composition of his, the Triumph of Death, in the Pisan Campo Santo; but
they are additional proofs of his intense and Dante-like genius. No doubt
Dante influenced him deeply, as he did all his contemporaries, whose minds
were fertile enough to ripen such seed. The large picture on the left--a
view of paradise--is full of energetic and beautiful figures, combined with
much dramatic effect and great technical skill. The opposite pictures,
representing hell, were not by Andrew, but by Bernard Orgagna, a man of far
inferior calibre. They have, moreover, been entirely revamped.

In the choir are the renowned frescos of Dominic Ghirlandaio,--scenes from
the lives of John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary. These, however, are
but names and frames. The great merit of these paintings is that they were
the first, or among the first, to introduce the actual into the world
of conventional and conventual art. They form a series of full-length
portraits,--sometimes of celebrated contemporaries, as Politian, Marsilio
Ficino, and others,--but always of flesh-and-blood people, living, moving,
and having a being. That group of Platonists, with their looks of profound
wisdom and dogmatic eloquence, are lifting their forefingers, pricking up
their ears, opening their mouths, (each obviously interrupting the flow of
the others' rhetoric,) in most lifelike fashion. One almost catches the
winged syllogisms as they fly from lip to lip. We are almost drawn into
the dispute ourselves, and are disposed to ventilate a score of outrageous
paradoxes, for the mere satisfaction of contradicting such wiseacres. These
heads are painted with a vivacity and an energy worthy of the Dutch great
masters of the seventeenth century. In fact, there is something caught, no
doubt, from the early schools of Flanders; for Dominic was the contemporary
of the glorious masters protected by Philip the Good of Burgundy,--the only
good thing he ever did in his life,--the man who opened the road for that
long triumphant procession which for two centuries was to march through the
Netherlands, Germany, and Italy. There is no want, however, of historical