udgment in
the Church of Santa Maria dell' Orto. In this subject, almost all
realizing or local statement had been carefully avoided by the most
powerful painters, they judging it better to represent its chief
circumstances as generic thoughts, and present them to the mind in a
typical or abstract form. In the judgment of Angelico the treatment is
purely typical, a long Campo santo, composed of two lines of graves,
stretches away into the distance; on the left side of it rise the
condemned; on the right the just. With Giotto and Orcagna, the
conception, though less rigid, is equally typical, no effort being made
at the suggestion of space, and only so much ground represented as is
absolutely necessary to support the near figures and allow space for a
few graves. Michael Angelo in no respect differs in his treatment,
except that his figures are less symmetrically grouped, and a greater
conception of space is given by their various perspective. No interest
is attached to his background in itself. Fra Bartolomeo, never able to
grapple with any species of sublimity except that of simple religious
feeling, fails most signally in this mighty theme.[64] His group of the
dead, including not more than ten or twelve figures, occupies the
foreground only, behind them a vacant plain extends to the foot of a
cindery volcano, about whose mouth several little black devils like
spiders are skipping and crawling. The judgment of quick and dead is
thus expressed as taking place in about a rood square, and on a dozen of
people at a time; the whole of the space and horizon of the sky and land
being left vacant, and the presence of the Judge of all the earth made
more finite than the sweep of a whirlwind or a thunder-storm.

Sec. 24. By Tintoret.

By Tintoret only has this unimaginable event been grappled with in its
verity; not typically nor symbolically, but as they may see it who shall
not sleep, but be changed. Only one traditional circumstance he has
received with Dante and Michael Angelo, the boat of the condemned; but
the impetuosity of his mind bursts out even in the adoption of this
image, he has not stopped at the scowling ferryman of the one, nor at
the sweeping blow and demon dragging of the other, but, seized
Hylas-like by the limbs, and tearing up the earth in his agony, the
victim is dashed into his destruction; nor is it the sluggish Lethe, nor
the fiery lake that bears the cursed vessel, but the oceans of the earth
and