ght figure looks as if in life it must have seemed almost
transparent; and the hands are very pathetic: noble, firm hands, subtle
of vein and wrist, crossed simply, neither in prayer nor in agony, but
in gentle weariness, over the book on his breast. That book is certainly
no prayer-book; rather a volume of Plato or Cicero: in his last moments
the noble old man has longed for a glance over the familiar pages; they
have placed the book on his breast, but it has been too late; the
drowsiness of death has overtaken him, and with his last sigh he has
gently folded his hands over the volume, with the faint, last clinging
to the things beloved in this world.

Such is that portrait sculpture of the early Renaissance, its only
sculpture, if we except the exquisite work in babies and angels just out
of the nursery of the Robbias, which is a real achievement. But how
achieved? This art is great just by the things which Antiquity did not.
And what are those things? Shall we say that it is sentiment? But all
fine art has tact, antique art most certainly; and as to pathos, why,
any quiet figure of a dead man or woman, however rudely carved, has
pathos; nay, there is pathos in the poor puling hysterical art which
makes angels draw the curtains of fine ladies' bedchambers, and fine
ladies, in hoop or limp Grecian dress, faint (the smelling bottle,
Betty!) over their lord's coffin; there is pathos, to a decently
constituted human being, wherever (despite all absurdities) we can
imagine that there lies some one whom it was bitter to see departing, to
whom it was bitter to depart. Pathos, therefore, is not the question;
and, if you choose to call it sentiment, it is in reality a sentiment
for line and curve, for stone and light. The great question is, How did
these men of the Renaissance make their dead people look beautiful? For
they were not all beautiful in life, and ugly folk do not grow beautiful
merely because they are dead. The Cardinal of Portugal, the beautiful
Ilaria herself, were you to sketch their profile and place it by the
side of no matter what ordinary antique, would greatly fall short of
what we call sculpturesque beauty; and many of the others, old humanists
and priests and lawyers, are emphatically ugly: snub or absurdly hooked
noses, retreating or deformedly overhanging foreheads, fleshy noses, and
flabby cheeks, blear eyes and sunk-in mouths; and a perfect network of
wrinkles and creases, which, hard as it is to say,