The industry of destruction; death of "a sheep in wolf's clothing"

Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance: Reading Notes Part XVI

Aretino is alternately panygerist and critic and given to exceeding his boundaries -- the polar opposite to Castiglione who revels in boundaries.
Running afoul of the Pope and nearly dragging his current patron, Federico. Gonzaga, into that ditch, Aretino finds himself an outcast from the courts of the powerful.

Embracing that role, Aretino styles himself as "the Truth Teller, born to strip men of their pretences; and of all their pretences, the most transparent were their pretensions to honor, truth, loyalty, courage. Princes, like parasites, knew no law but self-interest and he was their Scourge."

Aretino takes refuge in Venice, "the liberal asylum of the outcast, the expatriate, the freethinker."

With the Spanish Imperial armies surging into Italy, Federico worries about the future of his principality: "he was in the position -- the lofty position of the weathervane -- to scan the map of Italy and discern the drift of the morrow."

Roeder describes the new sack of Rome by murderous, plundering Spanish and German troops: "day after day the industry of destruction progressed . . . the city was divided into districts and the harrow passed over it slowly, exhaustively.

Amorality, then as now, of the banking and legal professions: "To meet the needs of the army, banks reopened and notaries reappeared, drafting inventories, registering bills of ransom, cashing notes of exchange, and storing loot. Like maggots on a charnel pile, they digested the disaster." Extortion becomes an industry, torture a pastime of idling troops.

German troops engage in a daily revelry of sacrilidge, tormenting priests, staging mock masses, and proclaiming Luther the pope.

Looking out over the devastation and rapine from his refuge at Castel Saint Angelo (with "slaughtered innocents lying moth-like below its walls") the Pope "as a cat licks itself, wept himself clean."

On Machiavelli's death, Roeder concludes he was "a sheep in wolf's clothing," that however unscrupulous his principles, his integrity was "flagrant" and his patriotism unstinting.

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