Character
In the past many conflicting estimates were made of the character and achievements of the pope during whose pontificate Protestantism first took form. More recent studies have served to produce a reportedly fairer and more honest opinion of Leo X. A report of the Venetian ambassador Marino Giorgi bearing the date of March 1517 indicates some of his predominant characteristics:
The pope is a good-natured and extremely free-hearted man, who avoids every difficult situation and above all wants peace; he would not undertake a war himself unless forced into it by his advisors; he loves learning; of canon law and literature he possesses remarkable knowledge; he is, moreover, a very excellent musician.
Leo X held a demeanor that won the affection and support of many. So much so, that he was later elected pope without much resistance. Although, he was taken with intellectual and cultural pursuits, he had no greater priority in his pontificate than maintaining peace. With reference to his other virtues, Ludovico Pastor comments that “the joyful humor, celebrated by all his contemporaries, never left the Pope, even amidst the multiple nightmares that the dispositions of his weakened health implied.”
Leo X’s love for all forms of art stemmed from the humanistic education he received in Florence, his studies in Pisa and his extensive travel throughout Europe. He loved the Latin poems of the humanists, the tragedies of the Greeks or the Livian comedies of Bibbiena and Ariosto, while still following the accounts from the explorers of the New World. Yet “Such a humanistic interest was itself religious…. In the Renaissance, the vines of the classical world and the Christian world, of Rome, were seen as intertwined. It was a historically minded culture where artists’ representations of Cupid and the Madonna, of Hercules and St. Peter could exist side-by-side.”
Read more about this topic: Pope Leo X
Famous quotes containing the word character:
“Much of a mans character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul.”
—Herman Melville (18191891)
“The character of the loggers admiration is betrayed by his very mode of expressing it.... He admires the log, the carcass or corpse, more than the tree.... What right have you to celebrate the virtues of the man you murdered?”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by the electric mediamovies, Telstar, flightfar surpasses any possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the worlds a sage.”
—Marshall McLuhan (19111980)