“We may assume then that the colossal statues of Giuliano and Lorenzo were studied with a view to their light and shadow as much as to their form; and this is a fact to be remembered by those who visit the chapel where Buonarroti laboured both as architect and sculptor.  Of the two Medici, it is not fanciful to say that the Duke of Urbino is the most immovable of spectral shapes eternalised in marble; while the Duke of Nemours, more graceful and elegant, seems intended to present a contrast to this terrible thought-burdened form.  The allegorical figures, stretched on segments of ellipses beneath the pedestals of the two Dukes, indicate phases of darkness and of light, of death and life.  They are two women and two men; tradition names them Night and Day, Twilight and Dawning.  Thus in the statues themselves and in their attendant genii we have a series of abstractions, symbolising the sleep and waking of existence, action and thought, the gloom of death, the lustre of life, and the intermediate states of sadness and of hope that form the borderland of both.  Life is a dream between two slumbers; sleep is death’s twin-brother; night is the shadow of death; death is the gate of life:—­such is the mysterious mythology wrought by the sculptor of the modern world in marble.  All these figures, by the intensity of their expression, the vagueness of their symbolism, force us to think and question.  What, for example, occupies Lorenzo’s brain?  Bending forward, leaning his chin upon his wrist, placing the other hand upon his knee, on what does he for ever ponder?

“The sight, as Rogers said well, ‘fascinates and is intolerable.’  Michelangelo has shot the beaver of the helmet forward on his forehead, and bowed his head, so as to clothe the face in darkness.  But behind the gloom there lurks no fleshless skull, as Rogers fancied.  The whole frame of the powerful man is instinct with some imperious thought.  Has he outlived his life and fallen upon everlasting contemplation?  Is he brooding, injured and indignant, over his own doom and the extinction of his race?  Is he condemned to witness in immortal immobility the woes of Italy he helped to cause?  Or has the sculptor symbolised in him the burden of that personality we carry with us in this life, and bear for ever when we wake into another world?  Beneath this incarnation of oppressive thought there lie, full length and naked, the figures of Dawn and Twilight, Morn and Evening.  So at least they are commonly called, and these names are not inappropriate; for the breaking of the day and the approach of night are metaphors for many transient conditions of the soul.  It is only as allegories in a large sense, comprehending both the physical and intellectual order, and capable of various interpretation, that any of these statues can be understood.  Even the Dukes do not pretend to be portraits, and hence in part perhaps the uncertainty that has gathered round them.  Very tranquil and noble is Twilight: