Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/108

86 the Virgin Mother over the dead body of Christ, expanded into the pity of all mothers over all dead sons, the entombment, with its cruel 'hard stones';—that is the subject of his predilection. He has left it in many forms, sketches, half-finished designs, finished and unfinished groups of sculpture, but always as a hopeless, rayless, almost heathen sorrow, no divine sorrow, but mere pity and awe at the stiff limbs and colourless lips. There is a drawing of his at Oxford in which the dead body has sunk to the earth between his mother's feet with the arms extended over her knees. The tombs at San Lorenzo are memorials, not of any of the nobler and greater Medici, but of Giuliano and Lorenzo the younger, noticeable chiefly for their somewhat early death. It is mere human nature therefore which has prompted the sentiment here. The titles assigned traditionally to the four symbolical figures, 'Night' and 'Day,' 'the Twilight' and 'the Dawn,' are far too definite for them; they come much nearer to the mind and spirit of their author, and are a more direct expression of his thoughts than any merely symbolical conceptions could possibly be. They concentrate and express, less by way of definite conceptions than by the touches, the promptings of a piece of music, all those vague fancies, misgivings, presentiments, which shift and mix and define themselves and fade again, whenever the thoughts try to