that in these compositions also we are concerned, not with the subjective inspiration of the artist who executed, but with the Pope's own well-considered and clearly formulated scheme. In the last few years it has been recognised that this scheme is entirely based on the ideas of the universe represented by the Florentine School. Especially it has been proved that the School of Athens is drawn after the model which Marsilio Ficino left of the Accademia, the ancient assembly of philosophers, while Parnassus has an echo of that bella scuola of the great poets of old times, whom Dante met in the Limbo of the Inferno. The four pictures of the Camera della Segnatura represent the aspirations of the soul of man in each of its faculties; the striving of all humanity towards God by means of aesthetic perception (Parnassus), the exercise of reason in philosophical enquiry and all scientific research (the School of Athens), order in Church and State (Gift of Ecclesiastical and Secular Laws), and finally theology. The whole may be summed up as a pictorial representation of Pico della Mirandola's celebrated phrase, "philosophia veritatem quaerit, theologia invenit, religio possidet"; and it corresponds with what Marsilio says in his Academy of Noble Minds when he characterises our life's work as an ascent to the angels and to God.
These compositions are the highest to which Christian art has attained, and the thoughts which they express are one of the greatest achievements of the Papacy. The principle elsewhere laid down is here reaffirmed: that the reception of the true Renaissance into the circle of ecclesiastical thought points to a widening of the limited medieval conception into universality, and indicates a transition to entire and actual Catholicity, like the great step taken by Paul, when he turned to the Gentiles and released the community from the limits of Judaistic teaching.
This expansion and elevation of the intellectual sphere is the most glorious achievement of Julius II and of the Papacy at the beginning of modern times. It must not only be remembered, but placed in the most prominent position, when history sums up this chapter in human development. Since Luther's time it has been the custom to consider the Papacy of the Renaissance almost exclusively as viewed by theologians who emphasised only moral defects in the representatives of this institution and the neglect of ecclesiastical reform. Certainly these are important considerations, and our further deductions will prove that we do not neglect them nor underestimate their immense significance for the life of the Church and Catholic unity. But from this standpoint we can never succeed in grasping the situation. Ranke in his Weltgeschichte could write the history of the first hundred years of the Roman Empire, without giving one word to all the scandalous tales that Suetonius records. The course of universal history and the importance of the Empire for the wide provinces of the Roman world were little influenced by them. Similarly, private faults of the Renaissance Popes were fateful for the
