omit nothing that is needed to characterise the impression produced upon the Christian world by this remorseless foe of heresy, this champion of the faith who dealt in butcheries and burnings.  S. Francis taught love; S. Dominic taught wrath:  and both, perhaps, were needed for the safety of the mediaeval Church—­the one by resuscitating the spirit of the Gospels, the other by resisting the intrusion of alien ideals ere the time for their triumph had arrived.  What the painters of these frescoes undertook to delineate for the Dominicans of Florence, was the fabric of society sustained and held together by the action of inquisitors and doctors issued from their order.  The Pope with his Cardinals, the Emperor with his Council, represent the two chief forces of Christendom, as conceived by the mediaeval jurists and the school of Dante.  Seated on thrones, they are ready to rise in defence of Holy Church, symbolised by a picture of S. Maria del Fiore.  At their feet the black and white hounds of the Dominican order—­Domini canes, according to the monkish pun—­are hunting heretical wolves.  Opposite this painting is the apotheosis of S. Thomas Aquinas.  Beneath the footstool of this “dumb ox of Sicily,” as he was called, grovel the heresiarchs—­Arius, Sabellius, Averroes.  At again a lower level, as though supporting the saint on either hand, are ranged seven sacred and seven profane sciences, each with its chief representative.  Thus Rhetoric and Cicero, Civil Law and Justinian, Speculative Theology and the Areopagite, Practical Theology and Peter Lombard, Geometry and Euclid, Arithmetic and Abraham, are grouped together.  It will be seen that the whole learning of the Middle Age—­its philosophy as well as its divinity—­is here combined as in a figured abstract, for the wise to comment on and for the simple to peruse.  None can avoid drawing the lesson that knowledge exists for the service of the Church, and that the Church, while she instructs society, will claim complete obedience to her decrees.  The ipse dixit of the Dominican author of the “Summa” is law.

Such frescoes, by no means uncommon in Dominican cloisters, still retain great interest for the student of scholastic thought.  In the church of S. Maria Sopra Minerva at Rome, where Galileo was afterwards compelled to sign his famous retractation, Filippino Lippi painted another triumph of S. Thomas, conceived in the spirit of Taddeo Gaddi’s, but expressed with the freedom of the middle Renaissance.  Nor should we neglect to notice the remarkable picture by Traini in S. Caterina at Pisa.  Here the doctor of Aquino is represented in an aureole surrounded by a golden sphere or disc, on the edge of which are placed the four evangelists, together with Moses and S. Paul.[137] At his side, within the burnished sphere, Plato and Aristotle stand upright, holding the “Timaeus” and the “Ethics” in their hands.  Christ in glory is above the group, emitting from His mouth three