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Updated: June 5, 2025
Thence he wrote a letter to Piero de'Medici, which is interesting, firstly, as showing the good relations prevailing between them; secondly, as refuting a story in Guicciardini, wherewith that historian, ready, as ever, to belittle the Borgias, attempts to show him cutting a poor figure.
Him she had terribly avenged. Getting her men-at-arms together, she had ridden at their head into the quarter inhabited by the murderers, and there ordered as Macchiavelli tells us the massacre of every human being that dwelt in it, women and children included, whilst she remained at hand to see it done. Thereafter she took a third husband, in Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de'Medici, who died in 1498.
As early as 1460 he had painted the three large canvases of Hercules for Lorenzo de'Medici, now no longer existing, but probably reflected in the two small panels of the same subject in the Uffizi. These alone are enough to mark him as one of the greatest artists of his time. The magnificent David, at Berlin, soon followed, and the little Daphne and Apollo in our National Gallery.
The place is full of Catherine de'Medici, of Henry III., of memories, of ghosts, of echoes, of possible evocations and revivals. It is covered with crimson and gold. The fireplaces and the ceilings are magnificent; they look like expensive "sets" at the grand opera.
We have already said that, though rich in extracts from the Latin poets, it contains scarcely any references to the Latin orators and historians. We must add, that it contains little, or rather no information, respecting the history and literature of modern Italy. To the best of our remembrance, Addison does not mention Dante, Petrarch Boccaccio, Boiardo, Berni, Lorenzo de'Medici, or Machiavelli.
"In the face of the oldest of the kings," says Vasari, "there is the most lively expression of tenderness as he kisses the foot of the Saviour, and of satisfaction at the attainment of the purpose for which he had undertaken his long journey. This figure is the portrait of Cosimo de'Medici, the most faithful and animated likeness of all now known of him.
In 1450 he visited Italy, where he painted the beautiful little altar-piece which is now in the Städel Institute at Frankfort, for Piero and Giovanni de'Medici. Another very fine example of his work is the triptych, now in the Berlin Museum, executed for Pierre Bladelin. In the centre is the Nativity, with a portrait of Bladelin kneeling, and angels.
In the fifteenth century the use of the national language in literature entirely died out, through the rise of the Humanists, and the craze for Greek and Latin classics; but toward the end of the fifteenth century, under Lorenzo de'Medici and Leo X, interest in their own literature among the Italians began to revive again.
Among the subjects of a secular character the history of Marie de'Medici, the triumph of the Emperor Charles V., and the Sultan at the head of his Army, gave him abundant opportunities of portraying Oriental and European pageantry, with rich arms and regalia, and all the pomp and circumstance of war. Profusion pouring forth of abundance, that was one of Rubens's most salient characteristics.
We have traced the early part of this under the Medici and Pope Nicholas. Lorenzo de'Medici was the centre of its later development. From his court went forth that galaxy of artists which the world of art unites in calling the unequalled masters of all ages Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and a host of others.
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