Church in the city, still he mitigated many of the hardships and the ignominies which that power had entailed in the hands of the great Farnese. When Paul III. died in 1549 his fortress remained as a legacy to the city, with a Castellano to watch over its (Papal) interests. This man proceeded to rule as his master had taught him, and he defended the castle vigilantly against the Pope’s nephew, who made some efforts to gain possession of so rich a prize.
The policy of Julius III. was of a much milder order. “Julius had always loved our city with a peculiar partiality,” says Mariotti, “and he sent his relation Cardinal della Corgna hither, endowing him with full authority, and hardly had the Cardinal arrived than he restored to the city the arms of which she had been deprived so long; and in February of that same year Julius III. sent a brief to the holders of ecclesiastical liberty, which was addressed to the Priori delle Arte (heads of City Guilds), a title which had not been heard of in Perugia since 1539; and to this grace the same Pope added considerable sums of money for the maintenance of those same magistrates....”
It will be easy to anyone who has formed even a dim conception of what the strength of the spirit of liberty was like in the minds of the Perugians to understand the pure sensation of delight which the Pope’s open acknowledgment of their old municipal rule, followed as it was by a message couched in such friendly terms, was likely to produce. Fretting as the citizens had been for many years under the rule of the despotic Paul, they hailed his more temperate successor as a sort of saviour, and they determined to express their sentiments of joy in what Bonazzi fitly terms “a day of political bacchanalia.”[71]
“So on the morning of the first day in May the heads of the principal guilds of the Mercanzia and the Cambio met in the piazza, and there having put aside their black apparel (Paul III. had Insisted on the Priori wearing a form of mourning, in order, and probably with perfect wisdom, to insist on his own authority in Perugia), they reassumed the crimson of the former Priori, and thrusting their heads through the golden chains which the Pope’s Vice-Legate himself insisted upon hanging round them in token of their reinstatement, they took their seats upon the damask benches and listened to the Mass of the Holy Ghost, sung by the Vice-Legate. Then, upon leaving the church, all the religious orders, the Confraternitàs, the guilds, the gentlemen, the troops, and the excited populace seeing the transfigured magistrates, lifted a frenzied cry, and forming into a monstrous procession to the sound of pipes, of drums, of trumpets, bells, and much artillery, the whole crowd followed the Priori to the Church of S. Agostino and there, having heard another musical mass, the new magistrates, followed by an ever increasing and clamorous cortège, went on to take up quarters on the first floor of the Palazzo Pubblico.”
Not satisfied with this demonstration of their delight and loyalty toward the new Pope, the Perugians determined to commemorate the occasion through the medium of art. They commissioned Adone Doni to paint the above described scene of the reinstatement of the magistrates (see the picture in the Palazzo Pubblico), whilst Vincenzo Danti, then a mere boy, was employed to make the big bronze statue of Julius III., which is one of the most remarkable points in the present town.
But to us who know the almost purely democratic, or at least municipal, tendencies of past Perugia, this great bronze figure of a Pope eternally blessing the city always excites a sense of something false and contradictory, and had we been permitted to visit the benevolent Julius in the caverns of the wine shop, we should have felt him in that place to be a truer symbol of the spirit of the town throughout her troubled history.