disaster; and now the only man who by his diplomatical sagacity could maintain the balance of power had been taken from them.  To his friends and dependants in Florence the loss appeared irreparable.  Poliziano poured forth his sorrow in a Latin threnody of touching and simple beauty.  Two years later both he and Pico della Mirandola followed their master to the grave.  Marsilio Ficino passed away in 1499; and a friend of his asserted that the sage’s ghost appeared to him.  The atmosphere was full of rumours, portents, strange premonitions of revolution and doom.  The true golden age of the Italian Renaissance may almost be said to have ended with Lorenzo de’ Medici’s life.

CHAPTER II

I

After the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Michelangelo returned to his father’s home, and began to work upon a statue of Hercules, which is now lost.  It used to stand in the Strozzi Palace until the siege of Florence in 1530, when Giovanni Battista della Palla bought it from the steward of Filippo Strozzi, and sent it into France as a present to the king.

The Magnificent left seven children by his wife Clarice, of the princely Roman house of the Orsini.  The eldest, Piero, was married to Alfonsina, of the same illustrious family.  Giovanni, the second, had already received a cardinal’s hat from his kinsman, Innocent VIII.  Guiliano, the third, was destined to play a considerable part in Florentine history under the title of Duke of Nemours.  One daughter was married to a Salviati, another to a Ridolfi, a third to the Pope’s son, Franceschetto Cybo.  The fourth, Luisa, had been betrothed to her distant cousin, Giovanni de’ Medici; but the match was broken off, and she remained unmarried.

Piero now occupied that position of eminence and semi-despotic authority in Florence which his father and grandfather had held; but he was made of different stuff, both mentally and physically.  The Orsini blood, which he inherited from his mother, mixed but ill in his veins with that of Florentine citizens and bankers.  Following the proud and insolent traditions of his maternal ancestors, he began to discard the mask of civil urbanity with which Cosimo and Lorenzo had concealed their despotism.  He treated the republic as though it were his own property, and prepared for the coming disasters of his race by the overbearing arrogance of his behaviour.  Physically, he was powerful, tall, and active; fond of field-sports, and one of the best pallone-players of his time in Italy.  Though he had been a pupil of Poliziano, he displayed but little of his father’s interest in learning, art, and literature.  Chance brought Michelangelo into personal relations with this man.  On the 20th of January 1494 there was a heavy fall of snow in Florence, and Piero sent for the young sculptor to model a colossal snow-man in the courtyard of his palace.  Critics have treated this as an insult