us Romans. Pomponio Leto, his preceptor, had imbued him with the spirit of humanism, and imparted to him the gift of a gay and bright conversation. He seemed to have brought back with his advent to the pontificate the fine old days of Leo X, with a higher standard of morals. I may also recall among his other traits that, like Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna, the hero and the heroine of my next two chapters, he did not despise the cultivation of poetry in leisure hours; that he illustrated the "Epistulae ad Atticum" of Cicero, and wrote himself a beautiful set of epistles to Charles V, Francis I, Erasmus, and Cardinals Sadoleto and Cortesi. The coin of the value of ten bajocchi took from him the name of paolo, a name which common people still apply to the fifty centimes piece of the present currency. We cannot forget, besides, that the Order of the Jesuits was founded under his rule, perhaps the most important event, next to the Reformation, in the history of the modern church.

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Paul III was of medium height, with a well-proportioned head, brilliant eyes, long nose, flowing beard, prominent lips, and slightly stooping shoulders. I have described in Pagan and Christian Rome," pp. 245, 246, the magnificent tomb raised to him in St. Peter's, on the left-hand side of the tribune, where he appears seated between the allegorical figures of Prudence and Justice, the most marvellous artistic creations of Guglielmo della Porta. This mausoleum, brought to completion in 1575, stood originally against one of the piers of the cupola, now bearing the name of St. Longinus; but Urban VIII, Barberini, having selected for his own resting-place the niche on the right hand of the apse, caused the memorial to Paul III to be transferred, for the sake of symmetry, to the opposite niche, in 1628. The columns and marbles used for the decoration of both

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were taken from the temple of the Sun in the Colonna garden on the Quirinal. But the best monument in memory of Paul III is the statue raised to him on that ancient seat of glory, the Capitoline hill, by his collaborator in the hygienic and material reform of the city, Latino Giovenale Mannetti. The inscription on the pedestal mentions expressly the fact that thanks to Paul III " urbs situ et diverticulis viarum deformis et impervia, disiectis male positis aedificiis in meliorem formam redacta est" (the city, disfigured and made uninhabitable by the narrowness and tortuosity of its alleys, had undergone a wholesome transformation). The raising of this beautiful tribute of gratitude to Pope Farnese, as a reformer of the street system, had probably been suggested to Mannetti by the sight of another monument which was then preserved in the Capitol: I mean the pedestal dedicated to the Emperor Vespasian by the people of Rome, "quod vias urbis neglegentia superiorum temporum corruptas impensa sua restituit," for having reorganized and improved the street system after the great fire of Nero and the civil war brought about by Vitellius.' The fact of finding these two great benefactors of the city, Vespasian and Paul III, honored on the sacred hill of Saturn, for the same reason and in the same manner, at an interval of fifteen centuries, cannot fail to impress the student of Roman history.

1 The pedestal of Vespasian's statue, described as "great" by Poggio and as "admirable" by Smet, had been made use of in the middle ages to sustain the third column of the porch of the Conservatori palace, on the right side of the entrance. During the reconstruction of the same palace, which began in 1537, the historical monument perished, probably in a lime-kiln.

CHAPTER IV

MICHELANGELO

MICHELANGELO began his marvellous career as an imitator of antiques. There was in the garden of Lorenzo de' Medici, at San Marco in Florence, "a sleeping Cupid carved in marble on a round base," either a Greek work of the Alexandrine school, or a Roman work of the Imperial period, representing the young god lulled to sleep by the sound of a running brook or by that of a fountain. The artist, who had already shown his appreciation of classic models in the head of the Faun (1489), now in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, in the fight of the Lapithæ and the Centaurs (1490), now in the Casa Buonarroti, and in the figure of Hercules (1492), now lost, was especially pleased with this image of the graceful son of Aphrodite, and set his mind to reproduce it, or to imitate it with the best of his skill. Such reproductions had become popular in those days, and this one was seen and praised beyond measure by the Magnifico Lorenzo.

The subsequent fate of the work is uncertain. It appears, however, that the Cupid having been sold for thirty scudi to the dealer Baldassare del Milanese, - we do not know whether for a real antique or for an imitation, it was offered by the latter and resold as an antique to Raphael Riario, cardinal of San Giorgio, who was gathering a valuable collection of marbles in his Palazzo della Cancelleria. The forgery having been discovered and the contract cancelled, Baldassare sold the Cupid again, probably as the work of

Michelangelo, to Cesar Borgia, who in turn made a present of it to Guidobaldo Feltre, duke of Urbino.

We meet here for the first time with the most attractive type of a Renaissance lady, Isabella d' Este Conzaga, who like so many noble contemporaries, imbued with the principles of Humanism, was engaged in gathering ancient and modern works of art for her "Studio" di Corte Vecchia. Traces of her first acquaintance with Michelangelo are to be found in a letter written on June 30, 1502, to her brother, Cardinal Ippolito I of Este. "The duke of Urbino," she says, "had in his castle a marble Venus, small but perfect, and a Cupid given to him by Cesar Borgia. Both pieces have now fallen again into the hands of the latter, since the capture of my brother's castle and the invasion of his states. As I am aware that the invader is not an admirer of art and antiquities, will you kindly ask him to make me a present of both marbles?”

Cardinal Ippolito made such gallant haste in complying with Isabella's wish, that on July 21 the Venus and the Cupid were duly deposited in the Studio di Corte Vecchia. The next mention of the young god occurs in the inventory of the Conzaga collections made in 1542: ". . . and furthermore, a Cupid sleeping on a lion's skin, attributed to Praxiteles, placed on the left side of the window in the 'Grotta di Madama,' and a sleeping one of Carrara marble, carved by the hands of Michelangelo, and placed on the opposite side of the same window." We hear again of both in 1573, when Jacques Auguste du Thou, the historian of Kings Henry III and Henry IV, visited Mantua. Having been shown first the one by Michelangelo, he found it to be far above the praises which had been bestowed on it; but as soon as he was allowed to gaze at the other one, the alleged work of Praxiteles, which had been momentarily

hidden from view with a silk cover, Du Thou and his fellow travellers felt ashamed at their want of discernment, and declared that while the older Cupid was brimming with life the modern was lacking feeling and expression. "Quelques domestiques," says the author of the "Mémoires de la vie de J. A. du Thou," "leur dirent que Michelange, qui était plus franc que les habiles gens comme lui ne le sont ordinairement, pria instamment la Comtesse Isabelle, après qu'il lui eût fait présent de son Cupidon, et qu'il eût vu l'autre,

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qu'on ne montrât l'ancien que le dernier, afin que naisseurs pûssent juger en le voyant, de combien en ces sortes d'ouvrages les anciens l'emportent sur les modernes."

The last evidence of the permanency of both works at the Corte Vecchia is the following entry in the inventory of 1627: "Un amorin che dorme sopra un sasso, stimato scudi venti un' altro amorin che dorme sopra una pelle di leone stimato scudi venticinque." Praxiteles' work, therefore, was valued at that time only five scudi above that of the Flor