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Among the goldsmiths were Orcagna, Ghiberti, Ghirlandajo, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Francia, Verrocchio, Andrea del Sarto.
The legend was made the subject of a fresco, painted about 1350, by the eminent Italian painter and architect, Orcagna, upon the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa, which some readers may be glad to be reminded was a cemetery, so called because it was covered with earth brought from the Holy Land.
Lippo Lippi, and Giotto, and why, Orcagna painted on graveyard walls; and I can almost fancy, sometimes, that this room is a vault, a tomb, a dungeon, where they torture people. Turn to the place, good Mac, Shakespeare's tragedy of 'Macbeth, Act Third, Scene Fourth, and read the scene to us, as you know how to read; I will manage the accompaniments."
The little Bigallo The Misericordia Or San Michele Andrea Orcagna The Tabernacle Old Glass A company of stone saints Donatello's S. George Dante conferences The Guilds of Florence The Palazzo Vecchio Two Towers Bandinelli's group The Marzocco The Piazza della Signoria Orcagna's Loggia Cellini and Cosimo The Perseus Verrocchio's dolphin The Great Council Hall Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo's cartoons Bandinelli's malice The Palazzo Vecchio as a home Two cells and the bell of independence.
It was betimes in the morning that the symbolic offerings to be carried in grand procession were all assembled at their starting-point in the Piazza della Signoria that famous piazza, where stood then, and stand now, the massive turreted Palace of the People, called the Palazzo Vecchio, and the spacious Loggia, built by Orcagna the scene of all grand State ceremonial.
It is as though one stood in a loggia in deep shadow, at the end of the day in the last gold of the sunset; and there, amid the ancient fading glory of the frescoes, is the wonderful shrine that Orcagna made for the picture of Madonna, who had turned the Granary of S. Michele into the Church of the People.
Pregnant as are the paintings of Michael Angelo with religious import, they are no longer Catholic in the sense in which the frescoes of the Lorenzetti and Orcagna and Giotto are Catholic. He went beyond the ecclesiastical standing ground and reached one where philosophy includes the Christian faith. Thus the true spirit of the Renaissance was embodied in his work of art.
It would seem as if skill and polish, with the amount of attention which they appropriate, with their elevation of manner over matter, and thence their lowered standard, are apt to rob from or blur in men these highest qualifications of genius, for it is true that judges miss even in the Lionardo, Michael Angelo, and Raphael of a later and much more accomplished generation, and, to a far greater extent, in the Rubens of another and still later day, the perfect simplicity, the unalloyed fervour, the purity of tenderness in Giotto, Orcagna, Fra Angelico, and in their Flemish brethren, the Van Eycks and Mabuse.
I once thought all that part of Scripture which referred to the casting out of devils was metaphorical; but I know better now; for the one that Luther assaulted with his inkstand was not more palpable than that which enters into my heart every now and then, and overturns the altars of the 'true, good, and beautiful, and sets up instead a small hall of Eblis, as full of horrible, mis-shapen things as that hideous 'Last Judgment' of Orcagna, in the Campo Santo at Pisa, which you once showed me in a portfolio of engravings.
Yet, in truth, it was for the Priori themselves that loggia was built, though not by Orcagna as it is said, to provide, perhaps, a lounge in summer for the fathers of the city, and for a place of proclamation that all Florence might hear the laws they had made. Yes, and to-day, too, do they not proclaim the tombola where once they announced a victory?
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