[142] Now the department of Lot-et-Garonne. Matteo Bandello had held the bishopric of Agen until a few years before this time.
[143] The Palazzo dei Diamanti, now the Pinacoteca, built for Sigismondo d’Este in 1493. The building alluded to by Montaigne is probably the Palazzo Mignardi.
[144] In the time of Leo X. the neighbouring city of Recanati had been burnt by the Turks.
[145] The Santa Casa is built of stone and not of brick.
[146] Montaigne’s offering had probably disappeared before the shrine was pillaged by the French, as there is no mention of it in a catalogue of the ex votos by Murri, printed in 1792.
In 1802 Eustace visited Loreto and found the treasury empty. “No vestige now remains of this celebrated collection of everything that was valuable; rows of empty shelves and numberless cases only enable the treasurer to enlarge on its immensity and curse the banditti that plundered it. ‘Galli,’ he adds, ‘semper rapaces, crudeles, barbarorum omnium Italis infestissimi.’”—Classical Tour, i. 166.
[147] The marble casing of the Santa Casa was designed by Bramante and the sculptures executed by Sansovino, Girolamo Lombardo, Bandinelli, Giovanni da Bologna, Guglielmo della Porta, Raffaele da Montelupo, Sangallo, and others. It was begun under Leo X. and finished under Paul III.
[148] Louis d’Amboise was born in 1479, and made cardinal by Julius II. He died at Ancona in 1517.
[149] Georges d’Armagnac was born in Gascony in 1500, and became a Spanish ecclesiastic. He subsequently was made archbishop of Toulouse, and died at Avignon in 1585.
[150] The principal works now in the church are by Luca Signorelli, and Melozzo da Forli. Montaigne does not notice the bronze doors by Girolamo Lombardo, which rival Ghiberti’s at Florence. The church was begun in 1468 on the site of an ancient one which, according to Vasari, was adorned with frescoes by Domenico Veneziano and his pupil Piero della Francesca.