The same Webster condemns that evil custom of aping life and movement on the monuments of dead men, which began to obtain when the motives of pure repose had been exhausted.  “Why,” asks the Duchess of Malfi, “do we grow fantastical in our death-bed?  Do we affect fashion in the grave?” “Most ambitiously,” answers Bosola; “princes’ images on their tombs do not lie as they were wont, seeming to pray up to heaven; but with their hands under their cheeks (as if they died of the toothache):  they are not carved with their eyes fixed upon the stars; but, as their minds were wholly bent upon the world, the self-same way they seem to turn their faces.”  A more trenchant criticism than this could hardly have been pronounced upon Andrea Contucci di Monte Sansavino’s tombs of Ascanio Sforza and Girolamo della Rovere, if Bosola had been standing before them in the church of S. Maria del Popolo when he spoke.  Were it the function of monumental sculpture to satirise the dead, or to point out their characteristic faults for the warning of posterity, then the sepulchres of these worldly cardinals of Sixtus IV.’s creation would be artistically justified.  But the object of art is not this.  The idea of death, as conceived by Christians, has to be portrayed.  The repose of the just, the resurrection of the body, and the coming judgment, afford sufficient scope for treatment of good men and bad alike.  Or if the sculptor have sublime imagination, he may, like Michael Angelo, suggest the alternations of the day and night, slumber and waking, whereby “our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

This digression will hardly be thought superfluous when we reflect how large a part of the sculptor’s energy was spent on tombs in Italy.  Matteo Civitali of Lucca was at least Rossellino’s equal in the sculpturesque delineation of spiritual qualities; but the motives he chose for treatment were more varied.  All his work is penetrated with deep, prayerful, intense feeling; as though the artist’s soul, poured forth in ecstasy and adoration, had been given to the marble.  This is especially true of two angels kneeling upon the altar of the Chapel of the Sacrament in Lucca Cathedral.  Civitali, by singular good fortune, was chosen in the best years of his life to adorn the cathedral of his native city; and it is here, rather than at Genoa, where much of his sculpture may also be seen, that he deserves to be studied.  For the people of Lucca he designed the Chapel of the Santo Volto—­a gem of the purest Renaissance architecture—­and a pulpit in the same style.  His most remarkable sculpture is to be found in three monuments:  the tombs of Domenico Bertini and Pietro da Noceto, and the altar of S. Regulus.  The last might be chosen as an epitome of all that is most characteristic in Tuscan sculpture of the earlier Renaissance.  It is built against the wall, and architecturally designed so as to comprehend a full-length figure of the bishop stretched upon his bier and watched by angels, a group of Madonna and her child seated above him, a row of standing saints below, and a predella composed of four delicately finished bas-reliefs.  Every part of this complex work is conceived with spirit and executed with care; and the various elements are so combined as to make one composition, the body of the saint on his sarcophagus forming the central object of the whole.