Foglietta's epitaph, visible on Sauli's tombstone in Santa Sabina until the late cinquecento, makes much of the role of fate in his career, and also of his virtue. This should not be read as a posthumous declaration of his innocence: an epitaph has to provide as positive an account as possible of a person's life and rarely has anybody, however badly behaved in life, had their sins recounted on their tombstone. Indeed, in his book Foglietta condemned Sauli for his actions, blaming his acquiescence in Petrucci's machinations on spite or bad advice. It was surely kinder for Foglietta to say that fate (or Petrucci and a combination of tertiary fever and dropsy) brought a swift end to Sauli's career and life.

The epitaph does, however, highlight the fact that now that Sauli was in heaven he ‘despise[s] riches, quantities of gold, kingdoms and glory’. This was far from the case when he was still on earth: he had avidly collected benefices, had been keen on money and the spending of it, glorying in the eminence he had attained. He was clearly an ambitious cardinal, but his ambition was dependent on patronage. The patronage encountered in this book has been twofold: that bestowed by the pope and that bestowed by Sauli himself. Unless a cardinal had substantial personal wealth one could not exist without the other, and in order for Sauli to be a lavish patron with a large famiglia, to decorate his palace and his churches and to reward humanists for their promotion of him in print he needed money, which was in turn derived from benefices which were in the gift of the pope.