He now became the admiration of his master and his fellow scholars; and about the same time Pinturicchio, after having painted with so much applause at Rome before Raffaello was born, aspired to become, as it were, his scholar in the great work at Siena. He did not himself possess a genius sufficiently elevated for the sublime composition which the place required; nor had Pietro himself sufficient fertility, or a conception of mind equal to so novel an undertaking. It was intended to represent the life and actions of Æneas Silvius Piccolomini, afterwards Pope Pius II.; the embassies entrusted to him by the council of Constance to various princes; and by Felix, the antipope, to Frederick III., who conferred on him the laurel crown; and also the various embassies which he undertook for Frederick himself to Eugenius IV., and afterwards to Callistus IV., who created him a Cardinal. His subsequent exaltation to the Papacy, and the most remarkable events of his reign, were also to be represented; the canonization of S. Catherine; his attendance on the Council of Mantua, where he was received in a princely manner by the Duke; and finally his death, and the removal of his body from Ancona to Rome. Never perhaps was an undertaking of such magnitude entrusted to a single master. The art itself had not as yet attempted any great flight. The principal figures in composition generally stood isolated, as Pietro exhibited them in Perugia, without aiming at composition. In consequence of this the proportions were seldom true, nor did the artists depart much from sacred subjects, the frequent repetition of which had already opened the way to plagiarism. Historical subjects of this nature were new to Raffaello, and to him, unaccustomed to reside in a metropolis, it must have been most difficult, in painting so many as eleven pictures, to imitate the splendour of different courts, and as we may say, the manners of all Europe, varying the composition agreeably to the occasion. Nevertheless, being conducted by his friend to Siena, he made the sketches and cartoons of _all_ these subjects, says Vasari in his life of Pinturicchio, and that he made the sketches of the whole is the common report at Siena. In the life of Raffaello he states that he made _some of the designs and cartoons for this work_, and that the reason of his not continuing them, was his haste to proceed to Florence, to see the cartoons of Da Vinci and Bonarruoti. But I am more inclined to the first statement of Vasari, than the subsequent one. In April, 1503, Raffaello was employed in the Library, as is proved by the will of Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini.[30] While the Library was yet unfinished, Piccolomini was elected Pope on the twenty-first day of September; and his coronation following on the eighth of October, Pinturicchio commemorated the event on the outside of the Library, in the part opposite to the duomo. Bottari remarks, that in