With the emergence of the bourgeois classes a self-satisfied positivism, vividly portrayed in the person of Cosimo de' Medici, superseded the passions and enthusiasms of a previous age.

Thus force, craft, and practical materialism formed the basis of Italian immorality.

Vehement contention in the sphere of politics, restless speculation, together with the loosening of every tie that bound society together in the Middle Ages, emancipated personality and substituted the freedom of self-centered vigor and virility (Virtu) for the prescriptions of civil or religions order.

In the nation that had shaken off both Papal and Imperial authority no conception of law remained to control caprice.

Instead of law men obeyed the instincts of their several characters, swayed by artistic taste or tyrannous appetite, or by the splendid heroism of extinct antiquity.