masters of all ages--Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and a host of
others.[22]

Unfortunately in Italy at least the great movement in art and literature
took an antireligious, sometimes an antipatriotic, tone. Lorenzo was
openly defiant and scornful of the teachings of the Church, and after his
death a French king, Charles VIII, was able to enter Italy and march from
end to end of it without opposition. Religion seemed dying there, and
love of country dead.

Florence underwent an extravagant though brief religious revival. The
monk Savonarola preached against wickedness in high places, and thundered
at the Florentines for their presumption and vanity. The impressionable
people wept, they appointed a "day of vanities" and laid all their rich
robes and jewels at Savonarola's feet. They made him ruler of the city.
But, alas! they soon tired of his severities, sighed for their vanities
back again, and at last burned the reformer at the stake.[23]

In Rome itself there arose popes, Lorenzo's followers, who preferred
art to Christianity, or others like the terrible Alexander Borgia, who
adopted the maxims of the new statecraft. Alexander, a worthy disciple of
Louis XI, admired falsehood before truth, and sought to win his aims by
poisoning his enemies. The career of his nephew Caesar Borgia has supplied
history with its most awful picture of successful crime, and the book
written in his praise by Macchiavelli has given us a new word for Satanic
subtlety and treachery. We call it Macchiavellian. The rest of Europe
shrank from Italy in fear, and named it "poisoning Italy."[24]

Against the spiritual dominance of such a land the world was surely ready
for revolt. The mind of man, so long and slowly awakening, and at last so