celebrating this picture, and Italian literature must perish ere
Beatrice be forgotten.

I shall not pretend to say by what means, since it was not by words,
Spinello discovered that he was beloved by Beatrice: but assuredly the
discovery gave him considerable pain. The form of Beatrice would rise up
both in his sleeping and waking dreams before his fancy, among his most
cherished associations; and her features, although he observed it not,
mingled themselves, as it were, with the elements of every picture he
painted.

While this was the state of his mind and feelings, Spinello was engaged
to paint his famous picture of the "Fall of the Angels," for the church
of St. Angelo at Arezzo. The design of this great work, which has been
celebrated by Vasari, Moderni, and other writers on Italian art, was
at once magnificent and original; and the countenance and figure of
Lucifer, upon which the artist appeared to have concentrated all the
rays, as it were, of his genius, were conceived in a manner fearfully
sublime. Spinello disdained the vulgar method of binding together, by
an arbitrary link, all the attributes of ugliness, which artists have
generally pursued when they would represent the greatest of the fallen
angels; and, after meditating long upon the best mode of embodying
the principle of evil, determined to clothe it with a certain form of
beauty, though of a kind not calculated to delight, but on the contrary
to awaken in the soul all those feelings of uneasiness, anxiety,
apprehension and terror, which usually slumber in the abysses of our
nature, and are disturbed only on very extraordinary occasions.

From the moment in which he began to delineate this miraculous figure,
a singular change seemed to have taken place in his whole nature.