d 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 his disposal forced Federigo to give
the building an irregular outline. The fine facade, with its embayed
_loggie_ and flanking turrets, is placed too close upon the city
ramparts for its due effect. We are obliged to