In the eyes of the French strangers it was all very marvellous—the beautiful city with its stately palaces and hospitals, and the fair churches with their Gothic spires and pinnacles, their slender creamy shafts and deep red terra-cotta mouldings; the Milanese ladies with their jewelled robes and mantles embroidered with cunningly wrought devices, the flowering lilies and the garlands of laurel and myrtle—all seen under the radiant sunshine and the deep blue of the Italian skies. But what excited their admiration and wonder more than all was the Castello.
"A thing," writes one of them, "truly marvellous and inestimable, with so many large and beautiful rooms that I lost all reckoning. Without are broad lakes, fair running streams, and bridges. There is a fine large square on the side of the town, and on the other are beautiful meadows and woods and the château, where the Moro had his stables, painted with frescoes of different-coloured horses."
King Louis wondered most of all at the strength and completeness of the bastions and excellence of the artillery, exclaiming that never before had he seen so strong and splendid a citadel! And he and all the Frenchmen greatly blamed that second Judas, who had betrayed his master and delivered it up without a blow.
The next morning, his Majesty attended mass at S. Ambrogio, accompanied by the Dukes of Ferrara and Savoy, the Marquis of Mantua, Cæsar Borgia, and all the cardinals and ambassadors, and afterwards visited the church and convent of S. Maria delle Grazie. Here he gazed with admiration on the Cenacolo of Leonardo, that master of whose genius he had heard so much, and expressed his ardent wish to transfer the famous wall-painting to France, a sentiment which can hardly have gratified the Dominican friars or the Italian princes in his train. The painter was not present on this occasion. His master had fled, the works upon which he was engaged were all interrupted, and on the approach of the French he had left Milan for one of his favourite country retreats in the hills of Bergamo or the mountains of Como, where he could study Nature and pursue his scientific researches in peace. And the French king and Cæsar Borgia, whose genuine appreciation of fine art was well known, did not fail to admire Bramante's fair chapel and that latest masterpiece of Lombard sculpture, the noble tomb which the Moro had raised to be an eternal memorial of his love and sorrow. There were others in his train that day who could hardly look unmoved on the sleeping form of the young duchess with the child-like face and the brocade robes which Il Gobbo had fashioned with such exquisite skill. There was her brother-in-law, Francesco Gonzaga, and Niccolo da Correggio, in whose heart that fair face and bright eyes, he tells us, were for ever enshrined; there were her brothers, Alfonso and Ferrante; above all, there was her father, the aged Duke Ercole. The sight of that marble figure, with the soft curling hair and the long fringe of eyelashes and quietly folded hands, must have vividly recalled the memory of his dead child, and of all the joy and brightness that had vanished in the grave with Beatrice. For him at least that must have been a bitter moment.
And there was yet another, young Baldassare Castiglione, that courtly and handsome boy who had been sent to Milan a few years before to finish his education, and had now followed his master, the Marquis of Mantua, to wait upon the French king. He had been present many a time at those brilliant fêtes in the Castello, and had seen Duchess Beatrice in her most radiant and triumphant hour, had talked with Leonardo and Bramante, and looked on Messer Galeaz as the mirror of chivalry. Now he came back to find the scene changed and that gay company all dead or gone. And the next day he sat down to write home to Mantua and tell his mother of all the pomp and splendour of the scenes which he had witnessed. He described the king's triumphal entry, and the great procession in which he had taken part, with all a boy's enthusiasm; but he could not refrain from a sigh over the melancholy change in the Castello, when he told her how these halls and courts, that had once been the home and meeting-place of rare intellects and accomplished artists, "the fine flower of the human race," were now full of drinking-booths and dung-hills—of rude soldiery, who defiled the place with their foul habits and polluted the air with their savage oaths. So passes the glory of the world.
FOOTNOTES:
[78] L. Pélissier, op. cit.