cture. 'Piled by
the hands of giants for mighty kings of old,' says Macaulay, well, of
the Cyclopean walls. 'It somewhat resembles a prison or castle, and is
remarkable for its bold simplicity of style, the unadorned huge blocks
of stone being hewn smooth at the joints only,' says a modern writer,
of Brunelleschi's palatial masterpiece. Every visitor to Florence must
have noticed on every side the marks of this sullen and rugged Etruscan
character. Compare for a moment the dark bosses of the Palazzo Strozzi,
the '_apre energie_' of the Palazzo Vecchio, the '_beaute sombre et
severe_' of the mediaeval Bargello, with the open, airy brightness of
the Doge's Palace, or the glorious Byzantine gold-and-blue of St.
Mark's at Venice, and you get at once an admirable measure of this
persistent trait in the Etruscan idiosyncrasy. Tuscan architecture is
massive and morose where Venetian architecture is sunny and smiling.

Now, Tuscan religion has in all times been specially influenced by the
peculiarly gloomy tinge of the Tuscan character. It has always been a
religion of fear rather than of love; a religion that strove harder to
terrorize than to attract; a religion full of devils, flames, tortures,
and horrors; in short, a sort of horrible Chinese religion of dragons
and monstrosities, and flames and goblins. In the painted tombs of
ancient Etruria you may see the familiar devil with his three-pronged
fork thrusting souls back into the seething flood of a heathen hell, as
Orcagna's here thrust them back similarly into that of its more modern
Christian successor. All Etruscan art is full throughout of such
horrors. You find their traces abundantly in the antique Etruscan
museum at Florence; you find them on the mediaeval Campo Santo at Pisa;
you find them with greater skill, but equal repulsiveness, in the work
of the great Renaissance artists. The 'ghastly glories of saints' the
Tuscan revels in. The most famous portion of the most famous Tuscan
poem is the 'Inferno'--the part that gloats with minute and truly
Tuscan realism over the torments of the damned in every department of
the mediaeval hell. And, as if still further to mark the continuity of
thought, here in Orcagna's frescoes at Santa Maria Novella you have
every horror of the heathen religion incongruously mingled with every
horror of the Christian--gorgons and harpies and chimaeras dire are
tormenting the wicked under the eyes of the Madonna; centaurs are
shooting and