* Cf. the admirable Creighton: “In the precarious condition of Italian politics allies were not to be trusted unless their fidelity was secured by interested motives; so Alexander VI used the marriage connections of his family as a means to secure for himself a strong political party. He had no one whom he could trust save his own children, whom he regarded as instruments for his own plans.”—M. Creighton, History of the Papacy During the Period of the Reformation, III, 263. The impartiality and learning of the Anglican bishop is matched in this field only by the scholarship and honesty of the Catholic Ludwig von Pastor’s History of the Popes. The existence of these two remarkable histories should long since have dissipated the mist of legend cast by partisan pamphleteering around the Renaissance popes.
* Pastor (V, 417n) accepts the evidence as conclusive of Alexander’s guilt; but the Pope’s character was so blackened by hostile gossip that charity may still suspend judgment.
* “The general tendency of investigation, while utterly shattering all idle attempts to represent Alexander as a model pope, has been to relieve him of the most odious imputations against his character. There remains the charge of secret poisoning from motives of cupidity, which indeed appears established, or nearly so, only in a single instance; but this may imply others.”—Richard Garnett in The Cambridge Modern History, I, 242.
* Cf. Cambridge Modern History, I, 239: “Nothing could be less like the real Lucrezia than the Lucrezia of the dramatists and romancers.”
* “These nations”—France, Spain, England, Hungary—“had now become great military monarchies, for which” Italy’s “loose bundle of petty states was no match. A Cesare Borgia might possibly have saved her if he had wrought at the beginning of the fifteenth century instead of the end…. The only considerable approach to consolidation was the establishment of the Papal Temporal Power, of which Alexander and Julius were the chief architects. While the means employed in its creation were often most condemnable, the creation itself was justified by the helpless condition of the Papacy without it, and by the useful end it was to serve when it became the only vestige of dignity and independence left to Italy.”—Cam-bridge Modern History, I, 252.
* Rejecting as legend the alleged foundation of the Japanese imperial dynasty in 660 B.C.
* Pius IV presented it to Venice; hence its later name of Palazzo Venezia. It was the official headquarters of Benito Mussolini during the Fascist regime.
* Stefano Infessura composed a Diario delia città di Roma, a history of fifteenth-century Rome from family records and personal observation. He was an ardent republican who looked upon the popes as despots; he was also a partisan of the Colonna; he cannot be trusted when he retails stories, not elsewhere confirmed, about the wickedness of the popes.46
* In a consistory of June, 1486, Cardinal Borgia reproached Cardinal Balue for being drunk; to which Balue responded by calling the future Alexander VI “son of a whore.”57a
* Cf. his fondness for Federigo, son of Isabella d’Este. Gossip did not scruple to put the vilest interpretation on this affection.15
* Which should be the Hermes of Praxiteles but more probably is the Statue of Liberty in the harbor of New York.
* It should be recalled that one might become a cardinal without being a priest, and that cardinals were chosen for their political ability and connections rather than for religious qualities.
* On these hunts Leo’s favorite retreat was the Villa Magliana. Built for Sixtus IV, enlarged by Innocent VIII and Julius II, it was adorned for Julius with frescoes of Apollo and the Muses by the Umbrian Giovanni di Pietro (Lo Spagna). For its chapel Raphael (between 1513 and 1520) designed three frescoes, of which two survive in the Louvre; probably they were painted by Lo Spagna from Raphael’s cartoons.21
* At Leo’s death the tapestries were pawned to ease the papal insolvency; at the sack of Rome they were seriously injured; one was cut into fragments, and two were sold to Constantinople. All were restored to the Sistine Chapel by 1554; and every year, on the feast of Corpus Christi, they were exhibited to the people in the Piazza di San Pietro. Louis XIV had them copied in oils. Seized by the French in 1798, they were again returned to the Vatican in 1808. They are now displayed there in a hall of their own, the Galleria degli Arazzi, or Hall of the Arrases.
* The picture was bought in 1753 for Frederick Augustus II of Saxony at a price of 60,000 thalers ($450,000?), and for almost two centuries it remained the chief treasure of the Dresden Gallery. Along with Correggio’s Holy Night, Giorgione’s Venus, and some 920,000 other art objects, it was taken from Germany by the victorious Russians after the Second World War.85
* Another and finer Fornarina, in the Uffizi, is by Sebastiano del Piombo.
* Sarton concludes: “As to syphilis, I have been thus far unable to discover a single description of it anterior to those which appeared in quick succession in 1495 and following years. In spite of frequent reaffirmations in recent years of the pre-Columbian antiquity of European syphilis, I remain unconvinced.”37
* Marsilius of Padua belongs rather to the Reformation than to the Renaissance, and consideration of him is deferred accordingly.
*Guicciardini wrote an important comment on this passage: “It is true that the Church has prevented the union of Italy in a single state; but I do not know whether this be a good or an evil. A single republic might certainly have made the name of Italy glorious, and been of the utmost profit to the capital city; but it would have proved the ruin of every other city. It is true that our divisions have brought many calamities upon us, although it should be remembered that the invasions of the barbarians began at the time of the Romans, precisely when Italy was united. And divided Italy has succeeded in having so many free cities that I believe a single republic would have caused her more misery than happiness…. This land has always desired liberty, and therefore has never been able to unite under one rule.”—Considerazioni interno di Discorsi di Machiavelli, i, 12.104
* This term arose about 1300 as punctum contra punctum— point counter point, note against note; notes being then indicated by points.
* E.g., The Fall of Man (c. 1570, Prado)—a frank apotheosis of the human form; The Annunciation (c. 1545, Scuola di San Rocco, Venice; still another in San Salvatore, Venice); The Gypsy Madonna (1510, Vienna); Mater Dolorosa (1554, Prado); The Presentation (1538, Venice)—a vast panorama (twenty-six by eleven and a half feet) of mountainous landscape, majestic architecture, and colorful figures, with Mary pictured as a girl diffidently ascending the Temple steps, two of Titian’s loveliest women at the base, against the wall an old woman realer than life, selling eggs; this is one of Titian’s finest religious pictures. He painted Mary again in The Virgin with the Rabbit (c. 1530, Louvre). The Transfiguration (c. 1560, San Salvatore, Venice), the work of a man of eighty-three, is a vigorous conception of the astonished Apostles, with a glowing representation of the illuminated Christ. In The Last Supper (1564 Escorial) every figure is masterly except that of Christ—where Leonardo also failed; and in Christ Crowned with Thorns (1542, Louvre), Jesus, as in Michelangelo, is a gladiator rather than a saint. The Ecce Homo of the Vienna Gallery (c. 1543) still leaves Christ a massive and muscular divinity, whom Pilate (a humorous portrait of Aretino) offers to a crowd not of Jerusalem’s rabble, but of such distinguished personalities as Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent, Titian’s daughter Lavinia, and Titian himself. A Crucifixion in Ancona (c. 1560) reduces the suffering Christ to more credible proportions; and another in the Escorial (c. 1565) effectively pictures the darkness, at the final hour, enveloping hills and sky and cross and the watchers at its foot. Twice—in 1529 (in the Louvre) and thirty years later (in the Prado)—Titian pictured The Burial of Christ; in the later—perhaps also in the earlier—painting he portrayed himself as Joseph of Arimathea. At an uncertain date he represented The Supper at Emmaus (Louvre), exquisite but too refined; Rembrandt would more successfully convey the awe felt in that moment of incredulous recognition. For Charles V Titian painted (1554) a picture variously called The Trinity or The Last Judgment, and labeled La Gloria in the Prado: a confusing mass of heads and legs, and, in a cloud, the First and Second Persons of the Trinity, with the Holy Ghost taking the form of light. It seems a little absurd, but the Emperor took it with him when he retired to a convent in 1557, and ordered it placed above the high altar after his death.