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Updated: June 25, 2025
See Perkins's Italian Sculptors, pp. 46, 47. Istoria della Vita e Fatti dell' eccellentissimo Capitano di guerra Bartolommeo Colleoni, scritta per Pietro Spino. Republished, 1859. See Vol. I., Age of the Despots, p. 310, note 2. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. chap, xvi., may be consulted as to the several claims of the two brothers.
King René of Anjou, by special patent, authorised him to bear his name and arms, and made him a member of his family. The Duke of Burgundy, by a similar heraldic fiction, conferred upon him his name and armorial bearings. This will explain why Colleoni is often styled 'di Andegavia e Borgogna. In the case of René, the honour was but a barren show.
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 Venetians, in whose service Colleoni still remained, when they became aware of this project, met it with peaceful but irresistible opposition. Colleoni had been engaged continually since his earliest boyhood in the trade of war. It was not therefore possible that he should have gained a great degree of literary culture.
Colleoni, having long held the bâton of the Republic, desired that after death his portrait, in his habit as he lived, should continue to look down on the scene of his old splendour. By an ingenious quibble the Senators adhered to the letter of his will without infringing a law that forbade them to charge the square of S. Mark with monuments.
In his red cap he rides with a fine assurance and is the best horseman in Venice after the great Colleoni. In the choir, where Titian's "Assumption" once was placed, are two more dead Doges.
Venice gave him not only honours and money but much land, and he divided his old age between agriculture and thus becoming still more the darling of the populace almsgiving. Colleoni died in 1475 and left a large part of his fortune to the Republic to be spent in the war with the Turks, and a little for a statue in the Piazza of S. Mark.
It was indeed no slight tribute to Colleoni's reputation for integrity that the jealous republic, which had signified its sense of Carmagnola's untrustworthiness by capital punishment, should have left him so long in the undisturbed disposal of their army. The standard and the baton of St. Mark were conveyed to Colleoni by two ambassadors, and presented to him at Brescia on June 24, 1455.
Strip a chapel of the fifteenth century of ornamental adjuncts, and an uninteresting shell is left: what, for instance, would the façades of the Certosa and the Cappella Colleoni be without their sculptured and inlaid marbles?
His favorite place of abode was Malpaga, a castle built by him at the distance of about an hour's drive from Bergamo. The place is worth a visit, though its courts and gates and galleries have now been turned into a monster farm, and the southern rooms, where Colleoni entertained his guests, are given over to the silkworms.
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