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.