Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III MAXIMILIAN ? THE LAST OF THE KNIGHTS (1459-1519) We cannot do much sightseeing in Innsbruck, or for that matter in the Tyrol at large, without continually coming upon traces of Emperor Maximilian L, of the house of Habsburg-Austria. His was an all-pervading personality, filling his age, and leaving a trail of legends to his credit in the mouths of his people. What did Maximilian I. look like? He was a man with an aquiline nose set in a broad face, with a delicately chiselled mouth, of which the lower lip protruded slightly, with keen, dark eyes, and long hair hanging to his shoulders, ? he had the face of an artist, strong and sensitive, romantic and imaginative. His personality was commanding, yet full of temperament, full of kindliness. These traits appear in the many portraits of him which are extant, whether we take that superb portrait by Bernhard Strigel in the Pinakothek at Munich, his full face, by Lucas of Leyden, in the Gemaldegalerie of Vienna, his kneeling figure in Bernardo Zer- nale’s picture in the Pinacoteca of Milan, his profile by Ambrose de Predis in the Kunst- historische Museum in Vienna, or, finally, that portrait by Albrecht Diirer, showing him in his declining years, which is now kept in the Gemaldegalerie in Vienna. The features are everywhere the same, even on numerous medals, coins, and in woodcuts. The marble tablets that surround Maximilian’s cenotaph, in the Hofkirche, tell the story of his life. Let us turn the leaves of that illustrated text-book. We find, (1)
The Wedding of Maximilian with Mary of Burgundy. Charles the Bold, of Burgundy, had no son to succeed him. He left an only daughter, Mary, who presently found herself beset with difficulties, plunged into that network of intrigue into which the wily Louis XI. had dra…
