[25] In the British Museum is a drawing for this figure, attributed to Gentile Bellini, about which I shall have more to say.
The scene in which the event takes place is more interestingly painted in some ways than any of the other landscapes. It is easy to see that studies for it have been made upon the Palatine itself, where tradition has always held that Sebastian, who was a captain of the Roman Guard, met his martyrdom. The small old Roman brickwork, overgrown with exquisitely drawn acanthus and ivy, is rendered with detailed care, and broken columns stand or lie around. In the background we see the half-ruined Colosseum, as Sixtus IV. left it when he built the Sixtine Bridge from its blocks. On the right is a church--it may be San Giovanni e Paolo, or the one raised in honour of the saint himself. Nowhere up to this time has the beauty and the melancholy of the Roman landscape been rendered by any artist, and once more we feel how deeply beauty in all its forms appealed to the Umbrian painter.
[Illustration: _Anderson photo_] [_Borgia Apartments, Vatican, Rome_
We now turn to the principal wall, facing the window, the most splendid of all the frescoes which Pintoricchio has left. At the foot of the great arch of Constantine, which is crowned with a golden bull, St. Catherine of Alexandria holds a theological dispute with fifty philosophers at a council convoked by the Emperor Maximian. The only woman in the great assemblage, the fair little figure stands before the throne of the Emperor and illustrates the points of her arguments upon her fingers. The same model has served here as for Santa Barbara--tradition says it was Lucrezia herself, the dearly-loved daughter of the Pope--with the small delicate features and long fair hair, which she is described by Burckhardt as possessing. The scene is laid in the usual sunny landscape. Old men with high caps and turbans dispute together, potentates ride upon the scene, pages attend their masters, bearing their volumes for reference, a greyhound steals forward at the feet of a squire who bears a halberd on his shoulder. Some are hastily searching their books as if short of arguments, but the king's daughter is speaking on without hesitation, as if inspired by an unerring director. Lucrezia was fifteen the year this was painted, and was given in marriage to Giovanni Sforza. Full of wit and charm as she was, the painter may have caught the idea of his composition from seeing her foremost in lively discussion among the nobles of her father's court, but the figure and gesture is practically copied from Masolino's of the same subject in San Clemente. All the evil Lucrezia witnessed, all the black deeds she took part in, if history says truly, seem to have swept over that fair head, and when she settled down at Pesaro with her third husband, we gather that she was glad to leave intrigue and crime behind and to lead a comparatively peaceable, respectable existence for the rest of her life.