"Medici" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... damask hangings and satin and velvet, which any man who has cash in his pocket may have, is giving encouragement to the art of his country, and doing at this day exactly that which the Strozzi, the Borghesi, the Medici and so many other bankers and merchants did three hundred and odd years ago, and by doing made Italy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... wildly-dramatic personalities, a scene already singularly attractive by its artistic beauty. A heady religious fanaticism was worked by every prominent egotist in turn, pondering on his chances, in the event of the extinction of the house of Valois with the three sons of Catherine de Medici, born unsound, and doomed by astrological prediction. The old manors, which had exchanged their towers for summer-houses under the softening influence of Renaissance fashions, found themselves once more medievally insecure amid a vagrant warfare ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... gift. Books I know better than men, and it was my peculiar acquaintance with books that brought Ganns and me together in New York. There I served him well in an amazing police case and aided him to prove a crime, the discovery of which turned upon a certain paper manufactured for the Medici. But a greater thing than this criminal incident sprang from it; and that is my friendship with the wonderful Peter. Not above half a dozen books have taught me more than that man. He is a Machiavelli on the ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... which later was to give Caesar Borgia all 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 his ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... all sizes were used in ecclesiastical music, there is still some doubt as to who was the first solo violinist of eminence. The earliest of whom we have any account worthy of mention, was Baltazarini, a native of Piedmont, who went to France in 1577 to superintend the music of Catharine de Medici. In 1581 he composed the music for the nuptials of the Duke de Joyeuse with Mlle. de Vaudemont, sister of the queen, and this is said to have been the origin of the heroic ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... wood, 1506, as a gift from the painter to his uncle, Simone Ciarla, of Urbino. In 1588 the portrait passed from Urbino to the Academy of St. Luke, Rome. Later it was sold to Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici for the Hall of Portraits of the Old Masters in ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... 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 ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... 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 History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... of the painter began to be whispered outside the convent walls, and reached the ears of Cosimo da Medici, one of the powerful rulers of Florence. He offered the monks a new home, and, when they were settled in the convent of San Marco in Florence, he invited Fra ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... he has never been 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 ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... for his 'Compleat Angler' (1653), but author also of charming brief lives of Donne, George Herbert, and others of his contemporaries; and Sir Thomas Browne, a scholarly physician of Norwich, who elaborated a fastidiously poetic Latinized prose style for his pensively delightful 'Religio Medici' (A Physician's ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... Sicily, which possessed several. Frederic's collections 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 ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... as we know, by 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
... was a single short period—a passing moment, almost—on which the citizen who wished to impress himself upon the community and to imbed himself in the local annals must seize. Marshall heard him instancing the Fuggers, of Augsburg, and the Loredani and Morosini, of Venice, and the Medici and Tornabuoni, of Florence, and many other names alien and all unfamiliar—merchants, most of them, it seemed, who had perpetuated their name and fame by improving the precise moment when their town, like plaster-of-Paris, was ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... over 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, ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... historic associations of Pareil's life. As a famous surgeon he was in constant attendance on figures renowned in history, personages like Coligny (who was murdered by the mob of Paris while recovering from an amputation of Pareil's), Erasmus, Servetus, Leonardo da Vinci, and Catherine de Medici. Like Chaucer's doctour of physik, Pareil knew well the works of "Olde Ypocras," Galen, Avycen, etc., the famous physicians whose names have come down from history, but he was no pedantic scholar, preferring to do his own thinking. A stout Protestant, his last ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... 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
... 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 of the greatest masters in the world." ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... to such an unlimited extent. There was neither honor nor honesty to be found among them. They were common to every man who attracted their fancy without regard to fidelity to any one in particular. The seed sown by the infamous Catherine de Medici, the utter depravity of the court of Charles IX, and the profligacy of Henry IV, bore an astonishing supply of bitter fruit. The love of pleasure had, so to speak, carried every woman off her feet, and there was no limit to their abuses. Mademoiselle de l'Enclos, ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... 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 ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... The Venus 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 the authenticity ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... had been uppermost in Elizabethan literature, the Renaissance had been essentially pagan and sensuous. It had hardly touched the moral nature of man, and it brought little relief from the despotism of rulers. One can hardly read the horrible records of the Medici or the Borgias, or the political observations of Machiavelli, without marveling at the moral and political degradation of a cultured nation. In the North, especially among the German and English peoples, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... political structure may be incomplete or concealed. Old organs will be utilized to express new forces, and so gradual and subtle will be the change that it may hardly be recognized. The pseudo-democracies under the Medici at Florence and under Augustus at Rome are familiar examples of this type. Or again, if the political structure be rigid, incapable of responding to the changes demanded by growth, the expansive forces of social and economic transformation may rend it in some catastrophe like that of the French ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... thing like it," March resumed, too incredulous of the evil future to deny himself the aesthetic pleasure of the parallel, "is the rise of the Medici in Florence, but even the Medici were not mere manipulators of pulls; they had some sort of public office, with some sort of legislated tenure of it. The King of New York is sovereign by force of will alone, and he ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... had for half his life been chained to the desk, for he had been many years a clerk in the great merchant houses of the Medici. Until he was forty years old he had hardly gone outside his native city. In the latter half of the fifteenth century each Italian city was a little world in itself, with its own standards, customs and traditions. The fact that Vespucci spent most ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... still some haggle about Tuscany, the Duke of which is old and heirless; Last of the Medici, as he proved. Baby Carlos would much like to have Tuscany too; but that is a Fief of the Empire, and might easily be better disposed of, thinks the Kaiser. A more or less uncertain point, that of Tuscany; as many points are! Last of the Medici complained, in ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... bigoted Protestant country was not without its effect on his mind, as can be traced in his book. Here he took the degree of Doctor of Medicine, and shortly afterwards returned to England. Soon after his return, about the year 1635, he published his "Religio Medici," his first and greatest work, which may be fairly regarded as the reflection of the mind of one who, in spite of a strong intellect and vast erudition, was still prone to superstition, ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... smiling. If Lorenzo de' Medici, conscious of millions of ducats in his coffers, had been addressing some leech of the period, he could not have spoken with a loftier air than this inhabitant of the fourth story of a tenement house in ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... suits of armor and weapons that had been worn and handled by a great many of the French kings; and a religious book that had belonged to St. Louis; a dressing-glass, most richly set with precious stones, which formerly stood on the toilet-table of Catherine de' Medici, and in which I saw my own face where hers had been. And there were a thousand other treasures, just as well worth mentioning as these. If each monarch could have been summoned from Hades to claim his own relics, we should have had ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 at the ...
— The Children's Book of Celebrated Pictures • Lorinda Munson Bryant
... Brown, 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 to those who found upon such resemblances a general charge of plagiarism, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the rest of the noble stock had been butchered at Tyburn. She knew that Gerald, after many wanderings, 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 in all his ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... this system with all the vigor and unscrupulousness characteristic of the Medici. Had he been asked whether he really believed in these pardons, he would have said that the Church always believed the pope had power to grant them. Had he spoken his real mind in the matter, he would have ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... by Baldassare Peruzzi, an artist and architect of great fame in his day, who was born in 1480 at Florence, or Volterra, or Siena, it is not known which, each of these noble cities of Tuscany having claimed to be his birthplace. When the Roman people held high festival in honour of Giuliano de Medici, they obtained various works of art from Baldassare, including a scene painted for a theatre, so admirably ingenious and beautiful, that very great amazement is said to have been awakened in every beholder. At a later period, when the "Calandra," written by the Cardinal di ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... flawless 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 to ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... overlook your being so foolish; but for me it is inexcusable. The Italians of the Renaissance did not give themselves over to such folly. They put their hearts seriously into building up their age and generation. Lorenzo de Medici dragged from the corners of Europe and Asia some two hundred Greek and Latin manuscripts. Other Florentines, Venetians, Romans collected private libraries. Princes of the land turned their wealth not to their ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... player on the Violin of whom we have any account worthy of attention was Baltazarini, a native of Piedmont. He removed to France in the year 1577, whither he was sent by Marshal de Brissac to superintend the music of Catherine de Medici. He was probably the introducer of Italian dances into Paris, and he delighted the Court as much by his skill on the Violin as by ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... income, in the accustomed luxury of the chateaux of his relatives he quickly recovered his old pose of an independent and only temporarily deposed potentate, and proceeding to Paris in his character as Chevalier du Roi, was able to obtain a surprising degree of recognition. Welcomed by Catherine de Medici as a Catholic among the Catholics, he was present as a councilor of the King's Order at the private and preliminary trial conducted by the queen mother of the assassin of his old general and commander the Duc de Guise. King Charles IX may possibly have granted a part of Count ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... yesterday. By whatever enthusiasm 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... middle of the 16th Century, the use of tobacco was confined to the American Indians. In 1560 the Spaniards began to cultivate tobacco as an ornamental plant, and Jean Nicot, the French Ambassador at Lisbon, introduced it at the court of Catherine de Medici in the form of snuff. Smoking subsequently became a custom which spread rapidly throughout the world, although often vigorously opposed by Governments. In the 17th Century, smoker's noses were cut ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... venture to affirm that the brain which devised and the hand which 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
... is how your Court and your Government think, I am sorry for you," broke in Montriveau. "The Restoration, madam, ought to say, like Catherine de Medici, when she heard that the battle of Dreux was lost, 'Very well; now we will go to the meeting-house.' Now 1815 was your battle of Dreux. Like the royal power of those days, you won in fact, while you lost in right. Political Protestantism has gained an ascendancy ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... reached him of the great Henry's assassination. To the fair Montmorency's very decided proclivity to gallantry was to be attributed—if we may believe the scandal-loving Tallemant des Reaux—her long confinement, by the Regent Marie de' Medici's consent, within the gloomy fortress of Vincennes, rather than any reason of State for her sharing her husband's imprisonment. In fact, it was believed that the jealous prince procured her incarceration simply to keep her ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... Vasari—"had at this time been given to the monks of San Domenico da Fiesole, but they did not occupy it longer than from about the middle of July to the end of January, because Cosimo de' Medici and Lorenzo his brother had obtained for them, from Pope Eugenius, the church and convent of San Marco, which had previously been occupied by Salvestrine monks, to whom San Giorgio was given in exchange. ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... greater part of this interest to their being executed in times of sickness or indolence, when the master, however strong, was failing in his purpose, and, however diligent, tired of his work. It will be enough to name, as an example of this class, the sheet of studies for the Medici tombs, No. 45, in which the lowest figure is, strictly speaking, neither a study nor a working drawing, but has either been scrawled in the feverish languor of exhaustion, which cannot escape its subject ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... and the world needs, too, the Savonarolas—they form an Opposition of Forces that holds the balance true. Power left to itself attains a terrific impetus: a governor is needed, and it was Savonarola who tempered and tamed the excesses of the Medici. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... as he sat there alone, in an oriel looking seawards, there lay on a table before him a thin folio, containing the chief works of Sir Thomas Brown—amongst the rest his well known Religio Medici, from which he had just read ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... economic efforts of youth and poverty, and went on accumulating in bulk and in the costliness of its contents as succeeding years brought wealth and honours to the great prelate. What those merchant princes, the Medici, did for the Laurentian Library at Florence is part of history. Old Cosmo, who had his mercantile and political correspondents in all lands, made them also his literary agents, who thus sent him goods too precious to be ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... "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' ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... cuts the flesh into little flaps which, on withdrawing the knife, close up and prevent the blood from issuing forth. At the same time, however, no power can make them heal again. A blow from such a weapon is as surely fatal as the poisoned poignard of the Borgia or the Medici. ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... of this tale is the brilliant Scottish gentleman whose handsome person, extraordinary scholarship, great accomplishments, courage, eloquence, subtlety, and achievement gained him the sobriquet of "The Admirable." The chief scenes are laid in Paris at the time of Catherine de' Medici's rule and Henry III.'s reign, when the air was full of intrigue and conspiracy, and when religious quarrels were not more bitter and dangerous than political wrangles. The inscrutable king, the devout Queen ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Medici's idylls were particularly rich in descriptions of Nature and full of feeling. 'Here too that delight in pain, in telling of their unhappiness and renunciation; here too those wonderful tones which distinguish the sonnets of the fourteenth and ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... views, having received elementary drawing instructions from a friend of Stevens, I think that there is evidence, in carefully examining the figures upon the Wellington Monument and the Dorchester House chimney-piece a finer knowledge of line in Stevens's work. Michael Angelo's Medici figures, and indeed, his other famous works, are not so unequivocably good; the effigies superimposing the sarcophagi are, for brief instance, "pillowy," though they may be more anatomic. The suavity of nature's hypo-refined grace ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... to 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, while the tinkly temple bells ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... as well as any one, but I wonder if I can ever learn anything that will make me care to look twice at some of those old things in the long entrance gallery of the Uffizi. I doubt it. Give me the old palaces where the Medici lived, and let me study up what they did. Or even Dante, or Michael Angelo! He was an artist who is worth studying about. Why! do you know, he built the fortifications of San ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... ecclesiastical sovereignties. Of these there is no longer a trace in the present, though the might of the burghers exists still, and the city that was once called the kernel of the Hanseatic League, and boasted of its Lorenzo de' Medici in the person of the good and enlightened Matthias Overstolz, has now almost as proud a place among merchants as Hamburg or Frankfort. Before we pass to more modern things let us not forget the shrine ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... have remained for Lucretia Borgia and Catharine de Medici, when the dreadful boundary line between innocence and guilt was passed, and the lost creatures stood upon the lonely outer side? Only horrible, vengeful joys, and treacherous delights were left for these miserable women. With what disdainful ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... in the line of the Trollopes. Philanthropy runs on in the 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 of ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... to sit in a study adorned with casts, as large as life, of the Vatican Apollo and the celestial Venus." Fancy Shelley with his bright eyes and elf-locks in a tiny, low-roofed room, correcting proofs of "Laon and Cythna", between the Apollo of the Belvedere and Venus de' Medici, life-sized, and as crude as casts by Shout could make them! In this house, Miss Clairmont, with her brother and Allegra, lived as Shelley's guests; and here Clara Shelley was born on the 3rd of September, 1817. In the same autumn, Shelley suffered from a severe pulmonary attack. The critical ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... for the consequence. But It is in this field that men must recognise their inability. All 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the German, had its origin in Italy, when Catherine de' Medici came to Paris as the bride of Henri II. She brought with her, among other artists, her perfumer, Sieur Toubarelli, who established himself in the flowery land of Grasse. Here for four hundred years the industry has remained rooted and the ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... Monte, the brother-in-law of Ubaldi, the reigning Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand de Medici was made acquainted with the merits of our young philosopher; and, in 1589, he was appointed lecturer on mathematics at Pisa. As the salary, however, attached to this office was only sixty crowns, he was compelled to enlarge this inadequate income by the additional occupation ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... sending forth odoriferous, balmy, and enchanting gales to the grateful olfactory organs, from the half-withered stems of pining and consumptive geraniums; to complete the picture, two unique plaster casts of naked figures, the Apollo Belvidere and the Venus de Medici, at most a foot in altitude, are placed on clumsy wooden pedestals of three times that height before the parlour-windows, painted in a chaste flesh-colour, and guarded by a Whitechapel bull-cdog, who, like another Cerberus, sits growling at ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... of your friendship for me, Sir, leaves me nothing to desire of all that is precious in England, China, and the Indies!" Do you know, after such a testimony under the hand of a princess, that I am determined, after the laudable example of the house of Medici, to take the title of Horace the Magnificent! I am only afraid it should be a dangerous example for my posterity, who may ruin themselves in emulating the magnificence of their ancestor. It happens comically, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... 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, ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... "teach" Blake.) I 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
... round a new centre. 67. IV. Formation of lime-stone by aqueous solution; calcareous spar; white marble; antient statue of Hercules resting from his labours. Antinous. Apollo of Belvidere. Venus de Medici. Lady Elizabeth Foster, and Lady Melbourn by Mrs. Damer. 93. V. 1. Of morasses. Whence the production of Salt by elutriation. Salt-mines at Cracow, 115. 2. Production of nitre. Mars and Venus caught by Vulcan, 143. 3. Production of iron. Mr. ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... powers of invention declining. He left a son and a daughter, both worthy of the name they were called upon to bear; the son, a cutter as unerring and exact as the square rule; the daughter, apt at embroidery, and at designing ornaments. The marriage of Henry IV. and Marie de Medici, and the exquisite court-mourning for the afore-mentioned queen, together with a few words let fall by M. de Bassompiere, king of the beaux of the period, made the fortune of the second generation of Percerins. M. Concino Concini, ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Protestant. Apparently, her faith was founded in deep religious conviction. When Catharine of Medici advised her to follow her husband into the Catholic Church, she ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... great truth in that saying, so often quoted, as carrying a reproach with it: "Ubi tres medici, duo athei,"—"Where there are three physicians, there ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Ruy Gomez de Silva, but was held to be the king's bastard; the Marquis of Bourgou, one of the Archduke Ferdinand's sons, by Philippina Welserine; Don Vespasian Gonzaga, of the house of Mantua, a great soldier, who had been viceroy in Spain; Giovanni de Medici, Bastard of Florence; Amedo, Bastard of Savoy, with many such like, besides others of meaner quality." [Grimstone, cited ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... possum, docti confreri, En moi satis admirari Qualis bona inventio Est medici professio; Quam bella chosa est et bene trovata. Medicina illa benedicta, Quae, suo nomine solo, Surprenanti miraculo, Depuis si longo tempore, Facit a gogo vivere ...
— The Imaginary Invalid - Le Malade Imaginaire • Moliere
... that my temper is up, I may as well go on and abuse every body I can think of. They have a grand mausoleum in Florence, which they built to bury our Lord and Saviour and the Medici family in. It sounds blasphemous, but it is true, and here they act blasphemy. The dead and damned Medicis who cruelly tyrannized over Florence and were her curse for over two hundred years, are salted away in a circle of costly vaults, and in their midst the Holy Sepulchre was to have been ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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
... 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
... been found by the engineers engaged in the construction of fountains for Cosmo dei Medici in Florence that they could not raise water in an ordinary pump more than thirty-two feet above the reservoir. The water, having reached this height, would rise no higher. Galileo was appealed to for a solution of the difficulty. {29b} Imbued with the ancient notion ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... moment Florence attracted him, for here, in January of 1491, under the presidency of Lorenzo de' Medici, called the Magnificent, the foremost artists of the day were gathered to consider the decoration of the facade of the Florentine Duomo; and here Perugino was present, beside such masters as Domenico Ghirlandajo, Cosimo Rosselli, Andrea della Robbia, Botticelli, Baldovinetti, ...
— Perugino • Selwyn Brinton
... informed the public that Castalani was one of the oldest and most honored names in Italy. There had been a Castalani in the Medici time, a close friend of the magnificent Lorenzo, it was asserted. One paper declared that a Castalani had worn the triple tiara, which a learned don of Oxford took the trouble to write and deny. And it would appear ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... to light; once in 1554, when they were drawn by Giovanni Colonna,[47] and again in 1859, when the present duke of Fiano was rebuilding the southern wing of the palace on the Via in Lucina. Of the panels and basreliefs found in 1554, some were removed to the Villa Medici and inserted in the front of the casino, on the garden side; others were transferred to Florence; those of 1859 have been placed in the vestibule of the Palazzo Fiano. They ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... II., a member of the illustrious Florentine family of the Medici. He upheld the family tradition by his liberal patronage of ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... 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 fundamental ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... was the guest 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 several ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... 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 ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... individual that accomplishes this, but the Spirit alone, that diffuses itself over all. For Art especially is dependent on the tone of the public mind, as the more delicate plants on atmosphere and weather; it needs a general enthusiasm for Sublimity and Beauty, like that which, in the time of the Medici, as a warm breath of spring, called forth at once and together all those ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... not come into the War, but she will be 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
... 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
... Mary, Queen of Scots, was in danger. There were many who regarded it as a measure of self-defence to put to death so open a sympathizer with the work of persecution. La Mothe Fenelon, disheartened, promised Catharine de' Medici to do all that he could to promote the interests of France, but the chief influence must come from the king and herself. "Otherwise," he said, "your word will come to be of no authority, and I shall become ridiculous in everything that I tell them or promise ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... bailiff, in 1673. Bird-street was named after Mr. Joseph Bird, who was bailiff, in 1738; mayor in 1746. In Birch-field resided Mr. Birch. Roscoe lived here at one time, and it was here he wrote the greater part of the lives of "The Medici." I recollect a great many fine trees being in and about this vicinity. Bolton-street was named after John Bolton, Esq., or Colonel Bolton as he was called. Byrom-street was named after Octavius Byrom. Chisenhale-street is named after Chisenhale Johnson. Chorley-street ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... contains in it a lustrous gem, called the Portland stone, worth 10,000l., and her jewels altogether are of fabulous value. Nothwithstanding the changing fashions of High Society, she retains her preference for a Medici collar of lace and a spray ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... 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 magnificence, and Vasari tells us ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... changed 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 ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... balls had to strike at the exact moment indicated in the score and the players never succeeded in accomplishing that. The passage had to be suppressed but it is preserved in the library at the Opera. They also had to suppress the part of Catherine de Medici who should preside at the conference where the massacre of St. Bartholomew was planned. Her part was merged with that of St. Pris. They also suppressed the first scene in the last act, where Raoul, disheveled and covered with blood, interrupted ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... everywhere else in this right 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... passing. Then there is horticulture—which is one of my own vices; and, of course, I do not forget piety; but things are not so bad as that just yet. It is important that he should survive his father, because he is the last of the line of Medici, and I foresee troubles ahead. We shall have an Austrian prince who will make soldiers of us, or a revolution, when our throats will be cut. An unpleasant alternative—to kill or be killed!" With these and similar reflections he now dazzled and now ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... or their worships the mayors, of all the towns and communes of France, the gendarmes and the rest of the powers that be? In other respects—I give you my word for it—she was a rough sketch of a Venus dei Medici. ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... torrent of strong sad light, like an Ohio or Danube, 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 a bond? Suppose a ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the old French cathedrals with their interesting windows; and saw in the Louvre much glass of early French make as well as many beautiful Venetian mirrors with all sorts of unique histories. One mirror was that famous seventeenth century possession of Marie de Medici, a looking-glass set in a frame which represented a fortune of over thirty thousand dollars. This mirror was of rock crystal combined with cut and polished agates, and around it was a network of ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett
... Society, Philadelphia, collection of autographs made by Ferdinand J. Dreer, unpublished and hitherto unused letters of Erasmus, James VI of Scotland (2), Leo X, Hedio, Farel to Calvin, Forster, Melanchthon, Charles V, Albrecht of Mansfeld, Henry VIII, Francis I (3), Catherine de' Medici, Grynaeus, Viglius van Zuichem, Alphonso d'Este, Philip Marnix, Camden, Tasso, Machiavelli, Pius IV, Vassari, Borromeo, Alesandro Ottavio de' Medici (afterwards Leo XI), Clement VIII, Sarpi, Emperor Ferdinand, William ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... health and full of apologies for broken 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
... 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, ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... second thoughts, I prefer going back to my own writing again; it is so uninteresting to copy other people's writing. Two of the magistrates were doing justice. They looked at the photograph—and what did it represent? The famous statue called the Venus de' Medici! One of the magistrates took this discovery indignantly. He was shocked at the gross ignorance which could call the classic ideal of beauty and grace a disgusting work. The other one made polite allowances. He thought the lady was much to be ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... times 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 merits or to relieve the distresses ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Religio medici. The fourth edition, corrected and amended. London, by E.Cotes for ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... 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 Graeci minores" ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... the Empress herself has been more disputed than that of the society in which she was the one imposing personage. She stands in history with Elizabeth of England, with Catherine de' Medici, with Maria Theresa, among the women who have been like great men. Of her place in the record of the creation of that vast empire which begins with Prussia and ends with China, we have not here to speak. The materials for knowing her and judging her ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... the spirit of commerce, and by the intercourse with so many nations, shone in useful inventions; in the lap of abundance and liberty all the noble arts were carefully cultivated and carried to perfection. From Italy, to which Cosmo de Medici had lately restored its golden age, painting, architecture, and the arts of carving and of engraving on copper, were transplanted into the Netherlands, where, in a new soil, they flourished with fresh vigor. The Flemish school, a daughter of the Italian, soon vied with its ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... where the banks had established themselves under the protection of the Pope and the Guelph Orsini, and where the most reliable and latest news was sure to be obtained fresh from the Vatican. Instead of the Piazza di Spagna and the Villa Medici, the narrow streets and gloomy squares of Ponte, Parione and Sant' Eustachio became the gathering-place of society, high, low and indiscriminate; and far from exhibiting the slightest signs of mourning for its late ruler, the city gave itself up to a sort of Carnival season, all ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... are not likely to have met 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... The famous minister of Louis XIII; born in Paris, of a noble family of Poitou. Was made Bishop of Lucon by Henry IV at the age of twenty-two. Became Almoner to Marie de Medici, the Regent of France. Was elected a Cardinal in 1622. He wrote many books, including theological works, tragedies, and his own Memoirs. The authenticity of his Testament politique was ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... to wait on a captain who had arrived before us and was going on, told us there was nothing to be had. "We must eat, if we have to eat you," I said, savagely, for we were chilled through and fierce with hunger; but I might as well have tried to hurry the Venus de Medici. At last we got some cold sausage, a fire, and two couches, on which we lay down without undressing, and slept. I had scarcely closed my eyes, it seemed, when the girl, who was to call us at half-past five o'clock, came into the room. "Is it half-past five?" I asked. ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... the Hotel de Ville, and encouraged by the Coadjutor of the infirm old Archbishop of Paris, namely, his nephew, Paul de Gondi, titular Bishop of Corinth in partibus infidelium, a younger son of the Duke of Retz, an Italian family introduced by Catherince de Medici. There seemed to be a hope that the nobility, angered at their own systematic depression, and by Mazarin's ascendency, might make common cause with the Parliament and establish some effectual check to the advances of the Crown. ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Anne Mie towards the Luxembourg Gardens, the great devastated pleasure-ground of the ci-devant tyrants of the people. The beautiful Anne of Austria, and the Medici before her, Louis XIII, and his gallant musketeers—all have given place to the great cannon-forging industry of this besieged Republic. France, attacked on every side, is forcing her sons to defend her: persecuted, martyrised, done to ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... to represent Roger in the present paper is that published by De Renzi (Collectio Salernitana, tom. II, pp. 426-493) and entitled "Rogerii, Medici Celeberrimi Chirurgia." It is really the text published originally in the "Collectio Chirurgica Veneta" of 1546, ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... great decorative scheme, went through the vain forms of going upstairs and getting to bed. But sleep was out of the question. Her brain still kept at work, elaborating the ideas already proposed and adding still others to the plan. Why hadn't she laid more stress on the Medici? How had she contrived to overlook John Law and the South Sea Bubble, with all its attendant wigs, hooped petticoats and shoe-buckles? Then the Pine-Tree Shilling jumped to her eyes, and Virginia's use of ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... this way of settling the matter. However, he whispered it about that Lisle Court was in the market; and as it really was one of the most celebrated places of its kind in England, the whisper spread among bankers and brewers and soap-boilers and other rich people—the Medici of the New Noblesse rising up amongst us—till at last it reached the ears of ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... 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 ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... is a succession of gorgeous allegoric paintings, done at the instance of Mary of Medici, to celebrate the praise and glory of that family. I was predetermined not to like them for two reasons: first, that I dislike allegorical subjects; and second, that I hate and despise that Medici family and all that belongs ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... him one of the most extraordinary sights. It was a girl in the condition of our First Parents, carelessly lying on a bed. This creature was more beautiful than they paint Venus and the Graces; she presented to view a form of ivory whiter than snow, and more gracefully shaped than the Venus de' Medici at Florence. The cabinet which contained this treasure was lighted by so many wax-candles that their brilliancy dazzled you, and gave a new splendor to the beauties of ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... would like to hold a meeting of bookmen, each of whom should be a mighty hunter, and he would dare to invite Cosmo Medici, who was as keen about books as he was about commerce, and according to Gibbon used to import Indian spices and Greek books by the same vessel, and that admirable Bishop of Durham who was as joyful on reaching ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... cabalistic. I leaned against it, to look up to the summits of the walls, which rise to a vast height, from whence springs a slender tower. Above, in the apartments of the castle, were preserved numbers of curious cabinets, tables of inlaid gems, and a thousand rarities, collected by the house of Medici, but exposed by the present sovereign of Tuscany to ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... genius—the first who endowed an orchestra with an individual voice; and those two will live mostly because they created Beethoven. Ah, Beethoven! power and strength amidst serene suffering, Michael Angelo at the tomb of the Medici! A heroic logician, a kneader of human brains; for the symphony, with choral accompaniments, was the starting-point of all the great ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... not destined, however, to be successful. Pope Julius lives two years longer; Leo the Tenth succeeds; and, as Medici are not much prone to Church reformation some other scheme, and perhaps some other reformer, may be wanted. Meantime, the traffic in bulls of absolution becomes more horrible than ever. Money must be raised to supply ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... and sunset, Twittering birds and calm; Medici's fountain, shimmering net, Into the ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... 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
... rays presented the appearance of a ghostly Staubbach of unreal light. We must have been at an immense depth below the surface in which the opening lay; and if there had been a long day before us, it would have been curious to search for the fissure above. Sir Thomas Browne says, in the Religio Medici, 'Conceive light invisible, and that is a spirit.' We very nearly saw ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... poor doubting, mocking, useless Sadducee, I suppose," said the son as he bent again over the Religio Medici. There was a touch of dejection in his voice, which served to disarm that resentment which his father felt towards every view of anything that varied from the ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... almost always in faultless condition, and beautifully bound. Many of them were once to be found in such renowned collections as those of Grolier, Maioli, Henry II. of France and Diana of Poitiers, Katharine de' Medici, De Thou, Longepierre, Count von Hoym, etc.; and have bindings by Nicolas and Clovis Eve, Le Gascon, Padeloup, Derome, and Roger Payne. Among them are magnificent copies of the editions of Pliny printed at Venice by Joannes de Spira in 1469, and by Nicolas ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... Tarsus. Fourteen centuries later a miner's son, Martin Luther, won Germany for the Reformation, and John Wesley "while yet a student in college" started his mighty world-famous movement. At fifteen John de Medici was a cardinal, and Bossuet was known by his eloquence; at sixteen Pascal wrote a great work. Ignatius Loyola before he was thirty began his pilgrimage, and soon afterward wrote his most famous books. At twenty-two Savonarola was rousing the consciences of the Florentines, and ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... arrived there early in 1509, no longer an unknown canon from the northern regions but a celebrated and honoured author. All the charms of the Eternal City lay open to him and he must have felt keenly gratified by the consideration and courtesy with which cardinals and prelates, such as Giovanni de' Medici, afterwards Leo X, Domenico Grimani, Riario and others, treated him. It seems that he was even offered some post in the curia. But he had to return to his youthful archbishop with whom he thereupon visited Rome again, incognito, and afterwards travelled in ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... 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 by Charles, and Bristol was obliged ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... was, he had better have stripped off his surplice. No,—it was nothing but the cant of his calling. In Byron it was a mood, and he might have said just the opposite thing the next day, as he did in his two descriptions of the Venus de' Medici. That picture of old Matthew abides in the memory, and makes one think better of his kind. What nobler tasks has the poet than to exalt the idea of manhood, and to make the world we live ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... 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 Uffizi ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... Osbourne impressed me as first of all a woman of profound character and serious judgment, who could, if occasion called, have been the leader in some great movement. But she belonged to the quattrocento rather than to the nineteenth century. Had she been born a Medici, she would have held rank as one of the remarkable women of all time. That she was a woman of intellectual attainments is proved by the fact that she was already a magazine writer of recognized ability, and that at the moment when Stevenson ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... the tower 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... 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
... man that did either look for a Cardinal's cap for himself, or any body else, meaning Abbot Montagu: [Walter, second son to the first Earl of Manchester, embracing the Catholic religion while on his travels, was made abbot of Ponthoise through the influence of Mary de' Medici: he afterwards became Almoner to the Queen-Dowager of England: and died 1670.] and the House upon the whole did vote Sir Richard Temple innocent; and that my Lord Digby hath cleared the honour of His Majesty, and Sir Richard Temple's, ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... harpsichord maker, who was invited by Prince Ferdinand dei Medici to Florence, to take charge of the large collection of musical instruments the Prince possessed. At Florence he produced the invention of the pianoforte, in which he was assisted and encouraged by this high-minded, richly-cultivated, and very musical prince. Scipione Maffei tells ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... it's possible. And we must remember that the poisoners of those days were very ingenious. That was the heydey of La Voisin and the Marquise de Brinvilliers, of Elixi, and heaven knows how many other experts who had followed Catherine de Medici to France. So that's all quite possible. But there is one thing that isn't possible, and that is that a poison which, if it is administered as we think it is, must be a liquid, could remain in that cabinet fresh and ready ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... dainty figure against the soldier. Involuntarily he put out his arm which girded a slender waist; Faith drove simpering by; the crowd melted like a receding wave, and the lady extricated herself, breathless as one of the maids in Lorenzo de Medici's Songs of ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... 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 of MSS. While the hall of ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... to have been made for immediately anticipating the St 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 of France, Queen-presumptive of England, and actual Queen of Scotland, ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... he though, of the physicians themselves, and he replied as follows: "Honora medicum propter necessitatem, etenim creavit cum altissimus: a Deo enim est omnis medela, et a rege accipiet donationem: disciplina medici exaltavit caput illius, et in conspectu magnatum collaudabitur. Altissimus de terra creavit medicinam, et vir prudens non abhorrebit illam. Thus," he added, "speaketh the Book of Ecclesiasticus, of Medicine, and good Physicians; but of the bad ones we may safely affirm the very contrary, since ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... "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, and this hoped-for consummation did not follow. ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Lord Bute. The Briton was silenced by Wilkes's North Briton. Smollett lost his last patron; he fell ill; his daughter died; he travelled angrily in France and Italy. His "Travels" show the choleric nature of the man, and he was especially blamed for not admiring the Venus de Medici. Modern taste, enlightened by the works of a better period of Greek art, has come round to Smollett's opinions. But, in his own day, he was regarded as a Vandal ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... Jacques Coeur at Bourges I learned more of the history of Charles VII than any English boy of my generation. In the Chateau of Blois, the salamanders of Francois Premier, the statue of Diane de Poictiers, the poison cabinet of Catherine de Medici, the dungeons of the Cardinal de Lorraine, became living testimonies of the past under Paragot's imaginative teaching. He had set his heart on educating me; suddenly as the original impulse had seized ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... Rex sum, quid honor quid gloria mundi, Est vita mors hominum regia—vado mori. Vado mori miles victo certamine belli, Mortem non didici vincere vado mori. Vado mori medicus, medicamine non relevandus, Quicquid agunt medici respuo vado mori. Vado mori logicus, aliis concludere novi, Concludit breviter ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... were thrown 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 be wantonly ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott |
