Cesare Borgia

Cesare and Leonardo da Vinci were fast friends. My favorite quote about Cesare is from Nietzsche's Antichrist:
Quote:
To attack at the critical place, at the very seat of Christianity, and there enthrone the more noble values -- that is to say, to insinuate them into the instincts, into the most fundamental needs and appetites of those sitting there . . . I see before me the possibility of a perfectly heavenly enchantment and spectacle : -- it seems to me to scintillate with all the vibrations of a fine and delicate beauty, and within it there is an art so divine, so infernally divine, that one might search in vain for thousands of years for another such possibility; I see a spectacle so rich in significance and at the same time so wonderfully full of paradox that it should arouse all the gods on Olympus to immortal laughter -- Cesare Borgia as Pope! . . . Am I understood? . . . Well then, that would have been the sort of triumph that I alone am longing for today -- : by it Christianity would have been swept away! -- What happened? A German monk, Luther, came to Rome. This monk, with all the vengeful instincts of an unsuccessful priest in him, raised a rebellion against the Renaissance in Rome. . . . Instead of grasping, with profound thanksgiving, the miracle that had taken place: the conquest of Christianity at its capital -- instead of this, his hatred was stimulated by the spectacle. A religious man thinks only of himself. -- Luther saw only the corruption of the papacy at the very moment when the opposite was becoming apparent: the old corruption, the peccatum originale, Christianity itself, no longer occupied the papal chair! Instead there was life! Instead there was the triumph of life! Instead there was a great Yes to all lofty, beautiful and daring things! . . . And Luther restored the church: he attacked it. . . . The Renaissance -- an event without meaning, a great futility! -- Ah, these Germans, what they have not cost us! Futility -- that has always been the work of the Germans. -- The Reformation; Leibniz; Kant and so-called German philosophy; the war of "liberation"; the Reich -- every time a futile substitute for something that once existed, for something irrecoverable . . . These Germans, I confess, are my enemies: I despise all their uncleanliness in concept and valuation, their cowardice before every honest Yes and No. For nearly a thousand years they have tangled and confused everything their fingers have touched; they have on their conscience all the half-way measures, all the three-eighths-way measures, that Europe is sick of, -- they also have on their conscience the uncleanest variety of Christianity that exists, and the most incurable and indestructible -- Protestantism. . . . If mankind never manages to get rid of Christianity the Germans will be to blame. . . .

Ceci n'est pas un seing.