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the other beauties of a picture. It blinds us indeed to other wise obvious defects. Its absence may deter us from the admission of beauties which really exist, repels us when we are forced to reconstruct, mentally, the whole of that which is in a great measure altered by the effect of time. Yet in the case of Orcagna, such reconstruction is neces sary. Then, however, it becomes possible to compare him with Giotto, the only painter that can stand com parison with him; and the results of the process are equally important and interesting. Giotto is a dramatist, a thinker: he studies and reflects the expression of human passions. He is to the art, what Dante was to the poesy, of his country. In severe and simple, yet ele gant, metre, he inculcates great and durable lessons. Or cagna introduces a more yielding and sensitive religious feeling into art, the mild soft mysticism which finds its culminating point in Angelico. He is a link in the chain of Giotto, Masolino, Masaccio. From the school of Florence he derives his greatest qualities, from that of Sienna, from Simone and the Lorenzetti, the lesser ones. He tempered the sternness of the first with the softness of the second, combining in his figures tenderness and grace with severity of form, decorum, and nobleness of deportment. A Florentine, and therefore imbued with the best maxims, he takes from his Siennese rivals only that which suits his purpose; and though partial to the ex pression of tenderness, he never sinks to affectation. Va sari is evidently right when he says that Andrea Pisano was Orcagna’s first teacher, 1 Orsanmichele still exists to confirm the statement; nor could any one be more clearly fitted to impart grandeur and severity to Orcagna’s style than he, who had so successfully and conscientiously car ried out the conceptions of Giotto. One may almost rea lize, even at this day, Andrea, moulding the youthful genius of his disciple on the model and with the precepts of his own master and friend; and one may say that, ' Vas. Yol. II. p. 123.