als, 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, decay has begun its work; the third is reduced to a
grinning skeleton. The impression produced on the gay party