being chosen and another gonfaloniere, the people were called together in the Piazza and a new Balia was created, all of Piero’s creatures.  This so terrified “the Mountain” that they fled out of the city, but Luca Pitti remained, trusting in Giovanni Tornabuoni and the promises of Piero.  Now mark his fall.  He quickly learned the difference betwixt victory and misfortune, betwixt honour and disgrace.  His house, which formerly was thronged with visitors and the better sort of citizens, was now grown solitary and unfrequented.  When he appeared abroad in the streets, his friends and relations were not only afraid to accompany him, but even to own or salute him, for some of them had lost their honours for doing it, some their estates, and all of them were threatened.  The noble structures which he had begun were given over by the workmen, the good deeds requited with contumely, the honours he had conferred with infamy and disgrace.  For many persons, who in the day of his authority had loaded him with presents, required them again in his distress, pretending they were but loans and no more.  Those who before had cried him to the skies, cursed him down as fast for his ingratitude and violence; so that now, when it was too late, he began to repent himself that he had not taken Soderini’s advice and died honourably, seeing that he must now live with dishonour.

So far Machiavelli.  The unfinished, half-ruinous palace, designed in 1444 by Brunellesco, was a century later sold by the Pitti, quite ruined now, to Eleonora, the wife of Grand Duke Cosimo, and was finished by Ammanati.  The great wings were added later.  In May 1550, Cosimo I entered Palazzo Pitti as his Grand-Ducal residence.  To-day it is the King of Italy’s Palace in Florence.

The Galleria Palatina is a gallery of the masterpieces of the high Renaissance, formed by the Grand Dukes, who brought here from their own villas and from the Uffizi the greatest works in their possession.  Like other Italian galleries, it suffered from Napoleon’s generals; but though sixty or more pictures were taken to Paris, they all seem to have been returned.  Here the Grand Dukes gathered ten pictures by Titian eight by Raphael, as well as two, the Madonna del Baldacchino and the Vision of Ezekiel, which he designed, ten by Andrea del Sarto, six by Fra Bartolommeo, two lovely Peruginos, two splendid portraits by Ridolfo Ghirlandajo, four portraits by Tintoretto, several pictures by Rubens, two portraits, one of himself, by Rembrandt, a magnificent Vandyck, and many lesser pictures.  In the royal apartments, among other interesting or beautiful things, is Botticelli’s Pallas and the Centaur, painted, as some have thought, to celebrate Lorenzo’s return from Naples in 1480.  It is, then, rather as a royal gallery than as a museum that we must consider the Galleria Palatina, a more splendid if less catholic Salon Carre, the Tribuna of Italian painting.  It is strange that, among all the beautiful and splendid