint a large picture
of St. Francis preaching to the birds, he had to look at real birds
and he had to study a real man in the attitude of preaching. There
was no scene that had ever been painted from the life of Christ or
of any saint in which a man preached to a bird, so that the artist
was driven to paint from nature instead of copying former pictures.
Let us now read what a painter who lived in the sixteenth century,
Vasari by name, wrote about the rise of painting in his native city.
Some learned people nowadays say that Vasari was wrong in many of the
stories he told, but after all he lived much nearer than we do to the
times he wrote about, and it is safer to believe what he tells us than
what modern students surmise, except when they are able to cite other
old authorities to which Vasari did not have access.
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