Everywhere In The Structures Dating After The Gothic Period
There Is Want Of Sensibility; The Art Of The Renaissance Was
Not moulded
here in the moods of a refined and effeminate patriciate, such as in
Venice tempered it to beauty;
But it renders in marble the prepotence of
a commercialized nobility, and makes good in that form the right of the
city to be called Genoa the Proud. Perhaps she would not wish to be
called proud because of these palaces alone. It is imaginable that she
would like the stranger to remember the magnificence with which she
rewarded the patriotism of her greatest citizen after Columbus and
Mazzini: that mighty admiral, Andrea Doria, who freed this country first
from the rule of Charles V. and then from the rule of Francis I.; who
swept the Barbary corsairs from the seas; who beat the Turks in battles
on ship and on shore; who took Corsica from the French when he was
eighty-eight years old; who suffered from civil faction; who outlived
exile as he had outlived war, and who died at the age of ninety-four,
after he had refused the sovereignty of the country he had served so
long; who was the Washington of his day, and was equally statesman and
soldier, and, above all, patriot. It is his portrait that you see in
that old palace (called the Palace of the Prince because Charles V. had
called him Prince) overlooking the port, where he sits an old, old man,
very weary, in the sole society of his sarcastic cat, as I have noted
before.
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