beautiful above all
others of his age. Consequently he avoided all things that might prove
impediments to his vow, such as free discourse, the society of women,
balls, and songs. In this mortal flesh he lived as though he had been free
from it--the life, we may say, rather of an angel than a man. And if his
biography were written from his childhood to his death, it would be not
only an ensample, but confusion to the world. Upon his monument the hand
was modelled from his own, and the face is very like him, for he was most
lovely in his person, but still more in his soul."

While contemplating this monument of the young cardinal, we feel that the
Italians of that age understood sepulchral sculpture far better than their
immediate successors. They knew how to carve the very soul, according to
the lines which our Webster, a keen observer of all things relating to
the grave and death, has put into Jolenta's lips:--

But indeed,
If ever I would have mine drawn to the life,
I would have a painter steal it at such time
I were devoutly kneeling at my prayers;
There is then a heavenly beauty in't; _the soul
Moves in the superficies_.

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