entine Certosa, like the Cardinal di Portogallo in Samminiato, is
carved for us as he had been in life, but with that life suspended, its
fever all smoothed out, its agitations over, its pettinesses dignified
by death. This marmoreal repose of the once active man symbolises for
our imagination the state into which he passed four centuries ago, but
in which, according to the creed, he still abides, reserved for judgment
and reincarnation. The flesh, clad with which he walked our earth, may
moulder in the vaults beneath. But it will one day rise again; and art
has here presented it imperishable to our gaze. This is how the
Christian sculptors, inspired by the majestic calm of classic art,
dedicated a Christian to the genius of repose. Among the nations of
antiquity this repose of death was eternal; and being unable to conceive
of a man's body otherwise than for ever obliterated by the flames of
funeral, they were perforce led back to actual life when they would
carve his portrait on a tomb. But for Christianity the rest of the grave
has ceased to be eternal. Centuries may pass, but in the end it must be
broken. Therefore art is justified in showing us the man himself in an
imagined state of sleep. Yet this imagined state of sleep is so
incalculably long, and by the will of God withdrawn from human prophecy,
that the ages sweeping over the dead man before the trumpets of
archangels wake him, shall sooner wear away memorial stone than stir his
slumber. It is a slumber, too, unterrified, unentertained by dreams.
Suspended animation finds no fuller symbolism than the sculptor here
presents to us in abstract form.

The boys of Montepulciano have scratched Messer Aragazzi's sleeping
figure with _graffiti_ at their own free will. Yet they have had no
power to erase the poetry of Donatello's mighty style. That, in spite of
Bruni's envy, in spite of injurious time, in spite of the still worse
insult of the modernised cathedral and the desecrated monument, embalms
him in our memory and secures for him the diuturnity for which he paid
his twenty thousand crowns. Money, methinks, beholding him, was rarely
better expended on a similar ambition. And ambition of this sort,
relying on the genius of such a master to give it wings for perpetuity
of time, is, _pace_ Lionardo Bruni, not ignoble.

Opposite the figure of Messer Aragazzi are two square bas-reliefs from
the same monument, fixed against piers of the nave. One represents
Madonna