s played upon
by turns, tenderness and pity form the under-song throughout and
ultimately prevail; the curse is uttered in sorrow rather than wrath,
and from the pitying Virgin and the weeping archangel above, to the
mother endeavoring to rescue her daughter below, and the young secular
led to paradise under the approving smile of S. Michael, all resolves
itself into sympathy and love.--Michael Angelo's conception may be more
efficacious for teaching by terror--it was his object, I believe, as the
heir of Savonarola and the representative of the Protestant spirit
within the bosom of Catholicism; but Orcagna's is in better taste, truer
to human nature, sublimer in philosophy, and (if I mistake not) more
scriptural."--Vol. iii., pp. 139-141.

* * *

77. We think it somewhat strange that the object of teaching by terror
should be attributed to M. Angelo more than to Orcagna, seeing that the
former, with his usual dignity, has refused all representation of
infernal punishment--except in the figure dragged down with the hand
over the face, the serpent biting the thigh, and in the fiends of the
extreme angle; while Orcagna, whose intention may be conjectured even
from Solazzino's restoration, exhausted himself in detailing Dante's
distribution of torture, and brings into successive prominence every
expedient of pain; the prong, the spit, the rack, the chain, venomous
fang and rending beak, harrowing point and dividing edge, biting fiend
and calcining fire. The objects of the two great painters were indeed
opposed, but not in this respect. Orcagna's, like that of every great
painter of his day, was to write upon the wall, as in a book, the
greatest possible number of those religious facts or doctrines which the
Church desired should be known to the people. This he did in the
simplest and most straightforward way, regardless of artistical
reputation, and desiring only to be read and understood. But Michael
Angelo's object was from the beginning that of an artist. He addresses
not the sympathies of his day, but the understanding of all time, and he
treats the subject in the mode best adapted to bring every one of his
own powers into full play. As might have been expected, while the
self-forgetfulness of Orcagna has given, on the one hand, an awfulness
to his work, and verity, which are wanting in the studied composition of
the Sistine, on the other it has admitted a puerility commensurate with
the narrowness