GIULIANO DE' MEDICI was third son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and was known in the circle of Urbino by the same appellation. Born in 1478, he passed at that court several years of his family's exile from Florence; nor was he ungrateful for the splendid hospitality he there enjoyed, for, while he lived, his influence with his brother, Leo X., averted those designs against the dukedom, which were directed to his own aggrandisement. After the restoration of the Medici, Leo confided to him the government of Florence, which he endeavoured to administer in the spirit of his father, and succeeded in gaining the good will of the people. But the Pope was not satisfied with the re-establishment of his race as sovereigns of that republic; and the fine qualities and vast ideas of Giuliano suggested him as a fit instrument of further grasping schemes. To realise these, Leo coquetted between France and Spain, and, like his predecessors, sacrificed the peace of Italy. The prizes which he successively proposed for Giuliano, who, by resigning Florence into the hands of his nephew Lorenzo, the heir-male of his house, was free to accept whatever sovereignty might be had, were the duchy of Milan, a state in Eastern Lombardy and Ferrara, or the crown of Naples. In June, 1515, the Pontiff conferred on him the insignia of gonfaloniere and captain-general of the Church; but he was prevented from active service by a fever which cut him off in the following March, when only thirty-eight, not without suspicion of poison at the hands of his nephew Lorenzo. His name is enshrined in Bembo's prose and Ariosto's verse, whilst his tomb by Michael Angelo in the Medicean Chapel, which Rogers, with a quaint but happy antithesis, calls "the most real and unreal thing which ever came from the chisel," is one of the glories of art.[*41] Shortly before his death he had married Filiberta of Savoy, whose nephew, Francis I., created him Duke of Nemours, and, had his life been prolonged, would probably have aided him to further aggrandisement. [Footnote *41: Giuliano was not so bad a poet himself. Cf. on this subject SERASSI, in the Annotazioni to the _Tirsi_ of Castiglione at stanza 43, and the five sonnets contained in _Cod. Palat._, 206 (_I Cod. Palat. della Nazionale Centrale di Firenze_, vol. I., fasc. 4), and the six of _Cod. Magliabech._ II., I., 60 (BARTOLI, _I manoscritti della Bib. Nazionale di Firenze_, tom. I., p. 38).]