The Old Masters and Their Pictures | Page 8

decay has begun its work; the third is reduced to a grinning skeleton.
The impression produced on the gay party by the sight is very various.
Some look on carelessly; one holds his nose in disgust; one, a lady
jewelled and crowned, leans her head on her hand in solemn thought.
Above, on a rising ground, an aged monk (it is said, Saint Macarius) is
holding a scroll, and pointing out to passengers the moral of the sight
which meets them. The path winds up a hill crowned with a church,
and by its side at various points are hermits sitting in calm security, or
following peaceful occupations. One of them is milking a doe; another
is reading; a third is calmly contemplating from a distance the valley of
Death. About them are various animals and birds. The idea evidently

intended to be conveyed is that deliverance from the fear of death is to
be found not in gaiety and dissipation, but in contemplation and
communion with God.
'Such is the wonderful fresco, and the execution is as wonderful as the
conception. Belonging as the painter did to a rude and early period of
art, he yet had the power of endowing his figures with both majesty and
tenderness of expression.'
The Last Judgment is no less solemn and sad, with hope tempering its
sadness. Mrs Jameson's note of it is: 'Above, in the centre, Christ and
the Virgin are throned in separate glories. He turns to the left, towards
the condemned, while he uncovers the wound in his side, and raises his
right arm with a menacing gesture, his countenance full of majestic
wrath. The Virgin, on the right of her Son, is the picture of heavenly
mercy, and, as if terrified at the words of eternal condemnation, she
turns away. On either side are ranged the Prophets of the Old
Testament, the Apostles and other saints, severe, solemn, dignified
figures. Angels, holding the instruments of the Passion, hover over
Christ and the Virgin; under them is a group of archangels. The
archangel Michael stands in the midst holding a scroll in each hand;
immediately before him another archangel, supposed to represent
Raphael, the guardian angel of humanity, cowers down, shuddering,
while two others sound the awful trumpets of doom. Lower down is the
earth where men are seen rising from their graves; armed angels direct
them to the right and left. Here is seen King Solomon, who, whilst he
rises, seems doubtful to which side he should turn; here a hypocritical
monk, whom an angel draws back by the hair from the host of the
youth in a gay and rich costume, whom another angel leads away to
Paradise. There is wonderful and even terrible power of expression in
some of the heads; and it is said that among them are many portraits of
contemporaries, but unfortunately no circumstantial traditions as to
particular figures have reached us.'
One of Orcagna's altar-pieces, that of 'the coronation of the Virgin,'
containing upwards of a hundred figures, and with the colouring still
rich, is in our National Gallery. As an architect, Orcagna designed the

famous Loggia de' Lanzi of the grand ducal palace at Florence.
Now I must take you back to the bronze gates of the Baptistery in their
triumphant completion nearly a hundred years after the first gate was
executed by Andrea Pisano. I should have liked, but for our limits, to
tell in full the legend of the election of Lorenzo Ghiberti, the step-son
of a goldsmith, and skilled in chasing and enamelling, to design the
second gate; when yet a lad of twenty-three, how he and two other
young men, one of them still younger than Ghiberti, were declared the
most promising competitors in the trial for the work; how the last two
voluntarily withdrew from the contest, magnanimously proclaiming
Lorenzo Ghiberti their superior; how all the three lived to be famous,
the one as a founder in metal, the others as an architect and a sculptor,
and remained sworn brothers in art till death.
Lorenzo Ghiberti has left us an expression of the feeling with which he
set about his task, an expression so suggestive that, even had we no
other indication, it is enough to stamp the true and tender nature of the
man. He prepared for his achievement 'with infinite diligence and
love'--the words deserve to be pondered over. He took at least
twenty-two years to his work, receiving for it eleven hundred florins.
He chose his subjects from the life and death of the Lord, working them
out in twenty panels, ten on each side of the folding doors, and below
these were eight panels containing full-length figures of the four
evangelists and four doctors of the Latin Church, with a complete
border of fruit