pictures with a box without a lid, 1 0
A bench to put the tarsia on, 0 40

The words untranslated are, I suppose, Perugian words. At all events,
they do not appear in the large Italian dictionary edited by Tommaseo
and Bellini.

This Bernardino six years earlier worked as apprentice with Maestro
Mattia da Reggio, and was paid 6 florins 22 soldi for four months. His
name appears in the list of masters of stone and wood.

[Illustration: Plate 29.--_Panel from door of Sala del Cambio, Perugia._

_To face page 48._]

Frederic of Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, built himself a splendid palace
in that city between the years of 1468 and 1480, which cost 200,000
golden scudi. At that time a sack of corn cost rather less than five
modern Italian lire in the duchy, and a hectolitre of wine only one
franc sixty centimes, and one may gain some idea of the way in which
princes of liberal tastes lavished their money over the production of
works of art by comparing these figures. Among the decorations, which
include much stone carving of the most extraordinary finish, which in
the interior of the palace appears as fresh as the day it was completed,
were some splendidly inlaid doors, eight or nine of which still remain.
The palace was constructed upon the foundations of an older palace of
1350, much enlarged, and here he lived magnificently, and collected that
fine library which was subsequently removed to Rome, of which Vespasiano
da Bisticci, the Florentine bookseller, who had a good deal to do with
it, says that it was the most perfect that he knew, for in others there
were either gaps or duplicates, from which defects it was free.
Castiglione's "Cortigiano," the ideal of a courtier in those days,
describes the Court of Urbino as it was under Guidobaldo, his son and
successor. Among the decorations of the palace which still remain is the
panelling of a small studio on the _piano nobile_, close to the tiny
chapel, which is entirely surrounded by intarsia of the finest
description, which represents in the lower part a seat something like
the misereres of choir stalls surrounding the apartment, some parts of
which are raised and some lowered. In the spaces rest some portions of
the duke's arms, a sword, a mace, &c., leaning in the corners, and on
the lower parts of the seat are musical instruments, fruits and
sweetmeats in dishes, cushions, books, &c. The upper panels show
cupb