the air above.  From Petrarch they have borrowed the form and mystic robe of Death herself[131].  Uguccione della Faggiuola has sat for the portrait of the Captain who must quail before the terrors of the tomb, and Castruccio Castracane is the strong man cut off in the blossom of his age.  The prisons of the Visconti have disgorged their victims, cast adrift with maiming that makes life unendurable but does not hasten death.[132] The lazar houses and the charnels have been ransacked for forms of grisly decay.  Thus the whole work is not merely “an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson” of ascetic philosophy; it is also a realisation of mediaeval life in its cruellest intensity and most uncompromising truth.  For mere beauty these painters had but little regard.[133] Their distribution of the subjects chosen for treatment on each panel shows, indeed, a keen sense for the value of dramatic contrast and a masterly power of varying while combining the composition.  Their chief aim, however, is to produce the utmost realism of effect, to translate the poignancy of passion, the dread certainty of doom, into forms of unmistakable fidelity.  Therefore they do not shrink from prosaic and revolting details.  The knight who has to hold his nose above the open grave, the lady who presses her cheek against her hand with a spasm of distress, the horse who pricks his ears and snorts with open nostrils, the grooms who start aside like savage creatures, all suggest the loathsomeness of death, its physical repulsiveness.  In the “Last Judgment” the same kind of dramatic force is used to heighten a sublime conception.  The crouching attitude and the shrouded face of the Archangel Raphael, whose eyes alone are visible above the hand that he has thrust forth from his cloak to hide the grief he feels, prove more emphatically than any less realistic motive could have done, how terrible, even for the cherubic beings to whose guardianship the human race has been assigned, will be the trumpet of the wrath of God.[134] Studying these frescoes, we cannot but reflect what nerves, what brains, what hearts encased in triple brass the men who thought and felt thus must have possessed.  They make us comprehend not merely the stern and savage temper of the Middle Ages, but the intense and fiery ebullition of the Renaissance, into which, as by a sudden liberation, so much imprisoned pent-up force was driven.

A different but scarcely less important phase of mediaeval thought is imaged in the frescoes of the Cappella degli Spagnuoli in S. Maria Novella.[135] Dogmatic theology is here in the ascendant.  While S. Francis bequeathed a legend of singular suavity and beauty, overflowing with the milk of charity and mildness, to the Church, S. Dominic assumed the attitude of the saint militant and orthodox.  Dante’s words about him—­

                         L’amoroso drudo[136]
    Della fede Cristiana, il santo atleta,
    Benigno a’ suoi, ed a’ nemici crudo,