of Italian pleasure-houses? This unique blending of
the feudal past with the Renaissance spirit of the time when it was
built, connects it with the art of Ariosto--or more exactly with
Boiardo's epic. Duke Federigo planned his palace at Urbino just at the
moment when the Count of Scandiano had began to chaunt his lays of
Roland in the Castle of Ferrara. Chivalry, transmuted by the Italian
genius into something fanciful and quaint, survived as a frail work of
art. The men-at-arms of the Condottieri still glittered in gilded
hauberks. Their helmets waved with plumes and bizarre crests. Their
surcoats blazed with heraldries; their velvet caps with medals bearing
legendary emblems. The pomp and circumstance of feudal war had not yet
yielded to the cannon of the Gascon or the Switzer's pike. The fatal
age of foreign invasions had not begun for Italy. Within a few years
Charles VIII.'s holiday excursion would reveal the internal rottenness
and weakness of her rival states, and the peninsula for half a century
to come would be drenched in the blood of Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards,
fighting for her cities as their prey. But now Lorenzo de' Medici was
still alive. The famous policy which bears his name held Italy suspended
for a golden time in false tranquillity and independence. The princes
who shared his culture and his love of art were gradually passing into
modern noblemen, abandoning the savage feuds and passions of more virile
centuries, yielding to luxury and scholarly enjoyments. The castles were
becoming courts, and despotisms won by force were settling into
dynasties.

It was just at this epoch that Duke Federigo built his castle at Urbino.
One of the ablest and wealthiest Condottieri of his time, one of the
best instructed and humanest of Italian princes, he combined in himself
the qualities which mark that period of transition. And these he
impressed upon his dwelling-house, which looks backward to the mediaeval
fortalice and forward to the modern palace. This makes it the just
embodiment in architecture of Italian romance, the perfect analogue of
the _Orlando Innamorato_. By comparing it with the castle of the Estes
at Ferrara and the Palazzo del Te of the Gonzagas at Mantua, we place it
in its right position between mediaeval and Renaissance Italy, between
the age when principalities arose upon the ruins of commercial
independence and the age when they became dynastic under Spain.

The exigencies of the ground at