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He was a Roman Catholic too, which made him all the more acceptable to the Florentines, and especially to the grand duke, with whom he was a great favorite. This Mr. Sloane had bought some years before the date of my anecdote the ancient Medicean villa of Careggi, with a considerable extent of land surrounding it.
In company with his favourite pupil, Bronzino, he did the frescoes in the Loggie of the Medici villa at Careggi; one Loggia was soon completed, to the great delight of the Duke, but Jacopo shut himself up in the second and allowed no one to see what he was doing for five years; when at length he uncovered the frescoes general disappointment was the result.
To increase this knowledge, Cosmo had founded the Platonic academy, with periodical discussions at the villa of Careggi. The fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the council in 1438 for the reconciliation of the Greek and Latin Churches, had brought to Florence many a needy Greek scholar.
But to return, leaving these matters on one side, to the works of Jacopo: Duke Alessandro had caused to be restored in some parts the Villa of Careggi, formerly built by the elder Cosimo de' Medici, at a distance of two miles from Florence, and had carried out the ornamentation of the fountain and the labyrinth, which wound through the centre of an open court, into which there opened two loggie, and his Excellency ordained that those loggie should be painted by Jacopo, but that company should be given him, to the end that he might finish them the quicker, and that conversation with others, keeping him cheerful, might be a means of making him work without straying so much into vagaries and distilling away his brains.
Certainly Cosimo de' Medici was not the first Florentine to retire from the city perhaps to Careggi, perhaps to S. Domenico, perhaps farther still; for already in Boccaccio's day we hear the praise of country life, his description of Villa Palmieri, for instance, when at the end of the second day of the Decamerone those seven ladies and their three comrades leave Poggio Gherardo for that palace "about two miles westward," whither they came at six o'clock of a Sunday morning in the year 1348.
And the future? the future was big with Charles VIII and his carnival army, gay with prostitutes, bright with favours, and behind him loomed the fires of Piazza della Signoria. The peace of Italy is dead, the Pope told his Cardinals, when in the spring of 1492 Lorenzo passed away at Careggi It was true.
The great humanists of his time, Leonardo Bruni, Carlo Marsuppini, Poggio and Niccolò de' Niccoli were his companions, and in his palace in Via Larga, and in his villas at Careggi and Poggio a Caiano, he gathered the most precious treasures, rare manuscripts, and books, not a few antique marbles and jewels, coins and medals and statues, while he filled the courts and rooms, built and decorated by the greatest artists of his time, with the statues of Donatello, the pictures of Paolo Uccello, Andrea del Castagno, Fra Filippo Lippo, and Benozzo Gozzoli.
So we started early, the day before yesterday, from the Porta San Gallo, with nothing but the frosty grass and fresh air to remind us of the middle of December. Leaving the Prato road, at the base of the mountain, we passed Careggi, a favorite farm of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and entered a narrow glen where a little brook was brawling down its rocky channel.
I and my hostess went to pay a call on "Ouida," whom I knew more or less by correspondence, but the coachman took us by mistake to the Villa Careggi instead. By the kindness of Madame de Tchiacheff I was made known to the Strozzi family, and we visited their monumental palace, which was not then shown to the public.
I remember one day at Careggi, when Luigi was in his rattling vein, he was maintaining that nothing perverted the palate like opinion. `Opinion, said he, `corrupts the saliva that's why men took to pepper. Scepticism is the only philosophy that doesn't bring a taste in the mouth. `Nay, says poor Lorenzo de' Medici, `you must be out there, Luigi.
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