Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 29, 2025
Probably Lodovico's confidence had been shaken by Leonardo's endless delays and hesitation, but a few months later the master was at work again, this time it appears on a completely new model of the great statue. On April, 1490, we find the following memorandum in Leonardo's writing: "To-day I commenced this book, and began the horse again."
For, as you know, nothing is dearer to our hearts than the things that concern this church and monastery." Lodovico's exertions were not in vain, at least in the case of Perugino.
The conquest of Naples was an easy affair, no more than a step in the glorious enterprise that awaited the French king, for from Naples he could cross to engage the Turk, and win back the Holy Sepulchre, thus becoming a second Charles the Great. 1 See Corlo, Storia di Milano, and Lodovico's letter to Charles VIII, quoted therein, lib. vii.
On all sides poets and scholars celebrated Lodovico's name as the Pericles of this new Athens, and joined in the chorus of praise which inspired Pistoia's famous line "E un Dio in cielo e il Moro in terra." "There is one God in heaven and the Moro upon earth."
Soon Lodovico's passion for this new mistress became publicly known, Leonardo was employed to paint her picture; and, under the date of November, 1496, the annalist of Ferrara writes, "The latest news from Milan is that the duke spends his whole time and finds all his pleasure in the company of a girl who is one of his wife's maidens. And his conduct is ill regarded here."
We see on the one hand the spirit and resolution which made Beatrice, in the words of the Emperor Maximilian, not merely a sweet and loving wife to her lord, but a partner who shared actively in all his schemes and lightened every burden; and on the other, we understand the admiration which this force of character and tenacity of purpose excited in Lodovico's weaker and more easily swayed nature.
But Lodovico's personal friends and retainers mustered in force, as well as those captains and courtiers who could claim kinship with the house of Este. Niccolo da Correggio was there, as one nearly related to both bride and bridegroom, and was universally pronounced to be the handsomest and best dressed of all the cavaliers who were present that day.
While Lodovico's newly-formed alliance with Maximilian strengthened his hands on the one hand, on the other it helped to aggravate the strained relations already existing between himself and the royal family of Naples.
And as it was Lodovico's own wish to be buried in the same tomb, the sculptor was to carve an effigy of himself in ducal crown and mantle, lying at his wife's side in the last slumber.
The sudden death of Duke Francesco in 1466 brought a change in Lodovico's position, and the ingratitude with which the new duke, Galeazzo, treated his widowed mother, naturally irritated his brothers. In October, 1468, Bianca retired to Cremona, where she died a week after her arrival "more from sorrow of heart than sickness of body," wrote her doctor.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking