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Updated: May 14, 2025
In a letter to Salvestro da Montauto, of February 3, 1545 , Michael Angelo says that the Duke of Urbino ratified the deed, and the five statues were given to Raffaello da Montelupo to be carved.
Hawthorne was languid and weary of the city life, and an English lady, a friend of the Brownings, told us of this villa, which the Count da Montauto wished to let this summer, though never before, and so we tried for it and got it. It is a most enchanting situation, and the villa is immensely large and very nice.
What happened at this time about the tomb can be understood by help of a letter written to Salvestro da Montauto on the 3rd of February 1545. Michelangelo refers to the last contract, and says that the Duke of Urbino ratified the deed. Accordingly, five statues were assigned to Raffaello da Montelupo.
This statement was, to me, unexpected, and it has a certain importance. After a few weeks in Casa Bella, opposite Powers's house, Florence grew so hot that we were glad of an opportunity to rent the Villa Montauto, up on the hill of Bellosguardo, less than a mile beyond the city gate.
For at Montauto one of the terrors was the cohort of great spiders. There is no word in the dictionary so large or so menacing as a large spider of the Dr. Grimshawe kind. Such appear, like exclamations, all over the world. I saw one as huge and thrilling as these Italian monsters on the Larch Path at the Wayside, a few years later; but at Montauto they really swaggered and remained.
A morning dawned when the interest in living again became vigorous. A delicate-looking, essentially dignified young gentleman, the Count da Montauto, seeming considerably starved, but fascinatingly blue-blooded, appeared in our tiresome house.
For years afterwards my sensibilities were exercised over the question as to where the count was put while we enjoyed the space and loveliness of Montauto; I did not know that he had a palace in town. His sad, sweetly resentful glance had conveyed to me the idea, "Must I still live, if I live beneath my rank, and as a leaser of villas?"
In "Monte Beni" this oratory is minutely pictured, where "beneath the crucifix . . . lay a human skull . . . carved in gray alabaster, most skillfully done . . . with accurate imitation of the teeth, the sutures, the empty eye-caverns." Everywhere the intense picturesqueness gave material, at Montauto, for my father's romance.
On coming back to it, he made some additions to the old wooden structure, and caused to be built a low tower, which rose above the irregular roofs of the older and newer portions, thus supplying him with a study lifted out of reach of noise or interruption, and in a slight degree recalling the tower in which he had taken so much pleasure at the Villa Montauto.
He shouted and danced before the iron bars of the gate like a humanized note of music, uncertain where it belonged, and glad of it. Our very first knowledge of Montauto was rich and varied, with the relief from pretentiousness which all ancient things enjoy, and with the appealing sweetness of time-worn shabbiness.
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