The fresco cycle in the Chiostro Verde of S. Maria Novella at Florence, which has for its subjects stories from the Old Testament commencing with the Creation of Animals and including the Lives of Abraham and Jacob, has never been treated in detail, although it probably constitutes the most comprehensive narrative of its kind in Italian painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The
... [Show full abstract] deplorable condition of the frescoes, executed in terra verde, with scarcely a touch of other color (the sky of each field is a deep wine red), may have contributed to the causes for this neglect. And the famous scenes by Uccello, which belong to the series, overshadow the rest, leaving them to be dismissed with the very vague and not altogether justifiable attribution to the school of Paolo Uccello.1 To this great master of the early Renaissance belong the first bay, with the Creation of Animals, the Creation of Adam and Eve, and Fall of Man (first half of the thirties), and also the fourth bay with the Deluge, the Sacrifice of Noah, and the Drunkenness (about 1446).2
