Interesting as this work may be for the illustration of the "Divine Comedy" as understood by Dante's immediate successors, we turn from it with a sense of relief to admire the saints and angels ranged in goodly row, "each burning upward to his point of bliss" whereby the painter has depicted Paradise.

Early Italian art has nothing more truly beautiful to offer than the white-robed Madonna kneeling at the judgment seat of Christ.[129] It will be felt by every genuine student of art that if Orcagna painted these frescoes in S.Maria Novella, whereof there is no doubt, he could not have executed the wall-paintings in the Campo Santo at Pisa attributed to him by Vasari.

To what artists or artist we owe those three grave and awful panels, may still be regarded an open question.[130] At the end of the southern wall of the cemetery, exposed to a cold and equal north light from the cloister windows, these great compositions, after the lapse of five centuries, bring us face to face with the most earnest thoughts of mediaeval Christianity.

Their main purpose seems to be to illustrate the advantage of the ascetic over the secular mode of life, and to school men into living with the fear of death before their eyes.

The first displays the solitary vigils, self-imposed penances, cruel temptations, firm endurance, and beatific visions of the anchorites in the Thebaid.