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Updated: June 8, 2025
A second picture is The Last Judgment, and a third Hell, the resemblance between which and the great altar-piece in the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella at Florence, painted by Andrea Orcagna in 1357, was formerly considered proof of the same authorship.
Re-entering the transept, our guide showed us the chapel of the Strozzi family, which is accessible by a flight of steps from the floor of the church. The walls of this chapel are covered with frescos by Orcagna, representing around the altar the Last Judgment, and on one of the walls heaven and the assembly of the blessed, and on the other, of course, hell.
Orcagna himself, perhaps the only Giottesque who gave painting an onward push, had modelled and cast one of the bronze gates of the Florence baptistery; the generation of artists who arose at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and who opened the period of the Renaissance, were sculptors or pupils of sculptors.
The Order of Servites, whose church and convent are before us, was originally founded by seven Florentines of the Laudesi, that Compagnia di S. Michele in Orto which built Madonna a shrine by the art of Orcagna in Or S. Michele, as we have seen.
The left transept ends in the chapel of the Strozzi family, of which Filippo was the head in his day, and here we find Andrea Orcagna and his brother's fresco of Heaven, the Last Judgment and Hell.
It is the masterpiece of one who, like all the greatest artists of the Renaissance Giotto, Orcagna, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael did not confine himself to one art, but practised many. And though it would be unjust to compare such a man as Cellini with the greatest of all, yet he was great not only as a sculptor and a goldsmith, but as a man of letters and as a man of the world.
Nothing is more marked or more deeply interesting than the influence exercised by Dante over Signorelli, an influence he shared with Giotto, Orcagna, Botticelli, Michael Angelo, the greatest imaginative painters of Central Italy.
The marble employed is of a delicate softness, and Orcagna had enough of Giotto's tradition to make the Virgin a reality and to interest Her, for example, as a mother in the washing of Her Baby, as few painters have done, and in particular, as, according to Ruskin, poor Ghirlandaio could not do in his fresco of the birth of the Virgin Herself.
But the monks who are left take a pride in their church, which is attributed to Orcagna, and its possessions, among which come first the relief monuments of early Acciaioli in the floor of one of the chapels the founder's being perhaps also the work of Orcagna, while that of his son Lorenzo, who died in 1353, is attributed by our cicerone to Donatello, but by others to an unknown hand.
At certain seasons, when it is positively wicked to eat chicken salad, porter-house steak, and boned turkey, and when the thought of attending the usual round of parties gives good people nightmare, and sinful folks yet in the bonds of iniquity a prospective claim to the pleasant and enticing style of future amusements which Orcagna painted at Pisa, then Charity rushes to the rescue of ennuied society, and mercifully bids it give Calico Balls for a Foundling Hospital, or Thé Musicale for the benefit of a Magdalen Home, or a Cantata and Refreshments to build a Sailors' Bethel, or help to clothe and feed the destitute.
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