ever imitative skill. We must be careful to look at the face
just as the sculptor intended it to be seen, not upright, but lying
horizontally. It is only thus that we get the significance of the
beautiful continuous line across forehead and nose. The line of the
head-dress exactly follows that of the hair, and is drawn at the same
angle as the edge of the collar, which it meets. In the triangular
space thus formed is fitted the lovely profile of the face. Ruskin has
written with much enthusiasm of the merits of Ilaria's tomb. From it,
he declared, one may receive "unerring canon of what is evermore
lovely and right in the dealing of the art of man with his fate and
his passions." Still more helpful is his interpretation of the feeling
which the sculptor has conveyed. After first explaining that "every
work of the great Christian schools expresses primarily conquest over
death," he shows that this particular tomb has "all the peace of the
Christian eternity." We may see, he says, "that the damsel is not dead
but sleepeth; yet as visibly a sleep that shall know no ending until
the last day break and the last shadows flee away."[27]

[Footnote 23: Tennyson's "A Dream of Fair Women."]

[Footnote 24: Not "folded below her bosom," nor "laid on her breast,"
as in two familiar descriptions.]

[Footnote 25: That this mantle was a prevailing style of the period
among the aristocracy, we judge from an old Spanish painting, in which
King Ferdinand of Aragon and his queen both wear it. The picture is
reproduced in Carderara's _Iconografia Espanola_, and copied in
Planche's _Cyclopedia of Costumes_.]

[Footnote 26: The exact date is here given because of the vagueness of
some writers who refer to the event as "not many years" and "within
twenty years" after Ilaria's death in 1405.]

[Footnote 27: Quoted by Sydney Colvin in an article on Jacopo della
Quercia, in the _Portfolio_, 1883. See also _Modern Painters_, Part
III.]

VII

MADONNA AND CHILD
(_Detail of lunette_)

BY LUCA DELLA ROBBIA

In reading the gospel narrative of the life of Jesus we are glad to
learn something of his mother Mary. Her life had some peculiar
hardships to test the strength of her character. It was a strange lot
for a mother to have to tend her babe in the manger of an inn, but
such was Mary's experience. At the time of Jesus's birth she and
Joseph were in Bethlehem, whither they had come to pay their taxes.
There were many other people t