Along with a careful cultivation of fruit for the
purposes of the table, we find an interest in the plant for its own
sake, on account of the pleasure it gives to the eye. We learn from the
history of art at how late a period this passion for botanical
collections was laid aside, and gave place to what was considered the
picturesque style of landscape-gardening.
The collections, too, of foreign animals not only gratified curiosity,
but served also the higher purposes of observation. The facility of
transport from the southern and eastern harbors of the Mediterranean,
and the mildness of the Italian climate, made it practicable to buy the
largest animals of the south, or to accept them as presents from the
Sultans. The cities and princes were especially anxious to keep live
lions even where a lion was not, as in Florence, the emblem of the
State. The lions' den was generally in or near the government palace,
as in Perugia and Florence; in Rome, it lay on the slope of the
Capitol. The beasts sometimes served as executioners of political
judgements, and no doubt, apart from this, they kept alive a certain
terror in the popular mind. Their condition was also held to be ominous
of good or evil. Their fertility, especially, was considered a sign of
public prosperity, and no less a man than Giovanni Villani thought it
worth recording that he was present at the delivery of a lioness.
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