Page:Three Years in Europe.djvu/358

316 in the gloom of the Middle Ages after the extinction of ancient civilization, it was Florence which first lighted the torch of civilization, it was Florence which imparted to a dead world the vivifying energy of poetry and literature, of painting and sculpture, of arts and civilization! And where is the town in Europe or in the world,—Athens alone perhaps excepted,—which can boast of having given birth to such a galaxy of great men, such a crowd of the instructors of the world, as Florence? The names of Galileo and Dante alone would suffice to make a city proud, but Florence displays to the admiring world a host of other names almost as great and glorious. Petrarch and Boccacio, the merchant prince Lorenzo di Medici, Leonardi da Vinci the father of modern painting, and the matchless Michael Angelo, were all born in Florence! The devotee who sets out on an intellectual pilgrimage cannot come to a nobler shrine than Florence!

The glory of modern Florence is her matchless picture galleries, those of Uffizi and Pitti. One may study painting and sculpture in these galleries for months and years. I cannot pretend to give here any thing like a proper account of even the most celebrated paintings and statues collected here; all I can do is to mention by name only a few of the most important. The famous Venus di Medici, the matchless statue which was found in the sixteenth century among the ruins of Hadrian's palace near Tivoli, is in the Uffizi gallery. The still more famous statues of Niobe and her children which have been copied and reproduced in so many modern mansions in the capitals