The principle of utilizing the painter, the sculptor, and the architect for this purpose had been enunciated fifty years earlier. Recognizing that the earlier aim, which had sought to enforce a spiritual despotism by making the belief in a God-inspired pontiff universal, had failed, Nicholas V. determined to try the effect of making the Pope into a king. His court was to be the centre of European culture. With the aid of the vast wealth poured into the papal coffers during the Jubilee of 1450, Nicholas began by making the Vatican quarter of Rome a veritable stronghold for the sovereign pontiff. His full ambition was disclosed when his will was read to the princes of the church assembled round his deathbed. In this Nicholas V. showed that the Popes could be secured from internal revolution and external force by one thing only. That was by making the seat of the papacy so splendid in the eyes of Christendom that it would possess the sanctity that had attached to Imperial Rome itself. It was this great aim that Michael Angelo spent the best years of his life in forwarding. The personal ambition of each Pope interfered with the free progress of the great ideal, but it furnished a strong motive for many years, and actuated both of Angelo’s great patrons, Julius II. and Leo X. After finally settling in Rome Michael Angelo’s first task was the sculptured mausoleum of Julius II. Nicholas himself had started to rebuild the old basilica of St. Peter, in which Julius designed to set up his great tomb. Angelo suggested a great marble monument symbolical of the victory of human energy over death. Upon the lower tiers of a great pyramid the sculptor showed the arts and sciences which the Pope had loved to patronize. Above were the prophets and graces, of which the great statue of “Moses” was one. The apex of the pyramid was a group in which the earth and the heavens upheld the open tomb where the dead pope awaited the Resurrection hour. In all forty figures. The vastness of the conception can best be realized from the fact that the sculptor spent eight months among the marble mines at Carrara quarrying the necessary stone. The space covered by the design was about twenty-five feet by forty. It was soon found that the basilica was not large enough to contain the monument. “What would be the cost of rebuilding?” asked Julius. “100,000 scudi,” said the sculptor. “Let it be 200,000.” And Michael Angelo set to work. This great dream was never realized. The sculptor worked upon it for some years and then Julius was persuaded to entrust him with a task at least as great—that of decorating the vault of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. THE MEDICI TOMBS