146 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

That is to say, in all they did, the old artists endeavoured, in one way or another, to express the real facts of the subject or event, this being their chief business: and the question they first asked themselves was always, how would this thing, or that, actually have occurred? what would this person, or that, have done under the circumstances? and then, having formed their conception, they work it out with only a secondary regard to grace or beauty, while a modern painter invariably thinks of the grace and beauty of his work first, and unites afterwards as much truth as he can with its conventional graces. I will give you a single strong instance to make my meaning plainer. In Orcagna’s great fresco of the Triumph of Death, one of the incidents is that three kings,* when out hunting, are met by a spirit, which, desiring them to follow it, leads them to a churchyard, and points out to them, in open coffins, three bodies of kings such as themselves, in the last stages of corruption. Now a modern artist, representing this, would have endeavoured dimly and faintly to suggest the appearance of the dead bodies, and

* This incident is not of Orcagna’s invention, it is variously represented in much earlier art. There is a curious and graphic drawing of it, circa 1300, in the MS. Arundel 83, Brit. Mus.,¹ in which the three dead persons are walking, and are met by three queens, who severally utter the sentences,

“Ich am aferd.”

“Lo, whet ich se?”

“Me thinketh hit beth develes thre.”

To which the dead bodies answer-

“Ich wes wel fair.”

“Such scheltou be.”

“For Godes love, be wer by me.”

It is curious, that though the dresses of the living persons, and the “I was well fair” of the first dead speaker, seem to mark them distinctly to be women, some longer legends below are headed “primus rex mortuus,” etc.

¹ [In his notes on the British Museum’s collection of illuminated MSS., Ruskin says of this: “Glorious one, full of odd divinity and quaint lines, especially near the end,” and mentions it as among the three or four which “would be my choice out of the whole library.” For other references to Orcagna’s “Triumph of Death,” see below (in the Review of Lord Lindsay), p. 224; and Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. iv. § 20, ch. viii. § 6.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]