The year 1499, being the penultimate year of the Fifteenth Century, was occupied as far as the City was concerned with preparations for the Jubilee; that curious ceremony wherewith the Church affords an opportunity to the faithful to cleanse their souls from stain of sin by penitence and pious works. Penitence is an affair entirely personal, to be entreated of between a sinner and his Judge: but the Church, who (according to the Thirty Nine Articles) “hath power to ordain its rites and ceremonies,” prescribes the ceremonial works to be performed. In brief, these works consist in certain visits to certain basilicas of Rome, which must be entered by certain doors, and where certain prayers must be prayed. The Church, being a system, is systematic. In return for these works always supposing them to be accompanied by the appropriate penitence, She promises, from the infinite treasury of the Merits of our Divine Redeemer remission of the canonical punishment incurred, during his past life, by the sinner now penitent and purposing amendment. This Complaisance on the part of the Church technically is called an Indulgence; and the Jubilee Indulgence is in high esteem and eager acceptation. It is not in any sense a licence to sin; as, by a singularly silly misconception of its name,[42] it has been supposed to be: but, absolutely, a formal wiping of the slate, a ceremonial enabling of the soul to start anew. The Jubilee begins on Christmas Day with the opening, by the Supreme Pontiff, of a certain door in the Vatican Basilica, which remains an ingress until the Christmas Day of the century-end; and vast pilgrimages are used to flock into the City at such times. The year 1499 saw erected accommodation for visitors in the Borgo Nuovo, and numerous improvements on the Vatican side of Tiber. Churches were restored and furbished, the Mola of Hadrian strengthened; and the new wing of the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican called the Borgia Tower, which the Lord Alexander P.P. VI had built, was decorated in fresco by the brush of Messer Bernardino Betti (detto Il Pinturicchio). In his book on the lives of artists which Giovanni Vasari wrote half a century later it is said that Il Pinturicchio painted on a wall of the Borgia Tower a picture of the Blessed Virgin Mary before whom the Borgia Pontiff kneels in adoration. Vasari also says that the painter used, as his model for Deipara, Madonna Giulia Orsini (nate Farnese) who was the Pope’s mistress: and this statement is repeated by many, to this day, including the German historian Herr Gregorovius (who pretends to have been guided by documents and by documents alone), as an example of the flagitious profligacy and profanity of the Lord Alexander P.P. VI.