He had developed and encouraged the arts, capriciously, as Cellini's "Autobiography" tells us, but genuinely too, as we can see at the Uffizi and the Pitti.

The arts, however, were not what they had been, for the great period had passed and Florence was in the trough of the wave.

Yet Cosimo found the best men he could--Cellini, Bronzino, and Vasari--and kept them busy.

But his greatest achievement as a connoisseur was his interest in Etruscan remains and the excavations at Arezzo and elsewhere which yielded the priceless relics now at the Archaeological Museum.
With Cosimo I this swift review of the Medici family ends.

The rest have little interest for the visitor to Florence to-day, for whom Cellini's Perseus, made to Cosimo I's order, is the last great artistic achievement in the city in point of time.