the painted
arabesques and stucco frieze of children playing musical instruments,
the barrel-vaulted ceilings, and marble doorways with their rows of
cherub heads and dolphins. There the unicorn which Borso took for his
device, figures side by side with the imperial eagle granted him by
Frederic III when he came to visit Ferrara, and the fleur-de-lis of
France, which the Estes were privileged to bear on their coat-of-arms.
There we still see fragments of the frescoes on the months and seasons
of the year which Cossa and his scholars painted at the bidding of
successive dukes. Borso is there on his white horse as he rides out
hunting, attended by falconers and pages leading his favourite
greyhounds in the leash; or looking on at the races of St. George's Day,
surrounded by scholars and courtiers, dwarfs and jesters, and fair
ladies clad in glittering robes of cloth of silver and gold. All the
pageant of court-life in old Ferrara, as it was in the days when Duke
Ercole reigned and Isabella and Beatrice d'Este grew up under the good
Duchess Leonora's care, passes again before our eyes, as we linger in
these low halls of the little red-brick palace among the fruit trees of
this deserted quarter.

Niccolo III. and his elder sons had all been liberal patrons of art, and
had invited the best artists they could find from other parts of Italy.
Vittore Pisanello and Jacopo Bellini had both of them visited Ferrara
and painted portraits of the Este princes--that of Leonello, with his
long hooked nose and low forehead, is still preserved at Bergamo, and
Piero de' Franceschi, the mighty Umbrian, is said to have supplied a
design for Duke Borso's tomb. But it was in later years, under Ercole's
reign, that this little group of native artists arose, and that Cosimo
Tura and his followers founded the school which gradually spread to
Bologna and Modena and boasted such masters as Lorenzo Costa and
Francia, or helped to mould the genius of a Raphael and a Correggio.
Tura himself remained at Ferrara all his life, painting altar-pieces for
Duchess Leonora's favourite churches, as well as frescoes in the duke's
villas and portraits of the different members of the ducal family in
turn. In 1472, before the Duke's marriage, he painted the portrait of
Ercole--strange to say--together with his illegitimate daughter Lucrezia
d'Este, to be sent as a present to his bride, Leonora of Aragon, at her
father's court of Naples. Again, in the summer of 148