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"'Sunset. Leonora was speeding " Lucy interrupted. "Leonora? Is Leonora the heroine? Who's the book by?" "Joseph Emery Prank. 'Sunset. Leonora speeding across the square. Pray the saints she might not arrive too late. Sunset the sunset of Italy. Under Orcagna's Loggia the Loggia de' Lanzi, as we sometimes call it now " Lucy burst into laughter. "'Joseph Emery Prank' indeed! Why it's Miss Lavish!
His interest is neither in the untempered goodness of Angelico's saints, nor the untempered evil of Orcagna's Inferno; but with men and women, in their mixed and uncertain condition, always attractive, clothed sometimes by passion with a character of loveliness and energy, but saddened perpetually by the shadow upon them of the great things from which they shrink.
It was Orcagna's habit to sign his sculpture "Andrea di Cione, painter," and his paintings "Andrea di Cione, sculptor," and thus point his versatility. Within Or San Michele you learn the secret of the stoned-up windows which one sees with regret from without. Each, or nearly each, has an altar against it.
His interest is neither in the untempered goodness of Angelico's saints, nor the untempered evil of Orcagna's Inferno; but with men and women, in their mixed and uncertain condition, always attractive, clothed sometimes by passion with a character of loveliness and energy, but saddened perpetually by the shadow upon them of the great things from which they shrink.
The famous miraculous picture over the altar is notable rather for its properties than for its intrinsic beauty; it is the panels of the altar, which contain Orcagna's most exquisite work, representing scenes in the life of the Virgin, with emblematical figures interspersed, that one wishes to see.
Thus even Orcagna's masterpiece may strike us not as the plaything of a Pheidian genius condescending for once to "breathe through silver," but of a consummate goldsmith taxing the resources of his craft to form a monumental jewel. The façade of Orvieto was the final achievement of the first or architectural period of Italian sculpture.
Still Orcagna's work has partially escaped, and left us indications of what it was in his and its youth, when Michael Angelo and Raphael did not disdain to borrow from it in design and arrangement. Dean Alford has thus described Orcagna's mournful, thoughtful 'Triumph of Death: 'The picture is one of crowded action, and contains very many personages.
Baccio was one of the surging, conflicting crowd gathered beneath the mingling shadows of Orcagna's arches and Arnolfo's great palace, and at eventide he was one of the armed partisans who protected the friar back to his convent, menaced not only by rains from heaven, but by the stormy wrath of an angry populace, defrauded of the sight they came to see.
The great churches of Florence A Dominican cathedral The "Decameron" begins Domenico Ghirlandaio Alessio Baldovinetti The Louvre The S. Maria Novella frescoes Giovanni and Lorenzo Tornabuoni Ruskin implacable Cimabue's Madonna Filippino Lippi Orcagna's "Last Judgment" The Cloisters of Florence The Spanish Chapel S. Dominic triumphant Giotto at his sweetest The "Wanderer's" doom The Piazza, as an arena.
Standing to-day before the dim outline of Orcagna's "Hell" in the Church of Santa Maria Novella, at Florence, and mentally comparing those mediæval demons and monsters and torturers on the frescoed wall in front of me with the more antique Etruscan devils and tormentors pictured centuries earlier on the ancient tombs of Etrurian princes, the thought, which had often occurred to me before, how essentially similar were the Tuscan intellect and Tuscan art in all ages, forced itself upon me once more at a flash with an irresistible burst of internal conviction.
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