In the courtyard of the monastery attached to the Church of San Pietro in Montorio, the exact spot where his inverted cross was erected is enclosed in a lovely circular chapel surrounded by granite columns, the work of the great Bramante. The hole where the cross stood has never been filled up, but is left open to view, and, if you are one of the faithful, the good monk who shows it will give you a few grains of that consecrated soil to take home with you. The Church itself was built by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and Michelangelo took great interest in it, going to the length of quarrelling bitterly with his friend Vasari about the design for the chapel which they had jointly undertaken to put in for the reigning Pope, Julius III. He desired to have there a fitting sepulchre and memorial for his Cardinal-uncle, Antonio dei Monti, through whom the obscure Tuscan family had risen to power and prominence. The sculptor, seeing with his mind’s eye the statues he intended to place there, vowed that there should be no architectural ornamentation to detract from their effect; Vasari looked upon the statues as mere details of the ornamentation of the whole. So they quarrelled, both about the subordinates chosen by Vasari to carry out the work and about the work itself. Michelangelo won his point, the chapel was left austerely bare; the statues looked cold and lonely in it; and Michelangelo, who would have died rather than subscribe to an artistic falsehood, admitted his error and acknowledged that Vasari had been right. He left some fine traces of his genius in the paintings now in other chapels of the Church; he supplied Sebastian del Piombo with the design for the “Scourging of Christ,” and Vasari tells us a quaint story about another picture there. It seems that the famous Cardinal San Giorgio had a barber who, in his leisure hours, had learnt to handle the brush and had become a fine artist in tempera, but who could not draw a single correct line. Michelangelo discovered him, encouraged him to persevere, and, wishing to give him a chance, made a very careful cartoon of St. Francis receiving the Stigmata, and told the barber to copy and carry it out in colour. This the humble painter did, very successfully, and his name, Giovanni dei Vecchi, has come down to us, with those of the approved artists of his day.