He was again installed in Santa Maria del Popolo, that church which had been such a favourite place of devotion of Sixtus IV. and other churchmen of the House of Rovere. The choir, which now absorbed him for some months, and which is the most perfectly preserved and the most untouched of all his works, is a wonderful piece of ceiling painting, in the style in which he had lately adorned the Library ceiling at Siena. In the middle a "Coronation of the Virgin" recalls Fiorenzo and, still more, Bernardino Mariotto, the Umbrian with whom Pintoricchio is so constantly confused. Round this middle octagon the four Evangelists alternate with four sibyls, and at each corner the four Fathers of the Church sit on thrones. The sibyls are graceful types of young Italian women of the Renaissance--full of sweetness and refinement--the women Messer Bernardino knew in the mannered and highly-cultured palaces: no beings of a weird and wild prophetic race. They half recline in the mapped-out divisions; each perfectly fills the space without crowding, and assists the geometrical _coup d'œil_ which is the first impression of the ceiling in its entirety, yet the pose of each is extremely easy and unconstrained, and the lines soft and flowing. Of the Evangelists, each painted in a _tondo_, St. Matthew with a beautiful angel holding the ink, and St. Luke painting the portrait of the Virgin, are both singularly clear and excellent figures. The stately Fathers of the Church sit on throned seats like those of the Arts and Sciences, or the Sibyls at Spello. Their robes ring the changes on beautiful dashes of colour--white, rich green and rose, scarlet and dark blue. The whole is set in a bold pattern of grotesques in gold and vivid colours, scrolls mounted by women's busts, quaint birds growing out of acanthus branches, _putti_ riding on griffins, and a score of other fantastic devices. The impression is at once gay, graceful, and distinguished, excellent in decorative effect, and delicate in detail. [Illustration: [_Pavement, Siena Cathedral_ SYMBOLICAL SCENE] This was Pintoricchio's last work in Rome. Here he laid down the brush which he had first taken up in the Sixtine Chapel twenty-three years before. Even now there is more of his art there than that of any painter except Raphael, and at that day how proudly he could pass through the long series of great halls and chapels, which owed their beauty in greatest part to his brush and to his fancy.