the company of David, Isaiah and other [Judeo-Christian] prophets". Virgil's popularity in Medieval art is likely why Michelangelo included the Cumaean Sibyl on the ceiling painting of the Sistine Chapel, for, according to Paul Barolsky, the Sibyl's presence "evokes her song in Virgil [i.e. the Fourth Eclogue], prophesying spiritual renewal through the coming of Christthe very theme of the ceiling." Barolsky also points out that Michelangelo painted the Sibyl in close proximity to the prophet Isaiah; thus, the painter drew a visual comparison between the similar nature of their prophecies. This association between Virgil and Christianity reached a fever pitch in the fourteenth century, when the Divine Comedy was published; the work, by Dante Alighieri, prominently features Virgil as the main character's guide through Hell. Notably, in the second book Purgatorio, Dante and Virgil meet the poet Statius, who, having "read a hidden meaning in lines of Virgil's own" (that is, Eclogue 4.57), was allowed passage into Purgatory, and eventually Heaven. (This legend had developed earlier in the Middle Ages, but Dante's reference popularized it.) Bourne argues that Dante's inclusion of Statius's conversion through Virgil's poem is proof enough that Dante, like those before him, believed Virgil to have been an unknowing Christian prophet. Kallendorf notes that because writing the lines did not save Virgil, but reading them saved Statius, "Dante ... must have located the Christinization of Eclogue 4 in the reader rather than the writer." In the fifteenth century, a popular story concerning Secundian, Marcellian and Verianwho started out as persecutors of Christians during the reign of the Roman emperor Deciusemerged. The story claims that the trio were alarmed by the calm manner in which their Christian victims died, and so they turned to literature and chanced upon Eclogue 4, which eventually caused their conversions and martyrdom. Around this time, the famed astrologer and humanist philosopher Marsilio Ficino seems to have accepted that the poem was a prophecy, too. Later interpretations The French writer René Rapin (1621–1687) was fascinated with the potential connection between Virgil and Christianity, and used the Fourth Eclogue as an artistic influence, basing many of his lines in his own Sixth Eclogue on Virgil's work. One of the more overt modern references to the Fourth Eclogue, Virgil, and Christianity, appears in Alexander Pope's 1712 poem, Messiah. Bourne wrote that the work "shows clearly that [Pope] believed that Virgil's poem was based on a Sibylline