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One sat pretty much in the dark up there, and most people took their supper up with them. Once three apples and a great piece of bread and butter and sausage fell down right into the dungeon of Ugolino, where that unhappy man was to be starved to death; and there was great laughter among the audience.
She elected Ugolino her Captain-General. A man of the greatest force and ability, he was ambitious rather for himself than for Pisa. Having many Guelph friends, his business was to beat Genoa and the Guelph League. He succeeded in part. He bribed Florence with certain strongholds to leave the League, and he expelled the Ghibellines from Pisa.
Having been admitted to an audience of the Pope in presence of Cardinal Ugolino, he said: "Most Holy Father, I am not in fear of becoming importunate for the interests of your lowly servants, the Friars Minor, while you are occupied with so many important affairs which regard the whole Church.
It is no difficult task to conjure up the scene, to see the gorgeously clad courtiers and ladies bending forward in their seats and hanging upon the accents of this gifted and accomplished performer of their day. Of the history of Baccio Ugolino little, if anything, is known. There was a Ugolino of Orvieto, who flourished about the beginning of the fifteenth century.
Here stand his models for the famous group, Dancing, which adorns the Opera façade; and for The Four Quarters of the World, at the Fountain of the Observatoire. Among others of his productions may be cited a bronze group, Ugolino and his Children.
In each of the dismal abodes, far down in the bowels of the earth, which Dante is supposed to have visited with Virgil as a guide, in which some infernal deity presides, all sorts of physical tortures are accumulated, inflicted on traitors, murderers, robbers, men who have committed great crimes, unpunished in their lifetime; such men as Cain, Judas, Ugolino, men consigned to an infamous immortality.
In those days Luca Martini was writing some observations on the Commedia of Dante, and he pointed out to Vinci the cruelty described by Dante, which the Pisans and Archbishop Ruggieri showed towards Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, causing him to die of hunger with his four sons in the tower that is therefore called the Tower of Hunger; whereby he offered to Vinci the occasion for a new work and the idea of a new design.
It is safe to assume that the instrument to which Baccio Ugolino was wont to improvise and which was therefore utilized in "Orfeo" was the lyra di braccio and that del Lungo's imaginative picture must be corrected by the substitution of the bow for the plectrum.
His nephews, Galeazzo and Barnabas, conspired against him, and were exiled to Flanders. His wife, Isabella Fieschi, intrigued with Galeazzo and disgraced him by her amours with Ugolino Gonzaga and Dandolo the Doge of Venice. Finally suspicion rose to such a pitch between this ill-assorted couple, that, while Lucchino was plotting how to murder Isabella, she succeeded in poisoning him in 1349.
We have not even recourse to the supposition that Ugolino may have employed the pizzicato since that was not invented till after his day by Monteverde. We are, however, compelled to conclude that Baccio Ugolino preceded Corteccia in this manner of solo, afterwards called "recitar alla lira."
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