The Civilisation of the Renaissance in ItalyBurckhardt, Jacob
History
The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy
Burckhardt, Jacob
Italy -- Civilization; Renaissance -- Italy
perhaps the grandest expression of power in unity which can be imagined.
In other arts besides architecture the face and the memory of the Pope
live on in their most ideal form, and it is not without significance
that even the Latin poetry of those days gives proof of a wholly
different enthusiasm for Julius than that shown for his predecessors.
The entrance into Bologna, at the end of the ‘Iter Julii Secundi,’ by
the Cardinal Adriano da Corneto, has a splendour of its own, and Giovan
Antonio Flaminio,[266] in one of the finest elegies, appealed to the
patriot in the Pope to grant his protection to Italy.
In a constitution of his Lateran Council, Julius had solemnly denounced
the simony of the Papal elections.[267] After his death in 1513, the
money-loving cardinals tried to evade the prohibition by proposing that
the endowments and offices hitherto held by the chosen candidate should
be equally divided among themselves, in which case they would have
elected the best-endowed cardinal, the incompetent Rafael Riario.[268]
But a reaction, chiefly arising from the younger members of the Sacred
College, who, above all things, desired a liberal Pope, rendered the
miserable combination futile; Giovanni Medici was elected--the famous
Leo X.
We shall often meet with him in treating of the noonday of the
Renaissance; here we wish only to point out that under him the Papacy
was again exposed to great inward and outward dangers. Among these we
do not reckon the conspiracy of the Cardinals Petrucci, De Saulis,
Riario, and Corneto (1517) which at most could have occasioned a change
of persons, and to which Leo found the true antidote in the unheard-of
creation of thirty-nine new cardinals, a measure which had the
additional advantage of rewarding, in some cases at least, real
merit.[269]
But some of the paths which Leo allowed himself to tread during the
first two years of his office were perilous to the last degree. He
seriously endeavoured to secure, by negotiation, the kingdom of Naples
for his brother Giuliano, and for his nephew Lorenzo a powerful North
Italian state, to comprise Milan, Tuscany, Urbino, and Ferrara.[270] It
is clear that the Pontifical State, thus hemmed in on all sides, would
have become a mere Medicean appanage, and that, in fact, there would
have been no further need to secularise it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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