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Updated: June 25, 2025
Such power have mighty sculptors, even in our modern world, to make the mute stone speak in poems and clasp the soul's life of a century in some five or six transcendent forms. The Colleoni, or Coglioni, family were of considerable antiquity and well-authenticated nobility in the town of Bergamo.
The camp was duly furnished with tents and trenches, stockades, artillery, and all the other furniture of war. On the king's approach, Colleoni issued with trumpets blowing and banners flying to greet his guest, gratifying him thus with a spectacle of the pomp and circumstance of war as carried on in Italy. The visit was further enlivened by sham fights, feats of arms, and trials of strength.
The last six years of his life were spent in scheming to deprive Sforza of his lordships; and the war in the March, on which he employed Colleoni, had the object of ruining the principality acquired by this daring captain from Pope Eugenius IV. in 1443.
All these little canals have palaces of their own, not less beautiful than those of the Grand Canal but more difficult to see. Before entering the church and again after coming from it let us look at the Colleoni.
Many scions of the old ejected families recovered their authority in the subject towns. We hear again of the Scotti at Piacenza, the Rossi and Correggi at Parma, the Benzoni at Crema, the Rusconi at Como, the Soardi and Colleoni at Bergamo, the Landi at Bobbio, the Cavalcabò at Cremona.
"He was tall," writes a biographer of Colleoni, "of erect and well-knit figure, and of well-proportioned limbs. His complexion tended rather to brown, marked withal by bright and sanguine flesh-tints. He had black eyes; their brilliancy was vivid, their gaze terrible and penetrating.
He reached the highest point of his prosperity in 1455, when the Republic of S. Mark elected him General-in-Chief of their armies, with the fullest powers, and with a stipend of 100,000 florins. For nearly twenty-one years, until the day of his death, in 1475, Colleoni held this honourable and lucrative office.
When it ended, Colleoni presented the king with one of his own suits of armour, and gave to each of his servants a complete livery of red and white, his colours.
There is another portrait of Colleoni in a round above the great door, executed with spirit, though in a bravura style that curiously anticipates the decline of Italian sculpture. Gaunt, hollow-eyed, with prominent cheekbones and strong jaws, this animated half-length statue of the hero bears the stamp of a good likeness, but when or by whom it was made I do not know.
He was not a man to be easily assassinated; so they sent a hired ruffian to Caldora's camp to say that Bartolommeo had taken his name by fraud, and that he was himself the real son of Pùho Colleoni.
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