and remembered.
There is the monument, now in the museum at Ravenna, by a sculptor whose
name, were it known, would surely be among the greatest, of the
condottiere, Braccioforte: the body prone in its heavy case of armour,
not yet laid out in state, but such as he may have been found in the
evening, when the battle was over, under a tree where they had carried
him to die while they themselves went back to fight; the head has fallen
back, side-ways, weighed down by the helmet, which has not even been
unbuckled, only the face, the clear-cut, austere features, visible
beneath the withdrawn vizor; the eyes have not been closed; and there
are few things more exquisite and solemn at once in all sculpture, than
the indication of those no longer seeing eyes, of that broken glance,
beneath the half-closed lids. There is Rossellino's Cardinal of Portugal
at S. Miniato a Monte: the slight body, draped in episcopal robes, lying
with delicate folded hands, in gracious decorum of youthful sanctity;
the strong delicate head, of clear feature and gentle furrow of
suffering and thought, a face of infinite purity of strength, strength
still ungnarled by action: a young priest, who in his virginal dignity
is almost a noble woman. And there is the Ilaria Guinigi of Jacopo della
Quercia (the man who had most natural affinity with the antique of all
these sculptors, as one may see from the shattered remains of the Fonte
Gaia of Siena), the lady stretched out on the rose-garlanded bed of
state in a corner of Lucca Cathedral, her feet upon her sleeping dog,
her sweet, girlish head, with wavy plaits of hair encircled by a
rose-wreathed, turban-like diadem, lying low on round cushions; the bed
gently giving way beneath the beautiful, ample-bosomed body, round which
the soft robe is chastely gathered, and across which the long-sleeved
arms are demurely folded; the most beautiful lady (whose majestic tread
through the palace rooms we can well imagine) that the art of the
fifteenth century has recorded. There is, above all, the Carlo
Marsuppini of Desiderio da Settignano, the humanist Secretary of the
Commonwealth, lying on the sarcophagus, superb with shell fretwork and
curling acanthus, in Santa Croce of Florence. For the youthful beauty
of the Cardinal of Portugal and of the Lady Ilaria are commonplace
compared with the refinement of this worn old face, with scant wavy hair
and thin, gently furrowed, but by no means ploughed-up features. The
sli