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Updated: June 8, 2025
The changes thus made in the Renaissance pillars are always injuries. This virtue is the proper opponent of Avarice; though it does not occur in the systems of Orcagna or Giotto, being included in Charity. It was a leading virtue with Aristotle and the other ancients. SECTION XLIX. Second side. Constancy; not very characteristic.
Such being the temper of the people, we find that some of the greatest works of art in this age were paintings of Death and Hell, Heaven and Judgment. Orcagna, in the Strozzi Chapel of S. Maria Novella, set forth these scenes with a wonderful blending of beauty and grotesque invention.
The most eminent pupil of Andrea Pisano, however, was a Florentine the great Andrea Arcagnuolo di Cione, commonly known as Orcagna. This man, like the more illustrious Giotto, was one among the earliest of those comprehensive, many-sided natures produced by Florence for her everlasting glory.
But perhaps it is as an architect that Orcagna is most interesting to us, for he it was who made the designs for the Loggia de Lanzi in Florence. Orcagna probably died before the Loggia was completed, and his brother Bernardo succeeded him as architect of the commune.
The pupil of Giotto and of Andrea Pisano, Orcagna is the most important artist of his time, the one vital link in the chain that unites Masolino with Giotto. He was a universal artist, practising as an architect and goldsmith no less than as a painter.
Orcagna seems to have been at work on it for some ten years, covering it with decoration and carving those reliefs of the Life of the Virgin in that grand style which he had found in Giotto and learned perhaps from Andrea Pisano. To describe the shrine itself would be impossible and useless.
But at the close of the thirteenth century, Giotto, and in the course of the fourteenth, Orcagna, sought, for the first time, to give some resemblance to nature in their backgrounds, and introduced behind their figures pieces of true landscape, formal enough still, but complete in intention, having foregrounds and distances, sky and water, forests and mountains, carefully delineated, not exactly in their true color, but yet in color approximating to the truth.
And yet to look out from the shady porch of one of the quiet cells upon the teeming vale of the Arno and the clustered towers of Florence must have deepened the sense of monastic quietude. The chapel, or rather the church, which is of great proportions and designed by Andrea Orcagna, the primitive painter, refines upon the consecrated type or even quite glorifies it.
And in spite of the seeds of evil in its own impatience, and in the gradually increasing worldliness of the mercantile body; in spite of the hostility of the angry soldier, and the malignity of the sensual priest, this government gave to Europe the entire cycle of Christian art, properly so called, and every highest Master of labour, architectural, scriptural, or pictorial, practised in true understanding of the faith of Christ; Orcagna, Giotto, Brunelleschi, Lionardo, Luini as his pupil, Lippi, Luca, Angelico, Botticelli, and Michael Angelo.
Yonder in the Strozzi Chapel is some of the very best work of an old painter called Orcagna, while here in the choir are notable frescoes by Ghirlandajo; but now I shall take you down these steps between the two into the cloister and there we will talk of Giotto.
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