med. It was from the
licentiousness of cardinals and the wanton revels of the Vatican in
Leo's time that young Luther the "barbarian" fled with horror to nail
up his theses on the doors of the churches in Wittenberg.

The history of tapestry in Italy at the Seventeenth Century was all in
the hands of the great families. Italy was not united under a single
royal head, but was a heterogeneous mass of dukedoms, of foreign
invaders, with the popes as the head of all. But Italy had experienced
a time of papal corruption, which had, as its effect, wars of
disintegration, the retarding of that unity of state which has only
recently been accomplished. State patronage for the factories was not
known, that steady beneficent influence, changeless through changing
reigns. Popes and great families regulated art in all its
manifestations, and who shall say that envy and rivalry did not act
for its advancement.

[Illustration: ITALIAN VERDURE. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY]

The desire to imitate the cultivation and elegance of Italy was
what made returning invaders carry the Renaissance into the rest of
Europe; and in a lesser degree the process was reversed when, in the
Seventeenth Century, a cardinal of the House of Barberini visited
France and, on viewing in the royal residences a superb display of
tapestries, his envy and ambition were aroused to the extent of
emulation. He could not, with all his power, possess himself of the
hangings that he saw, but he could, and did, arrange to supply himself
generously from another source. He was the powerful Francesco
Barberini, the son of the pope's brother (Pope Urban VIII, 1623-1644),
and it was he who established the Barberini Library and built from the
ruins of Rome's amphitheatres and baths the great palace which to-day
still dominates the street winding up to its aristocratic elegance. It
was to adorn this palace that Cardinal Francesco established ateliers
and looms and set artists and weavers to work. This tapestry factory
is of especial interest to America, for some of its chief hangings
have come to rest with us. _The Mysteries of the Life and Death of
Jesus Christ_, one set is called, and is the property of the Cathedral
of St. John, the Divine, in New York, donated by Mrs. Clarke.

Cardinal Francesco Barberini chose as his artists those of the school
of Pietro di Cortona with Giovanni Francesco Romanelli as the head
master. The director of the factory was Giacomo della Riviera alli