that all the great Florentines were preoccupied with death.
Outre-tombe! Outre-tombe!--is the burden of their thoughts, from Dante
to Savonarola. Even the gay and licentious Boccaccio gives a keener edge
to his stories by putting them in the mouths of a party of people who
had taken refuge from the danger of death by plague, in a country-house.
It was to this inherited sentiment, this practical decision that to be
pre-occupied with the thought of death was in itself dignifying, and a
note of high quality, that the seriousness of the great Florentines of
the fifteenth century was partly due; and it was reinforced in them by
the actual sorrows of their times. How often, and in what various ways,
had they seen life stricken down, in their streets and houses! La bella
Simonetta dies in early youth, and is borne to the grave with uncovered
face. The young Cardinal Jacopo di Portogallo dies on a visit to
Florence--insignis forma fui et mirabili modestia--his epitaph dares to
say. Antonio Rossellino carves his tomb in the church of San Miniato,
with care for the shapely hands and feet, and sacred attire; Luca della
Robbia puts his skyeyest works there; and the tomb of the youthful and
princely prelate became the strangest and most beautiful thing in that
strange and beautiful place. After the execution of the Pazzi
conspirators, Botticelli is employed to paint their portraits. This
preoccupation with serious thoughts and sad images might easily have
resulted, as it did, for instance, in the gloomy villages of the Rhine,
or in the overcrowded parts of medieval Paris, as it still does in many
a village of the Alps, in something merely morbid or grotesque, in the
Danse Macabre of many French and German painters, or the grim inventions
of Duerer. From such a result the Florentine masters of the fifteenth
century were saved by their high Italian dignity and culture, and still
more by their tender pity for the thing itself. They must often have
leaned over the lifeless body, when all was at length quiet and smoothed
out. After death, it is said, the traces of slighter and more
superficial dispositions disappear; the lines become more simple and
dignified; only the abstract lines remain, in a great indifference.
They came thus to see death in its distinction; and following it perhaps
one stage further, dwelling for a moment on the point where all that
transitory dignity must break up, and discerning with no clearness a new
body, they