those horses snuffing at the open graves, those countesses and princes face to face with skeletons, those serpents coiling round the flesh of what was once fair youth or maid, those multitudes of guilty men and women trembling beneath the trump of the archangel--tearing their cheeks, their hair, their breasts in agony, because they see Hell through the prison-bars, and hear the raging of its fiends, and feel the clasp upon their wrists and ankles of clawed hairy demon hands; in all this terrific amalgamation of sinister and tragic ideas, vividly presented, full of coarse dramatic power, and intensified by faith in their material reality, the Lorenzetti brethren, if theirs be indeed the hands that painted here, summed up the nightmares of the Middle Age and bequeathed an ever memorable picture of its desolate preoccupations to the rising world. They have called to their aid poetry, and history, and legend. Boccaccio supplies them with the garden scene of youths and damsels dancing among roses, while the plague is at their gates, and death is in the air above. From Petrarch they have borrowed the form and mystic robe of Death herself[131]. Uguccione della Faggiuola has sat for the portrait of the Captain who must quail before the terrors of the tomb, and Castruccio Castracane is the strong man cut off in the blossom of his age. The prisons of the Visconti have disgorged their victims, cast adrift with maiming that makes life unendurable but does not hasten death.[132] The lazar houses and the charnels have been ransacked for forms of grisly decay. Thus the whole work is not merely "an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson" of ascetic philosophy; it is also a realisation of mediaeval life in its cruellest intensity and most uncompromising truth. For mere beauty these painters had but little regard.[133] Their distribution of the subjects chosen for treatment on each panel shows, indeed, a keen sense for the value of dramatic contrast and a masterly power of varying while combining the composition. Their chief aim, however, is to produce the utmost realism of effect, to translate the poignancy of passion, the dread certainty of doom, into forms of unmistakable fidelity. Therefore they do not shrink from prosaic and revolting details. The knight who has to hold his nose above the open grave, the lady who presses her cheek against her hand with a spasm of distress, the horse who pricks his ears and snorts with open nostrils, the grooms who start aside like savage creatures, all suggest the loathsomeness of death, its physical repulsiveness. In the "Last Judgment" the same kind of dramatic force is used to heighten a sublime conception. The crouching attitude and the shrouded face of the Archangel Raphael, whose eyes alone are visible above the hand that he has thrust forth from his cloak to hide the grief he feels, prove more emphatically than any less realistic motive could have done, how