as Baccio wished and demanded every week. A beginning was made with
the quarrying and cutting of the Fossato stone, in order to make the
ornamentation in the form of the base, columns, and cornices; and
Baccio required that all should be done and carried to completion by
the stone-cutters of the Office of Works of S. Maria del Fiore. This
work was certainly executed by those masters with great diligence; and
if Baccio and Giuliano had urged it on, they would have finished and
built in all the ornaments of stone very quickly. But Baccio gave his
attention to nothing save to having the statues blocked out, finishing
few of them entirely, and to drawing his salary, which the Duke gave
him every month, besides paying for his assistants and meeting every
sort of expense that he incurred in the work, and giving him five
hundred crowns for one of the statues finished by him in marble;
wherefore the end of this work was never in sight.

Even so, if Baccio and Giuliano, being engaged on a work of such
importance, had brought the head of that hall into square, as they
could have done, instead of putting right only half of the eight
braccia by which it was awry, and leaving several parts badly
proportioned, such as the central niche and the two large ones at the
sides, which are squat, and the members of the cornices, which are too
slight for so great a body; if, as they might have done, they had gone
higher with the columns, thus giving greater grandeur, a better
manner, and more invention to that work; and if, also, they had
brought the uppermost cornice into touch with the level of the
original old ceiling above, they would have shown more art and
judgment, nor would all that labour have been spent in vain and wasted
so thoughtlessly, as has since been evident to those to whom, as will
be related, it has fallen to put it right and finish it. For, in spite
of all the pains and thought afterwards devoted to it, there are many
defects and errors in the door of entrance and in the relation of the
niches in the side-walls, in which it has since been seen to be
necessary to change the form of many parts, although it has never yet
been found possible, without demolishing the whole, to correct the
divergence from the square or to prevent this from being revealed in
the pavement and the ceiling. It is true that in the manner in which
they arranged it, even as it now stands, there is proof of great
craftsmanship and pains, and it deser