Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/663

 THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 607 but a frugal refreshment at the close of his day's work. Al- though rich, he lived like a poor man. Rarely did any friend or other person eat at his table ; and he would accept no pres- ents, considering that he would be bound to any one who offered him such. His temperance kept him in constant activity and he slept very little, frequently rising in the night because he could not sleep and resuming his labors with the chisel. For these occasions he had made himself a cap of pasteboard in the center of which he placed his candle, which thus gave him light without encumbering his hands. In his youth he frequently slept in his clothes; being wearied with his labors, he had no mind to undress merely that he might have to dress again. In his latter years he wore stockings of dog-skin for months together, and when these were removed, the skin of the leg sometimes came with them." With the close of the fifteenth century and the dispersion of artists from Florence which followed the death of Lorenzo de' Medici and the rise of the stern reformer of Rome be- religion and manners, Savonarola, Rome became S5S c the the great center of the artistic Renaissance, center especially when Pope Julius II called thither Raphael and Michelangelo and the architect Bramante. There Raphael decorated the Stanze in the Vatican with a series of great paintings, and Michelangelo adorned the end wall of the Sistine Chapel — a rectangular apartment so named after its builder, Sixtus IV — with his Last Judgment and the ceiling with his sibyls and prophets and scenes from the creation and fall of man. But with this Roman period we must take our leave of the artistic Renaissance, omitting the final period of the great Venetian school of painting in the course of the sixteenth century and the spread of Ren- aissance art to other lands. In the fifteenth century overland communication and trade with the Far East became much more diffi- Cessation of cult than in the days of Marco Polo. The cru- overland sading states in the East had all disappeared ; the Byzantine Empire was hastening to its fall; the Ottoman