in the worship Mary pays her infant son.[101] To the qualities of sweetness and tranquillity rare dignity is added in the monument of the young Cardinal di Portogallo.[102] The sublimity of the slumber that is death has never been more nobly and feelingly portrayed than in the supine figure and sleeping features of this most beautiful young man, who lies watched by angels beneath a heavy-curtained canopy.  The genii of eternal repose modelled by Greek sculptors are twin-brothers of Love, on whom perpetual slumber has descended amid poppy-fields by Lethe’s stream.  The turmoil of the world is over for them; they will never wake again; they do not even dream.  Sleep is the only power that still has life in them.  But the Christian cannot thus conceive the mystery of the soul “fallen on sleep.”  His art must suggest a time of waiting and a time of waking; and this it does partly through the ministration of attendant angels, who would not be standing there on guard if the clay-cold corpse had no futurity, partly by breathing upon the limbs and visage of the dead a spirit as of life suspended for a while.  Thus the soul herself is imaged in the marble “most sweetly slumbering in the gates of dreams.”

What Vespasiano tells us of this cardinal, born of the royal house of Portugal, adds the virtue of sincerity to Rossellino’s work, proving there is no flattery of the dead man in his sculpture.[103] “Among his other admirable virtues,” says the biographer, “Messer Jacopo di Portogallo determined to preserve his virginity, though he was beautiful above all others of his age.  Consequently he avoided all things that might prove impediments to his vow, such as free discourse, the society of women, balls, and songs.  In this mortal flesh he lived as though he had been free from it—­the life, we may say, rather of an angel than a man.  And if his biography were written from his childhood to his death, it would be not only an ensample, but confusion to the world.  Upon his monument the hand was modelled from his own, and the face is very like him, for he was most lovely in his person, but still more in his soul.”

While contemplating this monument of the young cardinal, we feel that the Italians of that age understood sepulchral sculpture far better than their immediate successors.  They knew how to carve the very soul, according to the lines which our Webster, a keen observer of all things relating to the grave and death, has put into Jolenta’s lips:—­

                         But indeed,
    If ever I would have mine drawn to the life,
    I would have a painter steal it at such time
    I were devoutly kneeling at my prayers;
    There is then a heavenly beauty in’t; the soul
    Moves in the superficies.