portentous Production that it was commonly reported--so great is alway
the force of fancy--that the said figure (of Lucifer trodden underfoot
by St. Michael in the Altar-piece of the Church of St. Agnolo at Arezzo)
painted by him had appeared to the artist in a dream, and asked him in
what place he had beheld him under so brutish a form."

_Lives of the most Excellent Painters_, by Giorgio Vasari.--"Life of
Spinello."]


Andrea Tafi, painter and worker-in-mosaic of Florence, had a wholesome
terror of the Devils of Hell, particularly in the watches of the night,
when it is given to the powers of Darkness to prevail. And the worthy
man's fears were not unreasonable, for in those days the Demons had good
cause to hate the Painters, who robbed them of more souls with a single
picture than a good little Preaching Friar could do in thirty sermons.
No doubt the Monk, to instil a soul-saving horror in the hearts of the
faithful, would describe to the utmost of his powers "that day of wrath,
that day of mourning," which is to reduce the universe to ashes, _teste
David et Sibylla_, borrowing his deepest voice and bellowing through his
hands to imitate the Archangel's last trump. But there! it was "all
sound and fury, signifying nothing," whereas a painting displayed on a
Chapel wall or in the Cloister, showing Jesus Christ sitting on the
Great White Throne to judge the living and the dead, spoke unceasingly
to the eyes of sinners, and through the eyes chastened such as had
sinned by the eyes or otherwise.

It was in the days when cunning masters were depicting at Santa-Croce in
Florence and the Campo Santo of Pisa the mysteries of Divine Justice.
These works were drawn according to the account in verse which Dante