Excerpt from The Story of Florence It is needless to say that the number of books, oldand new, is very considerable indeed, to which anyone venturing in these days to write yet another book on Florence must have had recourse, and to whose authors he is bound to be indebted - from the earliest Florentine chroniclers down to the most recent bio graphers of Lorenzo the Magnificent, of Savonarola, of Michelangelo - from Vasari down to our modern scientific art critics - from Richa and Moreni down to the Misses Homer. My obligations can hardly be acknowledged here in detail; but, to mention a few modern works alone, I am most largely indebted to Capponi's Storia della Repnboliea di Firenze, to various writings of Professor Pasquale Villari, and to Mr Arm strong's Lorenzo de' Medici to the works of Ruskin and J. A. Symonds, of M. Reymond and Mr Berenson; and, \in the domains of topography, to Baedeker's Hand Boo . In judging of the merits and the authorship of individual pictures and statues, I have usually given more weight to the results of modern criticism than to the pleasantness of old tradition. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.