228 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

opposite side, a queen, condemned herself but self-forgetful, vainly struggles to rescue her daughter from a demon who has caught her by the gown and is dragging her backwards into the abyss-her sister, wringing her hands, looks on in agony-it is a fearful scene.

“A vast rib or arch in the walls of pandemonium admits one into the contiguous gulf of Hell, forming the third fresco, or rather a continuation of the second-in which Satan sits in the midst, in gigantic terror, cased in armour and crunching sinners-of whom Judas, especially, is eaten and ejected, re-eaten and re-ejected again and again for ever. The punishments of the wicked are portrayed in circles numberless around him. But in everything save horror this compartment is inferior to the preceding, and it has been much injured and repainted.”-Vol.iii.p. 138.

57. We might have been spared all notice of this last compartment. Throughout Italy, 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 The infernos of Giotto at Padua,¹ and of Orcagna at Florence, have thus been destroyed; but in neither case have they been replaced by anything so merely disgusting as these restorations by Solazzino in the Campo Santo.² Not a line of Orcagna’s remains, except in one row of figures halfway up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.

58. 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

¹ [For a reproduction of Giotto’s “Inferno,” see Giotto and his Works at Padua.]

² [See again Modern Painters, vol.ii. (Vol. IV. p. 201 and n.). The repainting by Solazzino was done in 1530.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]