to him we owe the most splendid of Michael Angelo’s and Raphael’s masterpieces.  The Basilica of S. Peter’s, that materialized idea, which remains to symbolize the transition from the Church of the Middle Ages to the modern semi-secular supremacy of Papal Rome, was his thought.  No nepotism, no loathsome sensuality, no flagrant violation of ecclesiastical justice, stain his pontificate.  His one purpose was to secure and extend the temporal authority of the Popes; and this he achieved by curbing the ambition of the Venetians, who threatened to absorb Romagna, by reducing Perugia and Bologna to the Papal sway, by annexing Parma and Piacenza, and by entering on the heritage bequeathed to him by Cesare Borgia.  At his death he transmitted to his successors the largest and most solid sovereignty in Italy.  But restless, turbid, never happy unless fighting, Julius drowned the peninsula in blood.  He has been called a patriot, because from time to time he raised the cry of driving the barbarians from Italy:  it must, however, be remembered that it was he, while still Cardinal di San Pietro in Vincoli, who finally moved Charles VIII. from Lyons; it was he who stirred up the League of Cambray against Venice, and who invited the Swiss mercenaries into Lombardy; in each case adding the weight of the Papal authority to the forces which were enslaving his country.  Julius, again, has been variously represented as the saviour of the Papacy, and as the curse of Italy.[1] He was emphatically both.  In those days of national anarchy it was perhaps impossible for Julius to magnify the Church except at the expense of the nation, and to achieve the purpose of his life without inflicting the scourge of foreign war upon his countrymen.  The powers of Europe had outgrown the Papal discipline.  Italian questions were being decided in the cabinets of Louis, Maximilian, and Ferdinand.  Instead of controlling the arbiters of Italy, a Pope could only play off one against another.

    [1] ‘Fatale instrumento e allora e prima e poi de’ mali
    d’Italia,’ says Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia, vol. i. p. 84. 
    ‘Der Retter des Papstthums,’ says Burckhardt, p. 95.

Leo X. succeeded Julius in 1513, to the great relief of the Romans, wearied with the continual warfare of the old Pontifice terribile.  In the gorgeous pageant of his triumphal procession to the Lateran, the streets were decked with arches, emblems, and inscriptions.  Among these may be noticed the couplet emblazoned by the banker Agostino Chigi before his palace: 

  Olim habuit Cypris sua tempora; tempora Mavors
    Olim habuit; sua nunc tempora Pallas habet.

’Venus ruled here with Alexander; Mars with Julius; now Pallas enters on her reign with Leo.’  To this epigram the goldsmith Antonio di San Marco answered with one pithy line: 

  Mars fuit; est Pallas; Cypria semper ero: 

‘Mars reigned; Pallas reigns; Venus’ own I shall always be.’