It is interesting to note that, antipathetic as Hunt’s nature was, in many ways, not only to the individual Dante but to the theological thought of which he was the spokesman, in his view of the sacred art of the Italian Middle Age he anticipated the Pre-Raphaelites and the modern interpreters of Dante.  Here is a part of what he says of the paintings in the Campo Santo at Pisa:  “The best idea, perhaps, which I can give an Englishman of the general character of the painting is by referring him to the engravings of Albert Durer and the serious parts of Chaucer.  There is the same want of proper costume—­the same intense feeling of the human being, both in body and soul—­the same bookish, romantic, and retired character—­the same evidences, in short, of antiquity and commencement, weak (where it is weak) for want of a settled art and language, but strong for that very reason in first impulses, and in putting down all that is felt. . . .  The manner in which some of the hoary saints in these pictures pore over their books and carry their decrepit old age, full of a bent and absorbed feebleness—­the set limbs of the warriors on horseback—­the sidelong unequivocal looks of some of the ladies playing on harps and conscious of their ornaments—­the people of fashion seated in rows, with Time coming up unawares to destroy them—­the other rows of elders and doctors of the Church, forming part of the array of heaven—­the uplifted hand of Christ denouncing the wicked at the day of judgment—­the daring satires occasionally introduced against monks and nuns—­the profusion of attitudes, expressions, incidents, broad draperies, ornaments of all sorts, visions, mountains, ghastly looking cities, fiends, angels, sibylline old women, dancers, virgin brides, mothers and children, princes, patriarchs, dying saints, it would be simply blind injustice to the superabundance and truth of conception in all this multitude of imagery not to recognize the real inspirers as well as harbingers of Raphael and Michael Angelo, instead of confining the honour to the Masaccios and Peruginos, [who] . . . are no more to be compared with them than the sonneteers of Henry VIII.’s time are to be compared with Chaucer.  Even in the very rudest of the pictures, where the souls of the dying are going out of their mouths, in the shape of little children, there are passages not unworthy of Dante and Michael Angelo. . . .  Giotto, be thou one to me hereafter, of a kindred brevity, solidity, and stateliness with that of thy friend, Dante!” [23]

Among all the writers of his generation, Keats was most purely the poet, the artist of the beautiful.  His sensitive imagination thrilled to every touch of beauty from whatever quarter.  That his work is mainly retrospective and eclectic in subject is because a young poet’s mind responds more readily to books than to life, and this young poet did not outlive his youth.  In the Greek mythology he found a world of lovely images ready to his hand,