On entering we are at once struck by the dazzling profusion of gold and colour, the splendid and opulent decorative effect of the whole. In the contract between "the most reverend Lord Cardinal of Siena" and "Messer Bernardino called Il Pinturicchio, painter of Perugia," dated June 29th, 1502, "to paint a Library placed in the Duomo of Siena," almost as much stress is laid upon the "gold, azure, ultramarine, enamel-blue, azure-greens and other pleasing colours" as upon the ten histories in which he has to paint "the life of the Holy Memory of Pope Pius."[92] Francesco was probably led to intrust the work to Pinturicchio, rather than to a Sienese, because of the splendid work that he had just completed in the Vatican for the reigning Pontiff (who was hardly destined to leave a _santa memoria_), Alexander VI. The frescoes were begun in 1503, interrupted by the death of Francesco as Pius III. (he probably saw none of them), and resumed about the beginning of 1506. The ten histories on the wall make up an ideal representation of the career of a hero of the Renaissance. We see Enea Silvio in the first scene, a youth riding a white horse, starting for Basle to seek his fortunes in the great world away from the petty turmoils of his little Italian republic, as secretary to the Cardinal Domenico Capranica, the dignified ecclesiastic who heads the _cortège_ mounted upon a mule. In the background is the western side of the bay of Genoa, from which they made the journey by land to Basle. In the second, riper in years and in worldly wisdom (but less successfully realised by the painter) he is at Edinburgh before King James I. of Scotland, to whom he had been sent by his new employer, the powerful and influential Cardinal of Santa Croce, Niccolò d'Albergata, to persuade him to threaten the Border and so prevent our Henry VI. from interfering with the continental peace that had been concluded at Arras. This was in 1435. In the third, Enea Silvio has mounted a step higher in the social scale, being crowned poet laureate by the Emperor-elect, Frederick III., who made him one of his imperial secretaries in 1442. Hitherto there had been an antipapal tendency in the poet's movements; he had been involved in the more or less schismatical Council, had been friendly with and on the point of entering the service of the Savoyard antipope Felix. But Frederick professed neutrality, and the next fresco, the fourth, shows us his astute secretary's conversion to the papal side. We see him in Rome, in 1445, at the feet of Eugenius IV., to whom he had been sent as envoy by the Emperor or, as it would be more accurate to call him at this epoch, the King of the Romans. The two Cardinals in the foreground are said to be his two friends in the Sacred College, the Cardinal of Amiens and the Cardinal of Como, while the bearded prelate, the third on our left, is the famous platonist, Johannes Bessarion of Trebizond. This marks a