On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2): A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and LiteratureRuskin, John
General
On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2): A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature
Ruskin, John
Art; Essays; Literature
"A vast rib or arch in the walls of pandemonium admits one into the
contiguous gulf of Hell, forming the third fresco, or rather a
continuation of the second--in which Satan sits in the midst, in
gigantic terror, cased in armor and crunching sinners--of whom Judas,
especially, is eaten and ejected, re-eaten and re-ejected again and
again forever. The punishments of the wicked are portrayed in circles
numberless around him. But in everything save horror this compartment is
inferior to the preceding, and it has been much injured and
repainted."--Vol. iii., p. 138.
* * *
75. We might have been spared all notice of this last compartment.
Throughout Italy, owing, it may be supposed, to the interested desire of
the clergy to impress upon the populace as forcibly as possible the
verity of purgatorial horrors, nearly every representation of the
Inferno has been repainted, and vulgar butchery substituted for the
expressions of punishment which were too chaste for monkish purposes.
The infernos of Giotto at Padua, and of Orcagna at Florence, have thus
been destroyed; but in neither case have they been replaced by anything
so merely disgusting as these restorations by Solazzino in the Campo
Santo. Not a line of Orcagna's remains, except in one row of figures
halfway up the wall, where his firm black drawing is still
distinguishable: throughout the rest of the fresco, hillocks of pink
flesh have been substituted for his severe forms--and for his agonized
features, puppets' heads with roaring mouths and staring eyes, the whole
as coarse and sickening, and quite as weak, as any scrabble on the
lowest booths of a London Fair.
76. Lord Lindsay's comparison of these frescoes of Orcagna with the
great work in the Sistine, is, as a specimen of his writing, too good
not to be quoted.
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