Page:The Net of Faith.pdf/51

12 The popes and the princes knew the difference between a good statue and a bad statue, but they knew not the difference between good and evil; they all fought each others in palace and in field, with daggers and with crosses, and many of them died of the disease of the age known as the tuberculosis of the Borgia: poison. In some city states they employed artists as ambassadors, while in Rome the rabble became so noisy and dangerous that several Popes had to flee St. Peter's dilapidated city to save their bare skins. Botticelli was certainly justified when he put those Gre ek words into his Nativita̍, "This picture was painted by me Alexander amid the confusions of Italy at the time prophesied in the Second Woe of the Apocalypse, when Satan shall be loosed upon the earth."

But had Botticelli visited the countries outside Italy, he would have had to write the same thing there; for there was confusion in France, confusion in Germany, in Bohemia, everywhere. England was absorbed in her War of the Roses; Spain was busy exterminating Indians in her newly discovered America, ; Germany was in a state of chaos; in the West France lay exhausted from a hundred years' struggle to drive the English from the continent, and just then was saved from utter defeat by the