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Updated: June 25, 2025
While Beatrice encouraged these foreign poets to settle at Milan, Lodovico invited the Tuscans Bellincioni and Antonio Cammelli, surnamed Pistoia, to his court, in the hope of refining and polishing the rude Lombard diction.
About the same time, after executing an altar-piece that went to Pistoia, he set his hand to two others for the Company of S. Zanobi, which is beside the canonical buildings of S. Maria del Fiore; which altar-pieces were to stand on either side of the Annunciation that Mariotto Albertinelli had formerly painted there, as was related in his Life.
The Signory, seeing their adversaries disarmed, continued to negotiate an arrangement by means of the pope; but at the same time sent secretly to the mountains of Pistoia for infantry, which, with what other forces they could collect, were brought into Florence by night.
This Tuscan, and more than Attic, quality for there is something akin to it in certain Greek archaic sculpture is to be found, already perfect and most essential, in the façades of the early mediæval churches of Pistoia. Is to be found; because this quality, tense and restrained and distributed with harmonious evenness, reveals itself only to a certain fineness and carefulness of looking.
He did little work in his native city of Pistoia; but for the Company of the Buon Gesù in Borgo San Sepolcro he painted a Circumcision in oil on a panel, which is passing good. In the Pieve of the same place he painted a chapel in fresco; and on the bank of the Tiber, on the road that leads to Anghiari, he painted another chapel, also in fresco, for the Commune.
As for his old friends and comrades, the poets and scholars of Lodovico's court, their indignation knew no bounds, Lancinus Curtius hurled bitter epigrams at his head, and Pistoia held him up to the scorn of the whole world in some of his finest sonnets.
There is no population stirring; the very piazza is without activity; and, if you leave it, you may walk a mile between very large houses, churches, convents, and palaces, without meeting any one. Pistoia, in short, is an improvement on Oxford in the long vacation the place, however, has its ancient fame, has given birth to two or three distinguished literati, and figured in the civil wars.
He occupied himself with niello and with making larger works, such as some figures in silver, whereof two, half-length prophets, are placed at the head of the altar of S. Jacopo in Pistoia; these figures, which are held very beautiful, were wrought by him for the Wardens of Works in that city; and he made works in low-relief, wherein he showed that he had so great knowledge in his vocation that his intellect must needs overstep the bounds of that art.
A power which I cannot resist compels me to let thee know, that I am here because I committed sacrilege and charged another with the crime; but now, mark me, that thou mayest hear something not to render this encounter so pleasant: Pistoia hates thy party of the Whites, and longs for the Blacks back again.
For the early Italian poets, excepting Carducci's "Cino da Pistoia," my references are the same as those in Rossetti's "Dante and his Cycle," especially the "Rime Antiche" and the "Poeti del Primo Secolo." Professor d'Ancona's pleasant volume has greatly helped me in the history of the transformation of the courtly poetry of the early Middle Ages into the folk poetry of Tuscany.
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