Montaigne, who was in Florence in 1580, notes in his delightful _Journal_: “On Sunday I saw the Pitti Palace, and among other things a mule in marble, which is the effigy of one that is still alive; this honour has been paid on account of its long services in carrying materials for the building, at least so says a Latin inscription. We saw in the palace the Chimæra (antique), which has a head with horns and ears coming out of its shoulders, and a body like a small lion. On the preceding Saturday the Grand Duke’s palace was thrown open and filled with peasants, to whom nothing was closed; they danced in every corner of the large saloon. The concourse of this class of people is, it seems to me, emblematic of their lost liberty, which is thus evoked every year during the principal festival of the town” [24th June, St. John’s Day]. The Grand Duke invited Montaigne to dine at the palace, and he was evidently astonished at seeing Bianca take the place of honour above her husband. “This Duchess is handsome,” he writes, “according to the Italian idea, with an agreeable but imperious countenance, a coarse figure and breasts to match. She seems to have entirely subjugated the Prince, and to have had him under her dominion for a long time.” Torquato Tasso evidently admired the Grand Duchess, to whom he addressed many madrigals and sonnets, often playing fancifully with her “bel nome” Bianca, and praising her golden hair. “Voi rosati e bei labri E rosate le guancie avete ancora, Come vermiglio Aurora, E dorate le chiome E bianca sete come il vostro nome.” She must have been kind to the unhappy poet, who wrote, when sending to her fifty madrigals in manuscript: “Had your Highness not experienced both good and evil fortune, you would not so well understand the misfortunes of others.” Her husband, Francesco de’ Medici, however, declared he did not want a madman at his court; and when Tasso returned to Florence in 1590 his patroness was dead, and he is described as wandering about the Palazzo Pitti like a spectre, and the Florentines wrote, _actumi est de eo_. Francesco I. had a particular liking for fountains and grottoes. He ordered four unfinished colossal statues, rough-hewn out of marble by Michelangelo, to be used as supports for a mass of rockwork in a grotto near one of the entrances to the Boboli gardens. These are generally supposed to be four of the prisoners destined for the tomb of Pope Giulio II., but according to J. A. Symonds, “this attribution involves considerable difficulties. In the first place the scale is different, and the stride of one of them, at any rate, is too wide for the pedestals of that monument. Then their violent contortions and ponderous adult forms seem to be at variance with the spirit of the captives.... Their incompleteness baffles criticism; yet we feel instinctively that they were meant for the open air and for effect at a considerable distance.”