Nicholas, but was not absolutely necessary.  However this may have been, foundations for a new tribune were laid outside the old apse, and the wall rose some feet above the ground before the Pope’s death.  Paul II. carried on the building; but during the pontificates of Sixtus, Innocent, and Alexander it seems to have been neglected.  Meanwhile nothing had been done to injure the original basilica; and when Julius announced his intention of levelling it to the ground, his cardinals and bishops entreated him to refrain from an act so sacrilegious.  The Pope was not a man to take advice or make concessions.  Accordingly, turning a deaf ear to these entreaties, he had plans prepared by Giuliano da San Gallo and Bramante.  Those eventually chosen were furnished by Bramante; and San Gallo, who had hitherto enjoyed the fullest confidence of Julius, is said to have left Rome in disgust.  For reasons which will afterwards appear, he could not have done so before the summer months of 1506.

It is not yet the proper time to discuss the building of S. Peter’s.  Still, with regard to Bramante’s plan, this much may here be said.  It was designed in the form of a Greek cross, surmounted with a huge circular dome and flanked by two towers.  Bramante used to boast that he meant to raise the Pantheon in the air; and the plan, as preserved for us by Serlio, shows that the cupola would have been constructed after that type.  Competent judges, however, declare that insuperable difficulties must have arisen in carrying out this design, while the piers constructed by Bramante were found in effect to be wholly insufficient for their purpose.  For the aesthetic beauty and the commodiousness of his building we have the strongest evidence in a letter written by Michelangelo, who was by no means a partial witness.  “It cannot be denied,” he says, “that Bramante’s talent as an architect was equal to that of any one from the times of the ancients until now.  He laid the first plan of S. Peter’s, not confused, but clear and simple, full of light and detached from surrounding buildings, so that it interfered with no part of the palace.  It was considered a very fine design, and indeed any one can see with his own eyes now that it is so.  All the architects who departed from Bramante’s scheme, as did Antonio da San Gallo, have departed from the truth.”  Though Michelangelo gave this unstinted praise to Bramante’s genius as a builder, he blamed him severely both for his want of honesty as a man, and also for his vandalism in dealing with the venerable church he had to replace.  “Bramante,” says Condivi, “was addicted, as everybody knows, to every kind of pleasure.  He spent enormously, and, though the pension granted him by the Pope was large, he found it insufficient for his needs.  Accordingly he made profit out of the works committed to his charge, erecting the walls of poor material, and without regard for the substantial and enduring qualities which fabrics on so huge a scale demanded.  This is apparent in