The names of Sannazaro and Sabellico and
other writers of Latin poems prove little on the other side, since the
object with which they wrote was chiefly literary. The poems written in
Italian in the fifteenth and at the beginning of the sixteenth
centuries, in which we meet with genuine religious feeling, such as the
hymns of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and the sonnets of Vittoria Colonna
and of Michelangelo might have been just as well composed by
Protestants. Besides the lyrical expression of faith in God, we chiefly
notice in them the sense of sin, the consciousness of deliverance
through the death of Christ, the longing for a better world. The
intercessiOn of the Mother of God is only mentioned by the way. The
same phenomenon is repeated in the classical literature of the French
at the time of Louis XIV. Not till the time of the Counter-Reformation
did Mariolatry reappear in the higher Italian poetry. Meanwhile the
visual arts had certainly done their utmost to glorify the Madonna. It
may be added that the worship of the saints among the educated classes
often took an essentially pagan form.
We might thus critically examine the various sides of Italian
Catholicism at this period, and so establish with a certain degree of
probability the attitude of the instructed classes towards popular
faith.
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