“Lorenzo,” writes Gino Capponi, “represented and united in his own person a whole century; he wrote sacred hymns and carnival songs, sought the society of, and listened to, religious men, whilst he led a dissolute life. An assiduous worker in state affairs, and indefatigable in all things that served his purpose and augmented his fame, yet he appeared only to care for amusement and gaiety and the company of witty and brilliant men. He was so constituted that nothing came amiss to him. The Medici palace was a museum, a school and a place of meeting for all the learned men who flocked thither, and from it proceeded grave counsel and intellectual teaching, as well as shows and festivals and a general corruption of manners. Two popes passed their childhood there, and the Platonic Academy, intended to raise the standards of life and thought, was founded within its walls. Poliziano and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, one of the greatest men of his time, were constant visitors. There the first chips flew off the marble under the chisel of Michelangelo, and there Luigi Pulci read the _Morgante_ aloud. Such exuberance of life, such magnificence, such gaiety has probably never been witnessed in any other age, and the name of Lorenzo towers above it all.”[75] Piero de’ Medici was twenty-one when his father died, and was in all respects different from him. “This is not to be wondered at,” remarks Guicciardini, “as he was born of a foreign mother, whereby the Florentine blood got mixed, and he acquired foreign manners and a style too haughty for our habits of life.” On hearing of the approach of Charles VIII., in 1494, he quitted Florence in a panic, and rode to Sarzana, where he had an audience of the King, and granted all his demands. On his return to Florence, he dismounted at the Palazzo Vecchio, and informed the Signoria that he had ceded Sarzana, Sarzanella, Pietrasanta, Pisa, Leghorn and Ripafratta to Charles. Next day he was saluted in the streets with the cry of _Popolo! Libertà!_ and Giovanni Cambi went home and wrote in his diary: “I note how on the 9th November, 1494, by the grace of God and of the Virgin Mary, Piero di Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, the tyrant of his country, was expelled by the people at the hour of vespers.... The Signoria put the price of 2,000 scudi on his head and the same on the head of his brother, Messer Giovanni the Cardinal, and 5,000 if they were taken alive. They fled by the Porta S. Gallo and went to Bologna, and with them went Ser Piero da Bibbiena, his chancellor, who was the king of all evil; a vainglorious peasant, and the chief cause of the ruin of the said Piero.”