owing, it may be supposed, to the interested desire of
the clergy to impress upon the populace as forcibly as possible the
verity of purgatorial horrors, nearly every representation of the
Inferno has been repainted, and vulgar butchery substituted for the
expressions of punishment which were too chaste for monkish purposes.
The infernos of Giotto at Padua, and of Orcagna at Florence, have thus
been destroyed; but in neither case have they been replaced by anything
so merely disgusting as these restorations by Solazzino in the Campo
Santo. Not a line of Orcagna's remains, except in one row of figures
halfway up the wall, where his firm black drawing is still
distinguishable: throughout the rest of the fresco, hillocks of pink
flesh have been substituted for his severe forms--and for his agonized
features, puppets' heads with roaring mouths and staring eyes, the whole
as coarse and sickening, and quite as weak, as any scrabble on the
lowest booths of a London Fair.

76. Lord Lindsay's comparison of these frescoes of Orcagna with the
great work in the Sistine, is, as a specimen of his writing, too good
not to be quoted.

* * *

"While Michael Angelo's leading idea seems to be the self-concentration
and utter absorption of all feeling into the one predominant thought,
_Am I, individually, safe?_ resolving itself into two emotions only,
doubt and despair--all diversities of character, all kindred sympathies
annihilated under their pressure--those emotions uttering themselves,
not through the face but the form, by bodily contortion, rendering the
whole composition, with all its overwhelming merits, a mighty
hubbub--Orcagna's on the contrary embraces the whole world of passions
that make up the economy of man, and these not confused or crushed
into each other, but expanded and enhanced in quality and
intensity commensurably with the 'change' attendant upon the
resurrection--variously expressed indeed, and in reference to the
diversities of individual character, which will be nowise compromised by
that change, yet from their very intensity suppressed and subdued,
stilling the body and informing only the soul's index, the countenance.
All therefore is calm; the saved have acquiesced in all things, they can
mourn no more--the damned are to them as if they had never been;--among
the lost, grief is too deep, too settled for caricature, and while every
feeling of the spectator, every key of the soul's organ, i