TWO GREAT POPES OF THE RENAISSANCE.*
THis book is a notable addition to those uninterrupted annexations of Italian ground whereby German learning has
attained its acknowledged primacy in one of the most fascinating fields of historical knowledge. The Catholic Professor is no Dryasdust, his erudition and accuracy are un-
impeachable, and his "aloofness" (sit venia verbo !) is beyond
reproach. If in style Dr. Pastor is hardly a Sybel, and in philosophy not quite a Henke, we may nevertheless say on the whole that the present instalment of his history, which includes the pontificates of Alexander Borgia and Julius II., shows him to be fully equal to the requirements of his monu- mental subject.
A Pope said that when he got into heaven he should begin by asking "if Savonarola was a righteous man or not." The Roman Catholic Professor considers that the Florentine friar sincerely believed that he was a prophet and had a divine mission, and he calls him a " highly gifted and morally blameless but fanatical man," whose chief faults were " his interference in politics and his insubordination towards the Holy See." Dr. Pastor allows that Savonarola brought about an amazing moral revolution in Florence, and explains that he was no enemy of art, but only of the pagan develop- ments in the direction of the nude into which some of the painters of the Renaissance had fallen. Reprehensible, on the other hand, were the virulent anti-Roman diatribes of the friar's Lenten sermons, his reign of terror, his inquisi- torial proceedings in regard to family life, and his frenzied advocacy of the alliance with the dissolute Charles VIII. of France, in whom he saw God's chosen instrument for the purification of His Church. Further—the Pope's dealings with Savonarola were marked by extreme patience and for- bearance, and this final brief of excommunication was not launched till the close of the second year of the friar's resistance to the various warnings and instructions from Rome. Dr. Pastor's condemnation of Savonarola's rebellious behaviour rests on the Romish interpretation of Christ's charge to Peter, which we, of course, repudiate. But we can- not deny that the author's lifelike record of the great Dominican is, on the whole, equitable ; and we may add that though it readjusts in certain points the portraiture given by George Eliot and Villari, which almost makes the friar a species of "Old Catholic," it does not essentially differ from the estimates of the Bishop of London (in his History of the Papacy) and some other Protestant writers. Let us mention that the friar's fourth centenary jubilee has taken place this year, and that an appropriate collection of his writings and speeches, edited by Casanova, has been published in Florence.
Of Alexander VI. Dr. Pastor lays down that " undoubtedly genuine documents nullify all attempts to rebut the accusa- tions against the Pope," and he denounces "the modern attempts at whitewashing him as an unworthy tampering with the trath." He quotes startling passages from pamphlets of the time which denounce the abominable crimes of "this accursed beast," of the "abyss of vice," by whom, with those "poisonous plants," his son and daughter, " the bestiality and savagery of Nero and Caligula are surpassed." He has, we think, good grounds for rejecting the horrible hypothesis of Roscoe, Gregorovins, and others as to the parentage of Juan Borgia ; his candour induces him to assert that Juan was Alexander's son, an opinion not shared by Bishop Creighton, although a Papal brief calls the Pope the child's father- In the case of another Borgia problem the Austrian Pro- fessor is not particularly reticent. Lucrezia Borgia's union with her first husband, Giovanni Sforza, was child- less, and Sforza, having been brought by pressure to confess that the marriage was, in effect, null and void, the Pope de- creed the dissolution of the marriage. Herr Pastor observes that public rumour credited the Spanish family with crimes which, to use the language of the Envoy from Ferrara, "the moral sense shrinks from putting into words." But the enraged husband of Lucrezia, recalling his previous admission, of which the truth was doubtful, "took his revenge by attributing to Alexander VL the worst possible motives "; whereupon the Venetian Envoy wrote that the Pope
• Th. Histwu of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages drawn from the Secret Archives of the Vatican and other Sources. From toe German of Dr. Pastor, Professor of History in the University of Innsbruck. &Med by Frederick Ignatius Antrobns, of the Oratory. Vols. V. and VI. London : Kogan Paul, Trench, and Co. [248.]
permitted himself "things that are unexampled and un- pardonable,"—language supported by his colleague of Ferrara, who reported that " alcuni dicono molte altre cose que non aunt credenda literis." As to the charges in which both the Pope and Caesar Borgia were involved by the dissolution of Lucrezia's marriage, the Austrian scholar is less plain spoken than the Bishop of London. However, in dealing with the Pasquinades of the period he is plain spoken enough, citing verses like " Thais, Alexandri filia sponse, nurus." Cesar Borgia was not innovating on the habits of the Palace when he gave a supper to fifty hetaire, of whose proceedings we cannot speak here. A triple chain of evidence vouches for the facts alleged, and Pastor admits that at this Convivium quinquaginta nicretricum there was " dancing of a very'reprehensible character," which was witnessed by the Pope : he forgets that Madonna Lucrezia was present, and that, according to Burchardt's Diary, the gaiety of the even- ing was not promoted by dancing alone. The evil repute of Dom zetti's heroine of the dagger and Acgua tofana—compound of Messalina, Locusts, and Lady Macbeth—could not survive her rehabilitation by Gregorovins and Reumont, based on " the document," which has found general acceptance. Here is Pastor's picture of the physical Lucrezia
"All her contemporaries agree in describing her as singularly attractive, with a sweet joyousness and charm quite peculiar to herself. She is of middle height and graceful in form,' writes Uicolo Cagnolo of Parma ; her face is rather long, the nose well cut, hair golden, eyes of no special colour ; her mouth rather large, the teeth brilliantly white, her neck is slender and fair, the bust admirably proportioned. She is always gay and smiling.' Other narrators specially praise her long golden hair. Unfortu- nately we have no trustworthy portrait of this remarkable woman ; at the s...ne time we can gather from some medals which were struck at Ferrara during her stay there, a fair notion of her features. The best of these medals, designed apparently by Filippino Lippi, shows how false the prevailing conception of this woman's character, woven out of partisanship and calumny, has been. The little head with its delicate features is rather charming than beautiful, the expressi( n is maidenly, almost childish, the abundant hair flows down over the shoulders, the large eyes have a far-off look. The character of the face is soft, irresolute, and gentle; there is no trace of strong passions ; and rather it denotes a weak and passive nature, incapable of self- determination."
Numismatic deductions of temperament and psychology are slippery. Dr. Pastor announces his discovery that the colourless Lncrezia was the mother of a child during her Roman girlhood. As wife of her dead husband (murdered by Cmsar), she was harmless; in her operatic time as Duchess to Alfonso of Ferrara, she was probably immaculate, despite the lock of golden hair shown in the Ambrosian Library with her letters to Cardinal Bembo. We are interested to hear that the admirable Parisian expert, M. Yriarte, has excavated some new Borgian materials, from which, says Pastor, it is " quite on the cards" that some surprises may turn up.
If the Spanish Pope merited the epitaph " sepultus in inferno," he was not all devil. His unrestrained sensuality did not divert his attention from the care of secular order
and the faith ; he employed Bramante to restore and beautify Rome, and engaged Pinturicchio to paint the symbolical figures which, after the lapse of four centuries, still enchant the visitor of the Appartamento Borgia. But Alexander's predominant passion was the aggrandisement of his children; Julius II. had no selfish or private desires, and his sole aim was to build up the dominion of the Church. This violent, impulsive, unscrupulous Titan, to whom his countrymen applied the complex adjective " terribile " (given by Julius to Michael Angelo), was rather a great statesman and warrior than an ideal Pontiff like Innocent III.; bat he rescued the lost States of the Church from its enemies, and founded the Papacy anew. Dr. Pastor's warm en- comium of Julius agrees in essentials with the estimate of Bishop Creighton, and he justly contends that the Vicar of Christ, being a temporal Prince, must resort to carnal weapons for the maintenance, or recovery, of his mundane rights :— " As a matter of fact, this was a time in which no respect seemed to be paid to anything but material force, and the secular powers were striving on all sides to subjugate the Church to the
State Such a position appeared intolerable to Julius II. Penetrated with the conviction that, in order to rule the Church with independence, the Pope must be his own master in a terri- tory of his own, he set himself with his whole soul to the task of putting a slop to the di,Ineulbrntnent of the temporal possessions of the Holy See and saving the Church from 2,:tin falline under the domination of France, and he succeeded. Though he was unable to effect the complete liberation of Italy, still the crushing yoke of France was cast off, the independence and unity of the Church was saved, and her patrimony, which he had found almost entirely dispersed, was restored and enlarged. The kingdom of St. Peter now included the best and richest portion of Italy, and the Papacy had become the centre of gravity of the peninsula, and, indeed, of the whole political world.' Formerly,' says Machiavelli, 'the most insignificant of the Barons felt himself at liberty to defy the Papal power; now it commands the respect of a King of France.'" Here the Innsbruck Professor forgets to point out that if Julius was successful in his " Particularism," he did not
attain his frequently expressed desire that Italy rintanesss libera dei barbari. Far from being a precursor of Victor Emanuel and Garibaldi, he associated himself, when Cardinal della Rovere, with Sforza's invitation to Charles VIII., to cross the Alps, and by supporting the League of Cambray against Venice, and in negotiating the Holy League against France, he led to the chains of the foreigner being riveted on the peninsula more closely than before. The lampooners of the Rialto took revenge on their Papal enemy by retailing charges which were probably part of Italian lampooners' stock-in-trade, and are passed by without notice by both the Catholic Professor and the Bishop of London.
The Papal Pericles had his Phidias and his Polygnotus, and the author's chapters on this phase of Vatican history show his complete mastery of the literature of the subject, from Vasari to Knackfuss, and of his acquaintance with the buildings, statues, and pictures described. But of "art as art," as " Ding an sich," his sense appears to be somewhat im- perfect : the sublime and beautiful seem to affect him too much as illustrating certain forced modern interpretations of the personal and ecclesiastical ambitions of the Cinqaecento. E g., the principal feature of Bramante's original plan for St. Peter's was a colossal central dome resting on a Greek cross. Now the architect himself described his design as the Pantheon raised on the substructure of Constantine's Basilica. This does not suffice for Dr. Pastor, who thinks that Julius II. decided that the new temple of religion must be vast so as to be commensurate in size with "the idea of the universal Church "; and, again, that the huge central dome was to symbolise the Papacy as fulcrum of the Faith. Similar are the proofs that in the " Disputa del Sacramento" Raphael typified the doctrine that "the sacred Host is essentially the Pact of Union," and that in the "School of Athens" he intended "to portray the efforts of the human mind to discover and scientifically apprehend its own highest object and final cause by the light of reason."
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