be the line adopted by a writer treating of civilization in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He must paint the Popes of the Renaissance as they appeared in the midst of society, when Lorenzo de' Medici called Rome 'a sink of all the vices,' and observers so competent as Machiavelli and Guicciardini ascribed the moral depravity and political decay of Italy to their influence. It might be objected that there is now no need to portray the profligacy of that court, which, by arousing the conscience of Northern Europe to a sense of intolerable shame, proved one of the main causes of the Reformation. But without reviewing those old scandals, a true understanding of Italian morality, and a true insight into Italian social feeling as expressed in literature, are alike impossible. Nor will the historian of this epoch shrink from his task, even though the transactions he has to record seem to savor of legend rather than of simple fact. No fiction contains matter more fantastic, no myth or allegory is more adapted to express a truth in figures of the fancy, than the authentic well-attested annals of this period of seventy years, from 1464 to 1534.
Paul the Second was a Venetian named Pietro Barbi, who began life as a merchant. He had already shipped his worldly goods on board a trading vessel for a foreign trip, when news reached him that his uncle had been made Pope under the name of Eugenius IV. His call to the ministry consisted of the calculation that he could make his fortune in the Church with a Pope for uncle sooner than on the high seas by his wits. So he unloaded his bales, took to his book, became a priest, and at the age of forty-eight rose to the Papacy. Being a handsome man, he was fain to take the ecclesiastical title of Formosus; but the Cardinals dissuaded him from this parade of vanity, and he assumed the tiara as Paul in 1464. A vulgar love of show was his ruling characteristic. He spent enormous sums in the collection of jewels, and his tiara alone was valued at 200,000 golden florins. In all public ceremonies, whether ecclesiastical or secular, he was splendid, delighting equally to sun himself before the eyes of the Romans as the chief actor in an Easter benediction or a Carnival procession. The poorer Cardinals received subsidies from his purse in order that they might add luster to his pageants by their retinues. The arts found in him munificent patron. For the building of the palace of S. Marco, which marks an abrupt departure from the previous Gothic style in vogue, he brought architects of eminence to Rome, and gave employment to Mino da Fiesole, the sculptor, and to Giuliano da San Gallo, the wood-carver. The arches of Titus and Septimius Severus were restored at his expense, together with the statue of Marcus Aurelius and the horses of Monte Cavallo. But Paul showed his connoisseurship more especially in the collection of gems, medals, precious stones, and cameos, accumulating rare treasures of antiquity and costly masterpieces of Italian and Flemish gold-work in his cabinets. This patronage of contemporary art, no less than the appreciation of classical monuments, marked him as a Mæcenas of the true Renaissance type.[1] But the qualities of a dilettante were not calculated to shed luster on a Pontiff who spent the substance of the Church in heaping up immensely valuable curiosities. His thirst for gold and his love of hoarding were so extreme that, when bishoprics fell vacant, he often refused to fill them up, drawing their revenues for his own use. His court was luxurious, and in private he was addicted to sensual lust.[2] This would not, however, have brought his name into bad odor in Rome, where the Holy Father was already regarded as an Italian despot with certain sacerdotal additions. It was his prosecution of the Platonists which made him unpopular in an age when men had the right to expect that, whatever happened, learning at least would be respected. The example of the Florentine and Neapolitan academies had encouraged the Romans to found a society for the discussion of philosophical questions. The Pope conceived that a political intrigue was the real object of this club. Nor was the suspicion wholly destitute of color. The conspiracy of Porcari against Nicholas, and the Catilinarian riots of Tiburzio which had troubled the pontificate of Pius, were still fresh in people's memories; nor was the position of the Pope in Rome as yet by any means secure. What increased Paul's anxiety was the fact that some scholars, appointed secretaries of the briefs (Abbreviatori) by Pius and deprived of office by himself, were members of the Platonic Society. Their animosity against him was both natural and ill-concealed. At the same time the bitter hatred avowed by Laurentius Valla against the temporal power might in an age of conjurations have meant active malice. Leo Alberti hints that Porcari had been supported by strong backers outside Rome; and one of the accusations against the Platonists was that Pomponius Lætus had addressed Platina as Holy Father. Now both Pomponius Lætus and Valla had influence in Naples, while Paul was on the verge of open rupture with King Ferdinand. He therefore had sufficient grounds for suspecting a Neapolitan intrigue, in which the humanists were playing the parts of Brutus and Cassius. Yet though we take this trouble to construct some show of reason for the panic of the Pope, the fact remains that he was really mistaken at the outset; and of the stupidity, cruelty, and injustice of his subsequent conduct there can be no doubt. He seized the chief members of the Roman Academy, imprisoned them, put them to the torture, and killed some of them upon the rack. 'You would have taken Castle S. Angelo for Phalaris' bull,' writes Platina; 'the hollow vaults did so resound with the cries of innocent young men.' No evidence of a conspiracy could be extorted. Then Paul tried the survivors for unorthodoxy. They proved the soundness of their faith to the satisfaction of the Pope's inquisitors. Nothing remained but to release them, or to shut them up in dungeons, in order that the people might not say the Holy Father had arrested them without due cause. The latter course was chosen. Platina, the historian of the Popes, was one of the abbreviatori whom Paul had cashiered, and one of the Platonists whom he had tortured. The tale of Papal persecution loses, therefore, nothing in the telling; for if the humanists of the fifteenth century were powerful in anything it was in writing innuendoes and invectives. Among other anecdotes, he relates how, while he was being dislocated on the rack, the inquisitors Vianesi and Sanga held a sprightly colloquy about a ring which the one said jestingly the other had received as a love-token from a girl. The whole situation is characteristic of Papal Rome in the Renaissance.
[1] See Les Arts à la Cour des Papes pendant le XV. et le XVI. Siècles, E. Müntz, Paris, Thorin, 2me Partie. M. Müntz has done good service to æsthetic archæology by vindicating the fame of Paul II. as an employer of artists from the wholesale abuse heaped on him by Platina. It may here be conveniently noticed that even the fierce Sixtus IV. showed intelligence as a patron of arts and letters. He built the Sistine Chapel, and brought the greatest painters of the day to Rome—Signorelli, Perugino, Botticelli, Cosimo, Rosselli, and Ghirlandajo. Melozzo da Forlì worked for him. One of that painter's few remaining masterpieces is the wall-picture, now in the Vatican, which represents Sixtus among his Cardinals and Secretaries—a magnificent piece of vivid portraiture. Sixtus again threw the Vatican library open to the public, and In his days the Confraternity of S. Luke was founded for the encouragement of design. Rome owes to him the hospital of S. Spirito, a severe building, by Baccio Pontelli, and the churches of S. Maria del Popolo and S. Maria della Pace. Innocent VIII. added the Belvedere to the Vatican after Antonio del Pollajuolo's plan, and commenced the Villa Magliana. Alexander VI. enriched the Vatican with the famous Borgia apartments, decorated by Pinturhicchio. He also began the Palace of the University, and converted the Mausoleum of Hadrian into the Castle of S. Angelo. These brief allusions must suffice. It is not the object of the present chapter to treat of the Popes as patrons; but it should not be forgotten that, having accepted a place among the despots of Italy, they strove to acquit their debt to art and learning in the spirit of contemporary potentates.
[2] Corio sums up his character thus: 'Fu costui uomo alla libidine molto proclivo; in grandissimo precio furono le gioie appresso di lui. Del giorno faceva notte, e la notte ispediva quanto gli occorreva.' Marcus Attilius Alexius says: 'Paulus II. ex concubiná domum replevit, et quasi sterquilinium facta est sedes Barionis.' See Gregorovius, Stadt Rom, vol. vii. p. 215, for the latter quotation.
Paul did not live as long as his comparative youth led people to anticipate. He died of apoplexy in 1471, alone and suddenly, after supping on two huge watermelons, duos prægrandes pepones. His successor was a man of base extraction, named Francesco della Rovere, born near the town of Savona on the Genoese Riviera. It was