The portraits of the Dukes of Milan and their families carry us into a very different realm of feeling.  Medallions above the doors of sacristy and chancel, stately figures reared aloft beneath gigantic canopies, men and women slumbering with folded hands upon their marble biers—­we read in all those sculptured forms a strange record of human restlessness, resolved into the quiet of the tomb.  The iniquities of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, il gran Biscione, the blood-thirst of Gian Maria, the dark designs of Filippo and his secret vices, Francesco Sforza’s treason, Galeazzo Maria’s vanities and lusts; their tyrants’ dread of thunder and the knife; their awful deaths by pestilence and the assassin’s poignard; their selfishness, oppression, cruelty and fraud; the murders of their kinsmen; their labyrinthine plots and acts of broken faith;—­all is tranquil now, and we can say to each what Bosola found for the Duchess of Malfi ere her execution:—­

  Much you had of land and rent;
  Your length in clay’s now competent: 
  A long war disturbed your mind;
  Here your perfect peace is signed!

Some of these faces are commonplace, with bourgeois cunning written on the heavy features; one is bluff, another stolid, a third bloated, a fourth stately.  The sculptors have dealt fairly with all, and not one has the lineaments of utter baseness.  To Cristoforo Solari’s statues of Lodovico Sforza and his wife, Beatrice d’Este, the palm of excellence in art and of historical interest must be awarded.  Sculpture has rarely been more dignified and true to life than here.  The woman with her short clustering curls, the man with his strong face, are resting after that long fever which brought woe to Italy, to Europe a new age, and to the boasted minion of Fortune a slow death in the prison palace of Loches.  Attired in ducal robes, they lie in state; and the sculptor has carved the lashes on their eyelids, heavy with death’s marmoreal sleep.  He at least has passed no judgment on their crimes.  Let us too bow and leave their memories to the historian’s pen, their spirits to God’s mercy.

After all wanderings in this Temple of Art, we return to Antonio Amadeo, to his long-haired seraphs playing on the lutes of Paradise, to his angels of the Passion with their fluttering robes and arms outspread in agony, to his saints and satyrs mingled on pilasters of the marble doorways, his delicate Lavabo decorations, and his hymns of piety expressed in noble forms of weeping women and dead Christs.  Wherever we may pass, this master-spirit of the Lombard style enthralls attention.  His curious treatment of drapery as though it |were made of crumpled paper, and his trick of enhancing relief by sharp angles and attenuated limbs, do not detract from his peculiar charm.  That is his way, very different from Donatello’s, of attaining to the maximum of life and lightness in the stubborn vehicle of stone.  Nor do all the riches of the choir—­those multitudes