Identifier: appreciationofsc00stur (find matches)
Title: Appreciation of sculpture; a handbook by Russell Sturgis ...
Year: 1904 (1900s)
Authors: Sturgis, Russell
Subjects: Sculpture
Publisher: The Baker
Contributing Library: Whitney Museum of American Art, Frances Mulhall Achilles Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Metropolitan New York Library Council - METRO

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family which had destroyed the liberties ofhis beloved Florence, and the sculpturewas never completed. We may imaginethat after his final abandonment of it, ^any unfinished details of the architecturecould be and would have been carried outin strict accordance with that which al-ready existed. We know and we see thatno one has dared to touch the sculptureswhich had been left almost from the handand chisel of the great sculptor whose im-pressive personality seems to have filled upthe Italy of his time. Plate XXVI givesthe tomb of Lorenzo with its immediate ar-chitectural setting. The monuments include, each two gigan-tic recumbent figures, those set upon thecover of the sarcophagus in which the bodyis laid, and the seated portrait statue, howcompletely idealized we do not know, ofthe prince in whose name the tomb was setup. The reclining figures are known bynames which were affixed to them even inthe sculptors lifetime, and which were cer-tainly recognized and accepted in a way by(100)
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i t Plate XXVI.—TOMB of loren/o dei meuici, uy Michelangelo; in so-called NEW SACRISTY, CHURCH OK S. LORENZO, FLORENCE. The Italian Revival Michelangelo himself. Those of the tombof Lorenzo shown in Plate XXVI, are al-ways called Twilight and Dawn, and we areto accept the female statue as Dawn chieflybecause the Aurora of antiquity is recog-nized as a goddess ; while the marble giantwho reclines on the opposite side of thesarcophagus is, by exclusion, the EveningTwilight. It is a pity, perhaps, that thesenames have become so firmly fixed uponour tradition, upon our historical and ar-tistic associations with the monument.Aurora and Evening for Lorenzos tomb,Day and Night for Giulianos tomb—whatare those names to this inquiry? Whathave those names to do with the magnificentsculpture which Michelangelo thought, assculpture, were the proper appendages ofhis portrait statues ? The female figure.Night, is complete and has received a highpolish, Michelangelos practice in this set-ting, a

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