The Makers of Modern Rome, in Four Books

by Mrs. Oliphant

With this, however, we have nothing to do, and not very much altogether with the great Piccolomini, though he is one of the most interesting and sympathetic figures which has ever sat upon the papal throne. His death was a strange and painful conclusion to a life full of work, full of admirable sense and intelligence without exaggeration or pretence. He followed the policy of his predecessors in desiring to institute a Crusade, one more strenuously called for perhaps than any which preceded it, since Constantinople had now fallen into the hands of the Turks, and Christendom was believed to be in danger. It is scarcely possible to imagine that his full and active life should have been much occupied by this endeavour: nor can we think that this great spectator and observer of human affairs was consumed with anxiety in respect to a danger about which the civilised world was so careless: but in the end of his life he seems to have taken it up with tragical earnestness, perhaps out of compunction for previous indifference. The impulse which once moved whole nations to take the cross had died out; and not even the sight of the beautiful metropolis of Eastern Christianity fallen into the hands of the infidel, and so splendid a Christian temple as St. Sophia turned into a mosque had power to rouse Europe. The King of Hungary was the only monarch who showed any real energy in the matter, feeling his own safety imperilled, and Venice, also for the same reason, was the only great city; and except in these quarters the remonstrances and entreaties of Pius had no success. In these circumstances the Pope called his court about him and announced to them the plan he had formed, a most unlikely plan for such a man, yet possible enough if there was any remorseful sense of carelessness in the past. The Duke of Burgundy had promised to go if another prince would join him. The Pope determined that in the absence of any other he himself would be that prince. Old as he was, and sick, and no warrior, and perhaps with but little of the zeal which makes such a self-devotion possible, he would himself go forth to repel the infidel. "We do not go to fight," he said, with faltering voice. "We will imitate those who, when Israel fought against Amalek, prayed on the mountain. We will stand on the prow of our ship or upon some hill, and with the holy Eucharist before our eyes, we will ask from our Lord victory for our soldiers." After a pause of alarm and astonishment the Cardinals consented, and such preparations as were possible were made. It was published throughout all Christendom that the Pope was to sail from Ancona at a certain date, and that every one who could provide for the expenses of the journey should meet him there. He invited the old Doge of Venice to join with himself and the Duke of Burgundy, also an old man. "We shall be three old men," he said, "and our trinity will be aided by the Trinity of Heaven." A kind of sublimity was in the suggestion, a sublimity almost trembling on the borders of the ridiculous; for the enterprise was no longer one which accorded with the spirit of the time, and all was hesitation and difficulty. A miscellaneous host crowded to Ancona, where the Pope, much suffering, was carried in his litter, quite unfit for a long journey; but the most of them had no money and had to be sent back; and the Venetian galleys engaged to transport those who were left did not arrive till the pilgrims had waited long, and were worn out with delay and confusion. They arrived at last a day or two before Pope Pius died, when he was no longer capable of moving—and with his death the ill-fated Crusade fell to pieces and was heard of no more. It was the most curious end, in an enthusiasm founded upon anxious calculation, of a man who was never an enthusiast, whose eyes were always too clear-sighted to permit him to be led away by feeling, a man of letters and of thought, rather than of romantic-solemn enterprises or the zeal of a martyr. That he was a kind of martyr to the strong conviction of a danger which threatened Christendom, and the forlorn hope of repelling it, there can be no doubt.

Pius II. was succeeded in 1464 by Paul II., also in his way a man of more than usual ability and note. He was a Venetian, the nephew of the last Venetian Pope, Eugenius; and it was he who built, to begin with, the fine palace still called the Palazzo Venezia, with which all visitors to Rome are so well acquainted. It was built for his own residence during his Cardinalate, and remained his favourite dwelling, a habitation still very much more in the centre of everything, as we say, than the remote and stately Vatican. The reader will easily recall the imposing appearance of this fine building, placed at the end of the straight street—the chief in Rome—in which were run the many races which formed part of the carnival festivities, a recent institution in Pope Paul's day. The street was called the Corso in consequence; and it is not long since the last of these races, one of horses without riders, was abolished. The Palazzo Venezia commanded the long straight street from its windows, and all the humours and wonders of the town, in which the Pope took pleasure. It was Paul's fate to make himself an implacable enemy in the often contemned, but—as regards the place in history of either pope or king—all-important class of writers, which it must have seemed ridiculous indeed for a Sovereign Pontiff to have kept terms with, on account of any power in their hands. But this was a shortsighted conclusion, unworthy the wisdom of a Pope. And the result of the Pontiff's ill-treatment of the historian Platina, to whom we are so much indebted, especially for the lives of those Popes who were his contemporaries, has been a lasting stigma upon his character, which the researches of the impartial critics of a later age have shown to be partly without foundation, but which until quite recently was accepted by everybody. In this way a writer has a power which is almost absolute. We have seen in our own days a conspicuous instance of this in the treatment by Mr. Froude of the life of Thomas Carlyle. Numbers of Carlyle's friends made instant protest against the view taken by his biographer; but they did so in evanescent methods—in periodical literature, the nature of which is to die after it has had its day—while a book remains. Very likely many of Pope Paul's friends protested against the coolly ferocious account of his life given by the aggrieved and revengeful author; but it is only quite recently, in the calm of great distance, that people have come to think—charitably in respect to Pope Paul II.—that perhaps Platina's strictures might not be true.

Platina, however, had great provocation. He was one of the disciples of the famous school of Humanists, the then new school of learning, literature, and criticism, which had arisen under the papacy and patronage of Pope Nicolas V., and had continued to exist, though with less encouragement, under his successors. Pius II. had not been their patron as Nicolas was, but he had not been hostile to them, and his tastes were all of a kind congenial to their work. But Paul looked coldly upon the group of contemptuous scholars who had made themselves into an academy, and vapoured much about classical examples and the superiority of ancient times. He had no quarrel with literature, but he persuaded himself to believe that the academy which talked and masqueraded under classic names, and played with dangerous theories of liberty, and criticism of public proceedings, was a nest of conspirators and heretics scheming against himself. There was no foundation whatever for his fears, but that mattered little in those arbitrary days. This is Platina's own account of the matter:

"When Pius was dead and Paul created in his place, he had no sooner grasped the keys of Peter, than he proceeded—whether in consequence of a promise to do so, or because the decrees and proceedings of Pius were odious to him—to dismiss all the officials elected by Pius, on the ground that they were useless and ignorant (as he said): and deprived them of their dignity and revenues without permitting them to say a word in their own defence, though they were men who for their erudition and doctrine had been gathered together from all the ends of the world, and attracted to the court of Rome by the promise of great reward. The College was full of men of letters and virtuous persons learned in the law both divine and human. Among them were poets and orators who gave no less ornament to the court than they received from it. Paul sent them all away as incapable and as strangers, and deprived them of everything, although those who had bought their offices were allowed to retain them. Those who suffered most attempted to dissuade him from this intention, and I, who was one of them, begged earnestly that our cause might be committed to the judge of the Rota. Then he fixed on me his angry eyes. 'So,' he said, 'thou wouldst appeal to other judges against the decision we have made! Know ye not that all justice and law are in the casket of our bosom? Thus I will it to be. Begone, all of you! for, whatever you may wish I am Pope, and according to my pleasure can make and unmake.'"

After hearing this determined assertion of right, the displaced scholars withdrew, but continued to plead their cause by urgent letters, which ended at last in an unwise threat to make the continental princes aware how they were treated, and to bring about the Pope's ears a Council, to which he would be obliged to give account. The word Council was to a Pope what the red flag is to a bull, and in a transport of rage Paul II. threw Platina into prison. He never in his life did a more foolish thing. The historian was kept in confinement for two years, and passed one long winter without fire, subjected to every hardship; but finally was set free by the intercession of Cardinal Gonzaga, and remained, by order of the Pope, under observation in Rome, where watching with a vigilant eye all that went on, he laid up his materials for that brief but scathing biography of Paul II. which forms one of the keenest effects in his work, and from which the Pope's memory has never recovered. It is a dangerous thing to provoke a man of letters who has a keen tongue and a gift of recollection, especially in those days when such men were not so many as now.

Nevertheless Platina did a certain justice to his persecutor. "He built magnificently," he says, "splendidly in St. Marco, and in the Vatican." The Church of St. Marco is close to the Palazzo Venezia where Paul chiefly lived; he had taken his title as Cardinal from his native saint. Both in St. Peter's and in the Vatican he carried on the works begun by his predecessors, and though he was unkind to the scholars, he was not so in every case. "He expended his money liberally enough," says Platina, "giving freely to poor Cardinals and bishops, and to princes and persons of noble houses when cast out of their homes, and especially to poor women and widows, and the sick who had no one else to think of them. And he also took great trouble to secure that corn and other things necessary to life should be furnished in abundance, and at lower prices than had been known ever before." These were good and noble qualities which his enemy did not attempt to disguise.

The special service done by Pope Paul to the city would seem, however, to have been the restoration of some of those ancient monuments which belonged to imperial Rome, of which none of his predecessors had made much account. If he still helped himself freely, like them, from the great reservoir of the Colosseum, he bestowed an attention and care, which they had not dreamed of, upon some of the great works of classic art, the arches of Titus and of Septimus Severus in particular, and the famous statue of Marcus Aurelius. M. Muntz comments with much spirit on the reason why this Pope's works of restoration have been so little celebrated. His taste was toward sculpture rather than painting. "To the eyes of the world," says the historian of the arts, "the smallest fresco is of more account than the finest monuments of architecture, or of sculpture. Nicolas V. did better for his fame in engaging Fra Angelico than in undertaking the reconstruction of St. Peter's. Pius II. owes a sort of posthumous celebrity to the paintings in the library of the cathedral of Sienna."

The same classical tastes of which he thus gave token made Pope Paul a great collector of bronzes, cameos, medals, intaglios, the smaller precious objects of ancient art; the love of which he was the first to bring back as a special study and pursuit. His collection of these was wonderful for his time, and great for any time. All the other adornments of ancient art were dear to him, and his palace, which, after all, is his most complete memorial in Rome, was adorned like a bride with every kind of glory in carved and inlaid work, in vessels of gold and silver, embroideries and tapestries. He had the still more personal and individual characteristic of a love for fine clothes, which the gorgeous costumes of the popedom permitted him to indulge in to a large extent: and jewels, which he not only wore like an Eastern prince, but kept about him unset in drawers and cabinets for his private delight, playing with them, as Platina tells us, in the silent hours of the night. Some part at least of these magnificent tastes arose no doubt from the fact that he was himself a magnificent specimen of manhood, so distinguished in personal appearance that he had the naïve vanity of suggesting the name of Formosus for himself when elected Pope, though he yielded the point to the scandalised remonstrances of the Cardinals. This simplicity of self-admiration, so undoubting as to be almost a moral quality, no doubt gave meaning to the glorious mitres and tiara encrusted with the richest jewels, which it gave him so much pleasure to wear, and which take rank with the other great embellishments of Rome, though their object was more personal than official. The habits of his life were strange, for he slept during the day, and performed the duties of life during the night, the reason assigned for this being that he was tormented by a cough which prevented him from sleeping at the usual hours. "It was difficult to come to speech of him," Platina says, for this reason. "And when, after long waiting, he opened the door, you were obliged rather to listen than to speak; for he was very copious and long in speaking. In everything he desired to be thought astute, and therefore his conversation was in very intricate and ambiguous language He liked many sorts of viands on his table, all of the worst taste; and took much pleasure in eating melons, crawfish, pastry, fish, and salt pork, from which, I believe, came the apoplexy from which he died." Thus the prejudices of his enemy penetrated the most private details of the Pope's life. The venom of hatred defeats itself and becomes ridiculous when carried so far.

His fine collection was seized by his successor and broken up, as is the fate of such treasures; and his works in St. Peter's, as we shall see, had much the same fate, along with the great works of his predecessor for the embellishment of the same building, all of which perished or were set aside in the fever of rebuilding which ensued. But there is still a sufficient memorial of him in the sombre magnificence of his Venetian palace, to recall to us the image of a true Renaissance Pope, mingling the most exquisite tastes with the rudest, the perfection of personal vanity—for he loved to see himself in a procession, head and shoulders over all the people—with the likings of a gondolier. Thus we see him in the records of his contemporaries, watching from his windows the strange sports in the long street newly named the Corso, races of men and of horses, and carnival processions accompanied by all the cumbrous and coarse humour of the period; or a stranger sight still, seated by night in his cabinet turning over his wealth of sparkling stones, enjoying the glow of light in them and twinkle of many colours, while the big candles flared, or a milder light shone from the beaks of the silver lamps. Notwithstanding which strange humours, tastes, and vanities, he remains in all these records a striking and remarkable figure, no intellectualist, but an effective and notable man.