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Under Pietro Medici, Ficino was already at the head of a school; to him Pietro's son and Cosimo's grandson, the illustrious Lorenzo, came over from the Peripatetics. Among his most distinguished fellow-scholars were Bartolommeo Valori, Donato Acciaiuoli, and Pierfilippo Pandolfini.
I accept the theory of Alberti's authorship. A beautiful description of the religious temper, p. 74. What Pandolfini says about the beauty of the body is worthy of a Greek: what he says about exercise might have been written by an Englishman, p. 77. Pp. 82-89 are very important as showing how low the art of politics had sunk in Italy.
A little further on he indulges in another diatribe against great nobles, i signori, from whom he would have his sons keep clear at any cost. It is the animosity of the industrious burgher for the haughty, pleasure-loving, idle, careless man of blood and high estate. In the bourgeois household described by Pandolfini no one can be indolent.
The charm of a treatise like that of Pandolfini on the family evaporates as soon as we try to make a summary of its contents. Enough, however, has been quoted to show the thoroughly bourgeois tone which prevailed among the citizens of Florence in the fifteenth century. Very important results were the natural issue of this commercial spirit in the State. Talking of the Ordinanze di Giustizia, Varchi observes: 'While they removed in part the civil discords of Florence, they almost entirely extinguished all nobility of feeling in the Florentines, and tended as much to diminish the power and haughtiness of the city as to abate the insolence of the patriciate. A little further on he says: 'Hence may all prudent men see how ill-ordered in all things, save only in the Grand Council, has been the commonwealth of Florence; seeing that, to speak of nought else, that kind of men who in a wisely constituted republic ought not to fulfill any magistracy whatever, the merchants and artisans of all sorts, are in Florence alone capable of taking office, to the exclusion of all others. Machiavelli, less wordy but far more emphatic than Varchi, says of the same revolution: 'This caused the abandonment by Florence not only of arms, but of all nobility of soul. The most notable consequence of the mercantile temper of the republics was the ruinous system of mercenary warfare, with all its attendant evils of ambitious captains of adventure, irresponsible soldiery, and mock campaigns, adopted by the free Italian States. It is true that even if the Italians had maintained their national militias in full force, they might not have been able to resist the shock of France and Spain any better than the armies of Thebes, Sparta, and Athens averted the Macedonian hegemony. But they would at least have run a better chance, and not perhaps have perished so ignobly through the treason of an Alfonso d'Este , of a Marquis of Pescara , of a Duke of Urbino , and of a Malatesta Baglioni . Machiavelli, in a weighty passage at the end of the first book of his Florentine History, sums up the various causes which contributed to the disuse of national arms among the Italians of the Renaissance. The fear of the despot for his subjects, the priest-rule of the Church, the jealousy of Venice for her own nobles, and the commercial sluggishness of the Florentine burghers, caused each and all of these powers, otherwise so different, to intrust their armies to paid captains. 'Di questi adunque oziosi principi e di queste vilissime armi sar
Under Pietro Medici, Ficino was already at the head of a school; to him Pietro's son and Cosimo's grandson, the illustrious Lorenzo, came over from the Peripatetics. Among his most distinguished fellow-scholars were Bartolommeo Valori, Donato Acciaiuoli, and Pierfilippo Pandolfini.
A week later, on our return from the convent of San Marco, where we had seen the cell of Savonarola and many lovely but faded frescoes of Fra Angelico and Fra Bartolommeo, whom should we find waiting for us in our temporary home on the Via Pandolfini but Count Alvala?
Agnolo Pandolfini, teaching thrift to his sons in Alberti's charming treatise on "The Government of the Family," frequently groans over the insolence, the astuteness of the peasantry; and indeed seems to consider that it is impossible to cope with them a conclusion which would have greatly astounded the bailiffs of the feudal proprietors in the Two Sicilies and beyond the Alps.
The ancient palace on the Duomo side of the piazza is attributed in design to Raphael, who, like most of the great artists of his time, was also an architect and was the designer of the Palazzo Pandolfini in the Via San Gallo, No. 74.
If this should seem a mere pleasaunce of delight, the vision of a poet, the garden of a dream, we have only to remember how realistically and simply Boccaccio has described for us that plague-stricken city, scarcely more than a mile away, to be assured of its truthfulness: and then listen to Alberti or old Agnolo Pandolfini, is it? in his Trattato del Governo della Famiglia, one of the most delightful books of the fifteenth century.
Agnolo Pandolfini tells us how, after his wedding, he shut himself in with his wife, and knelt down before the family altar with the picture of the Madonna, and prayed, not to her, but to God, that He would vouchsafe to them the right use of their property, a long life in joy and unity with one another, and many male descendants: 'For myself I prayed for wealth, honour, and friends; for her blamelessness, honesty, and that she might be a good housekeeper. When the language used has a strong antique flavor, it is not always easy to keep apart the pagan style and the theistic belief.
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