depicting the departure of Charles for Naples, accompanied by Caesar
Borgia and the Sultan Djem.[72]

These paintings are now lost, and with them the portraits of the members
of the Borgia family. Pinturicchio doubtless painted several likenesses
of the beautiful Lucretia. Probably many of the figures in the paintings
of this master resemble the Borgias, but of this we are not certain. In
the collections of antiquaries, and among the innumerable old portraits
which may be seen hanging in rows on the discolored walls in the palaces
of Rome and in the castles in Romagna, there doubtless are likenesses of
Lucretia, of Caesar, and of his brothers, which the beholder never
suspects as such. It is well known that there was a faithful portrait of
Alexander VI and his children above the altar of S. Lucia in the Church
of S. Maria del Popolo, the work of Pinturicchio. Later, when Alexander
restored this church, the painting was removed to the court of the
cloister, and eventually it was lost.[73]

Of the famous artists of the day, Lucretia must likewise have known
Antonio di Sangallo, her father's architect, and also Antonio
Pollajuolo, the most renowned sculptor of the Florentine school in Rome
during the last decades of the fifteenth century. He died there in 1498.

But the most famous of all the artists then in Rome was Michael Angelo.
He appeared there first in 1498, an ambitious young man of three and
twenty. At that time the city of Rome was an enchanting environment for
an artistic nature. The boundless immorality of her great past, speaking
so eloquently from innumerable monuments of the pagan and Christian
worlds; her majesty and holy calm; the sudden breaking loose of furious
passions--all this is beyond the imaginative power of modern men, just
as is the wickedly secular nature of the papacy and the spirit of the
Renaissance which swept over these ruins. We are unable to comprehend in
their entirety the soul-activities of this great race, which was both
creative and destructive. For to the same feeling which impelled men to
commit great crimes do we owe the great works of art of the Renaissance.
In those days evil, as well as good, was in the _grand style_. Alexander
VI displayed himself to the world, for whose opinion he had supreme
contempt, as shamelessly and fearlessly as did Nero.

The Renaissance, owing to the violent contrasts which it presents, now
naively and now in full consciousness of their incongruity,