t, the Campo Santo of Pisa. He there painted three of
the four 'Novissima,' Death, Judgment, Hell, and Paradise--the two
former entirely himself, the third with the assistance of his brother
Bernardo, who is said to have colored it after his designs. The first of
the series, a most singular performance, had for centuries been
popularly known as the 'Trionfo della Morte.' It is divided by an
immense rock into two irregular portions. In that to the right, Death,
personified as a female phantom, batwinged, claw-footed, her robe of
linked mail [?] and her long hair streaming on the wind, swings back her
scythe in order to cut down a company of the rich ones of the earth,
Castruccio Castracani and his gay companions, seated under an
orange-grove, and listening to the music of a troubadour and a female
minstrel; little genii or Cupids, with reversed torches, float in the
air above them; one young gallant caresses his hawk, a lady her
lapdog,--Castruccio alone looks abstractedly away, as if his thoughts
were elsewhere. But all are alike heedless and unconscious, though the
sand is run out, the scythe falling and their doom sealed. Meanwhile the
lame and the halt, the withered and the blind, to whom the heavens are
brass and life a burthen, cry on Death with impassioned gestures, to
release them from their misery,--but in vain; she sweeps past, and will
not hear them. Between these two groups lie a heap of corpses, mown down
already in her flight--kings, queens, bishops, cardinals, young men and
maidens, secular and ecclesiastical--ensigned by their crowns, coronets,
necklaces, miters and helmets--huddled together in hideous confusion;
some are dead, others dying,--angels and devils draw the souls out of
their mouths; that of a nun (in whose hand a purse, firmly clenched,
betokens her besetting sin) shrinks back aghast at the unlooked-for
sight of the demon who receives it--an idea either inherited or adopted
from Andrea Tafi. The whole upper half of the fresco, on this side, is
filled with angels and devils carrying souls to heaven or to hell;
sometimes a struggle takes place, and a soul is rescued from a demon who
has unwarrantably appropriated it; the angels are very graceful, and
their intercourse with their spiritual charge is full of tenderness and
endearment; on the other hand, the wicked are hurried off by the devils
and thrown headlong into the mouths of hell, represented as the crater
of a volcano, belching out flames n