It was just at this epoch that Duke Federigo built his castle at Urbino.  One of the ablest and wealthiest Condottieri of his time, one of the best instructed and humanest of Italian princes, he combined in himself the qualities which mark that period of transition.  And these he impressed upon his dwelling-house, which looks backward to the mediaeval fortalice and forward to the modern palace.  This makes it the just embodiment in architecture of Italian romance, the perfect analogue of the ‘Orlando Innamorato.’  By comparing it with the castle of the Estes at Ferrara and the Palazzo del Te of the Gonzagas at Mantua, we place it in its right position between mediaeval and Renaissance Italy, between the age when principalities arose upon the ruins of commercial independence and the age when they became dynastic under Spain.

The exigencies of the ground at his disposal forced Federigo to give the building an irregular outline.  The fine facade, with its embayed loggie and flanking turrets, is placed too close upon the city ramparts for its due effect.  We are obliged to cross the deep ravine which separates it from a lower quarter of the town, and take our station near the Oratory of S. Giovanni Battista, before we can appreciate the beauty of its design, or the boldness of the group it forms with the cathedral dome and tower and the square masses of numerous out-buildings.  Yet this peculiar position of the palace, though baffling to a close observer of its details, is one of singular advantage to the inhabitants.  Set on the verge of Urbino’s towering eminence, it fronts a wave-tossed sea of vales and mountain summits toward the rising and the setting sun.  There is nothing but illimitable air between the terraces and loggias of the Duchess’s apartments and the spreading pyramid of Monte Catria.

A nobler scene is nowhere swept from palace windows than this, which Castiglione touched in a memorable passage at the end of his ‘Cortegiano.’  To one who in our day visits Urbino, it is singular how the slight indications of this sketch, as in some silhouette, bring back the antique life, and link the present with the past—­a hint, perhaps, for reticence in our descriptions.  The gentlemen and ladies of the court had spent a summer night in long debate on love, rising to the height of mystical Platonic rapture on the lips of Bembo, when one of them exclaimed, ‘The day has broken!’ ’He pointed to the light which was beginning to enter by the fissures of the windows.  Whereupon we flung the casements wide upon that side of the palace which looks toward the high peak of Monte Catria, and saw that a fair dawn of rosy hue was born already in the eastern skies, and all the stars had vanished except the sweet regent of the heaven of Venus, who holds the borderlands of day and night; and from her sphere it seemed as though a gentle wind were breathing, filling the air with eager freshness, and waking among the numerous woods upon the neighbouring hills the sweet-toned symphonies of joyous birds.’