"Medici" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... There is Religio-Medici and Laici.—But perhaps the volume is not quite Quakerish enough or exclusively for it—but your own VIGILS is perhaps the Best. While I have space, let me congratulate with you the return of Spring—what a Summery Spring too! all those qualms ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... which he failed to shine was the making of sufficient money to live upon. Luckily he had no responsibilities; his father and his twin brother had died when he was yet a boy, and his mother, whose only noteworthy achievement had been the naming of her twin sons Marquis de Lafayette and Lorenzo de Medici Randall, had supported herself and educated her child by making coats up to the very day of her death. She was wont to say plaintively, "I'm afraid the faculties was too much divided up between my twins. L. D. M. is ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... he would like to hold a meeting of bookmen, each of whom should be a mighty hunter, and he would dare to invite Cosmo Medici, who was as keen about books as he was about commerce, and according to Gibbon used to import Indian spices and Greek books by the same vessel, and that admirable Bishop of Durham who was as joyful on reaching Paris as ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... spectator. I know Gustavus Adolphus was a king of Sweden, but I do not know when; and apart from their names I know nothing of Theodoric, Charles Martel, Peter the Hermit, Lodovico Moro, the Emperor Maximilian, Catherine of Aragon, Catherine de' Medici, Richelieu, Frederick Barbarossa, Cardinal Wolsey, Prince Rupert—I do not refer to Anthony Hope's hero, Rupert of Hentzau—Saint Louis, Admiral Coligny, or the thousands of other illustrious personages that ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... of Silvestro de Medici, the head of one of the noblest of the popular families. In this way I became acquainted with Marcella, the sister of Silvestro, and after a courtship of several ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... et inquisiui ab illis de curia, de numero illorum qui sunt in curia domini, et responderunt mihi quod de histrionibus sunt bene 18. Thuman; Custodes autem canum et bestiarum, et auium sunt. 15. Thuman; Medici vero pro corpore Regis sunt 400. Christiani autem 8. et vnus Saracenus. Et ego quando fui ibi, hij omnes omnia necessaria tam ad victum, quam ad vestitum habebant de Curia domini Canis. Quando autem vult equitare de vna terra ad aliam, habet 4. exercitus equitum, et vnus per vnam ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 9 - Asia, Part 2 • Richard Hakluyt
... Pulci. This man, who was born at Florence in the year 1432, and who was deeply versed in the Bible, composed a poem, called the "Morgante Maggiore," which he recited at the table of Lorenzo de Medici, the great patron of Italian genius. It is a mock-heroic and religious poem, in which the legends of knight-errantry, and of the Popish Church, are turned to unbounded ridicule. The pretended hero of it is a converted giant, called Morgante; though his adventures do ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... of Venice had at this period for its doge Augustin Barbarigo; and it was to the council of Ten that in respect of foreign affairs as well as of the home department the power really belonged. Peter de' Medici, son of Lorenzo de' Medici, the father of the Muses, was feebly and stupidly, though with all the airs and pretensions of a despot, governing ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... several days in Genoa, and made from thence a journey, rich in the beauties of nature, along the shore to Carrara. I had seen statues in Paris, but my eyes were closed to them; in Florence, before the Venus de Medici, it was for the first time as if scales fell from my eyes; a new world of art disclosed itself before me; that was the first fruit of my journey. Here it was that I first learned to understand the beauty of form—the spirit which ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... the German, had its origin in Italy, when Catherine de' Medici came to Paris as the bride of Henri II. She brought with her, among other artists, her perfumer, Sieur Toubarelli, who established himself in the flowery land of Grasse. Here for four hundred years the industry has remained rooted and the family formulas ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... 1506, as a gift from the painter to his uncle, Simone Ciarla, of Urbino. In 1588 the portrait passed from Urbino to the Academy of St. Luke, Rome. Later it was sold to Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici for the Hall of Portraits of the Old Masters in ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... feats of strength, which filled his comrades with enthusiasm, he would come in fresh, serene, indifferent, as though he were coming out of a bath. He fenced with the French painters of the Villa Medici; learned to box with Englishmen and Americans; organized, with some German artists, excursions to a grove near Rome, which were talked about for days in the cafes of the Corso. He drank countless healths with his companions to the Kaiser ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... is fallen, I hear, the gallant Medici taken, Noble Manara slain, and Garibaldi has lost il Moro;— Rome is fallen; and fallen, or falling, heroical Venice. I, meanwhile, for the loss of a single small chit of a girl, sit Moping and mourning here,—for her, and myself ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough
... had better have stripped off his surplice. No,—it was nothing but the cant of his calling. In Byron it was a mood, and he might have said just the opposite thing the next day, as he did in his two descriptions of the Venus de' Medici. That picture of old Matthew abides in the memory, and makes one think better of his kind. What nobler tasks has the poet than to exalt the idea of manhood, and to make the world we live ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... time he raised himself on his elbow and ordered his three friends to go away. They obeyed at once, and scarcely had they left by one door than the curtain of the other was raised, and the monk, pale, immovable, solemn, appeared on the threshold. When he perceived him, Lorenzo dei Medici, reading in his marble brow the inflexibility of a statue, fell back on his bed, breathing a sigh so profound that one might have supposed it was ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... account of his miserable feelings." "I met Smelfungus," he wrote later on, "in the grand portico of the Pantheon—he was just coming out of it. ''Tis nothing but a huge cockpit,' said he—'I wish you had said nothing worse of the Venus de Medici,' replied I—for in passing through Florence, I had heard he had fallen foul upon the goddess, and used her worse than a common strumpet, without the least provocation in nature. I popp'd upon ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... doubt as to who was the first solo violinist of eminence. The earliest of whom we have any account worthy of mention, was Baltazarini, a native of Piedmont, who went to France in 1577 to superintend the music of Catharine de Medici. In 1581 he composed the music for the nuptials of the Duke de Joyeuse with Mlle. de Vaudemont, sister of the queen, and this is said to have been the origin of the heroic and historical ballet ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... on through the grove, and turning into the rue de Medici, traversed it to the Boulevard. At the corner she bought a bunch of violets and walked on along the Boulevard to the rue des Ecoles. A cab was drawn up before Boulant's, and a pretty girl aided ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... This simile is imitated by Lorenzo de Medici, in his Ambra, a poem, first published by Mr. Roscoe, in the Appendix to his Life of Lorenzo. Marking the tracts of air, the clamorous cranes Wheel their due flight in varied ranks descried: And each with outstretch'd neck his rank maintains ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... is true, as far as ever from the delicate rusticity of Lorenzo de' Medici, and not particularly near to the humour of the Athenian rustics, but for burlesque it is passably amusing. The Midsummer Night's Dream had appeared possibly a decade earlier, and the audience in the college hall at Oxford can hardly but have been ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... Eugenius IV., when long-standing differences between the Greek and Latin Churches were brought to an end in a most amicable manner. Alas! for the Greeks, that they did not accept the decisions of that day as final. On the 22d of January, 1439, Cosmo de Medici, then Gonfaloniere of Florence, received the Pope and his cardinals, with a pomp and splendor unknown to the history of modern Europe. On the 12th of the following month came the Patriarch, Joseph of Constantinople, and ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... inferring that ability to supply an elaborate scenic investiture for the sacred drama was not wanting. When the sacred plays began to be written, their authors were for the most part persons of no distinction, but Lorenzo de Medici wrote one and Pulci also contributed to this form of art. The best writers, according to Symonds, were Feo ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... their time been mighty and illustrious personages; but what seemed most delectable unto the friar was an autographic writing wherein 'twas shewn that the booke sometime had been given by Venus di Medici ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... Sir Thomas Browne, as to whom the average person has no offensive juvenile memories. He is bound to have read somewhere that the style of Sir Thomas Browne is unsurpassed by anything in English literature. One day he sees the *Religio Medici* in a shop-window (or, rather, outside a shop-window, for he would hesitate about entering a bookshop), and he buys it, by way of a mild experiment. He does not expect to be enchanted by it; a profound ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... conferred by Cosimo de' Medici on learning was the accumulation and the housing of large libraries. During his exile he built the library of S. Giorgio Maggiore at Venice, and after his return to Florence he formed three separate collections of MSS. While the hall of the Library of S. Marco ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... her, with the grand-ducal coronet at top, her story on a label at bottom, which Gray is to compose in Latin, as short and expressive as Tacitus, (one is lucky when one can bespeak and have executed such an inscription!) the Medici arms on one side, and the Capello's on the other. I must tell you a critical discovery of mine apropos: in an old book of Venetian arms, there are two coats of Capello, who from their name bear a hat; on one of them is added a fleur-de-lis on a blue ball, which I am persuaded was ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... Schlichtingius, Disput pro Socino Contra Memerum, p. 484. Licet vero dolendum sit talis promiscue passim que fieri, et abiisse in morem pejus tamen adhuc est quod malis istis, praeter conciones interdam ali quas, quibuedam in locis, nulla adhibeatur medici na, nec rectores ecclesiarum haec cura tangat, ut vi tia tam late grassantia, disciplina et censura ecclesiastica, ab ipso Christo et apostolis instituta coer ceantur. Unde factum est ut non solum ista pec cata, qua leviora videntur, acd etiam alia graviora, puta comessationes, ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... no more of it till the revival of letters in Italy. Angelo Poliziano met with two very inaccurate and incomplete manuscripts of Epictetus' Enchiridion, which he translated into Latin and dedicated to his great patron Lorenzo de' Medici, in whose collection he had found the book. Poliziano's version was printed in the first Bale edition of the Enchiridion, A.D. 1531 (apud And. Cratandrum). Poliziano recommends the Enchiridion to Lorenzo as a work well suited to his temper, and useful ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... Italian Platonist, born at Florence; in 1463 became president of a Platonic school, founded by Cosmo de' Medici, where he spent many years spreading and instilling the doctrines of Plato, and, indeed, ancient philosophy generally; entered the Church in 1473, and under the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici was appointed to the canonry of Florence Cathedral; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Cellini's statue of Perseus holding the head of Medusa, and standing over her headless and still writhing body, out of which, at the severed neck, gushed a vast exuberance of snakes. Likewise, a sitting statue, by Michel Angelo, of one of the Medici, full of dignity and grace and reposeful might. Also the bronze gate of a baptistery in Florence, carved all over with relieves of Scripture subjects, executed in the most lifelike and expressive manner. The cast ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... selections in Manly's English Prose, Craik's English Prose Selections, Garnett's English Prose from Elizabeth to Victoria. Pilgrim's Progress and Grace Abounding in Standard English Classics, Pocket Classics, Student's Classics. Religio Medici and Complete Angler in Temple Classics and Everyman's Library. Selections from Dryden in Manly's English Prose and Manly's English Poetry. Dryden's version of Palamon and Arcite (the Knight's Tale of Chaucer) in Standard English Classics, Riverside ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... last night, and yet he stood gazing about him with an interest which a long-married man does not often feel in his own reception hall. The rugs, the two pillars, the Spanish tapestry chairs, were all the same. The Venus di Medici stood on her column as usual and there, at the end of the hall (opposite the front door), was the full-length portrait of Mrs. Wanning, maturely blooming forth in an evening gown, signed with the name of a French painter who seemed purposely to have made ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... Borromini, for its splendid paintings and internal magnificence; that of Pamfili in the square of Navona, with a library and gallery; Rospigliosi, upon the Quirinal hill, etc. Among the palaces of Rome, which bear the name of villas, is the Villa Medici, on the Pincian mount, on which were formerly situated the splendid gardens of Lucullus: it once contained a vast number of masterpieces of every kind; but the grand dukes Leopold and Ferdinand have removed the finest works (among them, the group ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... last, slowly, while Mr. Harland, Catherine, and Swinton the secretary all drew up closer to him at the table and leaned eagerly forward—"And I should say"— here he raised his eyes and looked full at the dark, brooding, sinister face of Brayle—"I should say that it belonged to the Medici period. It must have been part of the dress of a nobleman of that time—the design seems to me to be Florentine. Perhaps if these jewels could speak they might tell a strange story!—they ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... fulfil one of the darling dreams of my whole life. I must go to Italy, to the holy city of Rome, and kneel upon the graves of Cicero and Caesar. I must see St. Peter's, the Venus de Medici, ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... the Vatican when Alexander VI. had won renown as a secret murderer. They had seen, close at hand, the merciless cruelty of Julius II. They had carefully noted the crimes of Sixtus IV., which culminated in the assassination of Julian de' Medici beneath the dome of Florence at the moment the Host was uplifted. They had sat near Leo X. while he enjoyed the obscenities of the Calandria and the Mandragora,—plays which, in the most corrupt of modern cities, would, in our day, be stopped by the police. No wonder ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... venal judges. Their sublime art became the handmaid of effeminacy, of vanity, of sensuality. It could not rise above the level of those who dedicated themselves to its service. It did not make men better. Was Leo X. a wiser Pope because he delighted in pictures? Did art make the Medici at Florence more susceptible to religious impressions? Does art sanctify Dresden or Florence? Does it make modern capitals stronger, or more self-sacrificing, better fitted to contend with violence, or guard against the follies which undermine a state? ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Catharine de Medici, lectured ably to students of both sexes. James Guillemeau was a French surgeon of great eminence, who died in 1813; but the obstetrical observations which gave value to his books were contributed by Madame Veronne. It was to the Countess of Cinchon, and the influence ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... in order,—for many years held by the Medici family. It is now owned by the Austrian Emperor, and is the pride of the Imperial Court. It is cut as a rose, nine-sided, and is of a yellow tint, lessening somewhat its value. Its weight is one hundred ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... the emperor.[***] The dread of losing England, and of fortifying the Lutherans by so considerable an accession, made small impression on Clement's mind, in comparison of the anxiety for his personal safety, and the fond desire of restoring the Medici to their dominion in Florence. As soon, therefore, as he had adjusted all terms with the emperor he laid hold of the pretence of justice, which required him, as he asserted, to pay regard to the queen's appeal; and suspending the commission of the legates, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... in his brother did not remove all suspicions of that young man's steadfastness from his mind is shown by the following letter, written two days later than the above, to Lorenzo de' Medici: ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... showing the certainty of forgery. II. The Second Florence MS. the forged MS. III. Cosmo de' Medici the man imposed upon. IV. Digressions about Cosmo de' Medici's position, and fondness for books, especially Tacitus. V. The many suspicious marks of forgery about the Second Florence MS.; the Lombard characters; the attestation of Salustius. ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... of any merit. Soon after his return to England in 1771 he produced his picture of Venus, which was compared, though with little justice, to the Galatea of Raphael, the Venus of Titian and the Venus de Medici. In 1773 he exhibited his "Jupiter and Juno on Mount Ida." His [v.03 p.0445] "Death of General Wolfe," in which the British and French soldiers are represented in very primitive costumes, was considered as a falling-off from his great style of art. His fondness for Greek costume was assigned ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... moment, to ask if this magic were real, and remember the calm holy airs that breathed from the presence of some woman, beautiful only in her soul. But then you never would have looked upon Sybilla Rothesay as a woman at all—only a flesh-and-blood fairy—a Venus de Medici ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... wear! Now, as this is a true ditty, I do not assert—this, you know, is between us— That she's in a state of absolute nudity, Like Powers's Greek Slave or the Medici Venus; But I do mean to say, I have heard her declare, When at the same moment she had on a dress Which cost five hundred dollars, and not a cent less, And jewelry worth ten times more, I should guess, That she had not a thing in the wide world ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... gossip, and before we know it, our lives are gone. I overlook your being so foolish; but for me it is inexcusable. The Italians of the Renaissance did not give themselves over to such folly. They put their hearts seriously into building up their age and generation. Lorenzo de Medici dragged from the corners of Europe and Asia some two hundred Greek and Latin manuscripts. Other Florentines, Venetians, Romans collected private libraries. Princes of the land turned their wealth not to their own idle pleasure but ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... Ghirlandajo, vulgarly jaunty in Fillipino, preposterously starched and prim in Mantegna, ludicrously undignified in Signorelli; and mediaeval stiffness, awkwardness, and absurdity reach their acme perhaps in the little boys, companions of the Medici children, introduced into ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... Hercules and two Hippolyti Of Este, a Hercules and Hippolyte Of the Gonzagas' and the Medici, Hunt and fatigue the monster in his flight: Nor Julian lets his good son pass him by; Nor bold Ferrant his brother; nor less wight Is Andrew Doria; nor by any one Is Francis ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... writers mentioned Lamb was in rarest sympathy; many are the references to them in his books and in his letters. With Andrew Marvell he shows his kinship in his verse, with the authors of "The Religio Medici" and of "The Anatomy of Melancholy," in diverse ways in his prose. Now fanciful and euphemistic with these, he is, as soon as occasion calls for plainer statement, clear and simple in expression. As one critic has put it, ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... Presley, you will take two chances, I am sure, and, oh, by the way, I have such good news. You know I am one of the lady members of the subscription committee for our Fair, and you know we approached Mr. Shelgrim for a donation to help along. Oh, such a liberal patron, a real Lorenzo di' Medici. In the name of the Pacific and Southwestern he has subscribed, think of it, five thousand dollars; and yet they will talk of the meanness ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... the Coadjutor of the infirm old Archbishop of Paris, namely, his nephew, Paul de Gondi, titular Bishop of Corinth in partibus infidelium, a younger son of the Duke of Retz, an Italian family introduced by Catherince de Medici. There seemed to be a hope that the nobility, angered at their own systematic depression, and by Mazarin's ascendency, might make common cause with the Parliament and establish some effectual check to the advances of the ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... are so kind about answering questions, perhaps you could tell me of some magazine or shop (in New York) where I could find authentic portraits of historic people, like Catherine de Medici, Louis XI., Louis XII., etc. I do not want them to be too expensive, and I do not want them to ...
— The Great Round World And What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 22, April 8, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... dynasty."] He has a worse name and more disciples than any political thinker who ever lived. He truly described the technic of existence for the self-contained state. That is why he has the disciples. He has the bad name chiefly because he cocked his eye at the Medici family, dreamed in his study at night where he wore his "noble court dress" that Machiavelli was himself the Prince, and turned a pungent description of the way things are done into an eulogy on ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... of the Museum! For what purpose? Do you want to fire grape-shot at the Apollo Belvedere? What have those cartridges to do with the Venus de Medici? Oh! the young men of the present day are all blackguards! What a pretty creature is their Benjamin Constant! And those who are not rascals are simpletons! They do all they can to make themselves ugly, they are badly dressed, they are ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... character. The same was the case with the Arabs: civilisation only dawned upon them when the vigour of their military spirit became softened under the sceptre of the Abbassides. Art did not appear in modern Italy till the glorious Lombard League was dissolved, Florence submitting to the Medici, and all those brave cities gave up the spirit of independ ence for an inglorious resignation. It is almost super fluous to call to mind the example of modern nations, with whom refinement has increased in direct proportion to the decline of their liberties. Wherever ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... lamb as Catherine II., and that, so far from assassinating her own husband and Czar Ivan,[2] she wept over every chicken that she had for dinner. How crimes, like fashions, flit from clime to clime! Murder reigns under the Pole, while you, who are in the very town where Catherine de' Medici was born, and within a stone's throw of Rome, where Borgia and his holy father sent cardinals to the other world by hecatombs, are surprised to hear that there is such an instrument as a stiletto. The papal is now a mere gouty chair, and the ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... Fold by fold Beneath me as it struggles. I behold Its glistening scales. Twice hath it overthrown My kindred and companions. Me alone It moveth not, but is by me controlled, I can remember when the Medici Were driven from Florence; longer still ago The final wars of Ghibelline and Guelf. Florence adorns me with her jewelry; And when I think that Michael Angelo Hath leaned on me, I glory ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... and by the intercourse with so many nations, shone in useful inventions; in the lap of abundance and liberty all the noble arts were carefully cultivated and carried to perfection. From Italy, to which Cosmo de Medici had lately restored its golden age, painting, architecture, and the arts of carving and of engraving on copper, were transplanted into the Netherlands, where, in a new soil, they flourished with fresh vigor. The Flemish school, a daughter of the Italian, soon vied ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... isle, where habit is the very antithesis of the airy license of "Abroad," it is not, as it is in the artistic haunts of the Continent, en regle to vaunt one's self on the paucity of one's shekels or to acknowledge acquaintance with the Medici's pills in their modern form of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... I forgot that it was the library and its pictures I was attempting to describe. Well, at the other end hangs a portrait of Pope Gregory, by Passerotti; the expression of the face Italian, attitude like Raphael. Over the door a portrait of Cosmo de Medici by Bronzino Allori, fresh as if painted yesterday. "The works of that master," I said, "are rare, but a friend of mine, Mr. Day, had a noble one at his rooms in Piccadilly, St. John in the Wilderness. The conception ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... in his "Religio Medici,"[49] alludes to the scandal that is generally attached to our profession, we being accused of professing no religion. That this opinion is still prevalent at the present day is undeniable,—philosophers and physicians are believed to be atheists ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... glorious view over the gardens where, even in winter, tangled masses of flowers ran riot, while beyond lay the picturesque old red-roofed Tuscan city. Fiesole is distinctly a village of the wealthy, for the several colossal villas, built in the days of the Medici and even before, are now owned by rich foreigners, many ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... Persano's flag-ship at Palermo, he was received with a salute of nineteen guns, which practically recognised his position as dictator, and Medici's contingent of 3000 men was equipped and armed by Cavour; all secrecy as to the relations between the minister and the Sicilian revolution was, therefore, at an end. He wished that Sicily should be annexed ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... worthy to rank with the best that his followers have produced. In the extensive use of dialect he was a pioneer; in romance he has 'La Peau de chagrin' and 'La Recherche de l'absolu' to his credit; while some of the work in the tales connected with the name of Catherine de Medici shows what he could have done in historical fiction had he continued to follow Scott. And what is true of the form of his fiction is true of its elements. Tragedy, comedy, melodrama are all within his reach; he can call up tears and shudders, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... Empress's robe, which consequently must be carried by Ladies of Honor or of the Palace." This remark displeased the Emperor, and many members of the council cited many examples to refute it, notably that of Maria de' Medici. Joseph, who had foreseen their arguments, displayed unexpected erudition: "Maria de' Medici," he said, "was accompanied only by Queen Margaret, the first wife of Henri IV., and by Madame (Catherine of Bourbon), the ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... decorate the Strozzi Palace at Florence, and of which similar specimens are still attached to the angles of the Riccardi Palace, once the famous residence of the Medici, in the same city, are among, the best examples of their kind still remaining. We are informed by Vasari that these "lumiere miravigliosi" were the work of one Nicolo Grosso Caparra, a celebrated artificer of the time, by whom it is not unlikely that many of the beautiful rings and cressets ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 1, No. 7, - July, 1895 • Various
... going to France regularly for my mother's health, she every year did her homage to the Venus. What is more, when she went for the first time to Florence, she fully realised how poor a thing the Venus de Medici was in comparison. ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... a hymn of triumph. About the middle of April he set out for Rome. His first halt was at Ferrara, which inspired the "Lament of Tasso" (published July 17, 1817). He passed through Florence, where he saw "the Venus" (of Medici) in the Uffizi Gallery, by reedy Thrasymene and Term's "matchless cataract" to "Rome the Wonderful." At Rome, with Hobhouse as companion and guide, he stayed three weeks. He returned to Venice on the 28th of May, but shortly removed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Lorenzo the Magnificent, during my last "spell of wet," it was uncourteous not to refer to the pleasant commemorative poem of "Ambra," which Lorenzo himself wrote, and which, whatever may be said against the conception and conduct of it, shows in its opening stanzas that the great Medici was as appreciative of rural images—fir-boughs with loaded snows, thick cypresses in which late birds lurked, sharp-leaved junipers, and sturdy pines fighting the wind—as ever he had been of antique jewels, or of the rhythm of such as Politiano. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... flagged—then dropped altogether. Mr. Blake idly turned over the books on his bedroom table. I had taken the precaution of looking at them, when we first entered the room. THE GUARDIAN; THE TATLER; Richardson's PAMELA; Mackenzie's MAN OF FEELING; Roscoe's LORENZO DE MEDICI; and Robertson's CHARLES THE FIFTH—all classical works; all (of course) immeasurably superior to anything produced in later times; and all (from my present point of view) possessing the one great merit of enchaining nobody's interest, and exciting nobody's brain. I left Mr. Blake to the ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... a marriage, after Mary's death, with the daughter of that terrible woman Catherine de Medici, widow of Henry II. of France, and there is much reason to believe that it was this Duke of Alva who planned the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. There were sinister conferences between Catherine, Philip, and Alva, and little doubt exists that the hideous tragedy which occurred ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... Times; Robertson's History of Scotland; Robertson's Charles V.; Vertot's Revolutions of Sweden; Vertot's Revolutions of Portugal; Sismondi's History of the Italian Republics, (abridged in Lardner's Cabinet of History;) Roscoe's Lorenzo de Medici and Leo X.; Sketches from Venetian History; Malcolm's History of Persia; Irving's Life of Columbus; Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella; Robertson's History of America; Bancroft's History of America; Winthrop's Journal; Ramsay's American Revolution; Marshall's ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... revenge on the United States, and I had planned it. How often, in half a hundred cities of Europe, had I not observed the American citizen seeing the sights thereof at high speed? Yes, even in front of the Michael Angelo sculptures in the Medici Chapel at Florence had I seen him, watch in hand, and heard him murmur "Bully!" to the sculptures and the time of the train to his wife in one breath! Now it was impossible for me to see Washington under the normal conditions of a session. ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... hearts: but the most eminent merit of this History consists in the moral and political considerations with which it abounds; it is like Tacitus." In like manner, Machiavelli is compared to Thucydides; while Varchi's long periods, adulation of the Medici, and municipal details are condemned by the same authority: yet one familiar with modern literature in this department will, despite this general commendation of native critics, be apt to ascribe the conservative charm of the Italian historians ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... beauty. A heady religious fanaticism was worked by every prominent egotist in turn, pondering on his chances, in the event of the extinction of the house of Valois with the three sons of Catherine de Medici, born unsound, and doomed by astrological prediction. The old manors, which had exchanged their towers for summer-houses under the softening influence of Renaissance fashions, found themselves once more medievally insecure ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... Plautus printed at Florence in 1514 for Lorenzo di Medici, Polydore Virgil's History with the fine Holbein designs, printed at Basle in 1556, and other interesting books, were also exhibited on the screen, the size, of course, being very much enlarged. He spoke of Elzevir in the seventeenth century when handwriting began to fall ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... by this time a facile draughtsman is evidenced by his vigorous pen-and-ink sketch—now in a private collection in Paris—of Bernardo Bandini, who in the Pazzi Conspiracy of April 1478 stabbed Giuliano de' Medici to death in the Cathedral at Florence during High Mass. The drawing is dated December 29, 1479, the date of ...
— Leonardo da Vinci • Maurice W. Brockwell
... day?' Very well, my good man. You are a good judge—of ordinaire, I dare say. Nothing so provokes my anger, and rouses my sense of justice, as to hear other men undeservedly praised. In a word, if you wish to remain friends with me, don't praise anybody. You tell me that the Venus de' Medici is beautiful, or Jacob Omnium is tall. Que diable! Can't I judge for myself? Haven't I eyes and a foot-rule? I don't think the Venus IS so handsome, since you press me. She is pretty, but she has no expression. ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... many pictorial haunts of Florence, and I was gratified without delay. I found him in the course of the morning in the Tribune of the Uffizi—that little treasure-chamber of world-famous things. He had turned his back on the Venus de' Medici, and with his arms resting on the rail-mug which protects the pictures, and his head buried in his hands, he was lost in the contemplation of that superb triptych of Andrea Mantegna—a work which has neither the material splendour nor the commanding force of some of its neighbours, ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... Roger in the present paper is that published by De Renzi (Collectio Salernitana, tom. II, pp. 426-493) and entitled "Rogerii, Medici Celeberrimi Chirurgia." It is really the text published originally in the "Collectio Chirurgica Veneta" of 1546, of which the ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... had found time not only to build up for himself an enormous fortune, but also to become thoroughly well acquainted with literature and art by the way. Mr. Roscoe had written biographies of Lorenzo de Medici, the great Florentine, and of Leo X., the art-loving pope; and throughout his whole life he was always deeply interested in painting and sculpture and everything that related to them. He was a philanthropist, too, who had borne ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... damned skunk has waxed the stairs again? If I have to have my joints set in plaster again before being called home, she can just present me between the palms here to her relations as the Venus de' Medici. Nothing but ...
— Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit) - A Tragedy in Four Acts • Frank Wedekind
... their creator. And in such a figure as that of the "Adams Memorial" (Pl. 30), in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, his imaginative power reaches to a degree of impressiveness almost unequalled in modern art. One knows of nothing since the tombs of the Medici that fills one with the same hushed awe as this shrouded, hooded, deeply brooding figure, rigid with contemplation, still with an eternal stillness, her soul rapt from her body on some distant quest. Is she Nirvana? Is she The ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... beautiful paintings as well as any one, but I wonder if I can ever learn anything that will make me care to look twice at some of those old things in the long entrance gallery of the Uffizi. I doubt it. Give me the old palaces where the Medici lived, and let me study up what they did. Or even Dante, or Michael Angelo! He was an artist who is worth studying about. Why! do you know, he built the fortifications of San ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... Minister of the Gospel; The Royal Extinguisher, or the King of Brobdingnag and the Liliputians (etched after the design of Isaac Robert). Six subjects, La Diligence and La Doriane, Venus de Medici and Mer de Glace, Visit to Vesuvius and Forum Boarium, and Nosing the Nob at Ramsgate, a coarsely executed satire aimed at his Majesty and his eccentric subject, ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... in connexion with the first publication (extorted by circumstance) of the Religio Medici, on the natural "inactivity of his disposition"; and he does, as I have said, pass very quietly through an exciting time. Born in the year of the Gunpowder Plot, he was not, in truth, one of those clear and clarifying souls which, in an age alike of practical ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... Robert Ingersoll Aitken We seem to hear him say "And now where next to place the chisel?" He is creating "Day," which is seen in the Medici Chapel, Church of San ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James
... works in Pietra dura at Florence. It is the taste displayed in outline and application of this ornament, combined with the lightness and simplicity of the building, which gives it an advantage so prodigious over the gloomy portals of the chapel of the Medici. The graceful flow, the harmonious colours, combined with the mild lustre of the marble on which the ornamentation is displayed, form the peculiar charm of the building, and distinguish it from any other in the world. The materials are Lapis Lazuli, Jasper, ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... will soon see how the Emperor Charles bestows honours upon her husband. His Majesty understood how to provide for his daughter, who is his first child. Her former marriage, it is true, was short. Alessandro de' Medici, to whom she was wedded at almost too early an age, was murdered scarcely a year after their nuptials. Her present husband, the Duke of Parma, whom you will see, is, on the contrary, younger than she, but since the unfortunate campaign against Algiers, in which he participated, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Because of a crime, etc.: refers to the destroying of the liberties of the Florentine republic by Cosimo dei Medici and his grandson, Lorenzo, who lived in the then Medici (now Riccardi) Palace, whose darkening of the street with its bulk symbolizes the crime which took the light ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... political structure may be incomplete or concealed. Old organs will be utilized to express new forces, and so gradual and subtle will be the change that it may hardly be recognized. The pseudo-democracies under the Medici at Florence and under Augustus at Rome are familiar examples of this type. Or again, if the political structure be rigid, incapable of responding to the changes demanded by growth, the expansive forces of social ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... fifteenth century Florence had come under the control of the great family of the Medici, whose members played the rle of very enlightened political bosses. By quietly watching the elections and secretly controlling the selection of city officials, they governed without letting it be suspected that ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... probable the evil would flourish extremely, and necessary information would be ruthlessly suppressed. Many of our present laws and provisions for public decency do work in that manner. The errand-boy may not look at the Venus de Medici, but he can cram his mind with the lore of how "nobs" run after ballet girls, and why Lady X locked the door. One can only plead here, as everywhere, no law, no succinct statement can save us without wisdom, a growing general wisdom and conscience, coming into ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... knowledge of the Incalculable powers of the human mind as of the incalculable powers of steam!" Had Madame Carolina been the consort of an Italian grand duke, selection would not be difficult; and, to inquire no farther, the court of the Medici alone would afford them everything they wanted. But Germany never had any character, and never produced nor had been the resort of illustrious men and interesting persons. What was to be done? The age of Frederick the Great was the only thing; and then that was so recent, and would offend ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... (1555) composed the struggle between the Catholic Emperor and the Protestant German princes. It was recognized by Catherine de' Medici when she massacred the French Protestants and signified to Queen Elizabeth that she might ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... of his rule; it is now a conservatory, whence rising terrace walks, statues and fountains only are visible; in the fresh silence of morning, they offered a striking contrast to that eventful scene. In an adjacent room a picture representing Maria de Medici's interview with Sully after the death of Henry IV., carries us back to an earlier era. Here Blucher had his headquarters, and here was settled the convention by which Paris was yielded to the allies. ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... old, was much less certain. He could cite Cleopatra, Catherine of Russia, Catherine de' Medici, and other familiar names to prove the woman's power; to which ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... considering that, in Italy, the Great LEO, by the encouragement which he gave to men of talents, had considerably increased the number of master-pieces; when the taste for the Fine Arts, after their previous revival by the Medici, having spread throughout that country, began to dawn in France about the end of the fifteenth century. By progressive steps, the efforts made by the French artists to emulate their masters, attained, towards the middle of the sixteenth century, a perfection ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... should advocate a return to the classics and all that the classics enshrined? Again, the example set by the tyrants who had grasped the reins of power in the Italian States, by men like Agnello of Pisa, the Viscontis and Francesco Sforza of Milan, Ferrante of Naples, and the de' Medici of Florence, was calculated to lower the moral standard of the period, and to promote an abandonment of Christian principles of truth, and justice, and purity of life. Everywhere men became more addicted to the pursuit ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... the daughter of that Medici to whom Machiavelli had dedicated his Prince. So little did religion actuate her conduct that she challenged Elizabeth to do to the Catholics of England what she herself had done to the Protestants of France, promising that if they were destroyed there would be no loss ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... the treachery of that human nature of which you speak so tenderly and reverently. So surely as you put faith in the truth and nobility of humanity, you will find it as soft-lipped and vicious as Paolo Orsini, who folded his wife, Isabella de Medici, most lovingly in his arms, and while he tenderly pressed her to his heart, slipped a cord around ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... She wanted to set that little jewelled shoe of hers on the neck of rebellion, when she should have held out her soft white hand to make friends of her foes. Her beauty and her grace might have done much, had she inherited with the pride of the Medici something of their finesse and suavity. But he loved her, Denzil, forgave all her follies, her lavish spending and wasteful splendour. 'My wife is a bad housekeeper,' I heard him say once, when she was hanging upon his chair as he sat at the end of the ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... with Chekhov, at a first performance of "Uncle Wanja," when suddenly the two were surrounded by a crowd of curious people. Gorki exclaimed with annoyance: "What are you all gaping at? I am not a prima ballerina, nor a Venus of Medici, nor a dead man. What can there be to interest you in the outside of a fellow who writes occasional stories." The Society Journals of Moscow wished to teach Gorki a lesson in manners, for having dealt so harshly with the appreciative patrons of the theatre. ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... many of the graces of life, and intellectual cultivation in all departments not political; it produced monuments of literary genius dazzling to the imaginations of shallow readers of history, who do not reflect that the men to whom the despotism of Augustus (as well as of Lorenzo de' Medici and of Louis XIV.) owes its brilliancy were all formed in the generation preceding. The accumulated riches, and the mental energy and activity produced by centuries of freedom, remained for the benefit ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... profound character and serious judgment, who could, if occasion called, have been the leader in some great movement. But she belonged to the quattrocento rather than to the nineteenth century. Had she been born a Medici, she would have held rank as one of the remarkable women of all time. That she was a woman of intellectual attainments is proved by the fact that she was already a magazine writer of recognized ability, and that at the moment ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... placed in Venice, partly in consequence of the Italian origin of the story, and partly, it would seem, because writers of fiction imagined that the further distant they could represent their incidents to have occurred, the more interest and probability would attach to them. Philippo Medici possessed a wife Philomela, renowned, "not for her beauty, though Italy afforded none so fair—not for her dowry, though she were the only daughter of the Duke of Milan—but for the admirable honours of her ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... the book and ink-bottle in this picture, "The Coronation of the Virgin," lived four hundred years ago. Their names are Giovanni and Giulio de' Medici. Botticelli, the artist, knew them well for he was born and brought up in Florence and used to spend a great deal of time at the ...
— The Children's Book of Celebrated Pictures • Lorinda Munson Bryant
... sister of Charles IX and wife of Philip of Spain, was returning from the Baths of Cauterets and passing through the city; the fete was in her honor. Charles was there, the King of France, with the queen-mother, Catherine de Medici; Marguerite of Valois, and her future husband, the ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... so many of the 'scutcheons on Florentine street-corners and palace-fronts are what he selected as the theme for his meditations, a choice which seems less odd when we know that his book, the labor and pleasure of his spare hours, was a study of the Medici. ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... San Giorgio—writes Vasari—"had at this time been given to the monks of San Domenico da Fiesole, but they did not occupy it longer than from about the middle of July to the end of January, because Cosimo de' Medici and Lorenzo his brother had obtained for them, from Pope Eugenius, the church and convent of San Marco, which had previously been occupied by Salvestrine monks, to whom San Giorgio was given in exchange. Moreover, they (Cosimo and Lorenzo de' Medici), being much devoted ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... the brother-in-law of Ubaldi, the reigning Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand de Medici was made acquainted with the merits of our young philosopher; and, in 1589, he was appointed lecturer on mathematics at Pisa. As the salary, however, attached to this office was only sixty crowns, he was compelled to enlarge this inadequate income by the additional ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... seems rarely to have been excited by the objects with which we are daily familiar; and when he did treat them, it was rather as things past, as they appear to us through the atmosphere of the hallowing memory. We have a striking instance of this in his statue of Lorenzo de' Medici; where, retaining of the original only enough to mark the individual, and investing the rest with an air of grandeur that should accord with his actions, he has left to his country, not a mere effigy of the person, but an embodiment of ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... belong probably the Belvidere Torso, so much admired by Michael Angelo, the Farnese Hercules, the Venus de'Medici, and the Fighting Gladiator. The Belvidere Torso is now considered to be a copy by Apollonius, the son of Nestor, of the Hercules of Lysippus, and probably executed in the Macedonian period. The Farnese Hercules is so exaggerated in its style as to have been deemed a work ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... original from the Italians? Whether this acute people were not, upon a time, bankers over all Europe? Whether that business was not practised by some of their noblest families who made immense profits by it, and whether to that the house of Medici did not originally owe ...
— The Querist • George Berkeley
... except there was no suggestion of an evil revery holding the current of his thought, or casting a shade of uncertainty over his soul, he looked not unlike the famous Il Penseroso familiar to art-seekers in the Medici Chapel of Florence. Then the eyes of the rivals met. The Greek was in no wise moved. How it would have been with him could he have seen through the disguise of the Sheik may never be said. On the other part, the Sheik lifted his head, and seemed taking on increase of stature. A projecting ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... Roscoe (Life of Lorenzo de Medici, vol. i. p. 75) considers that Hody has refuted this ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... Mr. Pullwool, that Pericles and Lorenzo de' Medici rolled in one, departed for a season from the city which he ruled and blessed. Did he run about the State and preach and crusade in behalf of Fastburg, and stir up the bucolic populations to stir up their ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... in my wrath that I would never again speak to a woman outside my own immediate family. I tried in vain to hire men nurses, and I sympathized with Paolo Orsini, who slipped a cord around the neck of Isabella di Medici, and strangled her; I almost envied Curzon of Simopetra who had never seen a woman. But I soon found that this misanthropy was unjust, that I misjudged the pure depths of life's river by a little dirty froth floating upon ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... Possessed of such an ascendancy, he was not contented to be the spiritual guide of the souls of men, but further devoted himself to the temporal prosperity and grandeur of his country. The house of Medici was at this time masters of the state, and the celebrated Lorenzo de Medici possessed the administration of affairs. But the political maxims of Lorenzo were in discord with those of our preacher. ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... like an Ohio or Danube, which pervaded them with his thoughts and colored all events with the hue of his mind. "What means did you employ?" was the question asked of the wife of Concini, in regard to her treatment of Mary of Medici; and the answer was, "Only that influence which every strong mind has over a weak one." Cannot Caesar in irons shuffle off the irons and transfer them to the person of Hippo or Thraso the turnkey? Is an iron handcuff so immutable a bond? Suppose a slaver on the coast of Guinea ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... their designs, from that people to Chevalier Bernini, an artist whose style resembles that of the Italian poets of the seventeenth century, we may observe the human mind at Rome, in the different characters of the arts, the edifices and the ruins. The middle ages, and the brilliant century of the Medici, re-appear before our eyes in their works, and this study of the past in objects present to our sight, penetrates us with the genius of the times. It was believed that Rome had formerly a mysterious name which was only known to a few adepts; it seems that it is yet necessary ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... to pass a bitter hour of waiting in the drawing-room of a physician well known for his high culture. Every picture in the room was a work of art, but every one was solemn and even severe. Dante, Savonarola, the tombs of the Medici, etc., etc., afforded no escape from sad thoughts. The only relief was in the sweet serenity of Emerson's face, and even in this instance the most severe of all the portraits had been chosen. There was not one point of color in any of the pictures, but indeed ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... pointing to the engraving opposite. "He lives, of course, in the capital; but he rents the villa behind our house,—the Medici Villa,—and when he is tired of Rome he runs down here for a week or so; and so your Gonerilla may have ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... himself which he had painted for the University of Oxford he was represented as holding in his hand a globe inscribed terella. In the Galileo Museum in Florence there is a terrella twenty-seven inches in diameter, of loadstone from Elba, constructed for Cosmo de' Medici. A smaller one contrived by Sir Christopher Wren was long preserved in the museum of the Royal Society (Grew's "Rarities belonging to the Royal Society," p. 364). Evelyn was shown "a pretty terrella described with all ye circles and ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... the condition of our First Parents, carelessly lying on a bed. This creature was more beautiful than they paint Venus and the Graces; she presented to view a form of ivory whiter than snow, and more gracefully shaped than the Venus de' Medici at Florence. The cabinet which contained this treasure was lighted by so many wax-candles that their brilliancy dazzled you, and gave a new splendor to the beauties ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Medici is considered the most perfect model of the female forms, and has been the admiration of the world for ages. Alexander Walker, after minutely describing this celebrated statue, says: "All these admirable characteristics of the female form, the mere existence of which in woman must, one ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... ball to be given day after to-morrow by MM. Jandidier. She has discovered, so one of her friends told me, a wonderful dressmaker, a stranger who has suddenly appeared from no one knows where, who is making a costume of Catherine de Medici's maid of honor; and it is to be ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... interpreted Leonardo's feeling towards the antique in the following note on this passage in manzi's edition, p. 501: "Sappiamo dalla storia, che i valorosi artisti Toscani dell'et dell'oro dell'arte studiarono sugli antichi marmi raccolti dal Magnifico LORENZO DE' MEDICI. Pare che il Vinci a tali monumenti non si accostasse. Quest' uomo sempre riconosce per maestra la natura, e questo principio lo stringeva alla sola imitazione d ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... a face fairer than that of the Ludovician Juno or the Venus of Medici. There is the Saxon blonde with the deep blue eye, whose glances return love for love, whose silken tresses rest upon her shoulders like a wealth of golden fleece, each thread of which looks like a ray of the morning sunbeam. There is the Latin brunette ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... the Princess Belgiojoso (1808-1871), who after the unsuccessful movement for Italian liberty in 1831 left Italy and resided in Paris, where Musset came often to her salon, i. LA NUIT, one of the famous allegorical statues made by Michaelangelo for the tombs of Giuliano and Lorenzo de Medici. ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... wanderings, had finally reached Rome, been educated under the care of his kinsman, Cardinal Pole, cherished as a dear son by the reigning Pontiff, had subsequently appeared at the Tuscan court of Cosmo de Medici; that consequently, since his return to Ireland, he might be considered the chief of the Catholic party there, although, to save himself from attainder and hold possession of his immense wealth in Munster, he displayed the greatest reserve in all his actions, appeared to respect ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... Mary de' Medici, had a talk with him, got angry, "became very red in the face," and wanted to be rid ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... when Gian Giacomo de' Medici laid the country of Siena waste, levelled her luxurious suburbs, and delivered her famine-stricken citizens to the tyranny of the Grand Duke Cosimo, this town has gone on dreaming in suspended decadence. Yet the epithet which was given to her in her days of glory, the title of "Fair ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... men abounded. The Emperor Charles V., Francis I. of France, and Henry VIII. of England, were on the thrones of their respective countries; in Hungary was John Hunyadi, at Constantinople Soliman the Magnificent held rule, while in Rome the "fatal house of Medici" were the successors of Saint Peter. War was a commonplace state of the times, but until the Crescent began to sweep the seas it had its manifestation in the perpetual quarrels of the nations of Christendom, which represented, as a rule, the insatiable ambitions ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... Cardinal—(Armand-Jean Du Plessis)—(1585-1642). The famous minister of Louis XIII; born in Paris, of a noble family of Poitou. Was made Bishop of Lucon by Henry IV at the age of twenty-two. Became Almoner to Marie de Medici, the Regent of France. Was elected a Cardinal in 1622. He wrote many books, including theological works, tragedies, and his own Memoirs. The authenticity of his Testament politique ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... come into the War, but she will be richer than we can ever be for a good many years, while the steel people who make the implements of destruction at Bethlehem will be richest of all. What my man makes I cannot say, but he is a king of sorts, even if not actually a Bethlehem boss, and the Medici are not in it! I have introductions to all the most famous collectors, but, hearing of his splendours, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug. 22, 1917 • Various
... adventurous was the career of Benvenuto Cellini, the marvellous gold worker, painter, sculptor, engraver, engineer, and author. His life, as told by himself, is one of the most extraordinary autobiographies ever written. Giovanni Cellini, his father, was one of the Court musicians to Lorenzo de Medici at Florence; and his highest ambition concerning his son Benvenuto was that he should become an expert player on the flute. But Giovanni having lost his appointment, found it necessary to send his son to learn some trade, and he was apprenticed to a goldsmith. ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... people." The name pater patrice was not borne by the Caesars alone, for the Roman Senate conferred the title upon Cicero, and offered it to Marius, who refused to accept it. "Father of his Country" was the appellation of Cosmo de' Medici, and the Genoese inscribed the same title upon the base of the statue erected to Andrea Doria. One of the later Byzantine Emperors, Andronicus Palaologus, even went so far as to assume this honoured title. Nor has the name "Father of the People" been confined to kings, ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... by the Republic of Venice, in his twenty-second year, to the chair of anatomy at Padua, which he filled for seven years with the highest reputation. He also taught at Bologna, and subsequently, by the invitation of Cosmo de' Medici, at Pisa. The first edition of his work, "De Corporis Humani Fabrica" was printed at Basle, in the year 1543; it is perhaps one of the most successful efforts of human industry and research, and from the date of its publication begins an entirely ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... could have been foreseen at the time. His interest in every kind of art and science was very great, and in spite of his keen intellect, he was all his life subject to a weakness which had been introduced (with other things) from Italy by Catherine de Medici, and had reigned supreme over the courts of her children. He had exercised every known method of inducing the devil to appear to him in person, though, as he has himself told me, without the smallest success. He had spent much time in investigating matters that ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... for the smell of blood, appears to have been introduced into the palaces of France from those of Italy by alliance with the Medici—those ennobled pawnbrokers of the middle ages, whose parvenu taste engendered the fantastic gilding of the renaissance, which they naturalized in the Tuileries and at Fontainbleau, in common with the stiletto and acqua tofana of their poisoners, and the fatalism ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... of Egypt must very much have fallen into disuse during the reigns of the latter Ptolemies, they had at least been left unchanged; and they teach us that the shadow of freedom may be seen, as in Rome under the Caesars, and in Florence under the Medici, long after the substance has been lost. In quarrels between man and man, the thirty judges, from the cities of Thebes, Memphis, and Heliopolis, were still guided by the eight books of the law. ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... to my old friend John Allen: which indeed keeps alive my humanity very much. . . . I have been about to divers Bookshops and have bought several books—a Bacon's Essays, Evelyn's Sylva, Browne's Religio Medici, Hazlitt's Poets, etc. The latter I bought to add to my Paradise, which however has stood still of late. I mean to write out Carew's verses in this letter for you, and your Paradise. As to the Religio, I have read it again: and keep my opinion of it: except admiring the eloquence, and ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... Rex sum, quid honor quid gloria mundi, Est vita mors hominum regia—vado mori. Vado mori miles victo certamine belli, Mortem non didici vincere vado mori. Vado mori medicus, medicamine non relevandus, Quicquid agunt medici respuo vado mori. Vado mori logicus, aliis concludere novi, Concludit breviter mors in ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... is a succession of gorgeous allegoric paintings, done at the instance of Mary of Medici, to celebrate the praise and glory of that family. I was predetermined not to like them for two reasons: first, that I dislike allegorical subjects; and second, that I hate and despise that Medici family and all that belongs to them. So no sympathy with the subjects blinded my eyes, ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... and eight children, of whom nothing is known but that his son Francesco became a painter. Giotto died in 1337, and was buried with great honors in the Church of Santa Maria del Fiore. Lorenzo de Medici erected a monument to his memory. The pupils and followers of Giotto were very numerous, and were called Giotteschi; among these TADDEO GADDI, and his son AGNOLO, are most famous: others were MASO and BERNARDO DI DADDO; but I shall not speak in ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... front of the Villa Medici, and when they got near the Piazza, della Trinita de' Monti they met a man on horseback, who, on seeing them, immediately approached the carriage. It was Archibald Marchmont, who had just arrived ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... learned more of the history of Charles VII than any English boy of my generation. In the Chateau of Blois, the salamanders of Francois Premier, the statue of Diane de Poictiers, the poison cabinet of Catherine de Medici, the dungeons of the Cardinal de Lorraine, became living testimonies of the past under Paragot's imaginative teaching. He had set his heart on educating me; suddenly as the original impulse had seized him, yet it lasted ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... letters are anything but answers. So you still want a motto? You must not take my ironical one, because your book, I take it, is too serious for it. Bickerstaff might have used it for his lucubrations. What do you think of (for a title) Religio Tremuli? or Tremebundi? There is Religio Medici and Laici. But perhaps the volume is not quite Quakerish enough, or exclusively so, for it. Your own "Vigils" is perhaps the best. While I have space, let me congratulate with you the return of spring,—what a summery spring ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb |
