ith virtues, angels, and cupids in a maze of
loveliest arabesque; and round the base of the building are told two
stories--the one of Adam from his creation to his fall, the other of
Hercules and his labors. Italian craftsmen of the _quattrocento_ were
not averse to setting thus together, in one frame-work, the myths of our
first parents and Alemena's son; partly, perhaps, because both subjects
gave scope to the free treatment of the nude; but partly, also, we may
venture to surmise, because the heroism of Hellas counterbalanced the
sin of Eden. Here, then, we see how Adam and Eve were made and tempted
and expelled from Paradise and set to labor, how Cain killed Abel, and
Lamech slew a man to his hurt, and Isaac was offered on the mountain.
The tale of human sin and the promise of redemption are epitomized in
twelve of the sixteen bass-reliefs. The remaining four show Hercules
wrestling with Antaeus, taming the Nemean lion, extirpating the Hydra,
and bending to his will the bull of Crete. Labor, appointed for a
punishment to Adam, becomes a title to immortality for the hero. The
dignity of man is reconquered by prowess for the Greek, as it is
repurchased for the Christian by vicarious suffering. Many may think
this interpretation of Amadeo's bass-reliefs far-fetched; yet, such as
it is, it agrees with the spirit of humanism, bent ever on harmonizing
the two great traditions of the past. Of the workmanship little need be
said, except that it is wholly Lombard, distinguished from the similar
work of Della Quercia at Bologna and Siena by a more imperfect feeling
for composition and a lack of monumental gravity, yet graceful, rich in
motives, and instinct with a certain wayward _improvisatore_ charm.

This chapel was built by the great Condottiere Bartolommeo Colleoni, to
be the monument of his puissance even in the grave. It had been the
Sacristy of S. Maria Maggiore, which, when the Consiglio della
Misericordia refused it to him for his half-proud, half-pious purpose,
he took and held by force. The structure, of costliest materials, reared
by Gian Antonio Amadeo, cost him fifty thousand golden florins. An
equestrian statue of gilt wood, voted to him by the town of Bergamo,
surmounts his monument inside the chapel. This was the work of two
German masters called Sisto figlio di Enrico Syri da Norimberga and
Leonardo Tedesco. The tomb itself is of marble, executed for the most
part in a Lombard style resembling Amadeo's, but