Paul III, Pope, 1534-1549

By JOHN ALLEMANG, The Globe and Mail
Tuesday, July 23, 2002

No wonder that when the 67-year-old Paul III took office, he did his best to show the downcast Romans a good time -- with fireworks displays, parades and horse races through the streets.

Paul wasn't an out-and-out hedonist like some of his predecessors. The famous portrait by Titian shows a lean, pensive man with a look of deep curiosity, serious if not severe. But pleasure-seeking was in his blood. A member of the powerful and corrupt Farnese family, educated as a free-thinking Renaissance humanist, he was made cardinal at 25 thanks to the influence of his sister, who was the elderly Pope Alexander VI's mistress.

He in turn looked after his own, making cardinals of his teenage grandsons and lodging them in the magnificent Palazzo Farnese (now the French embassy). Under his direction, Michelangelo painted the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, redesigned the Capitoline Hill into the ceremonial showpiece tourists admire as the Campidoglio, and took control of the building of St. Peter's.

But Paul III's enthusiastic encouragement of good living didn't prevent him from confronting the threat to the Catholic Church posed by Protestantism. He was a realist in religion, as in all else, and under him Rome belatedly recognized the need for the kind of reform Luther and other critics had been demanding. In the delicate years of diplomatic negotiation it took him to bring about the Council of Trent (1545), he did a remarkable job of overcoming the Vatican's fretful inertia, bringing in restless intellectuals to inspire reformist thinking on one hand, and establishing the powerful Roman Inquisition to suppress dissent on the other.

In an institution that looked doomed to decadence, Paul created new life.