| east wall. Columns supporting the vaulting of the Church divide the nave of the church on each side into four bays. The largest bays are near the entrance due to the structure of the nave. The entire surface of the nave is painted including the consoles of the ceilings which Cimabue painted, "creating the illusion that this ceiling is actually the underside of the corridor seen from below." Cimabue set an early standard for the art to play a skillfully discreet role in the architecture and to merge with it as if it were one. Due to the interruption of the planar surface by the protrusion of the clustering columns, the scenes that were to occupy the nave walls had to be created as individual vignettes and not one continual program so "all that was possible was a lateral harmony within the Legend itself." At any position within the nave, the viewer would always have some part of the series blocked by the structure of the church. This naturally provided for nine separate areas, four along each of the north and south walls and then one on the east wall.
The Legend is split up into twenty-eight separate parts, breaking down into three frescoes in each bay with four (2 apiece) on the east wall. To free each fresco from one another, painted columns were inserted. Also, the cornices were painted to frame each picture which "early Italian fresco-painting shows nothing to compare with the heavy emphasis placed in the Upper Church upon the |