[Footnote 15: Reply of Raphael to the brief of Leo X., naming him superintendent of the work of the church. See, further, the will of Raphael, (cited in Audin's _Leo X._ t. ii. p. 347.)]
Moreover, independently of all individual names, can it not be said in a general manner that it is going quite counter to historic truth to attempt to connect the art-movement of the sixteenth century with the influence of Luther and Calvin? It is well enough known, in truth, what was the attitude of the Reformation, especially of the Calvinistic part of it, toward the beautiful and the divine in the arts. Many of our old cathedrals in France still bear, after three hundred years, the marks of the iconoclastic fury of the Huguenots. The literal interpretation--literal even to barbarousness--of the text in Exodus, "Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images," it translated, especially in its beginnings, into a relentless proscription; and the statues, pictures, and wonderful great church-windows, where the middle ages had expended so much of faith and often so much of genius, disappeared under the blows of a most savage vandalism.
They are ours, then, altogether ours, those divine men, as the Greeks would have called them, who have written in the history of art the immortal pages stamped with the names of Perugino, Leonardo da Vinci, Brunelleschi, Bramante, Michael Angelo, and Raphael. It is not around Luther and Calvin that they should be grouped, but around those Roman pontiffs who gave such a vigorous impulse to literature and the arts, and who caused all those beautiful poems of painting or of stone to serve for the glorification of the Catholic Church. On that point, moreover, public sentiment has passed judgment for all future time. The history of the arts does not know the era of Luther; it knows and will always know the era of Leo X.
If it had been given to one of those masters of art of the sixteenth century to make a synoptical picture of that grand epoch, he would have singularly modified the perspectives and enlarged the horizons. In regard to that rebellious monk who holds up the Bible as a standard of revolt; in regard to those men who surround him, and among whom are found at the same time the co-workers and the adversaries of his work; a Melanchthon, who had been his disciple, and a Zwingle who had been his rival--strange council, where there is no unanimity except to attack and deny, and where there is division when the matter to be treated of is that of affirming and establishing--in this respect, one would have seen, majestically grouped upon the steps of a temple based, sixteen hundred years previously, upon immovable foundations, the Fathers of the Council of Trent, who, during a term of nearly twenty years, had brought together, classified, and fixed, in wonderful conformity with the whole current of tradition, the divers points of the doctrine and the discipline of the Christian church.