a fact to be remembered by those who visit the
chapel where Buonarroti laboured both as architect and sculptor. Of
the two Medici, it is not fanciful to say that the Duke of Urbino is
the most immovable of spectral shapes eternalised in marble; while the
Duke of Nemours, more graceful and elegant, seems intended to present
a contrast to this terrible thought-burdened form. The allegorical
figures, stretched on segments of ellipses beneath the pedestals of
the two Dukes, indicate phases of darkness and of light, of death and
life. They are two women and two men; tradition names them Night and
Day, Twilight and Dawning. Thus in the statues themselves and in their
attendant genii we have a series of abstractions, symbolising the
sleep and waking of existence, action and thought, the gloom of death,
the lustre of life, and the intermediate states of sadness and of hope
that form the borderland of both. Life is a dream between two
slumbers; sleep is death's twin-brother; night is the shadow of death;
death is the gate of life:--such is the mysterious mythology wrought
by the sculptor of the modern world in marble. All these figures, by
the intensity of their expression, the vagueness of their symbolism,
force us to think and question. What, for example, occupies Lorenzo's
brain? Bending forward, leaning his chin upon his wrist, placing the
other hand upon his knee, on what does he for ever ponder?

"The sight, as Rogers said well, 'fascinates and is intolerable.'
Michelangelo has shot the beaver of the helmet forward on his
forehead, and bowed his head, so as to clothe the face in darkness.
But behind the gloom there lurks no fleshless skull, as Rogers
fancied. The whole frame of the powerful man is instinct with some
imperious thought. Has he outlived his life and fallen upon
everlasting contemplation? Is he brooding, injured and indignant, over
his own doom and the extinction of his race? Is he condemned to
witness in immortal immobility the woes of Italy he helped to cause?
Or has the sculptor symbolised in him the burden of that personality
we carry with us in this life, and bear for ever when we wake into
another world? Beneath this incarnation of oppressive thought there
lie, full length and naked, the figures of Dawn and Twilight, Morn and
Evening. So at least they are commonly called, and these names are not
inappropriate; for the breaking of the day and the approach of night
are metaphors for many transient conditi