Her face is not beautiful, for the features, especially the nose, are large and prominent; but it is pure and expressive of vivid individuality.  The hair curls in crisp short clusters, and the ear, fine and shaped almost like a Faun’s, reveals the scrupulous fidelity of the sculptor.  Italian art has, in truth, nothing more exquisite than this still sleeping figure of the girl, who, when she lived, must certainly have been so rare of type and lovable in personality.  If Busti’s Lancinus Curtius be the portrait of a humanist, careworn with study, burdened by the laurel leaves that were so dry and dusty—­if Gaston de Foix in the Brera, smiling at death and beautiful in the cropped bloom of youth, idealise the hero of romance—­if Michelangelo’s Penseroso translate in marble the dark broodings of a despot’s soul—­if Della Porta’s Julia Farnese be the Roman courtesan magnificently throned in nonchalance at a Pope’s footstool—­if Verocchio’s Colleoni on his horse at Venice impersonate the pomp and circumstance of scientific war—­surely this Medea exhales the flower-like graces, the sweet sanctities of human life, that even in that turbid age were found among high-bred Italian ladies.  Such power have mighty sculptors, even in our modern world, to make the mute stone speak in poems and clasp the soul’s life of a century in some five or six transcendent forms.

The Colleoni, or Coglioni, family were of considerable antiquity and well-authenticated nobility in the town of Bergamo.  Two lions’ heads conjoined formed one of their canting ensigns; another was borrowed from the vulgar meaning of their name.  Many members of the house held important office during the three centuries preceding the birth of the famous general, Bartolommeo.  He was born in the year 1400 at Solza, in the Bergamasque Contado.  His father Paolo, or Puho as he was commonly called, was poor and exiled from the city, together with the rest of the Guelf nobles, by the Visconti.  Being a man of daring spirit, and little inclined to languish in a foreign state as the dependent on some patron, Puho formed the bold design of seizing the Castle of Trezzo.  This he achieved in 1405 by fraud, and afterwards held it as his own by force.  Partly with the view of establishing himself more firmly in his acquired lordship, and partly out of family affection, Puho associated four of his first-cousins in the government of Trezzo.  They repaid his kindness with an act of treason and cruelty, only too characteristic of those times in Italy.  One day while he was playing at draughts in a room of the Castle, they assaulted him and killed him, seized his wife and the boy Bartolommeo, and flung them into prison.  The murdered Puho had another son, Antonio, who escaped and took refuge with Giorgio Benzone, the tyrant of Crema.  After a short time the Colleoni brothers found means to assassinate him also; therefore Bartolommeo alone, a child of whom no heed was taken, remained to be his father’s avenger.  He and his mother