edici as a
family, that they had but one motive--mercenary ambition and
self-aggrandisement--is true, the fact remains that the crown did
not reach their brows until one hundred and seventy years from the
first appearance of old Giovanni di Bicci in Florentine affairs. The
statue of Cosimo I in the Piazza della Signoria has a bas-relief of
his coronation. He was then fifty-one; he lived but four more years,
and when he died he left a dukedom flourishing in every way: rich,
powerful, busy, and enlightened. He had developed and encouraged
the arts, capriciously, as Cellini's "Autobiography" tells us, but
genuinely too, as we can see at the Uffizi and the Pitti. The arts,
however, were not what they had been, for the great period had passed
and Florence was in the trough of the wave. Yet Cosimo found the best
men he could--Cellini, Bronzino, and Vasari--and kept them busy. But
his greatest achievement as a connoisseur was his interest in Etruscan
remains and the excavations at Arezzo and elsewhere which yielded
the priceless relics now at the Archaeological Museum.

With Cosimo I this swift review of the Medici family ends. The
rest have little interest for the visitor to Florence to-day,
for whom Cellini's Perseus, made to Cosimo I's order, is the last
great artistic achievement in the city in point of time. But I may
say that Cosimo I's direct descendants occupied the throne (as it
had now become) until the death of Gian Gastone, son of Cosimo III,
who died in 1737. Tuscany passed to Austria until 1801. In 1807 it
became French, and in 1814 Austrian again. In 1860 it was merged in
the Kingdom of Italy under the rule of the monarch who has given his
name to the great new Piazza--Vittorio Emmanuele.

After Gian Gastone's death one other Medici remained alive: Anna
Maria Ludovica, daughter of Cosimo III. Born in 1667, she married
the Elector Palatine of the Rhine, and survived until 1743. It was
she who left to the city the priceless Medici collections, as I have
stated in chapter VIII. The earlier and greatest of the Medici are
buried in the church of S. Lorenzo or in Michelangelo's sacristy; the
later Medici, beginning with Giovanni delle Bande Nere and his wife,
and their son Cosimo I, are in the gorgeous mausoleum that adjoins
S. Lorenzo and is still being enriched with precious marbles.

Such is an outline of the history of this wonderful family, and we
leave their ancient home, built by the greatest and wisest of t