"Medici" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with the realities and subtleties of character and of motive' which Swinburne finds largely lacking in them. A newspaper critic, reviewing the book in 1861, said: 'We should have conceived it hardly possible to make the crimes of Catherine de' Medici dull, however they were presented. Swinburne, however, has done so.' It seems to me, on the contrary, that the whole action, undramatic as it is in the strict sense of the theatre, is breathlessly interesting. The ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... holding the book and ink-bottle in this picture, "The Coronation of the Virgin," lived four hundred years ago. Their names are Giovanni and Giulio de' Medici. Botticelli, the artist, knew them well for he was born and brought up in Florence and used to spend a great deal of time ...
— The Children's Book of Celebrated Pictures • Lorinda Munson Bryant
... year 1557, when Gian Giacomo de' Medici laid the country of Siena waste, levelled her luxurious suburbs, and delivered her famine-stricken citizens to the tyranny of the Grand Duke Cosimo, this town has gone on dreaming in suspended decadence. ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... which stands at one side of the edifice, that was built by Marie de Medici for the astrologer whom she brought with her to Paris from Florence. On account of its historic interest, this structure will be preserved. On either side of this tower, overlooking the roofs of the neighboring dwellings, are perceived the summit of a tower of St. Eustache church and a campanile ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... elbow and ordered his three friends to go away. They obeyed at once, and scarcely had they left by one door than the curtain of the other was raised, and the monk, pale, immovable, solemn, appeared on the threshold. When he perceived him, Lorenzo dei Medici, reading in his marble brow the inflexibility of a statue, fell back on his bed, breathing a sigh so profound that one might have ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... could not suppose that the delay could be serious, feeling himself a little feverish, kept his room, and did not go to see the Marquis d'Espard. This day lost was, to this affair, what on the Day of Dupes the cup of soup had been, taken by Marie de Medici, which, by delaying her meeting with Louis XIII., enabled Richelieu to arrive at Saint-Germain before her, and ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... of the entertainments which ripened into Italian opera belongs to the last years of the fifteenth century, and was the work of the brilliant Politian, known as one of the revivalists of Greek learning attached to the court of Cosmo de' Medici and his son Lorenzo. This was the musical drama of "Orfeo." The story was written in Latin, and sung in music principally choral, though a few solo phrases were given to the principal characters. It was performed at Rome with great ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... of wild beasts were exhibited, for the popular amusement, in many parts of Italy. Raumer, Geschichte der Hohenstaufen, v. iii. p. 571. Gibbon, moreover, is mistaken; as a giraffe was presented to Lorenzo de Medici, either by the sultan of Egypt or the king of Tunis. Contemporary authorities are quoted in the old work, Gesner de Quadrupedibum ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... city of Florence was entering on the Golden Age of its history toward the end of the fifteenth century. Lorenzo, called the Magnificent, was head of the house of Medici, and first citizen of the proud Republic. He was himself an artist, a poet, and a philosopher; he loved the beautiful things of life, and had gathered about him a little court of ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... eternal-feminine type, longing for motherhood, but denying it for his sake; whether he would not be happier now in looking at her portrait if some warm tint from a Renaissance Madonna had mellowed the radiant Medici Venus who smiled from the frame. He was seized by a desire to turn the gazing picture ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... foreign politics. The embassy of the daughter of the King of France (who, by the date of the affair of the ducats, should be Charles VII) has been compared to a diplomatic sally of the mother of the childless actual King of France (Henri III), in 1586, when Catherine de Medici was no chicken. I do not see in the embassy of the Princess of the story any "intimate acquaintance with contemporary foreign politics" about 1591-3. The introduction of Mayenne as an adherent of the King of Navarre, shows either a most confused ignorance of foreign politics on the part ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... crowd, inquiring and disputing, and was presently absorbed in discussing the newest development of Florentine politics, the death of Lorenzo de Medici, and whether or not this death was the beginning of the time of tribulation that Savonarola had been seeing in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... glorious view over the gardens where, even in winter, tangled masses of flowers ran riot, while beyond lay the picturesque old red-roofed Tuscan city. Fiesole is distinctly a village of the wealthy, for the several colossal villas, built in the days of the Medici and even before, are now owned by rich ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... who is too thin, and not even so tall as the Venus de' Medici, may still be possessed of personal attractions. It was not altogether a matter of certainty, in this case, that the attractions were sufficiently remarkable to excite general admiration. The fine colour and the plump healthy cheeks, the broad smile, ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... his ferocity. Sixtus IV, a mighty being and a character of a much more powerful cast than even Alexander VI, was at war with Florence, where he had countenanced the Pazzi conspiracy for the murder of the Medici. He had made Girolamo Riario a great prince in Romagna, and later Alexander VI planned a similar career for ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... his death, St. James's was given to his brother Charles, who frequently resided here after his accession to the throne, and here Henrietta Maria gave birth to Charles II., James II., and the Princess Elizabeth. In 1638 the palace was given as a refuge to the queen's mother, Marie de Medici, who lived here for three years, with a pension of L3,000 a month! Hither Charles I. was brought from Windsor as the prisoner of the Parliament, his usual attendants, with one exception, being debarred access to him, and being replaced by common ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... the Italian poets of the seventeenth century, we may observe the human mind at Rome, in the different characters of the arts, the edifices and the ruins. The middle ages, and the brilliant century of the Medici, re-appear before our eyes in their works, and this study of the past in objects present to our sight, penetrates us with the genius of the times. It was believed that Rome had formerly a mysterious name which was only known to a few adepts; it seems that it is yet necessary to be initiated into ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... in rock-crystal of an Egyptian king of the Eighteenth Dynasty; madonnas and saints by Fifteenth Century painters; a complete garden set, fountain, statues and all, from a Pompeiian villa; Greek bronze and silver vessels and statuettes; Bernini's bust of the Cardinal de Medici; Fifteenth Century tapestries, and so many other objects of mediaeval and ancient art that a special catalogue has been prepared to ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... reason, but in the most ordinary words of the English language. It is, in itself, a matter perfectly indifferent whether we call a foreigner by the name which he bears in his own language, or by that which corresponds to it in ours; whether we say Lorenzo de Medici, or Lawrence de Medici, Jean Chauvin, or John Calvin. In such cases established usage is considered as law by all writers except Mr Mitford. If he were always consistent with himself, he might be excused for sometimes disagreeing with ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... little tight little isle, where habit is the very antithesis of the airy license of "Abroad," it is not, as it is in the artistic haunts of the Continent, en regle to vaunt one's self on the paucity of one's shekels or to acknowledge acquaintance with the Medici's pills in their modern form of the Three ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... for money. They had been at the Vatican when Alexander VI. had won renown as a secret murderer. They had seen, close at hand, the merciless cruelty of Julius II. They had carefully noted the crimes of Sixtus IV., which culminated in the assassination of Julian de' Medici beneath the dome of Florence at the moment the Host was uplifted. They had sat near Leo X. while he enjoyed the obscenities of the Calandria and the Mandragora,—plays which, in the most corrupt of modern cities, would, in our day, be stopped by the police. No wonder ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... the whole question was judged more strictly: Varchi discovers that the succession of the legitimate children 'is ordered by reason, and is the will of heaven from eternity.' Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici founded his claim to the lordship of Florence on the fact that he was perhaps the fruit of a lawful marriage, and at all events son of a gentlewoman, and not, like Duke Alessandro, of a servant girl. At this time ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... extraordinary physical beauty of type, of a breadth and nobility which contrast with the smaller, prettier, and less dignified forms of later art; the gesture, too, has not the conscious coquetry which we see in such a work as the Venus de' Medici. But, on the other hand, we must recognise that the statue represents the goddess under a human rather than a divine aspect, that even her mood and feeling of timidity are portrayed in a manner which, ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... John and six saints in the National Gallery (No. 677) also recalls the story of his wildness, inasmuch as it came from the Palazzo Medici, where Filippo worked for the great Cosimo di Medici. It was well known that Filippo paid no attention to his work when he was engaged in the pursuit of his pleasures, and so Cosimo shut him up in the palace so that he might not waste his time in running about while ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... studies at Paris and Louvain, that he was invited by the Republic of Venice, in his twenty-second year, to the chair of anatomy at Padua, which he filled for seven years with the highest reputation. He also taught at Bologna, and subsequently, by the invitation of Cosmo de' Medici, at Pisa. The first edition of his work, "De Corporis Humani Fabrica" was printed at Basle, in the year 1543; it is perhaps one of the most successful efforts of human industry and research, and from the date of its publication begins an entirely new era in the science ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... or a Hamlet; a loafer become a Girard or Astor, a Rothschild, Stewart, Vanderbilt, Field, Gould, or Rockefeller; a coward win at Yorktown, Wagram, Waterloo, or Richmond; a careless stonecutter carve an Apollo, a Minerva, a Venus de Medici, or a Greek Slave? Does luck raise rich crops on the land of the sluggard, weeds and brambles on that of the industrious farmer? Does luck make the drunkard sleek and attractive, and his home cheerful, while the ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... de' Medici, that monster of genius, had not long printed his Caccia col falcone. Angioletto had it by heart against his need; using it now he could never have made a better choice—as, indeed, he guessed. It was as good as a play to watch Borso's wary eyes at the commencement of this piece, and to see them ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... Venus—the beautiful Venus?—the Venus of the Medici?—she of the diminutive head and the gilded hair? Part of the left arm (here his voice dropped so as to be heard with difficulty,) and all the right, are restorations; and in the coquetry of that right arm lies, I think, the quintessence of all affectation. Give me the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... with him, seeing that he died and was buried some two hundred years ago. Yes, a very real man, who did his work well, but to little profit. He was a peasant lad of Absam, who, probably going to Innspruck whilst the archduke Leopold and his Italian consort, Claudia dei Medici, kept their gay court there, thought Italian violins were harsh and unsatisfactory in tone, and so quietly worked out one of a different make from his own principles; which has since gained for him the name of 'the father of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... not above turning his attention to goldsmithing, and in 1428 made a seal for Giovanni de Medici, a cope-button and mitre for Pope Martin V., and a gold nutre with precious stones weighing five and a half pounds, for ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... the classics enshrined? Again, the example set by the tyrants who had grasped the reins of power in the Italian States, by men like Agnello of Pisa, the Viscontis and Francesco Sforza of Milan, Ferrante of Naples, and the de' Medici of Florence, was calculated to lower the moral standard of the period, and to promote an abandonment of Christian principles of truth, and justice, and purity of life. Everywhere men became more addicted to the pursuit of sensual pleasure, of vain glory, and ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... revive the fire in nuptial cinders." [574] Moslems read it, just as they took ambergrised coffee, and for the same reason. Nafzawi, indeed, is the very antithesis of the English Sir Thomas Browne, with his well-known passage in the Religio Medici, [575] commencing "I could be content that we might procreate like trees." Holding that no natural action of a man is more degrading than another, Nafzawi could never think of amatory pleasures without ejaculating "Glory be to God," ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... Salisbury Plain, and it is nothing more than Hounslow Heath, or any other uninclosed down. It appears to me that St. Peter's the Coliseum, the Pantheon, the Palatine, the Apollo, the Laocoon, the Venus dei Medici, the Hercules, the Dying Gladiator, the Moses of Michelangelo, and all the higher works of Canova (I have already spoken of those of ancient Greece, still extant in that country, or transported to England), are as poetical as Mont Blanc, or Mount AEtna, perhaps still more so, as they ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... the second time, and you will soon see how the Emperor Charles bestows honours upon her husband. His Majesty understood how to provide for his daughter, who is his first child. Her former marriage, it is true, was short. Alessandro de' Medici, to whom she was wedded at almost too early an age, was murdered scarcely a year after their nuptials. Her present husband, the Duke of Parma, whom you will see, is, on the contrary, younger than she, but since the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... wound received from Montgomery in a tournay held to celebrate the conclusion of the treaty, and Catherine de Medici became Queen-Regent of France, and deferred carrying out the secret plot till St. Bartholomew's ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... there since last night, and yet he stood gazing about him with an interest which a long-married man does not often feel in his own reception hall. The rugs, the two pillars, the Spanish tapestry chairs, were all the same. The Venus di Medici stood on her column as usual and there, at the end of the hall (opposite the front door), was the full-length portrait of Mrs. Wanning, maturely blooming forth in an evening gown, signed with the name of a French painter who seemed purposely to have made his signature indistinct. ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... supposed to be for Lombard room, i.e., the room in which pawnbrokers used to store pledged property. The Lombards introduced into this country the three balls, said to be taken from the arms of the Medici family. ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... of the Medici family, succeeded Julius. He sent Michelangelo to Florence to employ his talents upon the Medicean church of San Lorenzo. He dismissed Perugino, Pinturicchio and Piero Delia Francesca, although Raphael in tears pleaded for them all. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... is symbolical of all that was to follow that at that point stands, looking down the vista of the centuries, the brilliant and sinister figure of Machiavelli. From that date onwards international policy has meant Machiavellianism. Sometimes the masters of the craft, like Catherine de Medici or Napoleon, have avowed it; sometimes, like Frederick the Great, they have disclaimed it. But always they have practised it. They could not, indeed, practise anything else. For it is as true of an aggregation of States as of an aggregation of individuals ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... Neither of the three could be said to write books, but they accumulated vast storehouses, whence thousands of volumes might be, and have been compiled. There is nothing in Burton so low as in many of the 'Essays' of Montaigne, but there is nothing so lofty as in passages of Browne's 'Religio Medici' and 'Urn-Burial.' Burton has been a favourite quarry to literary thieves, among whom Sterne, in his 'Tristram Shandy,' stands pre-eminent. To his 'Anatomy' he prefixes a poem, a few stanzas of ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... I may speak in the language of common life, always slept with his wife. He went every evening down to Josephine by a small staircase leading from a wardrobe attached to his cabinet, and which had formerly been the chapel of Maria de Medici. I never went to Bonaparte's bedchamber but by this staircase; and when he came to our cabinet it was always by the wardrobe which I have mentioned. The door opened opposite the only window of our room, and it commanded ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the great negotiators, when they have not been women, have had women at their elbows. Madame de Pompadour was ill served; she had not found her Gondremark; but what a mighty politician! Catherine de' Medici, too, what justice of sight, what readiness of means, what elasticity against defeat! But alas! madam, her Featherheads were her own children; and she had that one touch of vulgarity, that one trait of the good-wife, that she suffered family ties and ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... commandant of the fortress, an ancient-looking stronghold, built by the Medici family, over which we were conducted by his adjutant, a courteous gentleman with a red nose, who walked as if keeping time to military music. From the summit of the tower we had an extensive and most ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... in Italy had its academy with some strange fantastic name, which was an important element in the intellectual life of the people, and exercised a critical control over the literature of the day. Up to the year 1814 the Della Cruscans assembled in the Palazzo Riccardi, the ancient palace of the Medici; but that stately building being required for Government purposes, the members have since been accommodated in San Marco, where they have sunk into obscurity, many of the inhabitants of Florence being altogether ignorant of the existence of such an institution in their city. ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... he executed a very great work in Rome for the Neapolitan Cardinal, Olivieri Caraffa, at the request of the elder Lorenzo de' Medici, who was a friend of that Cardinal. While going thither for that purpose, he passed through Spoleto at the wish of Lorenzo, in order to give directions for the making of a marble tomb for his father Fra Filippo at the expense of ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... will take, for an example, Sir Thomas Browne, as to whom the average person has no offensive juvenile memories. He is bound to have read somewhere that the style of Sir Thomas Browne is unsurpassed by anything in English literature. One day he sees the *Religio Medici* in a shop-window (or, rather, outside a shop-window, for he would hesitate about entering a bookshop), and he buys it, by way of a mild experiment. He does not expect to be enchanted by it; a profound instinct tells him that Sir Thomas Browne is "not ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... Whether this acute people were not, upon a time, bankers over all Europe? Whether that business was not practised by some of their noblest families who made immense profits by it, and whether to that the house of Medici did not originally owe ...
— The Querist • George Berkeley
... was as subjective as it was objective. He saw the soul of Fra Lippo Lippi and the soul of his time as vividly as he saw the streets of Florence at night, the watch, the laughing girls, and the palace of the Medici round the corner. It was a remarkable combination, and it is by this combination of the subjective and objective imagination that he draws into some dim approach to Shakespeare; and nowhere closer than ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... the nobles, the Duke of Epernon, from the corpse of the King, by whose side he was sitting when Ravaillac struck him, strides into the Parliament of Paris, and orders it to declare the late Queen, Mary of Medici, Regent; and when this Parisian court, knowing full well that it had no right to confer the regency, hesitated, he laid his hand on his sword, and declared, that, unless they did his bidding at once, his sword should be drawn from its scabbard. This threat did its work. Within ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... emperor.[***] The dread of losing England, and of fortifying the Lutherans by so considerable an accession, made small impression on Clement's mind, in comparison of the anxiety for his personal safety, and the fond desire of restoring the Medici to their dominion in Florence. As soon, therefore, as he had adjusted all terms with the emperor he laid hold of the pretence of justice, which required him, as he asserted, to pay regard to the queen's appeal; and suspending the commission of the legates, he adjourned ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... Swiss Songs, which are now sung by the youth of many of the cantons; and various Swiss poets have successfully composed on national subjects, associated with their best feelings. In such paternal governments as was that of Florence under the Medici, we find that songs and dances for the people engaged the muse of Lorenzo, who condescended to delight them with pleasant songs composed in popular language; the example of such a character was followed by the men of genius of the age. These ancient songs, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... evidence is mountain high. Within a week the national scaffold will have done its work, and be laid away forever. This prompt and necessary justice will signal the last public assassination in America. Borgia, and Medici, and Brinvilliers, have left no descendants on this side of ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... this time Francesco I. (of the illustrious house of Medici) was Grand Duke of Tuscany, his father Cosimo I. having exchanged the title of Duke of Florence for that of Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1569. Francesco did much for the encouragement of art and science. He founded the well-known ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... conferred by Cosimo de' Medici on learning was the accumulation and the housing of large libraries. During his exile he built the library of S. Giorgio Maggiore at Venice, and after his return to Florence he formed three separate collections ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... there is a remedy. The old Duke of Florence, last of the Medici, is about to die childless: let the now Duke of Lorraine, your Imperial Majesty's intended Son-in-law, have Florence instead.—And so it had to be settled. 'Lorraine? To Stanislaus, to France?' exclaimed the poor Kaiser, still more the poor Reich, and poor Duke Franz. This was the bitterest ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... had finally reached Rome, been educated under the care of his kinsman, Cardinal Pole, cherished as a dear son by the reigning Pontiff, had subsequently appeared at the Tuscan court of Cosmo de Medici; that consequently, since his return to Ireland, he might be considered the chief of the Catholic party there, although, to save himself from attainder and hold possession of his immense wealth in Munster, he displayed the greatest reserve ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... brings back incidents of foreign travel, and opens up long vistas of delightful memories. For me, every bit of old pottery on the tops of the bookcases has its history. That Majolica jar painted with the Medici arms, and those Montelupo plates, were bought in Florence; those brass salvers with heads of Doges in repousse work were picked up in a dark old shop on one of the side canals of Venice. The tall jars, yellow, green, white, and brown, with grotesque dragon mouths and twisted handles, are ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... quite a small boy, a straw hat with black ribbons tied under the chin has made me feel ill. If I yielded to my natural impulses now, I should hide my face in Miss Champion's lap, and kick and scream until you took it off. I will paint you in the black velvet gown you wore last night, with the Medici collar; and the jolly arrangement of lace and diamonds on your head. And in your hand you shall hold an antique ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... came to occupy the position of princes of one of the Italian states, and were elected, like the doges of Venice, by a small oligarchy. Within seventy years the families of Borgia, Piccolomini, Rovere, and Medici were each represented by more than one pontiff, and a majority of the others were nearly related by blood or marriage to one of these great stocks. The cardinals were appointed from the pontiff's sons or nephews, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... the urine laid the foundation of much of the popular uroscopy and water-casting that had such a vogue in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His work on the subject passed through a dozen Latin editions, but is best studied in Ideler's "Physici et medici ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... light, matron!" There is a transformation scene for you! Now you see the delicate art colours in the Turkey carpets, and the subdued colours in the Medici Society's ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... too, in his Religio Medici, says—"There is music even in beauty," &c. The coincidence, no doubt, is worth observing, and the task of "tracking" thus a favourite writer "in the snow (as Dryden expresses it) of others" is sometimes not unamusing; but ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... to Rome. But this philosophical debate soon degenerated into an angry and personal quarrel of grammarians; and Bessarion, though an advocate for Plato, protected the national honor, by interposing the advice and authority of a mediator. In the gardens of the Medici, the academical doctrine was enjoyed by the polite and learned: but their philosophic society was quickly dissolved; and if the writings of the Attic sage were perused in the closet, the more powerful Stagyrite continued to reign, the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... says Sir Andrew had the rare faculty of surveying the conditions and circumstances of each one, gathering them up, and clearly seeing what was best to do. Professor Sheridan Delapine says: "He was specially fond of quoting Sydenham's words: 'Tota ars medici est in observationibus.'" ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... The Venus de Medici is considered the most perfect model of the female forms, and has been the admiration of the world for ages. Alexander Walker, after minutely describing this celebrated statue, says: "All these admirable characteristics of the female form, the mere existence of which ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... taught how to cultivate the spiritual sense. This is an art. In it St. Francis de Sales was very proficient. It gave George Herbert and a group of his imitators great contentment in the state to which they were called. As a book of secular meditation the "Religio Medici" is full of good points. For instance, Sir Thomas starts one on the road to meditation on the difference between democracy and freedom, humanity and nationalism in ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... subterranean excavations of a most remarkable character, one of them extending for more than two miles. Down to the time of Henry IV. Albert was known as Ancre. Concini, the Florentine favourite of Mary de' Medici, bought the lordship of Ancre with the title of marquis. With the help of his clever Florentine wife, Leonora Galigai, he completely subjugated the queen and her weak son, Louis XIII.; and, without so much as ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... astonished Parisians, who understood that it was possible to expend a thousand louis upon a dinner for ten persons, but only on the condition of eating pearls, like Cleopatra, or drinking refined gold, like Lorenzo de' Medici. ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... introducer of blank verse—the iambic pentameter without rhyme, occasionally broken for musical effect by a change in the place of the caesural pause. His translation of the Fourth Book of the AEneid, imitated perhaps from the Italian version of the Cardinal de Medici, is said to be the first specimen of blank verse in English. How slow its progress was is proved by Johnson's remarks upon the versification of Milton.[23] Thus in his blank verse Surrey was the forerunner of Milton, and in his rhymed pentameter ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... invested with the cordial assent and the sympathetic encouragement of Robert Barrett Browning. One never-to-be-forgotten day, all ethereal light and loveliness, has left its picture in memory, when, in company with Mr. Browning and his life-long friend, the Marchesa Peruzzi di' Medici (nata Story), the writer of this biography strolled with them under the host's orange trees and among the riotous roses of his Florentine villa, "La Torre All' Antella," listening to their sparkling conversation, ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... embroidery, such as have been handed down from generation to generation through hundreds of years. As an example of this, the Duchess of Marina's cloth of gold train, stitched with small rubies and seed-pearls, had formerly belonged to the family of Lorenzo de Medici. Such garments as these, when they are part of the property of a great house, are worn only on particular occasions, perhaps once in a year; and then they are laid carefully by and sedulously protected from dust and moths and ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... paroxysms of admiration. Of the Uffizi Gallery at Florence he writes: "I have spent three hours this morning in the gallery and I have made up my mind that if of all the treasures I have seen in Italy I were to choose one room it would be the Tribune of this gallery. It contains the Venus de' Medici, the Explorator, the Pancratist, the Dancing Faun and a fine Apollo. These more than outweigh the Laocoon and the Belvedere Apollo at Rome. It contains, besides, the St John of Raphael and many other chefs-d'oeuvre ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... reverse of the binding, and written in the same character with the text, three lines—of which the private history, or particular application, is now forgotten—although we learn, from the word bloys being written at top, that this MS. came from the library of Catherine de Medici—when she ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the lifted visor of the helmet, was calm and benignant; except there was no suggestion of an evil revery holding the current of his thought, or casting a shade of uncertainty over his soul, he looked not unlike the famous Il Penseroso familiar to art-seekers in the Medici Chapel of Florence. Then the eyes of the rivals met. The Greek was in no wise moved. How it would have been with him could he have seen through the disguise of the Sheik may never be said. On the other part, the Sheik lifted his head, ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... of the Medici is so called from its having been in the possession of the princes of that name in Rome when it first attracted attention, about two hundred years ago. An inscription on the base records it to be the work of Cleomenes, an Athenian sculptor of 200 B.C., but ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... a woman. Whose face it is hard to say. Not the Furies, not Lady Macbeth, not Catherine de Medici, not Phillip the Second, not Nero, not any face you have ever seen, but a gathering up from all the faces you have seen—the greatness, the splendor, the savagery, the greed, the pride, the hate, the mercilessness, into one colossal, terrifyingly Satanic woman-face. The ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... youthful ambassador reached France, Henry of Navarre had perished by the knife of Ravaillac, and Marie de' Medici, that wily, cruel, and false Italian, was regent during the minority of her son, Louis XIII. The Jesuits were now {61} all-powerful at the Louvre, and it was decided that Fathers Biard and Ennemond Masse should accompany Biencourt to Acadia. ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... which pervaded them with his thoughts and colored all events with the hue of his mind. "What means did you employ?" was the question asked of the wife of Concini, in regard to her treatment of Mary of Medici; and the answer was, "Only that influence which every strong mind has over a weak one." Cannot Caesar in irons shuffle off the irons and transfer them to the person of Hippo or Thraso the turnkey? Is an iron handcuff so immutable ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... with a air of disgust. "God grant it! For a princess of Valois blood, reared under the teaching of a Medici, had at least the recommendations of nobility and orthodoxy in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... with a church attached to it, without any other means having been employed in its erection than the money which she and her sisters had earned by their own needlework. The Archbishop of Florence (the celebrated Julius de Medici, afterwards Pope) was so struck with the manifest expression of God's will in the whole matter, that he obtained permission from Leo X. for the regular foundation of the convent under the rule of St. Dominic. They were all solemnly clothed on the 18th of November, ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... workmen who thus extended the firm hold of the growing republic to the southern bank. By so doing, they gave their city undoubted command of the imperial route from Germany Romeward, and brought in their train Dante and Giotto, Brunelleschi and Donatello, Fra Angelico and Savonarola, the Medici and the Pitti, Michael Angelo and Raffaele, and all the glories of the Renaissance epoch. For as at Athens, so in Florence, art and literature followed plainly in the wake of commerce. But the rise of Florence was the fall of Fiesole. Already in the eleventh century the undutiful ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... belief. Sir Thomas Browne, though he had written an exposure of "Vulgar Errors," testified in court to his faith in the possibility of witchcraft. Sir Kenelm Digby, in his "Observations on the Religio Medici," takes, perhaps, as advanced ground as any, when he says: "Neither do I deny there are witches; I only reserve my assent till I meet with stronger motives to carry it." The position of even enlightened ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... that Pericles and Lorenzo de' Medici rolled in one, departed for a season from the city which he ruled and blessed. Did he run about the State and preach and crusade in behalf of Fastburg, and stir up the bucolic populations to stir up their ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... was another great personage, who now viewed the movement of Luther with any thing but indifference; and this was Leo X., the reigning pope when the theses were published. He belonged to the illustrious family of the Medici, and was chosen cardinal at the age of thirteen. He was the most elegant and accomplished of all the popes, patronized art and literature, and ornamented his capital with palaces, churches, and statues. But with his sympathy for intellectual excellence, he was prodigal, luxurious, and worldly. ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... poetry of Italy had been composed exclusively in the literary Tuscan of the day. To Florence and to Lorenzo de' Medici in particular is due the honour of having first introduced the rustic speech of the people. His two poems written in the language of the peasants about Florence, La Nencia da Barberino and a canzonet In morte della Nencia, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... executed the Tenerumi di Vitello we have just tasted, were both of them inspired. In the construction of this dish there is to be recognised a breath of the same afflatus which gave us the Florentine campanile, and the Medici tombs, and the portrait of Monna Lisa. When we stand before any one of these masterpieces, we realise at a glance how keen must have been the primal insight, and how strenuous the effort necessary for the evolution of so consummate an achievement; and, with the ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... generator to "make it go." They pride themselves, sometimes justly, on their reasoning powers; but the product of their logic-mill is like artificial flowers, as unprofitable as the icy kiss of the Venus de Medici. Of that knowledge gleaned in the Vale of Sorrow they know nothing; of that wisdom which cannot be demonstrated by the laws of logic they have no more conception than has a mole of the glories of the morning. They are of the earth earthy. ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... where the battle, was fiercest. "I choose to show myself. They shall see the Bearnese," was his reply to those who implored him to have a care for his personal safety. And at last, when the day was done, the victory gained, and more French nobles lay dead on the field, as Catharine de' Medici bitterly declared, than had fallen in a battle for twenty years; when two thousand of the King's best troops had been slain, and when the bodies of Joyeuse and his brother had been laid out in the very room ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the convictions which have become established and because they propose measures which will realize interests of which the society has become conscious. A hero is not needed. Often a mediocre, commonplace man suffices to give the critical turn to thought or interest. "A Gian Angelo Medici, agreeable, diplomatic, benevolent, and pleasure-loving, sufficed to initiate a series of events which kept the occidental races in perturbation through two centuries."[163] Great crises come when great new forces are at work changing ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... misled, she finds something abhorrent in the very nature of the thing. In vain did loyal Frenchmen baptize the weed as the queen's own favorite, Herba Catherinae Medicae; it is easier to admit that Catherine de' Medici was not feminine than that tobacco is. Man also recognizes the antagonism; there is scarcely a husband in America who would not be converted from smoking, if his wife resolutely demanded her right of moiety in the cigar-box. No Lady Mary, no loveliest Marquise, could ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... Three years before "Cavalleria Rusticana" had started the universal conflagration Ruggiero Leoncavallo, who at sixteen years of age had won his diploma at the Naples Conservatory and received the degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Bologna at twenty, had read his dramatic poem "I Medici" to the publisher Ricordi and been commissioned to set it to music. For this work he was to receive 2400 francs. He completed the composition within a year, but there was no contract that the opera should be performed, ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... ambitious activity in parliament. He adopted an attitude of violent hostility to Clarendon. In foreign affairs he inclined strongly to the side of Spain, and opposed the king's marriage with Catherine of Portugal. He persuaded Charles to despatch him to Italy to view the Medici princesses, but the royal marriage and treaty with Portugal were settled in his absence. In June 1663 he made an attempt to upset Clarendon's management of the House of Commons, but his intrigue was exposed to the parliament ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... met Leo X., whose lifelong endeavour was to be found on both sides at once, or at least on the side of the bigger battalions; the Pope recognised Francis's claim to Milan, while Francis undertook to support the Medici in Florence, and to countenance Leo's project for securing the Duchy of Urbino ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... for Michel and for his protector. The spies of Catherine de Medici, mother of the King of France, were everywhere. These had sent word that De la Foret was now attached to the meagre suite of the widow of the great Camisard Montgomery, near the Castle of Mont Orgueil. The Medici, having treacherously slain the chief, became mad with desire to slay the lieutenant. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to pass a bitter hour of waiting in the drawing-room of a physician well known for his high culture. Every picture in the room was a work of art, but every one was solemn and even severe. Dante, Savonarola, the tombs of the Medici, etc., etc., afforded no escape from sad thoughts. The only relief was in the sweet serenity of Emerson's face, and even in this instance the most severe of all the portraits had been chosen. There was not one point of color in any of the pictures, ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... seven[22] satellites. Four of these were among the first celestial objects which Galileo discovered with his "optick tube," and he named them the "Medicean Stars" in honour of his patron, Cosmo de Medici. Being comparatively large bodies they might indeed just be seen with the naked eye, were it not for the overpowering ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... no vulgar poisoner: he was a great artist in poisons, comparable with the Medici or the Borgias. For him murder was a fine art, and he had reduced it to fixed and rigid rules: he had arrived at a point when he was guided not by his personal interest but by a taste for experiment. God ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... of my skin was my own affair, for help I would get from none. Hidden in the inner pocket of my vest was a dispatch to Montluc, the King's lieutenant in the South. In my hand I openly bore a letter, sealed with the palle of the Medici, and addressed in the Queen's own writing to the King. It was to be the means of my freeing the gates of Paris if difficulty arose, and how it did so I ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... may satisfy himself as to the union of commerce and literature by simply reading the history of the Medici, where commerce, literature, and the arts made one of the most splendid, useful, and powerful coalitions that ever were seen in modern times. Here is a fine sentence! Mr. Hammond once, when piqued by my raillery, declared that he never in his life saw, or could have conceived, ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... Medicj, Vulgar Errors, &c." (A reproduction of the page in the Vellum Book recording Browne's gift faces page 46.) The latter volume was evidently a copy of his "Pseudodoxia Epidemica . . . together with the Religio Medici," sixth edition, (London, 1672), which is still ...
— Three Centuries of a City Library • George A. Stephen
... Religio Medici Notes on Junius Notes on Barclay's 'Argenis' Note in Casaubon's 'Persius' Notes on Chapman's Homer Note in Baxter's 'Life of Himself' Fragment of an Essay on Taste Fragment of ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... line of the Wilberforces. Statesmanship runs on in the line of the Adamses. Henry and Catharine of Navarre religious, all their families religious. The celebrated family of the Casini, all mathematicians. The celebrated family of the Medici—grandfather, son and Catharine—all remarkable for keen intellect. The celebrated family ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... which he had painted for the University of Oxford he was represented as holding in his hand a globe inscribed terella. In the Galileo Museum in Florence there is a terrella twenty-seven inches in diameter, of loadstone from Elba, constructed for Cosmo de' Medici. A smaller one contrived by Sir Christopher Wren was long preserved in the museum of the Royal Society (Grew's "Rarities belonging to the Royal Society," p. 364). Evelyn was shown "a pretty terrella described ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... and again he hesitated before raising his hand to the grotesque knocker on the door of the studio, where doubtless the painter was at work—Master Porbus, sometime painter in ordinary to Henri IV till Mary de' Medici ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... unpractised eye. But the 'common green stone' was a great emerald, and the 'little Greek head' was an intaglio of Anacreon, cut some two thousand and odd hundred years ago by an art that is lost; and the setting had been made and chiselled for Maria de' Medici when she married Henry the Fourth of France. Logotheti liked to give Margaret things vastly more rare than she ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... Louvre, had spent an hour with Felix in that glowing embodiment of the pomp and majesty of human flesh known as the Rubens Medici-Room, and now, for the sheer pleasure of it, had decided to walk home. Mrs. Marshall-Smith, endowed with a figure which showed as yet no need for exercise, and having passed youth's restless liking for it, had vetoed the plan as far as she went, and entering her waiting ear, had been borne smoothly ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... with Venice, "the common ports of humanity," whither they were attracted by the fame of the bright galaxy of humanists—of Coluccio Salutati, collector of Latin manuscripts, Manuel Chrysoloras, Niccolo de' Niccoli, grubbing Poggio Bracciolini, Pope Nicholas, sometime Cosimo de' Medici's librarian and the founder of the Vatican Library, Giovanni Aurispa, famous collector of Greek manuscripts in the East, the renowned Guarino da Verona, Palla degli Strozzi, would-be founder of a public library, Cosimo de' Medici, whose princely collections are the chiefest ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... Medici's division to Motta, where I left it, not without regret, however, as better companions could not easily be found, so kind were the officers and jovial the men. They are now encamped around Padua, and will to-morrow march ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... equal to those on tables and other small works in Pietra dura at Florence. It is the taste displayed in outline and application of this ornament, combined with the lightness and simplicity of the building, which gives it an advantage so prodigious over the gloomy portals of the chapel of the Medici. The graceful flow, the harmonious colours, combined with the mild lustre of the marble on which the ornamentation is displayed, form the peculiar charm of the building, and distinguish it from any other in the world. The materials are Lapis Lazuli, Jasper, Heliotrope or ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... opponents of the Guises, who likewise stood so near her in their religious confession. With their consent she once occupied Havre, but allowed it without much hesitation to fall again into the hands of the French government which was then guided by Catharine Medici, who for some time even made common cause with the leaders of the Huguenots. We cannot here follow out these relations any further, for to understand them fully would require us to go into the details of the changeful dissensions in France: for English history these are only ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... Incalculable powers of the human mind as of the incalculable powers of steam!" Had Madame Carolina been the consort of an Italian grand duke, selection would not be difficult; and, to inquire no farther, the court of the Medici alone would afford them everything they wanted. But Germany never had any character, and never produced nor had been the resort of illustrious men and interesting persons. What was to be done? The age of Frederick the Great was ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... rosa camina, ung eglantier, folia myrti habens, sed paulo majora; recta assurgens in mediam altitudinem inter arborem et fruticem; fert spongiolas, quibus utuntur medici, ad malefica capitis ulcera, la malle tigne, vocatur antem vulgo in officinis pharmacopolarum, bedegar."—Stephani de re Hortensi Libellus, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... accept the shop-windows educationally, recalling that when you went to Europe you saw nothing that had not already stared at you through plate-glass on Fifth Avenue—for sale. Who wants to view one of the chairs that a Medici sat in, only to recall that months before he saw its mate in a shop-window at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-first Street; or to contemplate a pious yellow heathen bowed down before the image of Buddha, ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... puissant abbots once held sway, only a memory remains. The fortifications were razed in the seventeenth century and gave place to artizans' houses. The famous Fair of St. Germain has long been suppressed, where Henry IV. on the royal entry of Marie de' Medici, after promising the merchants that they should grow rich, since his queen had de l'argent frais, disappointed them all by chaffering much and buying nothing. Over the entrance of the church within the W. porch ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... money to live upon. Luckily he had no responsibilities; his father and his twin brother had died when he was yet a boy, and his mother, whose only noteworthy achievement had been the naming of her twin sons Marquis de Lafayette and Lorenzo de Medici Randall, had supported herself and educated her child by making coats up to the very day of her death. She was wont to say plaintively, "I'm afraid the faculties was too much divided up between my twins. L. D. M. is awful talented, but I guess M. D. L. ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... prudent enough; and his dethronement is to be charged to destiny—to kismet, rather than to any gate-opening carelessness on the purblind part of himself. 'Prudentia fato major,' said the Florentine. But the Medici was wrong, and before Death bandaged his eyes for eternity it was given him to see that Destiny, for all his caution and for all his craft, had fed his hopes to defeat. And yet, while Mr. Croker may not be charged as the reason of his own removal, some consideration ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... is said that absolutism, descending from father to son, never improves in the descent; in the case of some of the Italian cities it produced monsters. As the historian says: "The last Visconti, the last La Scalas, the last Sforzas, the last Farnesi, the last Medici—magnificent promoters of the humanities as their ancestors had been—were the worst specimens of the human race." The situation of government was partially relieved by the introduction at a later period of the trade guilds. All the industrial elements were organized into guilds, each one ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... Browne, the famous author of "Religio Medici," had expressed a doubt as to whether mice may be bred by putrifaction; but another scientist, Alexander Ross, disposed of this suggestion by the following line of argument which was supposed to be conclusive ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... and philosophy between them have placed Leghorn in the hands of the enemy of the Austrian family, and driven the only profitable commerce of Tuscany from its only port: it is not this sovereign, a far more able statesman than any of the Medici in whose chair he sits, it is not the philosopher Carletti, more ably speculative than Galileo, more profoundly politic than Machiavel, that call upon us so loudly to give the same happy proofs of the same good faith to the republic always the same, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... with which we are daily familiar; and when he did treat them, it was rather as things past, as they appear to us through the atmosphere of the hallowing memory. We have a striking instance of this in his statue of Lorenzo de' Medici; where, retaining of the original only enough to mark the individual, and investing the rest with an air of grandeur that should accord with his actions, he has left to his country, not a mere effigy of the person, but an embodiment of the mind; a portrait ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... the daughter of that Medici to whom Machiavelli had dedicated his Prince. So little did religion actuate her conduct that she challenged Elizabeth to do to the Catholics of England what she herself had done to the Protestants of France, promising that if they were destroyed there would be no loss of her good will.[77] ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... the honour, O Lionello the Magnificent. Verily you are bon prince! The Houses of Valois and of Medici were always kind to artists. But whither would you lead me? Back into that ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... let me digress. The few of my age will remember, and the many younger will have been told, that at this time the Italian queen-mother was the ruling power in France. It was Catharine de' Medici's first object to maintain her influence over Charles the Ninth—her son; who, ricketty, weak, and passionate, was already doomed to an early grave. Her second, to support the royal power by balancing the extreme Catholics against the Huguenots. For the latter purpose she would coquet first ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... little architectural merit, still it is very old, gray and crumbling, plainly telling the story of its age. The city has considerable commerce by the river, both in steam and sailing vessels, and exports a very respectable amount of domestic produce. Here we see the palace where Catharine de Medici and the Duke of Alva planned the terrible massacre of the Huguenots of France. A large, well-arranged public garden begins just at the city gate and extends along the left bank of the Adour, and there are many pleasant drives ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... town on the Loire, 14 m. E. of Tours, with a castle, once the residence of the French kings. The Conspiracy of A., the conspiracy of Conde and the Huguenots in 1560 against Francis II., Catharine de Medici, and the Guises. The Edict of A. (1563) conceded the free exercise of their worship to ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... dwells, in connexion with the first publication (extorted by circumstance) of the Religio Medici, on the natural "inactivity of his disposition"; and he does, as I have said, pass very quietly through an exciting time. Born in the year of the Gunpowder Plot, he was not, in truth, one of those clear and clarifying souls which, in an age ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... jewelled shoe of hers on the neck of rebellion, when she should have held out her soft white hand to make friends of her foes. Her beauty and her grace might have done much, had she inherited with the pride of the Medici something of their finesse and suavity. But he loved her, Denzil, forgave all her follies, her lavish spending and wasteful splendour. 'My wife is a bad housekeeper,' I heard him say once, when she was hanging upon his chair as he sat at the end of the Council table. The palace ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... fulfil one of the darling dreams of my whole life. I must go to Italy, to the holy city of Rome, and kneel upon the graves of Cicero and Caesar. I must see St. Peter's, the Venus de Medici, and the pope." ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... fidelity and with consummate skill. When, after the battle of Ravenna in 1512 the holy league determined upon the downfall of Pier Soderini, Gonfaloniere of the Florentine Republic, and the restoration of the Medici, the efforts of Machiavelli, who was an ardent republican, were in vain; the troops he had helped to organize fled before the Spaniards and the Medici were returned to power. Machiavelli attempted to conciliate his new masters, ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... my wrath that I would never again speak to a woman outside my own immediate family. I tried in vain to hire men nurses, and I sympathized with Paolo Orsini, who slipped a cord around the neck of Isabella di Medici, and strangled her; I almost envied Curzon of Simopetra who had never seen a woman. But I soon found that this misanthropy was unjust, that I misjudged the pure depths of life's river by a little dirty froth floating upon ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... that a contractor of public works, named Bohier, found the miser's treasure and used it in the construction of Chenonceaux, that marvellous chateau which, in spite of the wealth of several kings and the taste of Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de' Medici for building, remains unfinished to the ...
— Maitre Cornelius • Honore de Balzac
... sun is directly above Florence yonder in the distance in the plain, directly across those architectural features which have been so familiar to the world in pictures for some centuries, the Duomo, the Campanile, the Tomb of the Medici, & the beautiful tower of the Palazzo Vecchio; in this position it begins to reveal the secrets of the delicious blue mountains that circle around into the west, for its light discovers, uncovers, & exposes a white snowstorm of villas & cities that you ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... beauty and form, they reached absolute perfection. Hence we have a right to infer that Art can flourish under Pagan as well as Christian influences. It was a comparatively Pagan age in Italy when the great artists arose who succeeded Da Vinci, especially under the patronage of the Medici and the Medicean popes. Christianity has only modified Art by purifying it from sensual attractions. Christianity added very little to Art, until cathedrals arose in their grand proportions and infinite details, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... and two Hippolyti Of Este, a Hercules and Hippolyte Of the Gonzagas' and the Medici, Hunt and fatigue the monster in his flight: Nor Julian lets his good son pass him by; Nor bold Ferrant his brother; nor less wight Is Andrew Doria; nor by any one Is Francis Sforza ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... February 18, 1855, that the reign of the Iron Czar actually came to an end. But the news of his death was made public in Moscow only two days later. For forty-eight hours the sudden closing of that rule, which had been as sombre, as turbulent, as tyrannical as that of any Borgia or Medici, was concealed from the nation. But the morning of the twenty-first found the petty-official world, risen early from sleepless unrest, pushing aside its early tea to re-read the unexpected ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... attitude of Aristides in the Museum of Naples,—from the delicate lines which teach how grace can chasten nudity in the Goddess of the Tribune at Florence, to the embodied melancholy of Hamlet in the brooding Lorenzo of the Medici Chapel,—from the stone despair, the frozen tears, as it were, of all bereaved maternity, in the very bend of Niobe's body and yearning gesture, to the abandon gleaming from every muscle of the Dancing Faun,—from the stern brow of the Knife-grinder, and the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... dare say. Nothing so provokes my anger, and rouses my sense of justice, as to hear other men undeservedly praised. In a word, if you wish to remain friends with me, don't praise anybody. You tell me that the Venus de' Medici is beautiful, or Jacob Omnium is tall. Que diable! Can't I judge for myself? Haven't I eyes and a foot-rule? I don't think the Venus IS so handsome, since you press me. She is pretty, but she has no expression. And as for Mr. Omnium, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... which for centuries had been quite forgotten or absolutely ignored in Italy. Now Western scholars began to take an interest in the Greek language, which had been utterly neglected since the beginning of the Middle Ages. Interesting stories are told of the efforts made by such men as Cosmo de' Medici to gain possession of classical manuscripts. The revival of learning thus brought about had its first permanent influence in the fields of literature and art, but its effect on science could not be long delayed. Quite independently of the Byzantine influence, however, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... still-born; a Medici never survives his swaddling-clothes. Into the tiny graves are huddled a million destinies. The sexton's shovel smothers up a Renaissance; soon the daisies will blow above History. Those eyebrows are lifted, that lip curls, and two fair homes go down in sorrow. ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... engagements, Coleridge could write genuine literary criticisms of the first order. The following letter addressed to Sarah Hutchinson is his opinion of Sir Thomas Browne. He had presented her with a copy of 'Religio Medici' with copious annotations (see 'Athenaeum', 30 May ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... Bartholomew of twelve years later. But the sudden death of Francis and the widowhood of Mary changed the whole situation. The new King was in the power, not of the Guises, but of his mother, Catherine de Medici; and Mary of Scots would now have to accept a second or a third place in Paris. But in Europe, and in the politics of Europe, the beautiful young widow sprang at once into the foremost rank, and became the star of all eyes. Ex-Queen ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... said, speaking English with a slight foreign accent, which was more agreeable to the ear than otherwise. "But, my excellent boy, what magnificence! A Medici costume! Never say to me that you are not vain; you are as conscious of your good looks as any pretty woman. Behold me, how simple and unobtrusive ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... has thus attached greatness to the very name of the third Hohenzollern King. Great the Hohenzollern King certainly was, but his greatness is that of a Condottiere of the Italian Renascence, of a Catharine de' Medici. It is the greatness of a personality who is endowed, no doubt, with magnificent gifts, but who has prostituted all those gifts to the ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... hereditary qualities of the house of Sperelli. An Alessandro Sperelli brought in 1466 to Frederic of Aragon, son of Ferdinand King of Naples, and brother to Alfonso Duke of Calabria, a manuscript in folio containing the 'less rude' poems of the old Tuscan writers which Lorenzo de Medici had promised him at Pisa in 1465; and in concert with the most erudite scholars of his time, that same Alessandro wrote a Latin elegy on the death of the divine Simonetta—sad and melting numbers after the manner of Tibullus. Another Sperelli—Stefano,—was during ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... commerce has died away, but left behind a considerable share of the wealth and luxury that sprang from it. There is little spirit of enterprise; no rivalry between a class enriching itself and the class with whom wealth is hereditary; the jewels that were purchased under the reign of the Medici still shine without competitors on the promenade and at the opera. It is a people that has made its fortune, and lives contentedly on its revenues, and on what it gets from the stranger. "The first want of a Florentine," says our author, "is repose; even pleasure is secondary; it costs ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... recline in the Sagrestia Nuova, on the tombs of Giuliano de' Medici, third son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and Lorenzo of Urbino, his grandson. Strozzi's epigram on the Night, with Michel ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... buffets, upon the side-tables, upon the supper-table itself, in the midst of flowers and light, glittered most dazzlingly the richest and most costly gold and silver plate that could possibly be seen—relics of those ancient magnificent productions which the Florentine artists, whom the Medici family had patronized, had sculptured, chased, and cast for the purpose of holding flowers, at a time when gold yet existed in France. These hidden marvels, which had been buried during the civil wars, had timidly reappeared during the intervals of ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... would not for a moment admit; and he was even guilty of saying, "Antiquity can not sanctify that which is wrong in reason and false in principle." Soon after he committed another forepaugh by showing that a wonderful boat invented by Giovanni de Medici for the purpose of fighting hostile ships, would not work, since there were no men on board to guide it, and its automatic steering apparatus would as likely run its nose into land, as into the hull of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... of the paintings, except two, which adorn the gallery of the Luxembourg, were executed at Antwerp, by Rubens, for Mary de Medici. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 579 - Volume 20, No. 579, December 8, 1832 • Various
... Christian art a "darkness which might be felt;" from a little handful cloud out of the studio of Squarcione, it gathered density and volume through his scholar Mantegna—made itself a nucleus in the Academy of the Medici, and thence it issued in such a flood of "heathenesse" that Italy finally became covered with one vast deep and thick night of Pagandom. But in every deep there is a lower deep; and, through the same gods-worship, a night ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... smell of blood, appears to have been introduced into the palaces of France from those of Italy by alliance with the Medici—those ennobled pawnbrokers of the middle ages, whose parvenu taste engendered the fantastic gilding of the renaissance, which they naturalized in the Tuileries and at Fontainbleau, in common with the stiletto and acqua tofana of their poisoners, and the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... Titian's intrigues against the venerable Giovanni Bellini in connection with the Senseria, or office of broker, to the merchants of the Fondaco de' Tedeschi. We see there how, on the death of the martial pontiff, Julius the Second, Pietro Bembo proposed to Titian to take service with the new Medici Pope, Leo the Tenth (Giovanni de' Medici), and how Navagero dissuaded him from such a step. Titian, making the most of his own magnanimity, proceeds to petition the Doge and Signori for the first vacant broker's patent for life, on the same ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... in which men of letters looked, not to the public, but to the government, or to a few great men, for the reward of their exertions. It was thus in the time of Maecenas and Pollio at Rome, of the Medici at Florence, of Louis the Fourteenth in France, of Lord Halifax and Lord Oxford in this country. Now, Sir, I well know that there are cases in which it is fit and graceful, nay, in which it is a sacred duty to reward ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... correlated with each grade in the scale of human evolution—at any rate up to the point at which full-blown civilization is reached, when cases like that of Athens under Pericles, or Florence under the Medici, would probably cause him some trouble. For instance, he makes out that the lowest savages, Veddas, Pygmies, and so on, form groups of from ten to forty; whereas those who are but one degree less backward, such as the Australian natives, average from fifty to two hundred; whilst most of ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... richer than we can ever be for a good many years, while the steel people who make the implements of destruction at Bethlehem will be richest of all. What my man makes I cannot say, but he is a king of sorts, even if not actually a Bethlehem boss, and the Medici are not in it! I have introductions to all the most famous collectors, but, hearing of his splendours, I went ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug. 22, 1917 • Various
... of the Villa Medici, and when they got near the Piazza, della Trinita de' Monti they met a man on horseback, who, on seeing them, immediately approached the carriage. It was Archibald Marchmont, who ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... annoyed. But once more he was in dire need of some money. In Italy he had signed his name to certain documents which were now in the possession of Salvestro dei Medici, the well-known banker. These documents were "promissory notes" and they were due two months from date. Their total amount came to three hundred and forty pounds, Flemish gold. Under these circumstances, the noble knight could not well show the rage which filled his heart and his proud soul. Instead, ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... esteem and friendship of the Prince that he had broken off influential connections which he had with the Prince de Conde, and had declared for the Catholics; a change of sides which, having no other foundation, was regarded with suspicion: so much so that the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici, on the declaration of war by the Huguenots, proposed to have him imprisoned. The Prince de Montpensier prevented this and carried him away to Champigny when he went there with his wife. The Comte being a very pleasant, amiable man ...
— The Princess of Montpensier • Madame de La Fayette
... motives of man and the history of the world. She had read the chronicles of States and the memoirs of statesmen, and seen how craft carries on the movements of an age. Those Viscontis, Castruccios, and Medici; those Richelieus and Mazarins and De Retzs; those Loyolas and Mohammeds and Cromwells; those Monks and Godolphins; those Markboroughs and Walpoles; those founders of history and dynasties and sects; those leaders and dupers of men, greater or lesser, corrupters or corrupt, all standing out ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Tasso (1895), which draws largely upon the letters of contemporaries, the accounts of the ducal court, and other documentary evidence, have in a great measure exonerated the duke at the expense of the unhappy poet himself. Briefly, Tasso's intrigues with rival powers—the Medici at Florence, the papal court, and the Holy Office at Bologna—aroused the alarm and suspicion of the duke, whilst his general demeanour and his outbursts of violence and temper compelled, rather than afforded, a pretext for his confinement. Before his final and fatal return ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... San Gallo to the quaint old Bridge of the Goldsmiths, the fair city of Florence blazed with light and rang with shout and song. A struggling mass of spectators surged about the noble palace of the Medici, as out through its open gate-way and up the broad street known as the Via Larga streamed the great carnival pageant of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the head of the house ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... into the utmost consternation by the death of Henry IV. They apprehended the immediate repeal of the edict, and a renewal of the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day. But the regent, Mary de Medici, and the court immediately issued a decree confirming the ordinance. Louis XIII. was then a child but eight and a half years of age. As he came into power, he was urged by the Jesuits to exterminate the Protestants. But they were too powerful to ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... of Silvestro de Medici, the head of one of the noblest of the popular families. In this way I became acquainted with Marcella, the sister of Silvestro, and after a courtship of ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt |
