All the
good that can be said of him politically has been briefly and admirably
summed up by Francesco Vettori; the picture of Leo's pleasures is given
by Paolo Giovio and in the anonymous biography; and the shadows which
attended his prosperity are drawn with inexorable truth by the same
Pierio Valeriano.
We cannot, on the other hand, read without a kind of awe how men
sometimes boasted of their fortune in public inscriptions. Giovanni II
Bentivoglio, ruler of Bologna, ventured to carve in stone on the newly
built tower by his palace that his merit and his fortune had given him
richly of all that could be desired--and this a few years before his
expulsion. The ancients, when they spoke in this tone, had nevertheless
a sense of the envy of the gods. In Italy it was probably the
Condottieri who first ventured to boast so loudly of their fortune. But
the way in which resuscitated antiquity affected religion most
powerfully, was not through any doctrines or philosophical system, but
through a general tendency which it fostered. The men, and in some
respects the institutions, of antiquity were preferred to those of the
Middle Ages, and in the eager attempt to imitate and reproduce them,
religion was left to take care of itself. All was absorbed in the
admiration for historical greatness. To this the philologians added
many special follies of their own, by which they became the mark for
general attention.
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