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I turned to look after them, but they had already disappeared into that maze of crooked, squalid streets around the Pitti. Fortunately, there was not more than a sovereign in it. I was filled with regret, however, on account of my friend's letter. He had trusted me with some secret.
Maddalena Doni, in her portrait, painted by Raphael, which hangs in the Pitti Palace at Florence, wears a pair of these rich, heavy sleeves, fastened slightly at the shoulder, and worn over a shorter sleeve belonging to her dress. Thus we see how it was that a lady could disengage her sleeve at the right moment, and give it to the fortunate knight.
In Florence, within three years past, a fine portrait, by Titian, of the Doge Andrea Gritti, was picked out from a large lot of worthless canvases for six dollars. The Madonna del Gran Duca, at the Pitti, was bought by the father of the late Grand Duke, with some other pictures, of a widow, for a few dollars.
So disinterested and expensive a toy is its own justification; it belongs to the heroics of dilettantism. One grows to feel the collection of pictures at the Pitti Palace splendid rather than interesting.
According to Vasari, it was at this time that Michael Angelo carved two tondi: one for Bartolommeo Pitti, now in the Bargello at Florence, and the other for Taddeo Taddei, now at Burlington House, in the Diploma Gallery of the Royal Academy, London. It was acquired by Sir George Beaumont, and is the most valuable work the Academy possesses.
Having remained some time in this pious hue, I returned home and feasted upon grapes and ortolans with great edification; then walked to one of the bridges across the Arno, and surveyed the hills at a distance, purpled by the declining sun. Its mild beams tempted me to the garden of Boboli, which lies behind the Palazzo Pitti, stretched out on the side of a mountain.
Giovanni and Cosimo had had to work for their power; Piero stepped naturally into it, although almost immediately he had to deal with a plot the first for thirty years to ruin the Medici prestige, the leader of which was that Luca Pitti who began the Pitti palace in order to have a better house than the Medici.
But everywhere I came upon something that fed my famine for the old, the quaint, the picturesque, and however the day passed it was a banquet, a festival. I can only recall my breathless first sight of the Public Library and of the Athenaeum Gallery: great sights then, which the Vatican and the Pitti hardly afterwards eclipsed for mere emotion.
In this beautiful Paul Veronese of the Pitti everything is part of the charm the atmosphere as well as the figures, the look of radiant morning in the white-streaked sky as well as the living human limbs, the cloth of Venetian purple about the loins of the Christ as well as the noble humility of his attitude.
Such are his Flora, Venuses, Titian's Daughter of which there are several examples Magdalens, etc.; together with many so called portraits, such as his La Donna Bella in the Pitti, Florence. "Titian could paint such pictures so free from coarseness, so magnificent in all art qualities, that the world was delighted with them.
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