Lorenzo de’ Medici, Lorenzo the Magnificent, found time when steering through the perilous channels of endless family feuds to immortalize himself as a collector. To the efforts of Cosimo, his grandfather, are due those priceless classical and Oriental manuscripts which formed the nucleus of the Laurentian Library in Florence. The grandson was worthy of his forebear. Through Joannes Lascaris he procured from the monastery of Mount Athos two hundred manuscripts of greatest importance for the Laurentian, an incomparable collection, which, together with other works of art, disappeared at the sacking of Florence during the rule of Lorenzo’s wretchedly incompetent son, Piero. Lorenzo, notwithstanding his love for ancient works of art, was a ready patron of the art of his time. Lorenzo’s daughter, Catherine de’ Medici, had all the Medici love for art, and she, too, patronized living artists lavishly, as her husband’s father, Francis I, had done in France before her. She it was who took such constructively active thought for the planning of the Tuileries, and her interest in books, manuscripts, and other things led to enriching the collections of the Bibliothéque Nationale. What a remarkable list of collectors France can write in her Golden Book of Art-Lovers--Jean Grolier, De Thou, Pierre Jean Mariette, Cardinal Mazarin, Comte de Caylus--to name but a few of literally thousands! Nor must we forget Madame de Pompadour, whose library and marvelous collection of works of art were sold after her death. There is no question that Madame de Pompadour took a constructive interest in art and literature, an interest which led Voltaire to assert that without her patronage the culture of her time would have found itself in sorry plight under the rule of a king whose thoughts had little or nothing to do with the finer things of life, that king who stood at the palace window looking forth as the cortège of the Pompadour passed by in a drizzling rain and remarked: “It is a wet day for the Marquise!” Charles I of England was a king whose art-collecting proclivities produced rich spoils indeed for the Cromwellians. In the quaintly worded old catalogue recording his possessions we find noted among other things, “Item, a landscape piece of trees, and some moorish water, wherein are two ducks a swimming, and some troup of water flowers, being done in a new way, whereof they do make Turkey carpets, which was presented to the King by the French Ambassador, in an all over gilded frame 1 ft. 10 x 2 ft., 5 wide.” Some of King Charles’s treasures in the century following passed into the hands of Horace Walpole, who housed them in his villa at Strawberry Hill, that “Gothic castle” which revived the English eighteenth-century taste for Gothic design. Austin Dobson’s “Horace Walpole” says of the master of Strawberry Hill: