Romance of Roman Villas (The Renaissance)

E-text prepared by Chuck Greif and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

Pope Julius II. Viewing the Newly-found Statue of the Apollo Belvedere From the painting by Carl Becker. Permission of the Berlin Photographic Co.
ELIZABETH W. CHAMPNEY
AUTHOR OF ROMANCE OF THE ITALIAN VILLAS, ROMANCE OF THE FEUDAL CHÂTEAUX, ROMANCE OF THE FRENCH ABBEYS, etc.
ILLUSTRATED
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK AND LONDON The Knickerbocker Press 1908
In came the cardinal, grave and coldly wise, His scarlet gown and robes of cobweb lace Trailed on the marble floor; with convex glass He bent o'er Guido's shoulder. Walter Thornbury.
STILL unrivalled, after the lapse of four centuries the villas of the great cardinals of the Renaissance retain their supremacy over their Italian sisters, not, as once, by reason of their prodigal magnificence but in the appealing charm of their picturesque decay.
The centuries have bestowed a certain pathetic beauty, they have also taken away much, and the sympathy which these ruined pleasure palaces evoke whets our curiosity to know what they were like in their heyday of joyous revelling.
If we run down the list of the nobler villas of Rome we will find that, with few exceptions, they were built by princes of the purple, and that the names they bear are not Roman but those of the ruling families of other Italian cities.
That the sixteenth century should have produced the most palatial residences ever inhabited by prelates was but a natural outcome of the conditions then existing. The society of Rome was a hierarchical aristocracy made up of the younger sons of every powerful and ambitious family of Italy, and the red hat was so greatly desired not for the honour or emoluments of the cardinalcy per se but because it was a step to the papacy.