Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/416

364 from the church and send it secretly to Florence. On the evening of the 12th of March, the members of Duke Cosimo's new Academy, which had chosen Michelangelo for their first President, bore the illustrious dead in solemn procession to Santa Croce. Here, four months later, an imposing funeral service was held, and the tasteless monument erected by Vasari bore witness to the general decadence of art in Italy.

Michelangelo had outlived all the painters of his generation. Raphael had been dead forty-four years, Leonardo forty-five, and of all the illustrious company who had met to choose the site of David, sixty years before, not one was left. With him the race of giants who had made the sixteenth century famous passed away. Before his death, Florence had already lost much of her old glory, and had ceased to be the home of art and culture and the centre of Italian civilization. Her great days were over, and, deprived of freedom and independence, the city of Dante and Savonarola sank into obscurity and insignificance. The arts which had blossomed on the banks of Arno during three centuries and more, fell into decay, and the great movement of the Renaissance reached its appointed end.