Not less creditable than the general design of the tribune is the sculpture executed by the brothers.  The north side door is a master-work of early Renaissance chiselling, combining mixed Christian and classical motives with a wealth of floral ornament.  Inside, over the same door, is a procession of children seeming to represent the Triumph of Bacchus, with perhaps some Christian symbolism.  Opposite, above the south door, is a frieze of fighting Tritons—­horsed sea deities pounding one another with bunches of fish and splashing the water, in Mantegna’s spirit.  The doorways of the facade are decorated with the same rare workmanship; and the canopies, supported by naked fauns and slender twisted figures, under which the two Plinies are seated, may be reckoned among the supreme achievements of delicate Renaissance sculpture.  The Plinies are not like the work of the same master.  They are older, stiffer, and more Gothic.  The chief interest attaching to them is that they are habited and seated after the fashion of Humanists.  This consecration of the two Pagan saints beside the portals of the Christian temple is truly characteristic of the fifteenth century in Italy.  Beneath, are little basreliefs representing scenes from their respective lives, in the style of carved predellas on the altars of saints.

The whole church is peopled with detached statues, among which a Sebastian in the Chapel of the Madonna must be mentioned as singularly beautiful.  It is a finely modelled figure, with the full life and exuberant adolescence of Venetian inspiration.  A peculiar feature of the external architecture is the series of Atlantes, bearing on their shoulders urns, heads of lions, and other devices, and standing on brackets round the upper cornice just below the roof.  They are of all sorts; young and old, male and female; classically nude, and boldly outlined.  These water-conduits, the work of Bernardo Bianco and Francesco Rusca, illustrate the departure of the earlier Renaissance from the Gothic style.  They are gargoyles; but they have lost the grotesque element.  At the same time the sculptor, while discarding Gothic tradition, has not betaken himself yet to a servile imitation of the antique.  He has used invention, and substituted for grinning dragons’ heads something wild and bizarre of his own in harmony with classic taste.

The pictures in the chapels, chiefly by Luini and Ferrari—­an idyllic Nativity, with faun-like shepherds and choirs of angels—­a sumptuous adoration of the Magi—­a jewelled Sposalizio with abundance of golden hair flowing over draperies of green and crimson—­will interest those who are as yet unfamiliar with Lombard painting.  Yet their architectural setting, perhaps, is superior to their intrinsic merit as works of art; and their chief value consists in adding rare dim flakes of colour to the cool light of the lovely church.  More curious, because less easily matched, is the gilded woodwork above the altar of S. Abondio, attributed