inward tragedy we look on the stars or watch a mother with her little son.  What secret and immortal sorrow and resentment are expressed in those strange and beautiful figures of the tombs in the Sacristy of S. Lorenzo!  The names we have, given them are, as Pater has said, too definite for them; they suggest more than we know how to express of our thoughts concerning life, so that for once the soul of man seems there to have taken form and turned to stone.  The unfinished Pieta in the Duomo, it is said, he carved for his own grave:  like so much of his great, tragical work, it is unfinished, unfinished though everything he did was complete from the beginning.  For he is like the dawn that brings with it noon and evening, he is like the day which will pass into the night.  In him the spirit of man has stammered the syllables of eternity, and in its agony of longing or sorrow has failed to speak only the word love.  All things particular to the individual, all that is small or of little account, that endures but for a moment, have been purged away, so that Life itself may make, as it were, an immortal gesticulation, almost monstrous in its passionate intensity—­a mirage seen on the mountains, a shadow on the snow.  And after him, and long before his death, there came Baccio Bandinelli and the rest, Cellini the goldsmith, Giovanni da Bologna, and the sculptors of the decadence that has lasted till our own day.  With him Italian art seems to have been hurled out of heaven; henceforth his followers stand on the brink of Pandemonium, making the frantic gestures of fallen gods.

[Illustration:  “LA NOTTE”

From Tomb of Giulinto de’ Medici.  Michelangelo

Anderson]

FOOTNOTES: 

[115] It seems necessary to note that probably Arnolfo Fiorentino and Arnolfo di Cambio are not the same person.  Cf.  Crowe and Cavalcaselle, op. cit. vol. i. p. 127, note 4.

[116] Eccellenza della Statua di S. Giorgio di Donatello:  Marescotti, 1684.

XXII.  FLORENCE

ACCADEMIA

Florentine art, that had expressed itself so charmingly, and at last so passionately and profoundly, in sculpture, where design, drawing, that integrity of the plastic artist, is everything, and colour almost nothing at all, shows itself in painting, where it is most characteristic, either as the work of those who were sculptors themselves, or had at least learned from them—­Giotto, Orcagna, Masaccio, the Pollaiuoli, Verrocchio, and Michelangelo—­or in such work as that of Fra Angelico, Fra Lippo Lippi, Botticelli, and Leonardo, where painting seems to pass into poetry, into a canticle or a hymn, a Trionfo or some strange, far-away, sweet music.  The whole impulse of this art lies in the intellect rather than in the senses, is busied continually in discussing life rather than in creating