would live ever in
their shadow.

[Illustration: THE LADY WITH THE NOSEGAY (VANNA TORNABUONI?)

_In the Bargello. Andrea Verrocchio_

_Alinari_]

In two reliefs of Madonna and Child, one in marble and one in
terra-cotta, you find that strange smile again, not, as with Leonardo,
some radiance of the soul visible for a moment on the lips, but the
smile of a mother happy with her little son. In the two Tornabuoni
reliefs that we find here too in the Bargello, it is not Verrocchio's
hand we see; but in the group of Christ and St. Thomas at Or San
Michele, and in the fierce and splendid equestrian statue of Bartolomeo
Colleoni at Venice, you see him at his best, occupied with a subtle
beauty long sought out, and with an expression of the fierce ardour and
passion that consumed him all his life. He touches nothing that does not
live with an ardent splendour and energy of spirit because of him. If he
makes only a leaf of bronze for a tomb, it seems to quiver under his
hands with an inextinguishable vitality.

Softly beside him, untouched by the passion of his style, grew all the
lovely but less passionate works of the sculptors in marble, the sweet
and almost winsome monuments of the dead. Bernardo Rossellino, born in
1409, his elder by more than twenty years, died more than twenty years
before him, in 1464, carving, among other delightful things, the lovely
Annunciation at Empoli, the delicate monument of Beata Villana in S.
Maria Novella, and creating once for all, in the tomb of Leonardo Bruni
in S. Croce, the perfect pattern of such things, which served as an
example to all the Tuscan sculptors who followed, till Michelangelo
hewed the great monuments in the Sacristy of S. Lorenzo. His brother
Antonio, born in 1427, worked with him at Pistoja certainly in the tomb
of Filippo Lazzari in S. Domenico, surpassing him as a sculptor, under
the influence of Desiderio da Settignano. His finest work is the
beautiful tomb in S. Miniato of the young Cardinal of Portugal, who died
on a journey to Florence. In that strange and lovely place there is
nothing more beautiful than that monument under the skyey work of Luca
della Robbia, before the faintly coloured frescoes of Alessio
Baldovinetti. Under a vision of Madonna borne by angels from heaven,
where two angels stoop, half kneeling, on guard, the young Cardinal
sleeps, supported by two heavenly children, his hands--those delicate
hands--folded in death. Below, on a frieze at t