of the religion he had to teach.

78. Greater differences still result from the opposed powers and
idiosyncrasies of the two men. Orcagna was unable to draw the nude--on
this inability followed a coldness to the value of flowing lines, and to
the power of unity in composition--neither could he indicate motion or
buoyancy in flying or floating figures, nor express violence of action
in the limbs--he cannot even show the difference between pulling and
pushing in the muscles of the arm. In M. Angelo these conditions were
directly reversed. Intense sensibility to the majesty of writhing,
flowing, and connected lines, was in him associated with a power,
unequaled except by Angelico, of suggesting aerial motion--motion
deliberate or disturbed, inherent or impressed, impotent or
inspired--gathering into glory, or gravitating to death. Orcagna was
therefore compelled to range his figures symmetrically in ordered lines,
while Michael Angelo bound them into chains, or hurled them into heaps,
or scattered them before him as the wind does leaves. Orcagna trusted
for all his expression to the countenance, or to rudely explained
gesture aided by grand fall of draperies, though in all these points he
was still immeasurably inferior to his colossal rival. As for his
"embracing the whole world of passions which make up the economy of
man," he had no such power of delineation--nor, we believe, of
conception. The expressions on the inferno side are all of them
varieties of grief and fear, differing merely in degree, not in
character or operation: there is something dramatic in the raised hand
of a man wearing a green bonnet with a white plume--but the only really
far-carried effort in the group is the head of a Dominican monk (just
above the queen in green), who, in the midst of the close crowd,
struggling, shuddering, and howling on every side, is fixed in quiet,
total despair, insensible to all things, and seemingly poised in
existence and sensation upon that one point in his past life when his
steps first took hold on hell; this head, which is opposed to a face
distorted by horror beside it, is, we repeat, the only highly wrought
piece of expression in the group.

79. What Michael Angelo could do by expression of countenance alone, let
the Pieta of Genoa tell, or the Lorenzo, or the parallel to this very
head of Orcagna's, the face of the man borne down in the Last Judgment
with the hand clenched over one of the eyes. Neither in that