Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence

In the spring of 1864 the British poet, writer and playwright Algernon Charles Swinburne had the chance of spending many days in Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance, and in the Uffizi Gallery on the study of its several collections. He immediately realized that statues and pictures were ranged and classed, as all the world knows they are, with full care and excellent sense, but one precious division of the treasury was then unregistered in catalogue or manual. The huge mass of original ...