hat the order of the architecture was ruined; besides many other
errors, of which there is no need to speak. For the above-named Messer
Pier Francesco the same Tasso executed the door of the Church of S.
Romolo, and a window with knee-shaped brackets on the Piazza del Duca,
in an order of his own, substituting capitals for bases, and doing so
many other things without measure or order, that it might have been
said that the German Order had begun to return to life in Tuscany by
means of this man; to say nothing of the works that he did in the
Palace in the way of staircases and apartments, which the Duke has
been obliged to have destroyed, because they had no sort of order,
measure, or proportion, and were, on the contrary, all shapeless, out
of square, and without the least convenience or grace. All these
things were not done without some responsibility falling on Tribolo,
who, having considerable knowledge in such matters, should not, so it
seemed, have allowed his Prince to throw away his money and to do him
such an affront to his face; and, what was even more serious, he
should not have permitted such things to Tasso, who was his friend.
Well did men of judgment recognize the presumption and madness of the
one in seeking to exercise an art of which he knew nothing, and the
dissimulation of the other, who declared that he was pleased with that
which he certainly knew to be bad; and of this a proof may be found in
the works that Giorgio Vasari has had to pull down in the Palace, to
the loss of the Duke and the great shame of those men.

But the same thing happened to Tribolo as to Tasso, in that, even as
Tasso abandoned wood-carving, a craft in which he had no equal, but
never became a good architect, and thus won little honour by deserting
an art in which he was very able, and applying himself to another of
which he knew not one scrap, so Tribolo, abandoning sculpture, in
which it may be said with truth that he was most excellent and caused
everyone to marvel, and setting himself to attempt to straighten out
rivers, ceased to win honour by pursuing the one, while the other
brought him blame and loss rather than honour and profit. For he did
not succeed in his tinkering with rivers, and he made many enemies,
particularly in the district of Prato, on account of the Bisenzio, and
in many places in the Val di Nievole.

Duke Cosimo having then bought the Palace of the Pitti, of which there
has been an account in another p