stablished the Platonic Academy and
formed the first public library in the west. He rebuilt and endowed
the monastery of S. Marco. He built and rebuilt other churches. He
gave Donatello a free hand in sculpture and Fra Lippo Lippi and Fra
Angelico in painting. He distributed altogether in charity and churches
four hundred thousand of those golden coins which were invented by
Florence and named florins after her--a sum equal to a million pounds
of to-day. In every direction one comes upon traces of his generosity
and thoroughness. After his death it was decided that as Pater Patriae,
or Father of his Country, he should be for ever known.

Cosimo died in 1464, leaving an invalid son, Piero, aged forty-eight,
known for his almost continuous gout as Il Gottoso. Giovanni and Cosimo
had had to work for their power; Piero stepped naturally into it,
although almost immediately he had to deal with a plot--the first for
thirty years--to ruin the Medici prestige, the leader of which was that
Luca Pitti who began the Pitti palace in order to have a better house
than the Medici. The plot failed, not a little owing to young Lorenzo
de' Medici's address, and the remaining few years of Piero's life were
tranquil. He was a quiet, kindly man with the traditional family love
of the arts, and it was for him that Gozzoli worked. He died in 1469,
leaving two sons, Lorenzo (1449-1492) and Giuliano (1453-1478).

Lorenzo had been brought up as the future leading citizen of Florence:
he had every advantage of education and environment, and was rich in
the aristocratic spirit which often blossoms most richly in the second
or third generation of wealthy business families. Giovanni had been
a banker before everything, Cosimo an administrator, Piero a faithful
inheritor of his father's wishes; it was left for Lorenzo to be the
first poet and natural prince of the Medici blood. Lorenzo continued
to bank but mismanaged the work and lost heavily; while his poetical
tendencies no doubt distracted his attention generally from affairs.
Yet such was his sympathetic understanding and his native splendour and
gift of leadership that he could not but be at the head of everything,
the first to be consulted and ingratiated. Not only was he the first
Medici poet but the first of the family to marry not for love but
for policy, and that too was a sign of decadence.

Lorenzo came into power when only twenty, and at the age of forty-two
he was dead, but in the