Nicholas--one of whose dreams in the foundation of the Vatican Library was to render all the treasures of Greek literature accessible to Latin scholars--kept, says Pastor, the most eminent humanists of the day--Poggio, Guarino, Decembrio, Filelfo, Valla--labouring at these tasks. I have mentioned his extreme liberality to scholars. He paid Valla five hundred gold scudi for his translation of Thucydides, and Perotti five hundred Papal ducats as a first instalment for his translation of Polybius. He paid Manetti, the Hebrew scholar, six hundred ducats a year, but Fra Angelico only fifteen ducats a month for painting his chapel, and Benozzo Gozzoli only seven ducats a month. “Nicholas,” says Pastor, “was the most generous man of a lavish age.”

Nicholas commissioned Manetti to translate the whole Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek, but his death prevented his plan being carried out.

Nicholas, when he was a poor priest, was always in debt with his purchases of manuscripts. When he became Pope his tastes and enthusiasms remained unchanged.

“A noble library,” says Pastor, “was to form the crowning glory of the new Vatican.” The idea of this library, by means of which Nicholas hoped to make Rome the centre of learning for all ages to come, was perhaps the grandest thought of this great Pope, who was “as admirable for his genuine piety and virtue as for his many-sided culture. He wished to place all the glorious monuments of Greek and Roman intellect under the immediate protection of the Holy See, and thus to hand them down intact for future generations.”

Nicholas’s manuscripts, we are told, were nearly all of them made on parchment and bound in crimson velvet with silver clasps.

Besides the library he collected at the Vatican, which is estimated at from 5000 to 9000 manuscripts, he had a private library, mostly of profane authors, of which one catalogue still exists.

We know from this catalogue that Nicholas V. had over eight hundred Latin manuscripts kept in eight great chests. The manuscripts in the first were Biblical; in the second were of “The Fathers”; in the third and fourth, those of the great mediæval Doctors of the Church, like Thomas Aquinas; in the fifth, of heathen classics, as well as theological and historical works, for here was kept Valla’s translation of Thucydides mentioned above; in the sixth, of works on Theology and the Canon Law; in the seventh, chiefly of classical authors--among them Livy, Cicero, Juvenal, Quintilian, Virgil, Catullus, Terence, Pliny, Sallust, Horace, Ovid, and a translation of Homer. The contents of the eighth were mixed.

Voigt, quoted by Pastor, has given us a charming picture of the little Scholar of Sarzana in the days when he had become Pope. “It was his greatest joy to walk about his library arranging the books and glancing through their pages, admiring the handsome bindings and contemplating his own arms stamped on those that had been dedicated to him, and dwelling in thought on the gratitude that future generations of scholars would entertain towards their benefactor.”

Nicholas was very particular as to the legibility and accuracy of his copies, for he had himself been a copyist in his Florentine days.

Of all the works of Nicholas V. there is only one tittle which strikes the eye of the casual visitor to the Vatican. Or, perhaps I should say, one tiny gem, for, though minute in proportions, it is in quality as perfect as anything in the Vatican. I refer to the Chapel of Nicholas V., which is thought also to have been the study mentioned in the Vatican account books of 1449, decorated with intarsia wood, and gilt friezes and cornices, and some paintings executed by Fra Giovanni da Firenze (Fiesole) and his pupils, and with two windows executed by Fra Giovanni da Roma, a painter on glass, representing the Blessed Virgin and SS. Stephen and Lawrence. Pastor sees in these “almost a certainty that this celebrated chapel and the study mentioned in those books are identical, the latter having been afterwards converted into a private chapel for the Pope.” This Chapel of Nicholas V. may, without injustice, be mentioned in the same breath with the Riccardi Chapel at Florence, the Borgia Rooms, and the Cathedral Library at Siena, as one of the few frescoed chambers of which the _tout ensemble_ is as perfect as a single picture. And apart from the perfection and harmoniousness of the whole, we are confronted, as no one can help acknowledging, by the fact, that here Fra Angelico, then an old man of sixty, rose superior to all his previous efforts in making his figures more human and full of character, while his colouring remained as delightful as ever. It is said that one of the pupils who assisted him was Benozzo Gozzoli, the painter of the Riccardi Chapel at Florence. Certainly the two chapels leave rather a similar impression upon one. The frescoes deal with the lives of St. Stephen and St. Lawrence, the two saints who have a common grave in the Church of S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura. “This chapel,” says Kugler, “was for centuries consigned to oblivion, so that Bottari, in the last century, the door not being discoverable, made his entrance by a window. Here the story of the two saints is seen in a series on three of the walls, that of St. Stephen occupying the upper course. A Descent from the Cross by the master, above the altar, is still covered with whitewash. These remarkable frescoes evince a dramatic power and a skill in composition and drawing hardly shown by the master before, and prove that in his sixty-first year he was in the vigour of his art.” [Illustration: St. Lawrence. By Fra Angelico; in the Chapel of Nicholas V.]

The painter has left us a portrait of his patron, in the fresco of the Ordination of St. Lawrence by Sixtus II. The humanist Pope, who wears his own triple-crowned tiara in the place of the crownless tiara Sixtus would have worn, breathes an air of benignity which you feel must have belonged to one who so generously carried out the aspirations of his youth when the power came to him.

Pératé, who sees in the “frescoes” of this chapel the influence of the frescoes of Masaccio in the Carmine of Florence, considers that Nicholas V. was the builder of the Stanze, which Raffaelle was to cover with his famous frescoes; and points out that one of the last acts of Nicholas’s life was to compose an epitaph which was to go on the tomb of the gentle painter, Fra Angelico, with whom he had been so closely associated in the church of his order, the famous Dominican Church of S. Maria sopra Minerva.

“Non mihi sit laudi quod eram velut alter Apelles, Sed quod lucra tuis omnia, Christe, dabam, Altera nam terris opera extant, altera caelo, Urbs me Iohannem _Flos tulit Etruriae_.”

Fra Angelico came from Fiesole, three miles outside Florence, but could any name fit Florence so perfectly as that death-bed phrase of the humanist Pope, who owed both his humanism and his pontificate to Florence: _Flos Etruriae_--the flower of Etruria.

Nicholas has been blamed for the unprecedented magnitude of his projects. A modern historian said: “The lives of twenty Popes, and the treasures of Rhampsinitus (_i.e._ Rameses) would be required to carry them out.” Pératé retorted that he only wanted twenty years and an architect of genius; and that since Alberti was the forerunner of Leonardo da Vinci, he had the genius, he only lacked the years.