challenged the whole world to meet him in Rome and dispute publicly upon nine hundred theses; but so many of them seemed likely to be paradoxes against the true faith, too brilliantly defended, that the Pope forbade the contest.  Pico dabbled in the black arts, wrote learnedly (in his room at the Badia of Fiesole) on the Mosaic law, was an amorous poet in Italian as well as a serious poet in Latin, and in everything he did was interesting and curious, steeped in Renaissance culture, and inspired by the wish to reconcile the past and the present and humanize Christ and the Fathers.  He found time also to travel much, and he gave most of his fortune to establish a fund to provide penniless girls with marriage portions.  He had enough imagination to be the close friend both of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Savonarola.  Savonarola clothed his dead body in Dominican robes and made him posthumously one of the order which for some time before his death he had desired to join.  He died in 1494 at the early age of thirty-one, two years after Lorenzo.

Angelo Poliziano, known as Politian, was also a Renaissance scholar and also a friend of Lorenzo, and his companion, with Pico, at his death-bed; but although in precocity, brilliancy of gifts, and literary charm he may be classed with Pico, the comparison there ends, for he was a gross sensualist of mean exterior and capable of much pettiness.  He was tutor to Lorenzo’s sons until their mother interfered, holding that his views were far too loose, but while in that capacity he taught also Michelangelo and put him upon the designing of his relief of the battle of the Lapithae and Centaurs.  At the time of Lorenzo and Giuliano’s famous tournament in the Piazza of S. Croce, Poliziano wrote, as I have said, the descriptive allegorical poem which gave Botticelli ideas for his “Birth of Venus” and “Primavera”.  He lives chiefly by his Latin poems; but he did much to make the language of Tuscany a literary tongue.  His elegy on the death of Lorenzo has real feeling in it and proves him to have esteemed that friend and patron.  Like Pico, he survived Lorenzo only two years, and he also was buried in Dominican robes.  Perhaps the finest feat of Poliziano’s life was his action in slamming the sacristy doors in the face of Lorenzo’s pursuers on that fatal day in the Duomo when Giuliano de’ Medici was stabbed.

Ghirlandaio’s fresco in S. Trinita of the granting of the charter to S. Francis gives portraits both of Poliziano and Lorenzo in the year 1485.  Lorenzo stands in a little group of four in the right-hand corner, holding out his hand towards Poliziano, who, with Lorenzo’s son Giuliano on his right and followed by two other boys, is advancing up the steps.  Poliziano is seen again in a Ghirlandaio fresco at S. Maria Novella.

From S. Marco we are going to SS.  Annunziata, but first let us just take a few steps down the Via Cavour, in order to pass the Casino Medici, since it is built on the site of the old Medici garden where Lorenzo de’ Medici established Bertoldo, the sculptor, as head of a school of instruction, amid those beautiful antiques which we have seen in the Uffizi, and where the boy Michelangelo was a student.