e intrusion of alien ideals ere the time for their
triumph had arrived. What the painters of these frescoes undertook to
delineate for the Dominicans of Florence, was the fabric of society
sustained and held together by the action of inquisitors and doctors
issued from their order. The Pope with his Cardinals, the Emperor with his
Council, represent the two chief forces of Christendom, as conceived by
the mediaeval jurists and the school of Dante. Seated on thrones, they are
ready to rise in defence of Holy Church, symbolised by a picture of S.
Maria del Fiore. At their feet the black and white hounds of the Dominican
order--_Domini canes_, according to the monkish pun--are hunting heretical
wolves. Opposite this painting is the apotheosis of S. Thomas Aquinas.
Beneath the footstool of this "dumb ox of Sicily," as he was called,
grovel the heresiarchs--Arius, Sabellius, Averroes. At again a lower
level, as though supporting the saint on either hand, are ranged seven
sacred and seven profane sciences, each with its chief representative.
Thus Rhetoric and Cicero, Civil Law and Justinian, Speculative Theology
and the Areopagite, Practical Theology and Peter Lombard, Geometry and
Euclid, Arithmetic and Abraham, are grouped together. It will be seen
that the whole learning of the Middle Age--its philosophy as well as its
divinity--is here combined as in a figured abstract, for the wise to
comment on and for the simple to peruse. None can avoid drawing the lesson
that knowledge exists for the service of the Church, and that the Church,
while she instructs society, will claim complete obedience to her decrees.
The _ipse dixit_ of the Dominican author of the "Summa" is law.

Such frescoes, by no means uncommon in Dominican cloisters, still retain
great interest for the student of scholastic thought. In the church of S.
Maria Sopra Minerva at Rome, where Galileo was afterwards compelled to
sign his famous retractation, Filippino Lippi painted another triumph of S.
Thomas, conceived in the spirit of Taddeo Gaddi's, but expressed with the
freedom of the middle Renaissance. Nor should we neglect to notice the
remarkable picture by Traini in S. Caterina at Pisa. Here the doctor of
Aquino is represented in an aureole surrounded by a golden sphere or disc,
on the edge of which are placed the four evangelists, together with Moses
and S. Paul.[137] At his side, within the burnished sphere, Plato and
Aristotle stand upright, holding the "T