, and Vignola added the state
apartments, the sculpture gallery and the libraries.
The palace now passed for one of the wonders of Italy. The Duke's guest,
the witty and learned Aretino, celebrated it in verse, his friend
Cardinal Bembo in prose; Correggio painted the walls of one room, Guilio
Romano the ceiling of another. It seemed that magnificence could go no
farther, till the seventeenth century brought to the throne a Duke who
asked himself how a self-respecting prince could live without a theatre,
a riding-school and an additional wing to lodge the ever-growing train
of court officials who had by this time replaced the feudal men-at-arms.
He answered the question by laying an extra tax on his people and
inviting to Pianura the great Roman architect Carlo Borromini, who
regretfully admitted that his illustrious patron was on the whole less
royally housed than their Highnesses of Mantua and Parma. Within five
years the "cavallerizza," the theatre and the gardens flung defiance at
these aspiring potentates; and again Pianura took precedence of her
rivals. The present Duke's father had expressed the most recent tendency
of the race by the erection of a chapel in the florid Jesuit style; and
the group of buildings thus chronicled in rich durable lines the varying
passions and ambitions of three hundred years of power.
As Odo followed his guide toward the Duke's apartments he remarked a
change in the aspect of the palace. Where formerly the corridors had
been thronged with pages, lacqueys and gaily-dressed cavaliers and
ladies, only a few ecclesiastics now glided by: here a Monsignore in
ermine and lace rochet, attended by his chaplain and secretaries, there
a cowled Dominican or a sober-looking secular priest.
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