pectre of
death omnipotent, the solitude of the desert as the only refuge from a
sinful and doomed world, the dread of Divine justice inexorable and
inevitable. In those piles of the promiscuous and abandoned dead, those
fiends and angels poised in mid-air struggling for souls, those blind and
mutilated beggars vainly besieging Death with prayers and imprecations for
deliverance, while she descends in her robe of woven wire to mow down with
her scythe the knights and ladies in their garden of delight; again in
those horses snuffing at the open graves, those countesses and princes
face to face with skeletons, those serpents coiling round the flesh of
what was once fair youth or maid, those multitudes of guilty men and women
trembling beneath the trump of the archangel--tearing their cheeks, their
hair, their breasts in agony, because they see Hell through the
prison-bars, and hear the raging of its fiends, and feel the clasp upon
their wrists and ankles of clawed hairy demon hands; in all this terrific
amalgamation of sinister and tragic ideas, vividly presented, full of
coarse dramatic power, and intensified by faith in their material reality,
the Lorenzetti brethren, if theirs be indeed the hands that painted here,
summed up the nightmares of the Middle Age and bequeathed an ever
memorable picture of its desolate preoccupations to the rising world. They
have called to their aid poetry, and history, and legend. Boccaccio
supplies them with the garden scene of youths and damsels dancing among
roses, while the plague is at their gates, and death is in the air above.
From Petrarch they have borrowed the form and mystic robe of Death
herself[131]. Uguccione della Faggiuola has sat for the portrait of the
Captain who must quail before the terrors of the tomb, and Castruccio
Castracane is the strong man cut off in the blossom of his age. The
prisons of the Visconti have disgorged their victims, cast adrift with
maiming that makes life unendurable but does not hasten death.[132] The
lazar houses and the charnels have been ransacked for forms of grisly
decay. Thus the whole work is not merely "an hieroglyphical and shadowed
lesson" of ascetic philosophy; it is also a realisation of mediaeval life
in its cruellest intensity and most uncompromising truth. For mere beauty
these painters had but little regard.[133] Their distribution of the
subjects chosen for treatment on each panel shows, indeed, a keen sense
for the value of drama