was struck, however, by the physician's
aspect, and would have engaged him in talk had not one of the Duke's
gentlemen appeared with the announcement that his Highness would be
pleased to receive the Cavaliere Valsecca.

Like most dwellings of its kind in Italy, the palace of Pianura
resembled one of those shells which reveal by their outer convolutions
the gradual development of the creature housed within. For two or three
generations after Bracciaforte, the terrible founder of the line, had
made himself master of the republic, his descendants had clung to the
old brick fortress or rocca which the great condottiere had held
successfully against the burghers' arquebuses and the battering-rams of
rival adventurers, and which still glassed its battlements in the slow
waters of the Piana beside the city wall. It was Ascanio, the first
Duke, the correspondent of Politian and Castiglione, who, finding the
ancestral lair too cramped for the court of a humanist prince, had
summoned Luciano da Laurana to build a palace better fitted to his
state. Duke Ascanio, in bronze by Verocchio, still looked up with pride
from the palace-square at the brick and terra-cotta facade with its
fruit-wreathed arches crowned by imperial profiles; but a later prince
found the small rooms and intricate passages of Laurana's structure
inadequate to the pomp of an ally of Leo X., and Vignola added the state
apartments, the sculpture gallery and the libraries.

The palace now passed for one of the wonders of Italy. The Duke's guest,
the witty and learned Aretino, celebrated it in verse, his friend
Cardinal Bembo in prose; Correggio painted the walls of one room, Guilio
Romano the ceiling of another. It seemed that magnificence could go no
farther, till the seventeenth century brought to the throne a Duke who
asked himself how a self-respecting prince could live without a theatre,
a riding-school and an additional wing to lodge the ever-growing train
of court officials who had by this time replaced the feudal men-at-arms.
He answered the question by laying an extra tax on his people and
inviting to Pianura the great Roman architect Carlo Borromini, who
regretfully admitted that his illustrious patron was on the whole less
royally housed than their Highnesses of Mantua and Parma. Within five
years the "cavallerizza," the theatre and the gardens flung defiance at
these aspiring potentates; and again Pianura took precedence of her
rivals. The present Du