X. PALAZZO RICCARDI.

For himself he constructed four splendid villas, at Careggi, Fiesole, Caffaggiolo, and Trebbio, and in the city the magnificent palace in the Via Larga, now called the Riccardi.

This Riccardi palace, as Cosmo observed after his poor son Peter had become bed-ridden with the gout, was a marvellously large mansion for so small a family as one old man and one cripple.

He received permission, quite definite as he thought, from Father Riccardi (master of the Sacred Palace) to print it, and it appeared in 1632.

The Duomo III: A Ceremony and a Museum Chapter IV The Campanile and the Baptistery Chapter V The Riccardi Palace and the Medici Chapter VI S. Lorenzo and Michelangelo Chapter VII Or San Michele and the Palazzo Vecchio Chapter VIII

By Benozzo Gozzoli, in the Palazzo Riccardi Tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino.

CHAPTER V The Riccardi Palace and the Medici An evasion of

Visitors go to the Riccardi palace rather to see Gozzoli's frescoes than anything else; and indeed apart from the noble solid Renaissance architecture of Michelozzo there is not much else to see.

It was in the seventeenth century that the palace passed to the Riccardi family, who made many additions.

But Florence, although it bought the palace from the Riccardi family a century and more ago, has never cared to give it back its rightful name.

Looking diagonally across it from the church one sees the great walls of the courtyard of what is now the Riccardi palace, but was in the great days the Medici palace; and at the corner, facing the Borgo S. Lorenzo, is Giovanni delle Bande Nere, in stone, by the impossible Bandinelli, looking at least twenty years older than he ever lived to be.

Another delightful predella is that by Benozzo Gozzoli (1420-1498), Fra Angelico's pupil, whom we have seen at the Riccardi palace.

The picture is not only a sacred painting but (like the Gozzoli fresco at the Riccardi palace) an exaltation of the Medici family.

Such stones as are placed one upon the other in the Pitti and the Strozzi and the Riccardi nothing can displace.

Thus, at the corner of the Via Cavour and the Via de' Pucci, opposite the Riccardi palace, is a beautiful Madonna and Child by Donatello.

It was made for Cosimo de' Medici, to stand in the courtyard of the Medici palace (now the Riccardi), and until that time, since antiquity, no one had made a statue to stand on a pedestal and be observable from all points.

From S. Marco it is an easy step, along the Via Sapienza, to the Piazza dell' Annunziata, where one finds the church of that name, the Palazzo Riccardi-Mannelli, and opposite it, gay with the famous della Robbia reliefs of swaddled children, the Spedale degli Innocenti.

Though it is hard to define what are the social differences expressed by the large quadrangles of Francesco Sforza's hospital at Milan, and the heavy cube of the Riccardi palace at Florence, we feel that the genius loci has in each case controlled the architect.

Michellozzo was then commissioned to raise the mighty, but comparatively humble, Riccardi Palace at the corner of the Via Larga, which continued to be the residence of the Medici through all their chequered history, until at last they took possession of the Palazzo Pitti.

This ancestral palace of the Medici passed in 1659 to the Marchese Gabriele Riccardi, from the Duke Francesco II.

The best of these are the frescoes of the Pisan Campo Santo, of the Riccardi Palace of Florence, of San Gemignano, and of Montefalco.

I may refer to the picture of the hunters in the Taylor Gallery at Oxford, the "Vintage of Noah" at Pisa, the attendants of the Magi in the Riccardi Palace, and the Carola in the "Marriage of Jacob and Rachel" at Pisa.

Riccardi Chapel.

There is a beautiful fresco of the journey of the Magi in the Riccardi Chapel at Florence, painted by Benozzo Gozzoli for the old Cosmo de' Medici.

From the Alessandro Martinengo Gallery, Brescia (1640), thence to Collection Francesco Riccardi, Bergamo, where C. and C. saw it in 1877.