d; and as the crier had
proclaimed, so now in death went much folk to learn news of the other
world."

Such being the temper of the people, we find that some of the greatest
works of art in this age were paintings of Death and Hell, Heaven and
Judgment. Orcagna, in the Strozzi Chapel of S. Maria Novella, set forth
these scenes with a wonderful blending of beauty and grotesque invention.
In the treatment of the Inferno he strove to delineate the whole geography
of Dante's first _cantica_, tracing the successive circles and introducing
the various episodes commemorated by the poet. Interesting as this work
may be for the illustration of the "Divine Comedy" as understood by
Dante's immediate successors, we turn from it with a sense of relief to
admire the saints and angels ranged in goodly row, "each burning upward to
his point of bliss" whereby the painter has depicted Paradise. Early
Italian art has nothing more truly beautiful to offer than the white-robed
Madonna kneeling at the judgment seat of Christ.[129]

It will be felt by every genuine student of art that if Orcagna painted
these frescoes in S. Maria Novella, whereof there is no doubt, he could
not have executed the wall-paintings in the Campo Santo at Pisa attributed
to him by Vasari. To what artists or artist we owe those three grave and
awful panels, may still be regarded an open question.[130] At the end of
the southern wall of the cemetery, exposed to a cold and equal north light
from the cloister windows, these great compositions, after the lapse of
five centuries, bring us face to face with the most earnest thoughts of
mediaeval Christianity. Their main purpose seems to be to illustrate the
advantage of the ascetic over the secular mode of life, and to school men
into living with the fear of death before their eyes. The first displays
the solitary vigils, self-imposed penances, cruel temptations, firm
endurance, and beatific visions of the anchorites in the Thebaid. The
second is devoted to the triumph of Death over the pomp, strength, wealth,
and beauty of the world. The third reveals a grimly realistic and yet
awfully imaginative vision of judgment, such as it has rarely been granted
to a painter to conceive. Thus to the awakening soul of the Italians, on
the threshold of the modern era, with the sonnets of Petrarch and the
stories of Boccaccio sounding in their memories, this terrible master
presented the three saddest phantoms of the Middle Ages--the s