with assurance that all the grand artists who worked upon it could say as Raphael replied to Leo X.: "I love so much the Church of St. Peter!" [Footnote 15] [Footnote 15: Reply of Raphael to the brief of Leo X., naming him superintendent of the work of the church. See, further, the will of Raphael, (cited in Audin's _Leo X._ t. ii. p. 347.)] Moreover, independently of all individual names, can it not be said in a general manner that it is going quite counter to historic truth to attempt to connect the art-movement of the sixteenth century with the influence of Luther and Calvin? It is well enough known, in truth, what was the attitude of the Reformation, especially of the Calvinistic part of it, toward the beautiful and the divine in the arts. Many of our old cathedrals in France still bear, after three hundred years, the marks of the iconoclastic fury of the Huguenots. The literal interpretation--literal even to barbarousness--of the text in Exodus, "Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images," it translated, especially in its beginnings, into a relentless proscription; and the statues, pictures, and wonderful great church-windows, where the middle ages had expended so much of faith and often so much of genius, disappeared under the blows of a most savage vandalism. They are ours, then, altogether ours, those divine men, as the Greeks would have called them, who have written in the history of art the immortal pages stamped with the names of Perugino, Leonardo da Vinci, Brunelleschi, Bramante, Michael Angelo, and Raphael. It is not around Luther and Calvin that they should be grouped, but around those Roman pontiffs who gave such a vigorous impulse to literature and the arts, and who caused all those beautiful poems of painting or of stone to serve for the glorification of the Catholic Church. On that point, moreover, public sentiment has passed judgment for all future time. The history of the arts does not know the era of Luther; it knows and will always know the era of Leo X. III.