Chap. VIII. BERNARDINO PINTURICCHIO 285 hoping to live and reside there; (therefore) confiding in the clemency of your Lordships and considering the adverse nature of the times, the smallness and diminution of profits and the weight of his family; having heard also that craftsmen taking up their abode here receive grants of immunities, he prays exemption for thirty years from all taxes whatever, whether present or to come . . . This petition was favorably heard by the Balia, on the 26 lh of March 1507/ perhaps through the influence of the Piccolomini, perhaps also through that of Pandolfo Petrucci. It was but one of a series of distinctions extended to him at Sienna, having been preceded by a grant of lands at Montemassi in 1506. 2 During that year and 1507, he had the good fortune to complete the Piccolomini library. The first of ten compartments into which it is divided, represents the departure of iEneas Sylvius for the council of Basle in the suite of Cardinal Capranica, and is engraved in these pages. The next are: — Aeneas received by James the First of Scotland as envoy from the council of Basle. He is crowned a poet-laureate by Fre deric the Third. He appears as ambassador of the Emperor 'before the throne of the pontiff Eugenius the Fourth. He escorts and presents to the Emperor his bride, infanta of Portugal, at the gates of Sienna. He receives the cardinal’s hat from Calixtus the Third in the Vatican. He is carried in processional pomp after his elevation to the pontifical chair under the title of Pius the Second. He presides at Mantua the assembly in which a crusade was pro claimed. He canonizes S. Catherine of Sienna. He gives the signal for the departure of the crusaders from Ancona. In pictorial decorations of great compass some parts are necessarily better than others, whether it be that the draughtsman labours at one time with peculiar elasticity and vigour, at another with a certain languor; or the transposition of the drawing to the wall is alternately confided to a more or less gifted disciple. The master 1 The petition and deliberation are in Doc. Sen. III. 33-4. 2 Verm. ub. sup. 135.