It were to be desired that we knew more of his intercourse with Duke Federigo. In one of his dedicatory epistles, after alluding to the likelihood of that prince reading the work, he, in a vein of fulsome compliment and impudent conceit, complains of neglect from friends, and hints at a visit to Urbino. It is difficult to glean facts from the vague common-places of such letters; but in 1468 he thanks his patron for retaining at his court Demetrio Castreno, a learned Greek fugitive from Constantinople. Equally mannered and cold are his flattery and his condolence, on the death of Countess Battista in 1472. Next year he writes that, having begun a commentary on Federigo's life, and completed two books, he had been induced to submit them to the Duke of Milan, from whom he never could recover the manuscript.

Another protégé of Duke Federigo was Porcellio Pandonio, of Naples,[*84] whose pen was ever at command of the readiest patron, as historiographer or laureate. From his partiality to the designations of bard and secretary to Alfonso of Naples, it would seem that he chiefly rested his fame on his poetical compositions. From this judgment Muratori differs, protesting that in historical narrative none excelled his ease and elegance of diction.[85] Abject classicism, in thought and style, was then a common weakness of the learned; and however correctly Porcellio may have caught the Latin phraseology, it is difficult to get over the jarring effect of an idiom and nomenclature foreign to the times and incidents which it is his object vividly to portray. In his printed work, on the campaigns of 1451-2, between Venice and Milan, he uniformly disguises Sforza and Piccinino, their respective commanders, as Scipio and Hannibal, under which noms de guerre it requires a constant effort to recognise mediæval warriors, or to recollect that we are considering events dating some two thousand years after those who really bore them had been committed to the dust. The same affectation, common to many authors of his day, mars his unpublished writings which we have had occasion to examine in the Vatican Urbino Library, and their authority is greatly impaired by what Muratori well calls "prodigality of praise" to his heroes, that is, to his generous patrons. In a beautifully elaborated MS. (No. 373) he has collected, under the title of Epigrams, nearly fifty effusions in honour of our Duke and Duchess, and of members of their family or court, a favourite theme being the love-inspired longings of Battista for her lord's return from the wars. In the same volume is his Feltria, an epic composed at Rome about 1472, and narrating Federigo's campaigns, from that of 1460-1, under the banner of Pius II., by whose command Porcellio undertook to sing his general's prowess in three thousand Virgilian verses. Its merits may be fairly appreciated from extracts already given,[86] and from this allusion to the state of Italy at the outbreak of the war:—

"Jamque erat Ausoniæ populos pax alta per omnes,
Et tranquilla quies: jam nulli Martis ad aras
Collucent ignes; jam victima nulla cadebat.
Dantur thura Jovi; fumabat oliva Minervæ:
Sus erat in pretio, Cereris aptissima sacris,
Pampineique dei caper, et qui vitibus amens
Officit, atque merum ante aras cum sanguine fundit."

Such were the foreign poets who frequented Duke Federigo's court. Its native bards left few works meriting particular notice, with one interesting exception. We have elsewhere to discuss Giovanni Sanzi or Santi,[*87] of Urbino, his merits as a painter, and the celebrity reflected on him from the eminence of his son, the unequalled Raffaele. Here we shall speak of his epic on that Duke's life, of which we have made frequent use in our [first volume], and which demands attention on account of its excellence, as well as from the intimate connection with our subject of its author and theme.

This poem, having remained unedited in the Vatican arcana, long escaped the literary historians of the Peninsula, but it has been recently quoted by two writers, Pungileone and Passavant, the former of whom had not seen it.[88] Although, in his dedication to Duke Guidobaldo, composed after 1490, the author accounts for his becoming a painter, as we shall see in [chapter xxviii.], he gives no further explanation of the motives which inspired the labour of a poem, containing some twenty-four thousand lines, than "that after anxious thought and consideration of such new ideas as offered themselves, I wished to sing in this little used style of terza rima, the story of your most excellent and most renowned father's glorious deeds," whose "brilliant reputation not only was and is well known throughout Italy, but is, if I may say so, the subject of discourse beyond the Caucasus," "not without a conscious blush at the idea of dipping so mean a vessel in the water of this limpid and sparkling spring." With equal modesty, he deprecates all rivalry with the learned commentators who had celebrated the same theme in Latin, limiting the ambition of his "rude and brief compend" to rendering its interest accessible to more ordinary readers; but, looking back upon his twenty-three ample cantos, he fervently thanks the Almighty that an undertaking of so extended time and toil had at length attained its termination, and concludes by "humbly beseeching that you will regard the hero's far-famed actions, rather than the baseness of my style, whose only grace is the sincere devotion of a faithful servant to his lord." A similar tone marks the outset of his Chronicle:—

"If e'er in by-gone times a shallow mind
Shrank from the essay of a grand design,
So quake I in the labour-pangs of fear."

Compared with contemporary epics, the rhythm is smooth and flowing, and the style dignified, interspersed with highly poetical episodes and finely expressed moral reflections as well as apt illustrations from ancient history and mythology. The epithets, though abundant, are more than usually appropriate, and many terse maxims are happily introduced. Yet, in his object of placing his poem and his hero among the popular literature of the day, Giovanni must have failed, the Vatican MS. being the only known copy. Readers it, however, doubtless had, one of whom has curiously commemorated his admiration by jotting on the margin, "Were you but as good a painter as a poet, who knows!" Modern critics, contrasting his fresco at Cagli with the rhyming Chronicle, would probably arrive at an inverse conclusion, especially were they to pronounce upon the latter from the preamble which called forth that exclamation—an allegorical vision, told in nine weary chapters, wherein figure a motley crowd of mythological and heroic personages belonging to ancient and contemporary times.