"While Michael Angelo's leading idea seems to be the self-concentration and utter absorption of all feeling into the one predominant thought, _Am I, individually, safe?_ resolving itself into two emotions only, doubt and despair--all diversities of character, all kindred sympathies annihilated under their pressure--those emotions uttering themselves, not through the face but the form, by bodily contortion, rendering the whole composition, with all its overwhelming merits, a mighty hubbub--Orcagna's on the contrary embraces the whole world of passions that make up the economy of man, and these not confused or crushed into each other, but expanded and enhanced in quality and intensity commensurably with the 'change' attendant upon the resurrection--variously expressed indeed, and in reference to the diversities of individual character, which will be nowise compromised by that change, yet from their very intensity suppressed and subdued, stilling the body and informing only the soul's index, the countenance. All therefore is calm; the saved have acquiesced in all things, they can mourn no more--the damned are to them as if they had never been;--among the lost, grief is too deep, too settled for caricature, and while every feeling of the spectator, every key of the soul's organ, is played upon by turns, tenderness and pity form the under-song throughout and ultimately prevail; the curse is uttered in sorrow rather than wrath, and from the pitying Virgin and the weeping archangel above, to the mother endeavoring to rescue her daughter below, and the young secular led to paradise under the approving smile of S. Michael, all resolves itself into sympathy and love.--Michael Angelo's conception may be more efficacious for teaching by terror--it was his object, I believe, as the heir of Savonarola and the representative of the Protestant spirit within the bosom of Catholicism; but Orcagna's is in better taste, truer to human nature, sublimer in philosophy, and (if I mistake not) more scriptural."--Vol. iii., pp. 139-141. * * *