tic, less coffee-house living, appear to have inherited from
the Etruscans a desire to preserve the effigy of the dead, a desire
unknown to the Greeks. But the Etrusco-Roman monuments, where husband
and wife stare forth togaed and stolaed, half reduced to a conventional
crop-headedness, grim and stiff as if sitting unwillingly for their
portrait; or reclining on the sarcophagus-lid, neither dead, nor asleep,
nor yet alive and awake, but with a hieratic mummy stare, have little of
aesthetic or sympathetic value. The early Renaissance, then, first
bethought it of representing the real individual in the real death
slumber. And I question whether anything more fitting could be placed on
a tomb than the effigy of the dead as we saw them just before the
coffin-lid closed down; as we would give our all to see them but one
little moment longer; as they continue to exist for our fancy within the
grave; for to any but morbid feelings the beloved can never suffer
decay. Whereas a portrait of the man in life, as the throning popes in
St. Peter's, seems heartless and derisive; such monuments striking us as
conceived and ordered by their inmates while alive, like Michael
Angelo's Pope Julius, and Browning's Bishop, who was so preoccupied
about his tomb in St. Praxed's Church. The Renaissance, the late Middle
Ages, felt better than this: on the extreme pinnacle, high on the roof,
they might indeed place against the russet brick or the blue sky, amid
the hum of life and the movement of the air, the living man, like the
Scaligers, the mailed knight on his charger, lance in rest: but in the
church below, under the funereal pall, they could place only the body
such as it may have lain on the bier.

And that figure on the bier was the great work of Renaissance sculpture.
Inanimate and vulgar when in heroic figures they tried to emulate the
ancients, the sculptors of the fifteenth century have found their own
line. The modesty, the simplicity, the awful and beautiful repose of the
dead; the individual character cleared of all its conflicting meannesses
by death, simplified, idealized as it is in the memory of the
survivors--all these are things which belong to the Renaissance. As the
Greeks gave the strong, smooth life-current circulating through their
heroes; so did these men of the fifteenth century give the gentle and
harmonious ebbing after-life of death in their sepulchral monuments.
Things difficult to describe, and which must be seen