Farnese
That Evelyn was taken to the Farnese Palace the very first day of his sojourn in Rome is significant. The Roman of 1644 evidently considered this palace and its precincts to be Rome’s chief attraction; and this proves that in spite of the efforts of Paul V (Borghese), who had died some twenty years previously (1621), and of Urban VIII (Barberini), then just passing away, the Farnese pontiff, Paul III, dead for a century past, had succeeded in giving and preserving to his family an importance and magnificence hardly to be emulated and impossible to surpass. The bronze and marble tomb of Paul III is in St. Peter’s, to the left of the tribune. It contains the dust of as worldly a person, to quote Ranke, as ever Pope had been. Yet if his actions cannot be said to ” smell sweet and blossom in the dust”, his memory survives in the annals of Rome, fragrant with the love and pride of his people. He was an old, old man when he died in 1549. He had been fifteen years Pope and forty years a cardinal. The date of his birth carries the mind back to the years before Columbus. His education, conducted by Pomponeus Laetus, had begun in the full tide of the High Renaissance. In his early twenties he became a member of the household of Lorenzo the Magnificent, at whose table and in whose gardens he had met the most brilliant men of his time and had heard talk that embraced all that was then known or surmised of art and learning. For Constantinople had fallen to the Turk only a generation before that time, and what had survived of Greek culture, fleeing across the seas to Italy, had found its chief shelter and patronage in the household of the great Medici. While in Florence, young Farnese must have heard Savonarola preach; but no trace of the great Dominican’s influence is to be found throughout his long life. The classic spirit enthralled his intellect, and the splendor of the Medici prince captured his imagination. In later years his careful Latinity, his splendid and liberal manner, and his gay and witty conversation, together with his patronage of artists and his passion for the antique, proved how profoundly he had been influenced by the experiences of his early youth. Placed thus in the very heart of a movement which freed the individual from all limitations save those of his own personality and opened the world before him, he early made up his mind to become Pope and to raise his own family, as the Medici had done, to the rank of princes.