tesan
magnificently throned in nonchalance at a pope's footstool; if
Verocchio's Colleoni on his horse at Venice impersonate the pomp and
circumstance of scientific war--surely this Medea exhales the
flower-like graces, the sweet sanctities of human life, that even in
that turbid age were found among high-bred Italian ladies. Such power
have mighty sculptors, even in our modern world, to make the mute stone
speak in poems and clasp the soul's life of a century in some five or
six transcendent forms.

The Colleoni, or Coglioni, family were of considerable antiquity and
well authenticated nobility in the town of Bergamo. Two lions' heads
conjoined formed one of their canting ensigns; another was borrowed from
the vulgar meaning of their name. Many members of the house held
important office during the three centuries preceding the birth of the
famous general Bartolommeo. He was born in the year 1400 at Solza in the
Bergamasque Contado. His father, Paolo, or Puho as he was commonly
called, was poor and exiled from the city, together with the rest of the
Guelf nobles, by the Visconti. Being a man of daring spirit, and little
inclined to languish in a foreign state as the dependent on some patron,
Puho formed the bold design of seizing the Castle of Trezzo. This he
achieved in 1405 by fraud, and afterwards held it as his own by force.
Partly with the view of establishing himself more firmly in his acquired
lordship, and partly out of family affection, Puho associated four of
his first-cousins in the government of Trezzo. They repaid his kindness
with an act of treason and cruelty only too characteristic of those
times in Italy. One day while he was playing at draughts in a room of
the castle, they assaulted him and killed him, seized his wife and the
boy Bartolommeo, and flung them into prison. The murdered Puho had
another son, Antonio, who escaped and took refuge with Giorgio Benzone,
the tyrant of Crema. After a short time the Colleoni brothers found
means to assassinate him also; therefore Bartolommeo alone, a child of
whom no heed was taken, remained to be his father's avenger. He and his
mother lived together in great indigence at Solza, until the lad felt
strong enough to enter the service of one of the numerous petty Lombard
princes, and to make himself if possible a captain of adventure. His
name alone was a sufficient introduction, and the Duchy of Milan,
dismembered upon the death of Gian Maria Visconti, was in suc