The Marquis made his brilliant little court the resort of the arts and letters; and hither from Florence came once the elegant Politian, who composed his tragedy of “Orfeo” in Mantua, and caused it to be first represented before Lodovico.  But it must be confessed that this was a soil in which art flourished better than literature, and that even born Mantuan poets went off, after a while, and blossomed in other air.  The painter Mantegna, whom the Marquis invited from Padua, passed his whole life here, painting for the Marquis in the palaces and churches.  The prince loved him, and gave him a house, and bestowed other honors upon him; and Mantegna executed for Lodovico his famous pictures representing the Triumph of Julius Caesar. [Now at Hamilton Court, in England.] It was divided into nine compartments, and, as a frieze, went round the upper part of Lodovico’s newly erected palace of San Sebastian.  Mantegna also painted a hall in the Castello di Corte, called the Stanza di Mantegna, and there, among other subjects of fable and of war, made the portraits of Lodovico and his wife.  It was partly the wish to see such works of Mantegna as still remained in Mantua that took us thither; and it was chiefly this wish that carried us, the morning after our arrival, to the Castello di Corte, or the Ducal Palace.  Our thirst for Mantegnas was destined to be in no degree satisfied in this pile, but it was full of things to tempt us to forget Mantegna, and to make us more and more interested in the Gonzagas and their Mantua.

It is taken for granted that no human being ever yet gained an idea of any building from the most artful description of it; but if the reader cares to fancy a wide piazza, or open square, with a church upon the left hand, immense, uninteresting edifices on the right, and an ugly bishop’s palace of Renaissance taste behind him, he may figure before him as vastly and magnificently as he pleases the superb Gothic front of the Castello di Corte.  This facade is the only one in Italy that reminds you of the most beautiful building in the world, the Ducal Palace at Venice; and it does this merely by right of its short pillars and deep Gothic arches in the ground story, and the great breadth of wall that rises above them, unbroken by the second line of columns which relieves and lightens this wall in the Venetian palace.  It stands at an extremity of the city, upon the edge of the broad fresh-water lagoon, and is of such extent as to include within its walls a whole court-city of theatre, church, stables, playground, course for riding, and several streets.  There is a far older edifice adjoining the Castello di Corte, which Guido Bonacolsi began, and which witnessed the bloody end of his line, when Louis Gonzaga surprised and slew his last successor.  But the palace itself is all the work of the Gonzagas, and it remains the monument of their kingly state and splendid pride.