Paul the Second was a Venetian named Pietro Barbi, who began life as a merchant.  He had already shipped his worldly goods on board a trading vessel for a foreign trip, when news reached him that his uncle had been made Pope under the name of Eugenius IV.  His call to the ministry consisted of the calculation that he could make his fortune in the Church with a Pope for uncle sooner than on the high seas by his wits.  So he unloaded his bales, took to his book, became a priest, and at the age of forty-eight rose to the Papacy.  Being a handsome man, he was fain to take the ecclesiastical title of Formosus; but the Cardinals dissuaded him from this parade of vanity, and he assumed the tiara as Paul in 1464.  A vulgar love of show was his ruling characteristic.  He spent enormous sums in the collection of jewels, and his tiara alone was valued at 200,000 golden florins.  In all public ceremonies, whether ecclesiastical or secular, he was splendid, delighting equally to sun himself before the eyes of the Romans as the chief actor in an Easter benediction or a Carnival procession.  The poorer Cardinals received subsidies from his purse in order that they might add luster to his pageants by their retinues.  The arts found in him munificent patron.  For the building of the palace of S. Marco, which marks an abrupt departure from the previous Gothic style in vogue, he brought architects of eminence to Rome, and gave employment to Mino da Fiesole, the sculptor, and to Giuliano da San Gallo, the wood-carver.  The arches of Titus and Septimius Severus were restored at his expense, together with the statue of Marcus Aurelius and the horses of Monte Cavallo.  But Paul showed his connoisseurship more especially in the collection of gems, medals, precious stones, and cameos, accumulating rare treasures of antiquity and costly masterpieces of Italian and Flemish gold-work in his cabinets.  This patronage of contemporary art, no less than the appreciation of classical monuments, marked him as a Maecenas of the true Renaissance type.[1] But the qualities of a dilettante were not calculated to shed luster on a Pontiff who spent the substance of the Church in heaping up immensely valuable curiosities.  His thirst for gold and his love of hoarding were so extreme that, when bishoprics fell vacant, he often refused to fill them up, drawing their revenues for his own use.  His court was luxurious, and in private he was addicted to sensual lust.[2] This would not, however, have brought his name into bad odor in Rome, where the Holy Father was already regarded as an Italian despot with certain sacerdotal additions.  It was his prosecution of the Platonists which made him unpopular in an age when men had the right to expect that, whatever happened, learning at least would be respected.  The example of the Florentine and Neapolitan academies had encouraged the Romans to found a society for the discussion of philosophical questions.  The Pope conceived that a political intrigue was the real object of this club.  Nor