lic Works--Taxation--The City of
Rome assumes its present form--Nepotism in the Counter-Reformation
Period--Various Estimates of the Wealth accumulated by Papal
Nephews--Rise of Princely Roman Families.

It is not easy to define the intellectual and moral changes which passed
over Italy in the period of the Counter-Reformation[7]; it is still
less easy to refer those changes to distinct causes. Yet some analysis
tending toward such definition is demanded from a writer who has
undertaken to treat of Italian culture and manners between the years
1530 and 1600.

In the last chapter I attempted to describe the depth of servitude to
which the States of Italy were severally reduced at the end of the wars
between France and Spain. The desolation of the country, the loss of
national independence, and the dominance of an alien race, can be
counted among the most important of those influences which produced the
changes in question. Whatever opinions we may hold regarding the
connection between political autonomy and mental vigor in a people, it
can hardly be disputed that a sudden and universal extinction of liberty
must be injurious to arts and studies that have grown up under free
institutions.

But there were other causes at work. Among these a prominent place
should be given to an alteration in the intellectual interests of the
Italians themselves. The original impulses of the Renaissance, in
scholarship, painting, sculpture, architecture, and vernacular poetry,
had been exhausted.

[Footnote 7: I may here state that I intend to use this term
Counter-Reformation to denote the reform of the Catholic Church, which
was stimulated by the German Reformation, and which, when the Council of
Trent had fixed the dogmas and discipline of Latin Christianity, enabled
the Papacy to assume a militant policy in Europe, whereby it regained a
large portion of the provinces, that had previously lapsed to Lutheran
and Calvinistic dissent.]

Humanism, after recovering the classics and forming a new ideal of
culture, was sinking into pedantry and academic erudition. Painting and
sculpture, having culminated in the great work of Michelangelo, tended
toward a kind of empty mannerism. Architecture settled down into the
types fixed by Palladio and Barozzi. Poetry seemed to have reached its
highest point of development in Ariosto. The main motives supplied to
art by mediaeval traditions and humanistic enthusiasm were worked out.