“THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ART” 231

nor, we believe, of conception. The expressions on the inferno side are all of them varieties of grief and fear, differing merely in degree, not in character or operation: there is something dramatic in the raised hand of a man wearing a green bonnet with a white plume-but the only really farcarried effort in the group is the head of a Dominican monk¹ (just above the queen in green), who, in the midst of the close crowd, struggling, shuddering, and howling on every side, is fixed in quiet, total despair, insensible to all things, and seemingly poised in existence and sensation upon that one point in his past life when his steps first took hold on hell;² this head, which is opposed to a face distorted by horror beside it, is, we repeat, the only highly wrought piece of expression in the group.

61. What Michael Angelo could do by expression of countenance alone, let the Pietà of Genoa tell,³ or the Lorenzo, or the parallel to this very head of Orcagna’s, the face of the man borne down in the Last Judgment with the hand clenched over one of the eyes. Neither in that fresco is he wanting in dramatic episode; the adaptation of the Niobe on the spectator’s left hand is far finer than Orcagna’s condemned queen and princess; the groups rising below, side by side, supporting each other, are full of tenderness, and reciprocal devotion; the contest in the centre for the body which a demon drags down by the hair is another kind of quarrel from that of Orcagan between a feathered angel and bristly fiend for a diminutive soul-reminding us, as it forcibly did at first, of a vociferous difference in opinion between a cat and a cockatoo. But Buonaroti knew that it was useless to concentrate interest in the countenances, in a picture of enormous size, ill lighted; and he preferred giving full play to the powers of line-grouping, for which he could have found no nobler field. Let us not by unwise

¹ [With this, compare the passage from Ruskin’s diary of 1845 given in Vol.IV. p. 276.]

² [Proverbs v. 5.]

³ [For this medallion, see ibid. (Vol.IV. pp. 138 and n., p. 285 n.); and for the Lorenzo, p. 285 n.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]