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260 The fifteenth century. Chap. VlII. The most important and successful of Pinturicchio’s com missions in this church was, however, the laying out of the choir-ceiling, at the request of Giuliano della Rovere, 1 which he did with masterly distribution and pleasant colouring. The Coronation of the Virgin in a large central medallion; the four doctors of the church standing in niches in the angles, with a recumbent sybil in a shovel- frame above them, and an evangelist in a round between each sybil are a telling proof that Pinturicchio possessed the Umbrian taste for decoration, in thp absence of higher qualities essential to the production of great masterpieces. His labours in S. Maria del Popolo were closed in the chapel of Lorenzo Cibo, founded in 1486, but afterwards renewed by a second cardinal of the same name. The family, of which Lorenzo was a member, was one of the most potent in these years at Rome, because its head occupied the chair of S. Peter under the name ol Innocent the Eighth. Scarcely loss enterprising as a builder than his predecessor Sixtus the Fourth, this pontiff raised the Palace of Belvedere from its foun dations; and in the rooms subsequently transformed by Pius the Seventh into the gallery of statues called Museo Pio Clementino, Pinturicchio covered the walls with a panorama of the principal cities of Italy, the entrance- door being adorned' with a fresco of the Madonna.’ Tlie changes introduced since then have left but formless vestiges behind, respecting which one can only say that the Perugian character of Pinturicchio’s time is still trace able in them. • A more complete destruction awaited the frescos exe cuted for Sciarra Colonna in the Palazzo di S. Apostolo, 1 “S. Maria de Populo. Sunt irmlta; capellae varus picturis et marmoribus exornatse , majorem vero capellam tua beatitudo (Ju lius the Second) fnndavit, ac variis picturis exornavit mann Bernar dini Perusini. in q ” A1 b e r- tini opusc. ub. sup. p. 50. — 2 Vas. V. 268.