antipathetic as Hunt's nature was, in
many ways, not only to the individual Dante but to the theological
thought of which he was the spokesman, in his view of the sacred art of
the Italian Middle Age he anticipated the Pre-Raphaelites and the modern
interpreters of Dante. Here is a part of what he says of the paintings
in the Campo Santo at Pisa: "The best idea, perhaps, which I can give an
Englishman of the general character of the painting is by referring him
to the engravings of Albert Durer and the serious parts of Chaucer.
There is the same want of proper costume--the same intense feeling of the
human being, both in body and soul--the same bookish, romantic, and
retired character--the same evidences, in short, of antiquity and
commencement, weak (where it is weak) for want of a settled art and
language, but strong for that very reason in first impulses, and in
putting down all that is felt. . . . The manner in which some of the
hoary saints in these pictures pore over their books and carry their
decrepit old age, full of a bent and absorbed feebleness--the set limbs
of the warriors on horseback--the sidelong unequivocal looks of some of
the ladies playing on harps and conscious of their ornaments--the people
of fashion seated in rows, with Time coming up unawares to destroy
them--the other rows of elders and doctors of the Church, forming part of
the array of heaven--the uplifted hand of Christ denouncing the wicked at
the day of judgment--the daring satires occasionally introduced against
monks and nuns--the profusion of attitudes, expressions, incidents, broad
draperies, ornaments of all sorts, visions, mountains, ghastly looking
cities, fiends, angels, sibylline old women, dancers, virgin brides,
mothers and children, princes, patriarchs, dying saints, it would be
simply blind injustice to the superabundance and truth of conception in
all this multitude of imagery not to recognize the real inspirers as well
as harbingers of Raphael and Michael Angelo, instead of confining the
honour to the Masaccios and Peruginos, [who] . . . are no more to be
compared with them than the sonneteers of Henry VIII.'s time are to be
compared with Chaucer. Even in the very rudest of the pictures, where
the souls of the dying are going out of their mouths, in the shape of
little children, there are passages not unworthy of Dante and Michael
Angelo. . . . Giotto, be thou one to me hereafter, of a kindred brevity,
solidity, and stat