When he sets to work to describe the chapel
of St. Anthony in the Santo, the writer loses himself in ejaculations
and fantastic dreams. In Milan the people at least showed a fanatical
devotion to relics; and when once, in the year 1517, the monks of San
Simpliciano were careless enough to expose six holy corpses during
certain alterations of the high altar, which event was followed by
heavy floods of rain, the people attributed the visitation to this
sacrilege, and gave the monks a sound beating whenever they met them in
the street. In other parts of Italy, and even in the case of the Popes
themselves, the sincerity of this feeling is much more dubious, though
here, too, a positive conclusion is hardly attainable. It is well known
amid what general enthusiasm Pius II solemnly deposited the head of the
Apostle Andrew, which had been brought from Greece, and then from San
Maura, in the Church of St. Peter (1462); but we gather from his own
narrative that he only did it from a kind of shame, as so many princes
were competing for the relic. It was not till afterwards that the idea
struck him of making Rome the common refuge for all the remains of the
saints which had been driven from their own churches. Under Sixtus IV,
the population of the city was still more zealous in this cause than
the Pope himself, and the magistracy (1483) complained bitterly that
Sixtus had sent to Louis XI, the dying King of France, some specimens
of the Lateran relics.
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