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But the old painter-theologian, though indeed he showed the right hand of Christ lifted, and the left hand laid across His breast, had another meaning in the actions. The fingers of the left hand are folded, in both the figures; but in Michael Angelo's as if putting aside an appeal; in Orcagna's, the fingers are bent to draw back the drapery from the right side.
Giotto's campanile, Brunelleschi's cupola, and Orcagna's church of Orsammichele, in spite of their undoubted and authentic originality, are placed where he had planned. In 1294 the Florentines determined to rebuild their mother-church upon a scale of unexampled grandeur.
Florentine painting in the fourteenth century may be seen to best advantage in the churches of Florence and in the Accademia delle Belle Arti, for here in the Uffizi there is nothing from Giotto's or Orcagna's hand, though the work of their schools is plentiful.
As in Orcagna's fresco at Pisa, it comes capriciously, giving many and long reprieves to Barnardine, who has been waiting for it nine years in prison, taking another thence by fever, another by mistake of judgment, embracing others in the midst of their music and song.
Granting the grotesqueness, freedom, variety, and wonderful precision of these woodcuts, I beg my readers to contrast their spirit with that of Albrecht Dürer's 'The Knight, Death, and the Devil, or Orcagna's 'Triumph of Death. In Holbein's designs there is no noble consoling faith; there is but a fierce defiance and wild mockery of inevitable fate, such as goes beyond the levity with which the Venetians in the time of the plague retired to their country-houses and danced, sung, and told tales, till the pestilence was upon them.
Well, of your half-hour for Santa Maria Novella, after Ghirlandajo's choir, Orcagna's transept, and Cimabue's Madonna, and the painted windows, have been seen properly, there will remain, suppose, at the utmost, a quarter of an hour for the Spanish Chapel. That will give you two minutes and a half for each side, two for the ceiling, and three for studying Murray's explanations or mine.
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.
It seems to have been in a sort of recognition of the splendour and beauty of Orcagna's work that the Signoria, between 1355 and 1359, removed the corn-market elsewhere, and thus gave up the whole loggia to the shrine of Madonna. Thus the loggia became a church, the great popular church of Florence, built by the people for their own use, in what had once been the corn-market of the city.
The wonderful beauty of Orcagna's faces, profile after profile laid together like lilies in a garden border, can only be discovered after long study. It has been my good fortune to examine, through the kindness of Mrs. Higford Burr, of Aldermaston, a large series of tracings, taken chiefly by the Right Hon.
Ruskin as an evidence of Orcagna's devotion to the truth; but in this case that brilliant writer, but most unsafe critical guide, commits an error of a kind not uncommon with him.
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