his
patronage in an intelligent manner. Scholars and artists were clustered
about him in great numbers; Urbino was widely known as the Italian
Athens, and as one of the foremost centres of art and literature in all
Europe, when Elizabetta Gonzaga was wedded to Guidobaldo and became the
chatelaine of the palace. The young duke and his wife began their life
together under the most auspicious circumstances. From what his tutor,
Odasio of Padua, says about his boyhood, it is evident that if he were
alive to-day he could easily obtain one of the Cecil Rhodes Oxford
fellowships, for we are told that he cared only for study and for manly
sports, and that he was of an upright character. His memory was so
retentive that he could repeat whole books, word for word, after many
years, and in more ways than one he had displayed a wonderful precocity.
Elizabetta, too, had been given a most liberal and careful education,
and her ready intelligence was equalled only by her careful tact and her
perfect _savoir faire_. Indeed, on account of her many attainments,
personal charm, and her refining influence, which was far-reaching, she
may be likened to that celebrated Frenchwoman Catherine de Vivonne,
Madame de Rambouillet, whose hotel was, a century later, such a
rendezvous for the gentler spirits of France in that hurly-burly period
which followed the religious wars. Endowed as she was by nature, it was
by most fortuitous circumstance that she was called to preside over the
court of Urbino, for at that time there was no other woman in Italy who
was so fitted for such a distinguished position. It was in the last
decade of the _quattrocento_ that Elizabetta was married, and she found
clustered about her from the very start illustrious artists and men of
letters. Melozzo da Forli and Giovanni Santi--Raphael's father--were
there, and there the early youth of Raphael was spent; Jan van Eyck and
Justus of Ghent, the great Flemish painters, were also there, and the
palace was adorned with many monuments to their skill. Here it was that
Piero della Francesca had written his celebrated work on the science of
perspective, Francesco di Giorgio his _Trattato d'Architettura_, and
Giovanni Santi his poetical account of the artists of his time; and here
it was in the first days of the sixteenth century that Elizabetta was
the centre of a group which was all sweetness and light when compared
with the prevailing habits of life.

In this circle were to be