fresco is
he wanting in dramatic episode; the adaptation of the Niobe on the
spectator's left hand is far finer than Orcagna's condemned queen and
princess; the groups rising below, side by side, supporting each other,
are full of tenderness, and reciprocal devotion; the contest in the
center for the body which a demon drags down by the hair is another kind
of quarrel from that of Orcagna between a feathered angel and bristly
fiend for a diminutive soul--reminding us, as it forcibly did at first,
of a vociferous difference in opinion between a cat and a cockatoo. But
Buonaroti knew that it was useless to concentrate interest in the
countenances, in a picture of enormous size, ill lighted; and he
preferred giving full play to the powers of line-grouping, for which he
could have found no nobler field. Let us not by unwise comparison mingle
with our admiration of these two sublime works any sense of weakness in
the naivete of the one, or of coldness in the science of the other. Each
painter has his own sufficient dominion, and he who complains of the
want of knowledge in Orcagna, or of the display of it in Michael Angelo,
has probably brought little to his judgment of either.

80. One passage more we must quote, well worthy of remark in these days
of hollowness and haste, though we question the truth of the particular
fact stated in the second volume respecting the shrine of Or San
Michele. Cement is now visible enough in all the joints, but whether
from recent repairs we cannot say:--

"There is indeed another, a technical merit, due to Orcagna, which I
would have mentioned earlier, did it not partake so strongly of a moral
virtue. Whatever he undertook to do, he did well--by which I mean,
better than anybody else. His Loggia, in its general structure and its
provisions against injury from wet and decay, is a model of strength no
less than symmetry and elegance; the junction of the marbles in the
tabernacle of Or San Michele, and the exquisite manual workmanship of
the bas-reliefs, have been the theme of praise for five centuries; his
colors in the Campo Santo have maintained a freshness unrivaled by those
of any of his successors there;--nay, even had his mosaics been
preserved at Orvieto, I am confident the _commettitura_ would be found
more compact and polished than any previous to the sixteenth century.
The secret of all this was that he made himself thoroughly an adept in
the mechanism of the respective arts, and t