Dino was elected _Gonfaloniere a vita_ when the son of Lorenso il Magnifico had to leave Florence in a hurry after having failed to avert the transit of Charles the VIII and his troops through Florence. Cosimo and Lorenzo dei Medici had only ruled for about half a century but the changes which had taken place during that time in Tuscany and in the whole of Italy were so great that history shows whole centuries which have not displayed half of the difference made, for bad or good, by the civilisation of the time. History was indeed at a turning of the road so that when Dino came in power there was as much difference between the political world anterior to the Medicean rule and his own as there is between the sweet and gentle art of the Beato Angelico, and that of Signorelli who introduced realism in his own vigorous art. Good Dino, however, having been chosen Gonfaloniere to bring Florence back to its former virtuous ways, looked to the old Republican days for a model of government, and he failed to give his fellow citizens the political advantage that would have met their needs just as Signorelli would have shown himself a failure if he had painted exactly as the Beato had done. Machiavelli was no optimist, but whatever the weakness of his conception of history due to the philosophical notions of his time, he did not give himself up entirely to abusing the wickedness of the people. Sure enough, they were wicked—far more so than they had been before the Medicean had corrupted them—yet they were above all different and had, therefore, to be governed according to different ideas. It is no wonder, therefore, that the Florentine Secretary should have spent so many hours of his enforced leisure after the realisation of the event, the inevitability of which had so long haunted him, to warn his contemporaries and the posterity of the necessity of governing not according to a mummified ideal, but in harmony with one’s own time. _Bisogna riscontrarsi coi propri tempi_ and to do so he recommends the statesman again and again to get direct information of that which he calls _la verità effettuale delle cose_, that is effective or actual truth in matter of politics. It is both the experimental method of Galileo and Vico’s historical understanding of society that are alluded to in this constantly recurrent admonition of the man whose shrewdness was to blind posterity for several centuries and throw the power and depth of his political genius in the dark.