[177] Vat. Urb. MSS. No. 1198.
[178] Several of these MSS. I have found in the Laurentian library at Florence.
[179] Bib. Laurent, plut. 90, Cod. sup. No. 36. The rubric mentions Abbot Jerome as author of this letter. Gambino appears to have offered the incense of a poem in praise of Federigo, and is mentioned by Quadri as author of some fugitive and forgotten verses of local interest.
[180] Vat. Urb. MSS. No. 941.
[*181] For Federigo's intercourse with Campano, cf. G. Zannoni, Federigo di Montefeltro e G.A. Campano, in Atti della R. Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, vol. XXXVIII. (Torino).
[182] This painter was Justus of Ghent, mentioned at [p. 205]. To the subject of art at Urbino we shall return in ch. xxvii.
[183] We need not quote the many authorities, but in Muratori, Script., XXIII., pp. 268 and 777, will be found the Duke's good and evil qualities fairly balanced, and frightful details of the brutal licentiousness which he made his pastime.
[*184] Murder in church was a crime peculiar to that time. It might seem that the "tyrants" were so well guarded that it was impossible to lay hands on them save at mass; for on no other occasion was the whole family gathered together. To say nothing of the clergy and the Pope who murdered Giuliano and tried to murder Lorenzo de' Medici in S. Maria del Fiore, it was in church the Fabrianesi murdered their Signori the Chiavistelli (1435), the Milanesi Duke Giovan Maria Visconti (1412), and Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1476). Ludovico Sforza only escaped the same end because by chance he entered S. Ambrogio by a door that was not watched. For the whole subject see Reumont, Lorenzo de' Medici, pp. 387-97, especially 396, and Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Period of the Renaissance (trs. Middlemore, 1878), vol. I., p. 79.
[185] It is painful to find an author of our age, and especially one of Sismondi's merited reputation and influence, so warped by anti-despotic feelings as to become the apologist of assassination. The phrase we use is startling, but surely not misapplied to those passages in vol. XI., pp. 44 to 47, and p. 114, where, by innuendo, if not by argument, motives which led to the murder of Galeazzo Maria, and two years later to that of Giuliano de' Medici, are shielded from infamy by ingenious special-pleading, worthy the pen of Machiavelli or the morality of Loyola. I refer to the comments of Roscoe in his volume of Additional Illustrations to his Lorenzo de' Medici, pp. 114 to 119.
[186] The convention of Galeazzo Maria with Taddeo Manfredi, and the bull investing Riario, explain this transaction more fully than the authorities quoted by Sismondi, ch. lxxxiii. They are printed in vol. III. of Burriel's elaborate Life of Caterina Riario Sforza.