sand ducats, together with all arrears of pay due to
him, and ten thousand ducats owed him by the Duke of Ferrara. It set
forth the testator's intention that this money should be employed in
defence of the Christian faith against the Turk. One condition was
attached to the bequest. The legatees were to erect a statue to Colleoni
on the Piazza of St. Mark. This, however, involved some difficulty; for
the proud republic had never accorded a similar honor, nor did they
choose to encumber their splendid square with a monument. They evaded
the condition by assigning the Campo in front of the Scuola di S. Marco,
where also stands the Church of S. Zanipolo, to the purpose. Here
accordingly the finest bronze equestrian statue in Italy, if we except
the Marcus Aurelius of the Capitol, was reared upon its marble pedestal
by Andrea Verocchio and Alessandro Leopardi.

Colleoni's liberal expenditure of wealth found its reward in the
immortality conferred by art. While the names of Braccio, his master in
the art of war, and of Piccinino, his great adversary, are familiar to
few but professed students, no one who has visited either Bergamo or
Venice can fail to have learned something about the founder of the
Chapel of St. John and the original of Leopardi's bronze. The annals of
sculpture assign to Verocchio, of Florence, the principal share in this
statue: but Verocchio died before it was cast; and even granting that he
designed the model, its execution must be attributed to his
collaborator, the Venetian Leopardi. For my own part, I am loath to
admit that the chief credit of this masterpiece belongs to a man whose
undisputed work at Florence shows but little of its living spirit and
splendor of suggested motion. That the Tuscan science of Verocchio
secured conscientious modelling for man and horse may be assumed; but I
am fain to believe that the concentrated fire which animates them both
is due in no small measure to the handling of his northern
fellow-craftsman.

While immersed in the dreary records of crimes, treasons, cruelties, and
base ambitions, which constitute the bulk of fifteenth-century Italian
history, it is refreshing to meet with a character so frank and manly,
so simply pious and comparatively free from stain, as Colleoni. The only
general of his day who can bear comparison with him for purity of public
life and decency in conduct was Federigo di Montefeltro. Even here, the
comparison redounds to Colleoni's credit;