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This chapter is not so much about a location in Italy but about the extremes of "magnificence and misery" found here. He is particularly critical of Florence and the Medici family. And, again he criticizes to "old masters". "... but I keep on protesting against the groveling spirit that could persuade those masters to prostitute their noble talents to the adulation of such monsters as the French, Venetian and Florentine Princes of two and three hundred years ago, all the same.

I am told that the old masters had to do these shameful things for bread, the princes and potentates being the only patrons of art. If a grandly gifted man may drag his pride and his manhood in the dirt for bread rather than starve with the nobility that is in him untainted, the excuse is a valid one. It would excuse theft in Washingtons and Wellingtons, and unchastity in women as well."

I've tried to construct the slideshow to emphasize this disparity between these two extremes in Italy. I cannot help but think that our so-called 1% ers, our rich elites, desire to recreate this same level of inequality.