It has been said that architecture is petrified music.

In the Sacristy of S.Lorenzo we feel impelled to remember phrases of Beethoven.

Each of these statues becomes for us a passion, fit for musical expression, but turned like Niobe to stone.

They have the intellectual vagueness, the emotional certainty, that belong to the motives of a symphony.

In their allegories, left without a key, sculpture has passed beyond her old domain of placid concrete form.
The anguish of intolerable emotion, the quickening of the consciousness to a sense of suffering, the acceptance of the inevitable, the strife of the soul with destiny, the burden and the passion of mankind:--that is what they contain in their cold chisel-tortured marble.