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.