Crossing the church to the chapel in the left transept, the Strozzi Chapel, we mount into the true atmosphere of the Middle Ages--into one of those pictured theatres which set before us in part what Dante gave in full in his _Commedia_. The whole chapel is dedicated to St. Thomas Aquinas, the glory of the philosophy of the mediæval world and, above all, of the Dominican order, whose cardinal virtues are extolled in allegorical fashion on the ceiling; but the frescoes are drawn from the work of his greatest Florentine disciple, Dante Alighieri, in whose poem Thomas mainly lives for the non-Catholic world. It contains all Orcagna's extant work in painting. The altar piece, executed by Andrea Orcagna in 1357, is the grandest of its kind belonging to the Giottesque period. Its central motive, of the Saviour delivering the keys to St. Peter and the Summa to St. Thomas, the spiritual and philosophical regimens of the mediæval world, is very finely rendered; while the angelic choir is a foretaste of Angelico. Madonna presents St. Thomas; the Baptist, St. Peter; Michael and Catherine are in attendance upon the Queen of Heaven, Lawrence and Paul upon the Precursor. The predella represents St. Peter walking upon the waves, with on either side an episode in the life of St. Thomas and a miracle of St. Lawrence. The frescoes are best seen on a very bright morning, shortly before noon. The Last Judgment, by Andrea, shows the traditional representation of the Angels with trumpets and with the emblems of the Passion, wheeling round the Judge; and the dead rising to judgment, impelled irresistibly to right or left even before the sentence is pronounced. Above the one band, kneels the white-robed Madonna in intercession--type of the Divine Mercy as in Dante; over the others, at the head of the Apostles, is the Baptist who seems appealing for judgment--type of the Divine Justice. This placing Mary and St John opposite to each other, as in Dante's Rose of Paradise, is typical of Florentine art; Santa Maria del Fiore and San Giovanni are, as it were, inseparable. Among the blessed is Dante, gazing up in fixed adoration at the Madonna, as when following St Bernard's prayer at the close of his Vision; on the other side some of the faces of the lost are a miracle of expression. The Hell on the right wall, by Andrea's brother Leonardo, is more immediately taken from the _Commedia_. The Paradise on the left, or, rather, the Empyrean Heaven--with the faces _suadi di carità_, Angels and Saints absorbed in vision and love of God--is by Andrea himself, and is more directly pictorial than Dante's _Paradiso_ could admit. Christ and the Madonna are enthroned side by side, whereas we do not actually see Him in human form in the _Commedia_,--perhaps in accordance with that reverence which impels the divine poet to make the name _Cristo_ rhyme with nothing but itself. For sheer loveliness in detail, no other fourteenth century master produced anything to compare with this