Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/440

416 same thin curve marks the Thames up which the pirate Vikings sailed and the Thames of Sunday picnics.

And so to-day, too, a true map would circumscribe our globe—not with the equally non-existent circles of the spatial latitude and longitude, but with those of the spiritual latitude and longitude in which we float.

A companion fresco devotes itself to "The Last Judgment." To the sound of angel-trumpets the dead rise from their coffins to be marched right or left by stern sworded archangels, as the great arbiter—in a surmounting oval—may determine. Haloed saints occupy a safe platform on high and watch the suppliant panic-stricken sinners in the dock. Hell in many compartments takes half the picture, Satan throned at centre, a grisly Colossus, horned and fanged, and each compartment a chamber of unspeakable horror.

Michael Angelo's "Last Judgment," despite its Dantesque additions, preserves the general features of the Pisan.

The after-world was rendered not only in painting, but in other art-media. In his famous pulpit in the Baptistery of Pisa, Niccolo Pisano carved it in relief, imaginatively rendering the faces of the damned almost animal with sin. Byzantine art treated it in mosaic and enamel, while on the rich-jewelled Pal a d'Oro of St. Mark's, "Christ in Hades" has called forth the craft of the goldsmith. An exhaustive study of eschatological aesthetics would include also the innumerable apotheoses and receptions in Heaven, would involve a comparison with Teutonic and other pictorial conceptions, and would range from the pious sincerities of the primitives to the decorative compositions of the decadents.

I do not know if any scholar has yet thus treated the genesis and evolution of these pictorial images. They certainly did not derive from Dante, for Dante's poem itself contains an allusion to a Florentine calamity, which we know to have been the collapse in 1304 of a wooden bridge over the Arno, holding spectators of a popular representation of the horrors of the INferno.

Read as a poem of earth, the "Divine" Comedy has for us a value quite other than Dante—in his political and prophetic passion—designed. What we see in it is the complete Mappamondo of the Mediæval, a complete vision of the world with its ethics, its philosophy, and its science, as it reflected itself in the shining, if storm-tossed, soul of the Poet, whose epic was alike the climax and the conclusion of the Middle Ages. No wonder the Italian quotes it with the finality of a gospel text. For this epic is less of a people than of humanity. Though the Florentine background is of the pettiest—including even Dante's apologia for breaking a font in the church of St. John,—it is really world-history with which the poem is concerned; not world-history as the modern conceives it, for Dante's Mappamondo had neither America nor China, neither Russia nor Japan, but that selected conceptual world in which the cultured of his day lived and had their being: a world in which classic and chivalric legend had their equal part—as they have in the poetry of Milton.

And the fine temper of the man is shown in the gratitude towards the great Teachers of antiquity perambulating their limbo "with slow majestic port," acquiring from their continuous earthly reputation grace which holds them thus far advanced, and which, it seems reasonable to hope, will ultimately land them in Paradise. A society nourished on the Classics could not throw over Plato and Aristotle, Empedocles and Euclid, Orpheus and Averroes.

Such are the nebulous rings hovering round Dante's Mappamondo Infernale. But the circles of his Mappamondo Terrestre are clear and resplendent. 'Twas within the illumination of these circles that the Middle Ages and even Ages later built their sublime Cathedrals, painted their lovely Madonnas, and wrote their great Poems. For though doubtless much sacred art is merely splendid sensuous decoration, and some even of that which is indubitably spiritual may have been the work of free-thinking and free-living artists, it remains true that the Dark Ages had a light which electricity cannot replace.

But is our modern Mappamondo as scientific as we think it? Can we girdle it with no circles amid which to sail securely again through the infinities?