Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 3.djvu/470

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lives of the artists.

presence of the Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici; but ultimately, neither one nor the other of the two plans was put in execution.

The design of Baccio was censured on many points, not that it was a badly proportioned work in itself, but that it was of too unimportant a character when the magnificence of the building to which it was about to he attached was considered, and for this cause the gallery proposed for the cupola has never received its completion. Baccio afterwards gave his attention to the pavements of Santa Maria del Fiore and to the other buildings which he had in hand, and which were not a few, seeing that to him had been committed the particular charge of all the principal monasteries and convents in Florence, as well as that of numerous houses belonging to the citizens, both within the city and without. Finally, and when near his eighty-third year, but still retaining the firmness and clearness of his faculties, Baccio d’ Agnolo departed to a better life in the year 1543, leaving three sons, Giuliano, Filippo, and Domenico, who caused him to be buried in San Lorenzo.

Now of these, the three sons of Baccio, all of whom devoted their attention after his death to carving and woodwork, Giuliano, the second, was the one who gave most of his time to architecture both during the life and after the death of his father; wherefore, by the favour of the Duke Cosimo, he succeeded the latter in the works of Santa Maria del Fiore, and continued all that his father had commenced, not in that fabric only, but in respect to all the buildings which the death of Baccio had left unfinished.

At that time, Messer Baldassare Turini of Pescia, was about to place a picture by the hand of Raffaello da Urbino in the principal church of his native city, of which he was Provost, and determined to erect an ornament of stone-work, or rather indeed, an entire chapel around it, and to construct a tomb therein; Giuliano therefore conducted the whole work after his own designs and models: he restored the house of Messer Baldassare at Pescia likewise, and furnished it with many useful and handsome arrangements. For Messer Francesco Campana also, who was formerly first secretary to the Duke Alessandro, and afterwards to the Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, the same architect built a small house at Montughi,