The City of Rome in the fifteenth century.

With the fifteenth century a new period of magnificence dawned for the city. She became once more that which she had ceased to be since the ruin of the Roman empire;—the classic city of the world. On the eve of its fall the Papacy enthroned itself in splendour and majesty ; the centre of gravity of all the political relations of Italy and Europe lay in Rome. The secularisation and wealth of the Church created or heightened a feverish activity in all arts and learning. As in the times of Augustus and Trajan artists, poets, musicians, rhetoricians and scholars gravitated thither. The finer spirits of an epoch of culture flourish as a rule in unison—a law which Sallust has already noticed. And with the beginning of the sixteenth century, the overflowing intellectual life of the Italian nation reveals itself like a Bacchic triumphal procession, then droops and fades.

For only two decades was the city of Rome the classic theatre of this splendid culture, the centre which in the main gave form and colour to the European mind. It filled the place which under Lewis XIV. Paris afterwards assumed. In Rome however there was no combination of creative forces to exercise an influence on Italy, such as Paris exercised on France. Even in the sixteenth century creative intellects lived and flourished in every Italian city.