the just, the resurrection
of the body, and the coming judgment, afford sufficient scope for
treatment of good men and bad alike. Or if the sculptor have sublime
imagination, he may, like Michael Angelo, suggest the alternations of the
day and night, slumber and waking, whereby "our little life is rounded
with a sleep."

This digression will hardly be thought superfluous when we reflect how
large a part of the sculptor's energy was spent on tombs in Italy. Matteo
Civitali of Lucca was at least Rossellino's equal in the sculpturesque
delineation of spiritual qualities; but the motives he chose for treatment
were more varied. All his work is penetrated with deep, prayerful, intense
feeling; as though the artist's soul, poured forth in ecstasy and
adoration, had been given to the marble. This is especially true of two
angels kneeling upon the altar of the Chapel of the Sacrament in Lucca
Cathedral. Civitali, by singular good fortune, was chosen in the best
years of his life to adorn the cathedral of his native city; and it is
here, rather than at Genoa, where much of his sculpture may also be seen,
that he deserves to be studied. For the people of Lucca he designed the
Chapel of the Santo Volto--a gem of the purest Renaissance
architecture--and a pulpit in the same style. His most remarkable
sculpture is to be found in three monuments: the tombs of Domenico Bertini
and Pietro da Noceto, and the altar of S. Regulus. The last might be
chosen as an epitome of all that is most characteristic in Tuscan
sculpture of the earlier Renaissance. It is built against the wall, and
architecturally designed so as to comprehend a full-length figure of the
bishop stretched upon his bier and watched by angels, a group of Madonna
and her child seated above him, a row of standing saints below, and a
predella composed of four delicately finished bas-reliefs. Every part of
this complex work is conceived with spirit and executed with care; and the
various elements are so combined as to make one composition, the body of
the saint on his sarcophagus forming the central object of the whole.

To do more than briefly mention the minor sculptors of this group would be
impossible. Mino di Giovanni, called Da Fiesole, was characterised by
grace that tended to degenerate into formality. The tombs in the Abbey of
Florence have an almost infantine sweetness of style, which might be
extremely piquant, were it not that Mino pushed this quality in other
work