" ... my noble task, Of which all Europe talks from side to side."] [mq] {365} _Where Luxury might willingly be born_. _And buried Learning looks forth into fresher morn_,-- [MS. M. erased.] [426] [The wealth which permitted the Florentine nobility to indulge their taste for modern, that is, refined luxury was derived from success in trade. For example, Giovanni de' Medici (1360-1428), the father of Cosmo and great-grand-father of Lorenzo de' Medici, was a banker and Levantine merchant. As for the Renaissance, to say nothing of Petrarch of Florentine parentage, two of the greatest Italian scholars and humanists--Ficino, born A.D. 1430, and Poliziano, born 1454--were Florentines; and Poggio was born A.D. 1380, at Terra Nuova on Florentine soil.] [mr] _There, too, the Goddess breathes in stone and fills_.--[MS. M.] [427] [The statue of Venus de' Medici, which stands in the Tribune of the Uffizzi Gallery at Florence, is said to be a late Greek (first or second century B.C.) copy of an early reproduction, of the Cnidian Aphrodite, the work, perhaps, of one of his sons, Kephisodotos or Timarchos. (See _Histoire de la Sculpture Grecque_, par Maxime Collignon, Paris, 1897, ii. 641.) In a Catalogue Raissonné of _La Galerie de Florence_, 1804, in the editor's possession, which opens with an eloquent tribute to the enlightenment of the Medici, _la fameuse Vénus_ is conspicuous by her absence. She had been deported to Paris by Napoleon, but when Lord Byron spent a day in Florence in April, 1817, and returned "drunk with Beauty" from the two galleries, the lovely lady, thanks to the much-abused "Powers," was once more in her proper shrine.] [ms] ----_and we draw_ _As from a fountain of immortal hills_.--[MS. M. erased.] [428] {366} [Byron's contempt for connoisseurs and dilettanti finds expression in _English Bards, etc._, lines 1027-1032, and, again, in _The Curse of Minerva_, lines 183, 184. The "stolen copy" of _The Curse_ was published in the _New Monthly Magazine_ (_Poetical Works_, 1898, i. 453) under the title of _The Malediction of Minerva; or, The Athenian Marble-Market_, a title (see line 7) which must have been invented by and not for Byron. He returns to the charge in _Don Juan_, Canto 11. stanza cxviii. lines 5-9-- " ... a statuary, (A race of mere impostors, when all's done-- I've seen much finer women ripe and real, Than all the nonsense of their stone ideal)."