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Updated: June 7, 2025
When Sir George Hamilton assumed the duties of British representative at Florence, the yearly throng of English visitors was becoming more numerous and more heterogeneous, and all wanted to be invited to the balls at the Pitti Palace. Those were the most urgent in their applications, as will be easily understood, whose claims to such distinction were the most problematic.
As the house of Medici had for some centuries resided in the palace of Pitti, situated on the other side of the river, a full mile from these tribunals, the architect Vasari, who planned the new edifice, at the same time contrived a corridore, or covered passage, extending from the palace of Pitti along one of the bridges, to the gallery of curiosities, through which the grand-duke passed unseen, when he was disposed either to amuse himself with his antiquities, or to assist at his courts of judicature: but there is nothing very extraordinary either in the contrivance or execution of this corridore.
"It was my desire to see the world and to learn something of its people before I undertook to govern my own. My country is not rich and fat like this great land of Burgundy. I have neither the means nor the inclination to travel in state; so my dear friend and instructor, Sir Karl de Pitti, undertook to guide me and teach me in this journey to the outer world.
On the Max Joseph Platz, which has a bronze statue of King Max, a seated figure, and some elaborate bas-reliefs, is another front of the palace, the Konigsbau, an imitation, not fully carried out, of the Pitti Palace, at Florence. Between these is the old Residenz, adorned with fountain groups and statues in bronze. On another side are the church and theater of the Residenz.
Nothing is known of the birthplace of this painter, who appears first at Perugia, and was the master of Piero della Francesca. His work is very rare; in Florence there are two heads of saints in the Pitti, and Mr. Berenson speaks of a fresco of the Baptist and St. Francis in S. Croce.
"This," he resumed, "you will readily recognize, as you have so often looked at the picture in the Pitti Gallery in Florence the Madonna del Gran Duca. This is the only Madonna that belongs to this period of Raphael's painting, and the last important picture in the style. It was painted during the early part of his visit to Florence."
Much the same might be said of his partner Albertinelli, and his friend Andrea del Sarto, whom again we shall consider later in the Pitti Palace.
The statue of Cosimo I in the Piazza della Signoria has a bas-relief of his coronation. He was then fifty-one; he lived but four more years, and when he died he left a dukedom flourishing in every way: rich, powerful, busy, and enlightened. He had developed and encouraged the arts, capriciously, as Cellini's "Autobiography" tells us, but genuinely too, as we can see at the Uffizi and the Pitti.
The so-called Duke of Norfolk at the Pitti, supposed to represent the young Duke Guidobaldo of Urbino. Also the Isabella d'Este at Vienna, and somewhat earlier, the Cardinal Ippolito in Hungarian dress, at the Pitti; and the Daughter of Robert Strozzi, at Berlin.
The same contrast of lines, and yet balance of form, is carried out in the two S. Catherines who form the pyramid on each side of her, and in the varied characters of the encircling group of saints. The deleterious use of lampblack has spoiled the colouring; it, moreover, hangs in a bad light at the Pitti Palace.
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