The paintings shared a common source in the work of Giotto di Bondone and his disciples, and they seem to radiate from a set of paintings in the Franciscan monastery at Assisi. Although the frescoes of the church depicted events from the life of Christ, more than a thousand years before the Mongol Empire, or the life of Saint Francis, only shortly before Mongol contact, the artists depicted many of their subjects as Mongols or used Mongol dress and cloth for them:
