“Florence became a revelation for me that made me infinitely happy. However many works of art of the Italian Renaissance I had already seen in reproductions, and in the originals of the museums of Berlin, Munich and Paris, only now it it appeared to me not only as a beauty to be enjoyed aesthetically, but as the supreme culmination of the life of a highly gifted people, in which civilization and State operated in the most intimate way on each other. And everywhere I also felt the tragedy inherent in this greatness and its fall.”