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The angle in the walls made by the public fountain and the fact that it was a natural place for loiterers probably suggested the
choice of the spot. The assassin's identity was either never discovered or never revealed and the crime went unpunished, for Cellini
was not the only lucky rascal. Artists especially carried their lives in their hands, and genius was as open to violence as it was
to fame.
Historians and moralists accord scant justice and no mercy to Julius III. He is represented by them as spending his life in
senseless and indolent pleasures. Yet he had begun his pontificate with some show of earnestness. He had reopened the Council of
Trent, and had attempted to play a part in the diplomacy of Europe. That after two years he wearied of these arduous labors might
have been because he had sufficient wit to perceive that, for his time at least, the Papal See would have to be a tool in the hands
of Austria. His devotion to the creation of his villa was perhaps the only outlet for the activities of a nature too slight to cope
with the stem and sinister century on which his lot had fallen. Long days spent with Vignola, Amannati, and Vasari, and above all,
with the aged but undaunted Michelangelo himself, for whom this Pope felt a loving veneration, must have had a zest and stimulating
quality sufficient to make the Pope's life in this villa something more than the sybaritic enjoyment of mere sensuous beauty.
Beyond a doubt, the construction of his villa became an obsession with the Pope. He gradually abandoned all other avocations and
duties. It was at the villa that he held his audiences, received ambassadors, and gave his suppers, at which last his wit was said to
be of less fine quality than were his vintages. He even had a medal struck, with his own head on one side and on the other the front
elevation of the Villa Giulia, with the inscription, "Fons Virginibus."
One fatal day a pet monkey savagely attacked the Pope. He was rescued by a lad of sixteen whom he soon after made a cardinal.
The scandal was very great. Prelates and laymen alike felt this to be going too far. The Pope might lay himself open to censure but
not to ridicule. Here in the midst of the beauty created by Pope Julius, men's eyes began to turn toward the slightly grim, ascetic
figure of Cardinal della Croce, great Roman patrician and true saint, who, as if to give the final note to this life of vivid
contrast, moved about in the gay papal court, reserved, austere, devoted to a life of such sanctity that the Pope himself felt
uncomfortable in his presence.
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