he unloaded his bales, took to his book, became a priest, and at the
age of forty-eight rose to the Papacy. Being a handsome man, he was fain
to take the ecclesiastical title of Formosus; but the Cardinals
dissuaded him from this parade of vanity, and he assumed the tiara as
Paul in 1464. A vulgar love of show was his ruling characteristic. He
spent enormous sums in the collection of jewels, and his tiara alone was
valued at 200,000 golden florins. In all public ceremonies, whether
ecclesiastical or secular, he was splendid, delighting equally to sun
himself before the eyes of the Romans as the chief actor in an Easter
benediction or a Carnival procession. The poorer Cardinals received
subsidies from his purse in order that they might add luster to his
pageants by their retinues. The arts found in him munificent patron. For
the building of the palace of S. Marco, which marks an abrupt departure
from the previous Gothic style in vogue, he brought architects of
eminence to Rome, and gave employment to Mino da Fiesole, the sculptor,
and to Giuliano da San Gallo, the wood-carver. The arches of Titus and
Septimius Severus were restored at his expense, together with the statue
of Marcus Aurelius and the horses of Monte Cavallo. But Paul showed his
connoisseurship more especially in the collection of gems, medals,
precious stones, and cameos, accumulating rare treasures of antiquity
and costly masterpieces of Italian and Flemish gold-work in his
cabinets. This patronage of contemporary art, no less than the
appreciation of classical monuments, marked him as a Maecenas of the true
Renaissance type.[1] But the qualities of a dilettante were not
calculated to shed luster on a Pontiff who spent the substance of the
Church in heaping up immensely valuable curiosities. His thirst for gold
and his love of hoarding were so extreme that, when bishoprics fell
vacant, he often refused to fill them up, drawing their revenues for his
own use. His court was luxurious, and in private he was addicted to
sensual lust.[2] This would not, however, have brought his name into bad
odor in Rome, where the Holy Father was already regarded as an Italian
despot with certain sacerdotal additions. It was his prosecution of the
Platonists which made him unpopular in an age when men had the right to
expect that, whatever happened, learning at least would be respected.
The example of the Florentine and Neapolitan academies had encouraged
the Romans to found