Sublime

As the great Renaissance diplomat and courtier Niccolò Machiavelli wrote, “Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.”

concupiscence

Cesare Borgia was the son of the Spanish-Italian cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, soon to become Pope Alexander VI, who vies for the hotly contested title of most libertine Renaissance pope. “He had in the fullest measure all the vices of the flesh and of the spirit,” the pope’s contemporary Francesco Guicciardini wrote. He was the first pope to recognize