Aut nihil aut Cæsar vult dici Borgia; quidni? Cum simul et Cæsar possit et esse nihil.] [Footnote 440: 'When Neptune beheld Venice stationed in the Adriatic waters, and giving laws to all the ocean, "Now taunt me, Jupiter, with the Tarpeian rock and those walls of thy son Mars!" he cried. "If thou preferrest Tiber to the sea, look on both cities; thou wilt say the one was built by men, the other by gods."'] I have already touched upon the Virgilianism of Sannazzaro's 'Partus Virginis.'[441] What the cold churches of Palladio are to Christian architecture, this frigid epic is to Christian poetry. Leo X. delighted to recognise the Gospel narrative beneath a fancy dress of mythological inventions, and to witness the triumph of classical scholarship in the holy places of the mediæval faith. To fuse the traditions of Biblical and secular antiquity was, as I have often said, the dream of the Renaissance. What Pico and Ficino attempted in philosophical treatises, the poets sought to effect by form. Religion, attiring herself in classic drapery, threw off the cobwebs of the Catacombs, and acquired the right of _petites entrées_ at the Vatican. It did not signify that she had sacrificed her majesty to fashion, or that her tunic _à la mode antique_ was badly made. Her rouge and spangles enchanted the scholarly Pontiff, who forthwith ordered Vida to compose the 'Christiad,' and gave him a benefice at Frascati in order that he might enjoy a poet's ease. Vida's epic, like Sannazzaro's, was not finished during the lifetime of Leo. Both the 'Christiad' and the 'Partus Virginis' reflected lustre on the age of Clement. [Footnote 441: See above, p. 288.] Vida won his first laurels in the field of didactic poetry. Virgilian exercises on the breeding of silkworms and the game of chess displayed his faculty for investing familiar subjects with the graces of a polished style.[442] Such poems, whether written in Latin, or, like the 'Api' of Rucellai, in Italian, gratified the taste of the Renaissance, always appreciative of form independent of the matter it invested. For a modern student Vida's metrical treatise in three books on the 'Art of Poetry' has greater interest; since it illustrates the final outcome of classic studies in the age of Leo. The 'Poetica' is addressed to Francis, Dauphin of France, in his Spanish prison:[443]--