At Each Of The Angles Of The Table
Is A Large Figure In White Marble Of A Woman Elaborately
Dressed, With A Symbolic Meaning, And These Figures,
With Their Contemporary Faces And Clothes, Which Give
Them The Air Of Realistic Portraits, Are Truthful And Liv-
Ing, If Not Remarkably Beautiful.
Round the sides of
the tomb are small images of the apostles.
There is a
kind of masculine completeness in the work, and a
certain robustness of taste.
In nothing were the sculptors of the Renaissance
more fortunate than in being in advance of us with
their tombs: they have left us noting to say in regard
to the great final contrast, - the contrast between the
immobility of death and the trappings and honors that
survive. They expressed in every way in which it was
possible to express it the solemnity, of their conviction
that the Marble image was a part of the personal
greatness of the defunct, and the protection, the re-
demption, of his memory. A modern tomb, in com-
parison, is a sceptical affair; it insists too little on the
honors. I say this in the face of the fact that one has
only to step across the cathedral of Nantes to stand in
the presence of one of the purest and most touching
of modern tombs. Catholic Brittany has erected in
the opposite transept a monument to one of the most
devoted of her sons, General de Lamoriciere, the de-
fender of the Pope, the vanquished of Castelfidardo.
This noble work, from the hand of Paul Dubois, one
of the most interesting of that new generation of sculp-
tors who have revived in France an art of which our
overdressed century had begun to despair, has every
merit but the absence of a certain prime feeling. It
is the echo of an earlier tune, - an echo with a beauti-
ful cadence. Under a Renaissance canopy of white
marble, elaborately worked with arabesques and che-
rubs, in a relief so low that it gives the work a cer-
tain look of being softened and worn by time, lies the
body of the Breton soldier, with, a crucifix clasped to
his breast and a shroud thrown over his body. At
each of the angles sits a figure in bronze, the two best
of which, representing Charity and Military Courage,
had given me extraordinary pleasure when they were
exhibited (in the clay) in the Salon of 1876. They
are admirably cast, and they have a certain greatness:
the one, a serene, robust young mother, beautiful in
line and attitude; the other, a lean and vigilant young
man, in a helmet that overshadows his serious eyes,
resting an outstretched arm, an admirable military
member, upon the hilt of a sword. These figures con-
tain abundant assurance that M. Paul Dubois has been
attentive to Michael Angelo, whom we have all heard
called a splendid example but a bad model. The
visor-shadowed face of his warrior is more or less a
reminiscence of the figure on the tomb of Lorenzo de'
Medici at Florence; but it is doubtless none the worse
for that.
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