Lorenzo was the most remarkable prince of the _quattrocento_, but there were many others who patronized scholars and artists as generously as he. Alfonso of Aragon, the king who temporarily united the Two Sicilies, was devoted to the humanities. He was wont to hear Terence and Virgil read aloud at dinner, and took Livy with him on his campaigns. But Naples and Sicily had almost no share in the achievements and glory of the Italian Renaissance. Lawless, ignorant, poor, unsuccessful, they responded feebly to the efforts of individuals, who, here and there, strove to emulate the great Florentines. But in the North all the world was mad for art, and its princes led the fashion. Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino (1422-1482), was the foremost scholar among soldiers and the foremost soldier among scholars; he gathered together a noble library, now lodged in the Vatican; he built a palace, unmatched in Italy; and collected about him artists of all kinds. Yet Federigo was a soldier by nature as well as by profession, as one may see from the great portrait of him in the Uffizi, painted by Piero della Francesca. His strong profile, with firm mouth and big, broken, aquiline nose, testifies far more forcibly to his character as a warrior than as a virtuoso. His near neighbour, the tyrant of Pesaro (a little city by the Adriatic coast), Alessandro Sforza, passed the intervals between his battles in buying books. Duke Ercole of Ferrara was likewise a patron of art, and adorned his capital as well as his palaces and villas with all sorts of beautiful things. The dukes of Milan were somewhat eclipsed, but only for a time, by their less powerful rivals of Ferrara and Urbino. The old ducal line of the Visconti had died out with Filippo Maria, and Francesco Sforza (husband of Filippo's daughter), who succeeded to the duchy (1450), was busy making good his very defective title, and had little time to attend to art or letters. Even he kept humanists in his pay, and continued work on the glorious Certosa of Pavia.