to keep
up the splendour of his house and of his bank--saw the misfortunes of
the peasantry; the mill, the cottage by the riverside, invaded by the
flood; the doors burst open by the tremendous rushing stream, the
stables and garners filled with the thick and oozy waters; the poor
creatures, yesterday prosperous, clinging to the roof, watching their
sheep and cows, their hay, and straw, and flour, the hemp bleached in
the summer, the linen spun and woven in the long winter, their furniture
and chattels, their labour and their hope whirled along by the foaming
river.

Thus by this versatile Lorenzo dei Medici, this flippant, egotistic
artist and despot, has at last been broken the long spell of the Middle
Ages. The Renaissance has sung no longer of knights and of spring, but
of peasants and of autumn. An immoral and humanistic time, an immoral
and humanistic man, have had at length a heart for the simpler, ruder
less favoured classes of mankind; an eye for the bolder, grander, more
solemn sights of Nature: modern times have begun, modern sympathies,
modern art are in full swing.

SYMMETRIA PRISCA.

Mirator veterum, discipulusque memor,
Defuit mini symmetria prisca. Peregi
Quod potui; Veniam da mihi, posteritas.
--_Lionardo da Vinci's epitaph by Platino Piatto_.

Into the holy enclosure which had received the precious shiploads of
earth from Calvary, the Pisans of the thirteenth century carried the
fragments of ancient sculpture brought from Rome and from Greece; and in
the Gothic cloister enclosing the green sward and dark cypresses of the
graveyard of Pisa, the art of the Middle Ages came for the first time
face to face with the art of Antiquity. There, among pagan sarcophagi
turned into Christian tombs, with heraldic devices chiselled on their
arabesques and vizored helmets surmounting their garlands, the great
unsigned artist of the fourteenth century, Orcagna of Florence, or
Lorenzetti of Siena, painted the typical masterpiece of mediaeval art,
the great fresco of the Triumph of Death. With wonderful realization of
character and situation he painted the prosperous of the world, the
dapper youths and damsels seated with dogs and falcons beneath the
orchard trees, amusing themselves with Decameronian tales and sound of
lute and psaltery, unconscious of the colossal scythe wielded by the
gigantic dishevelled Death, and which, in a second, will descend and mow
them to the ground; while