is bowed and the hands crossed:  the face is wan and haggard.  The body is modelled to emphasise the pronounced lines of the big curve formed by the ribs from which the lower part of the body is fast sinking:  Donatello did the same thing with the crucifix.  An angel stands at each side of the Christ, holding up a curtain or pall behind the figure.  Each of these boys has a hand pressed against his cheek, the picture of tragedy:  they weep over the dead Saviour, their anguish is indescribable.  In the marble version of the same subject in London,[200] the angels are actually supporting the Christ, who, without their maintenance, would fall down.  His head is resting against one of the children’s hands:  one of the arms has slipped down inanimate, while the other hangs over the shoulder of the second angel, a consummate rendering of what is dead:  the veins are tumified, the skin is shrinking, and the muscles are uncontrolled.  This Christ is in some ways the more remarkable plastic achievement, though it is not so characteristic as the Paduan version.  The two reliefs are probably coeval, though that in London, with its attendant angels, has indications of being rather earlier in date, and almost shows the hand of Michelozzo in one or two details.  But the head of Christ, with its short thin beard, and the hair held back by a corded fillet, is similar to much that is exclusively Paduan.  The Entombment, a very large marble relief, consists of eight life-sized figures, four of whom are lowering the body into the sepulchre.  Here for the first time we have that frenzied and impassioned scene which became so common in Northern Italy.  The Entombment on the St. Peter’s Tabernacle is insipid by the side of this, where grief leads the Magdalen to tear out thick handfuls of her hair; others throw up their hands as they abandon themselves, as they scream in ungovernable sorrow.  It is a riot of woe, and the more solemn figures who are engaged with the dead body have grown grey with care.  This relief dates a new departure:  the Entombment and other episodes of the Passion henceforward lose their calm emblematic character, and are fraught with tragedy and gloom.  Donatello’s relief became the prototype for the Bellini, for Mantegna, and a host of artists who, without, perhaps, having seen the original, drew their inspiration from what it had already inspired.  For a while this intensification of the last scenes of Christ’s life bore good fruit for art, especially in the northern provinces:  but after a certain point nervous exhaustion ensued and produced a kind of hysteria, where the Magdalen’s tears must end in convulsive laughter, and where the tragedy is so demonstrative that the solemn element is utterly lost.[201] The profound pathos and teaching of the earlier scenes were exchanged for what was theatrical.  But Tragedy always held a place in Italian, or rather in Christian art:  it was out of place in antiquity.  The smiling and perennial youth of the gods, their happinesses, loves, and adventures,