Page:How to See the Vatican, Sladen, 1914.djvu/44

 Rh St. Peter. In that same year, 1447, when the little Ligurian of Sarzana was turned by chance into the head of Christendom, and burst upon an astonished world as a rose opens in the night, the great Ligurian city of Genoa gave birth to the greatest of all the sailors and citizens who sprang from the Republic of the Dorias.

Christopher Columbus was born just as Nicholas. became Pontiff. Truly the world was promised, if not a Renaissance, a fresh dawn, in which the clouds of Papal Schisms and Italian Wars should lift for a day of matchless brilliance, wherein the ships of Europe were to swim to Africa, India, and America, and the writers of Greece to come back across the Styx.

Few of the nine thousand manuscripts collected for the most magnificent and munificent of the patrons of learning by the great scholars of the Mid Quattrocento, like Poggio Bracciolini, the forerunner of Angelo Mai, but have gone the way of all the earth like the eight resplendent chests which contained his choicest treasures. Splendour was the language in which Nicholas would have the Vatican proclaim its message to the world. And even of the buildings with which he sought to make the Vatican Hill the rival of the Palatine, only one cell remains in the glory with which he clothed it—the tiny chapel which glows with the masterpieces of Fra Angelico, 6