The Old Masters and Their Pictures | Page 7

St John the Baptist, attached to the Cathedral. After some competition
the gates were intrusted to Andrea Pisano, one of a great group of
painters, sculptors, and architects linked together and named, as so
often happened in Italy, for their place of birth, Pisa. Andrea executed a
series of beautiful reliefs from the life of John the Baptist, which were
cast in 1330, gilt, and placed in the centre door-way. I shall leave the
rest of the gates, still more exquisitely wrought, till their proper time,
only observing that the Pisani group of carvers and founders are

supposed to have attained their extraordinary superiority in skill and
grace, even over such a painter as Giotto, in consequence of one of
them, Nicola Pisano, having given his attention to the study of some
ancient Greek sarcophagi preserved at Pisa.
Passing for a while from the gates of St John of Florence, we come
back to painting and a painter, and with them to another monument--in
itself very noble and curious in its mouldering age, of the old Italians'
love to their cities. Andrea Orcagna, otherwise known as Andrea di
Cione, one of a brotherhood of painters, was born in Florence about
1315. His greatest works are in the Campo Santa of Pisa.
This wonderful 'holy field' is a grand legacy, so far as dilapidation, alas,
will let it be, of the old painters. Originally a place of burial, though no
longer used as such, it is enclosed by high walls and an arcade,
something like the cloisters of a cathedral or college running round, and
having on the north and east sides chapels where masses for the dead
were celebrated. The space in the centre was filled with earth brought
from the Holy Land by the merchant ships of Pisa. It is covered with
turf, having tall cypress-trees at the corners, and a little cross in the
centre. The arcade is pierced with sixty-two windows, and contains on
its marble pavement hundreds of monuments--among them the Greek
sarcophagi studied by Nicola Pisano. But the great distinction of the
Campo Santa (of which there are many photographs) are the walls
opposite the windows of the arcade painted with Scriptural subjects by
artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for the decoration of the
walls was continued at intervals, during two hundred years. The havoc
wrought by time and damp has been terrible; not only are the pictures
faded and discoloured, but of the earliest only mutilated fragments,
'here an arm and there a head,' remain. Giotto's illustrations of the book
of Job have thus perished. 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. The action may be supposed to begin in the lower corner
on the right hand. There we see what appears to be a wedding-party
seated in festivity under a grove of orange-trees laden with fruit. Over
two of them a pair entertaining them with merry strains. But close to
them on the left comes swooping down on bats' wings, and armed with
the inevitable scythe, the genius of Death. Her wild hair streams in the
wind, her bosom is invulnerable, being closed in a trellised armour of
steel. Beneath her, on the ground, are a heap of corpses, shown by their
attire to be the great and wealthy of the world. Three winged figures,
two fiends and one angel, are drawing souls, in the form of children,
out of the mouths of three of these corpses. Above, the air is full of
flying spirits, angels and demons: the former beautiful and saintly, the
latter hideous and bestial. Some are dragging, or bearing upwards,
human souls: others are on their way to fetch them from the heaps of
dead: others, again, are flying about apparently without aim. Further
yet to the left, a company of wretched ones, lame and in rags, are
invoking Death with outstretched arms to come to their relief; but she
sweeps by and heeds them not.
'Dividing one half of the picture from the other, is a high range of rocks,
terminating in a fiery mountain, into which the demons are casting the
unhappy souls which they have carried off. Beyond that seems to be a
repetition of the same lesson respecting Death in another form. A party
of knights and dames are issuing on horseback from a mountain pass.
In the left hand of the picture there lie in their path three corpses in
coffins, with coronets on their heads. One is newly dead; on the second,