people of Italy could not put new blood and fresh life into the Curia, because in them the law of the body had triumphed over the law of the spirit. The same observation has to be made in the province of literature. We have spoken of Ariosto; the other productions of the Medicean period in the domain of literature are for the most part trifling and frivolous in their contents. As Gregorovius says, their poets sang the praises of Maecenas and Phryne, they wrote pastorals and epics of chivalry, while the freedom of Italy perished. The theatre, still more early and markedly than pictorial art, cut itself adrift from ecclesiastical subjects and from the whole world of religious ideas. It became not merely worldly, but distinctly pagan, and at the same time incapable of any great creation of lasting value which could touch the heart of the nation. Serious theological literature was almost entirely lacking at Leo's Court and during his pontificate, with the exception of two or three names, such as Sadoleto, Egidio of Viterbo, and Tommaso de Vio. After the death of Raffaelle and Leonardo painting and sculpture at once took a downward path. Michelangelo upheld for himself the great traditions of the best time of the Renaissance for almost another quarter of a century; but he was soon a very lonely man. Decadence showed itself directly after Raffaelle's death, when Marcantonio engraved Giulio Romano's indecent pictures, and Pietro Aretino wrote a commentary on them of still more indecent sonnets. Clement VII, who had at one time received this most worthless of all men of letters as a guest in his Villa Careggi, repulsed him after this. But Aretino was characteristic of his time; what other would have borne with him?
After Raffaelle's death ideas were no longer made the subject of paintings; the world of enjoyment, sweet, earthly, sensual enjoyment, was now depicted before art declined into a chilly mannerism and the composite falseness of eclecticism. A time which is no longer able to give an artistic rendering of ideas is incapable of resolution and of great actions. Not only the Muses and the Graces wept by Raffaelle's grave, the whole Julian epoch was buried with him. During Leo's reign he had undertaken with feverish activity to conjure up not only ancient Rome but the antique ideals. In vain. His unaided force was not enough for the task, and he saw himself deserted by those whom he most needed and on whom he relied. And then came the Sack of Rome; it was the tomb of all this ideal world of the Renaissance period. From the smoking ruins of the Eternal City rose a dense, grey fog, a gloomy, spiritless despotism, utterly out of touch with the joyous spring of the mind of the Italian people whose harbinger was Dante. Under its oppression the intellectual life of the nation soon sank asphyxiated.
The Guelf movement of the Middle Ages, which had its home in the free States of Tuscany and North Italy, was dead and gone; it could no longer give life or withhold it. And the old Ghibelline
