The Pope who succeeded Clement VII. in 1534 was in all ways fitted to represent the transition which I have indicated.  Alessandro Farnese sprang from an ancient but decayed family in the neighborhood of Bolsena, several of whose members had played a foremost part in the mediaeval revolutions of Orvieto.  While still a young man of twenty-five, he was raised to the Cardinalate by Alexander VI.  This advancement he owed to the influence of his sister Giulia, surnamed La Bella, who was then the Borgia’s mistress.  It is characteristic of an epoch during which the bold traditions of the fifteenth century still lingered, that the undraped statue of this Giulia (representing Vanity) was carved for the basement of Paul III.’s monument in the choir of S. Peter’s.  The old stock of the Farnesi, once planted in the soil of Papal corruption at its most licentious period, struck firm roots and flourished.  Alessandro was born in 1468, and received a humanistic education according to the methods of the earlier Renaissance.  He studied literature with Pomponius Laetus in the Roman Academy, and frequented the gardens of Lorenzo de’Medici at Florence.  His character and intellect were thus formed under the influences of the classical revival and of the Pontifical Curia, at a time when pagan morality and secular policy had obliterated the ideal of Catholic Christianity.  His sister was the Du Barry of the Borgian Court.  He was himself the father of several illegitimate children, whom he acknowledged, and on whose advancement by the old system of Papal nepotism he spent the best years of his reign.  Both as a patron of the arts and as an elegant scholar in the Latin and Italian languages, Alessandro showed throughout his life the effects of this early training.  He piqued himself on choice expression, whenever he was called upon to use the pen in studied documents, or to answer ambassadors in public audiences.  To his taste and love of splendor Rome owes the Farnese palace.  He employed Cellini, and forced Michelangelo to paint the Last Judgment.  On ascending the Papal throne he complained that this mighty genius had been too long occupied for Delia Roveres and Medici.  When the fresco was finished, he set the old artist upon his last great task of completing S. Peter’s.

So far there was nothing to distinguish Alessandro Farnese from other ecclesiastics of the Renaissance.  As Cardinal he seemed destined, should he ever attain the Papal dignity, to combine the qualities of the Borgian and Medicean Pontiffs.  But before his elevation to that supreme height, he lived through the reigns of Julius II., Leo X., Adrian VI., and Clement VII.  Herein lies the peculiarity of his position as Paul III.  The pupil of Pomponius Laetus, the creature of Roderigo Borgia, the representative of Italian manners and culture before the age of foreign invasion had changed the face of Italy, Paul III. was called at the age of sixty-six to steer the ship of the Church through troubled waters and in very altered