Of LUDOVICO ODASIO it is unnecessary to add anything to what we have already had occasion to say.[69] FRANCESCO VENTURINI of Urbino is reputed the first after the revival who wrote a complete Latin grammar. It was dedicated to Count Ottaviano Ubaldini, and was printed at Florence in 1482, and again in his native town by Henry of Cologne, in 1493-4.[70] Among his pupils he is said to have numbered both Raffaele and Michael Angelo.[*71] Besides BERNI DA GUBBIO, whose Diary has been edited in the Scriptores of Muratori, there were several annotators of events in their native duchy, whose prose writings remain in the Vatican Library, and have supplied us with useful information; but they were not historians, and it is unnecessary to bring them forth from their obscurity. Of one name, however, we may make an exception.
[Footnote 69: See vol. I., p. 297. His oration on the death of Federigo is No. 1233 of the Vat. Urb. MSS.]
[Footnote 70: Maestro Arrigo, of Cologne, _alias_ Heinrich v. Coln, had then a press at Urbino. The typographic art had been introduced there about 1481, and at Cagli five years earlier by Roberto da Fano and Bernardino da Bergamo.]
[Footnote *71: Francesco da Urbino, who was certainly Michelangelo's schoolmaster, does not seem to be the same as his friend Francesco Urbino, so touchingly spoken of in the following letter from Michelangelo to Vasari:--
"Messer Giorgio, Dear Friend,--Although I write but badly, yet will I say a few words in reply to yours. You know that Urbino is dead, for which I owe the greatest thanks to God; at the same time my loss is heavy and sorrow infinite. The grace is this, that while Urbino living kept me alive, in dying he has taught me to die not unwillingly but rather with a desire for death. I had him with me twenty-six years, and always found him faithful and true. Now that I had made him rich and thought to keep him on the staff and rest of my old age he has departed, and the only hope left me is that of seeing him again in Paradise, and of this God has given a sign in his most happy death. Even more than dying, it grieved him to leave me alive in this treacherous world, with so many troubles; the better part of me went with him, nothing is left to me but endless sorrow. I commend myself to you....