an, and devoted his
talents to the service of Duchess Beatrice until her death, after which
he went his way sadly, and sought shelter in his old haunts. Most of his
time after this was spent with the good Duchess Elizabeth at Urbino,
where the Milanese refugees found a warm welcome, and where Serafino was
caressed and _feted_ by all the great ladies in turn, until a premature
death closed his career, and he died in Rome in 1500, lamented in prose
and verse by the most cultured spirits of the age.

While Beatrice encouraged these foreign poets to settle at Milan,
Lodovico invited the Tuscans Bellincioni and Antonio Cammelli, surnamed
Pistoia, to his court, in the hope of refining and polishing the rude
Lombard diction. The priest Tanzio, writing after Bellincioni's death in
1492, remarks that this influence had already borne fruit, and that the
sonnet, which was practically unknown in Milan before Bellincioni's
coming, was now diligently cultivated there. But, not unnaturally, a
bitter rivalry sprung up between the Lombard and the Tuscan poets, and a
fierce poetic warfare was exchanged between them. Bellincioni's
suspicious and quarrelsome nature is revealed in his letters to his
patron, in which he is always complaining of the envious detractors
whose wicked tongues are employed in backbiting him day and night. His
own character was by no means free from the same imputations; and the
Ferrarese poet, Tebaldeo, the friend of Raphael and Castiglione,
composed a witty epitaph, in which he warns passers-by to avoid the last
resting-place of this singer, who had made so many enemies in life, lest
he turn in his grave and bite them. Bellincioni's bitterest foe was a
certain Bergamasque poet, Guidotto Prestinari, who wrote many odes and
songs in honour of Beatrice, and represented the old Lombard school. On
one occasion this misguided person even dared to attack Leonardo, and
wrote a sonnet in which he jeers at the great painter for spending his
time in hunting for curious worms and insects on the hills of Bergamo,
when he visited his friends of the Melzi family. Leonardo scorned to
take any notice of these petty insults, but in his letter to the
councillors of Piacenza we see the contempt which he had for Lombard
artists--"those rude and ignorant workmen," as he calls them, "who boast
they will get letters of recommendation from Signora Lodovico or his
Commissioner of Works, Messer Ambrogio Ferrari, when not one of them is
fit