moral life of the Church, but the question of what the Papacy was and meant for these times, is not summed up or determined by them. It is the right of these Popes to be judged by the better and happier sides of their government; the historian who portrays them should not be less skilful than the great masters of the Renaissance, who in their portraits of the celebrities of their time contrived to bring out the sitter's best and most characteristic qualities. Luther was not touched in the least degree by the artistic development of his time; brought up amid the peasant life of Saxony and Thuringia he had no conception of the whole world that lay between Dante and Michelangelo, and could not see that the eminence of the Papacy consisted at that time in its leadership of Europe in the province of art. But to deny this now would be injustice to the past.
The Medici had not stood aloof from this evolution, which reached its highest point under Julius II. Search has been made for the bridge by means of which the ideas of Marsilio and his fellow thinkers were brought from Florence to Rome. But there is no real need to guess at definite personages. Hundreds of correspondents had long since made all Italy familiar with this school of thought. Among those who frequented the Court of Rome, Castiglione, Bibbiena, Sadoleto, Inghirami, and Beroaldus had been educated in the spirit of Marsilio. His old friend and correspondent Raffaelle Riario was now, as Cardinal of San Giorgio and the Pope's cousin, one of the most influential personages in the Vatican. But before all we must remember Giovanni de' Medici and his cousin Giulio, the future Popes. They were Marsilio's pupils, and after the banishment of their family he remained their friend and corresponded with them, regarding them as the true heirs of Lorenzo's spirit; Raffaelle has represented the older cousin Giovanni standing near Julius II in the Bestowal of Spiritual Laws.
It was a kingdom of intellectual unity, which the brush of the greatest of painters was commissioned to paint on the walls of the Camera della Segnatura; the same idea which Julius caused to be proclaimed in 1512, in the opening speech of Aegidius of Viterbo at the Lateran Council, referring to the classical proverb: "ἁπλοῦς ὁ μῦθος τῆς ἀληθείας ἔφυ—simplex sermo veritatis." The world of the beautiful, of reason and science, of political and social order, had its place appointed in the kingdom of God upon earth. A limit was set to the neglect of secular efforts to explore nature and history, to the disregard of poetry and art, and its rights were granted to healthy human reason organised in the State; Gratiae et Musae a Deo sunt atque ad Deum referendae, as Marsilio had said.
The programme laid down by Julius II, had it been carried out, might have saved Italy and preserved the Catholic principle, when imperilled in the North. The task was to bring modern culture into harmony with Christianity, to unite the work of the Renaissance, so far
