Historians and moralists accord scant justice and no mercy to Julius III. He is represented by them as spending his life in senseless and indolent pleasures. Yet he had begun his pontificate with some show of earnestness. He had reopened the Council of Trent, and had attempted to play a part in the diplomacy of Europe. That after two years he wearied of these arduous labors might have been because he had sufficient wit to perceive that, for his time at least, the Papal See would have to be a tool in the hands of Austria. His devotion to the creation of his villa was perhaps the only outlet for the activities of a nature too slight to cope with the stern and sinister century on which his lot had fallen. Long days spent with Vignola, Amannati, and Vasari, and above all, with the aged but undaunted Michelangelo himself, for whom this Pope felt a loving veneration, must have had a zest and stimulating quality sufficient to make the Pope’s life in this villa something more than the sybaritic enjoyment of mere sensuous beauty. Beyond a doubt, the construction of his villa became an obsession with the Pope. He gradually abandoned all other avocations and duties. It was at the villa that he held his audiences, received ambassadors, and gave his suppers, at which last his wit was said to be of less fine quality than were his vintages. He even had a medal struck, with his own head on one side and on the other the front elevation of the Villa Giulia, with the inscription, “Fons Virginibus.” One fatal day a pet monkey savagely attacked the Pope. He was rescued by a lad of sixteen whom he soon after made a cardinal. The scandal was very great. Prelates and laymen alike felt this to be going too far. The Pope might lay himself open to censure but not to ridicule. Here in the midst of the beauty created by Pope Julius, men’s eyes began to turn toward the slightly grim, ascetic figure of Cardinal della Croce, great Roman patrician and true saint, who, as if to give the final note to this life of vivid contrast, moved about in the gay papal court, reserved, austere, devoted to a life of such sanctity that the Pope himself felt uncomfortable in his presence. The villa was still far from finished when Julius III’s short pontificate came to an end. The Conclave almost unanimously chose as his successor their saintly brother, Cardinal della Croce.[E] The world had entered upon a new phase. Northern Europe had brought the spirit of the Reformation to the gates of Rome, and men were ashamed of Pope Julius III, whose misfortune it had been to live half a century too late.