magined state of
sleep. Yet this imagined state of sleep is so incalculably long, and
by the will of God withdrawn from human prophecy, that the ages
sweeping over the dead man before the trumpets of archangels wake
him, shall sooner wear away memorial stone than stir his slumber. It
is a slumber, too, unterrified, unentertained by dreams. Suspended
animation finds no fuller symbolism than the sculptor here presents
to us in abstract form.

The boys of Montepulciano have scratched Messer Aragazzi's sleeping
figure with _graffiti_ at their own free will. Yet they have had no
power to erase the poetry of Donatello's mighty style. That, in
spite of Bruni's envy, in spite of injurious time, in spite of the
still worse insult of the modernised cathedral and the desecrated
monument, embalms him in our memory and secures for him the
diuturnity for which he paid his twenty thousand crowns. Money,
methinks, beholding him, was rarely better expended on a similar
ambition. And ambition of this sort, relying on the genius of such a
master to give it wings for perpetuity of time, is, _pace_ Lionardo
Bruni, not ignoble.

Opposite the figure of Messer Aragazzi are two square basreliefs
from the same monument, fixed against piers of the nave. One
represents Madonna enthroned among worshippers; members, it may be
supposed, of Aragazzi's household. Three angelic children,
supporting the child Christ upon her lap, complete that pyramidal
form of composition which Fra Bartolommeo was afterwards to use with
such effect in painting. The other basrelief shows a group of grave
men and youths, clasping hands with loveliest interlacement; the
placid sentiment of human fellowship translated into harmonies of
sculptured form. Children below run up to touch their knees, and
reach out boyish arms to welcome them. Two young men, with
half-draped busts and waving hair blown off their foreheads,
anticipate the type of adolescence which Andrea del Sarto perfected
in his S. John. We might imagine that this masterly panel was
intended to represent the arrival of Messer Aragazzi in his home. It
is a scene from the domestic life of the dead man, duly subordinated
to the recumbent figure, which, when the monument was perfect, would
have dominated the whole composition.

Nothing in the range of Donatello's work surpasses these two
basreliefs for harmonies of line and grouping, for choice of form,
for beauty of expression, and for smoothness of surface-wo