thout very great inconvenience and discomfort. Finally, when the Lord
Duke Cosimo came to occupy it in the year 1538, his Excellency began to
bring it into better form; but since those architects who served the
Duke for many years in that work were never able to grasp or to carry
out his conception, he determined to see whether he could effect the
restoration without spoiling the old part, in which there was no little
of the good; giving better order, convenience, and proportion, according
to the plan that he had in mind, to the awkward and inconvenient stairs
and apartments.

[Footnote 23: Chain.]

Sending to Rome, therefore, for Giorgio Vasari, painter and architect of
Arezzo, who was working for Pope Julius III, he commissioned him not
only to put in order the rooms that he had caused to be begun in the
upper part of the side opposite to the Corn Market, which were out of
the straight with regard to the ground-plan, but also to consider
whether the interior of the Palace could not, without spoiling the work
already done, be brought to such a form that it might be possible to go
all over it, from one part to another and from one apartment to another,
by means of staircases both secret and public, with an ascent as easy as
possible. Thereupon, while the said rooms, already begun, were being
adorned with gilded ceilings and scenes painted in oil, and with
pictures in fresco on the walls, and others were being wrought in
stucco, Giorgio took a tracing of the ground-plan right round the whole
of the Palace, both the new part and the old; and then, having arranged
with no small labour and study for the execution of all that he intended
to do, he began to bring it little by little into a good form, and to
unite, almost without spoiling any of the work already done, the
disconnected rooms, which previously varied in height even on the same
floor, some being high and others low. But in order that the Duke might
see the design of the whole, in the space of six months he had made a
well-proportioned wooden model of the whole of that pile, which has the
form and extent rather of a fortress than of a palace. According to this
model, which gained the approval of the Duke, the building was united
and many commodious rooms were made, as well as convenient staircases,
both public and secret, which give access to all the floors; and in this
manner a burden was removed from the halls, which were formerly like
public streets, for it ha