d roofs of the two small aisles, show
that in Tuscany there had survived or in truth arisen some good
craftsman. In short, the architecture of this church is such that
Filippo di Ser Brunellesco did not disdain to avail himself of it as a
model in building the Church of S. Spirito and that of S. Lorenzo in the
same city. The same may be seen in the Church of S. Marco in Venice,
which (to say nothing of S. Giorgio Maggiore, erected by Giovanni
Morosini in the year 978) was begun under the Doge Giustiniano and
Giovanni Particiaco, close by S. Teodosio, when the body of that
Evangelist was sent from Alexandria to Venice; and after many fires,
which greatly damaged the Doge's palace and the church, it was finally
rebuilt on the same foundations in the Greek manner and in that style
wherein it is seen to-day, at very great cost and under the direction of
many architects, in the year of Christ 973, at the time of Doge Domenico
Selvo, who had the columns brought from wheresoever he could find them.
And so it continued to go on up to the year 1140, when the Doge was
Messer Piero Polani, and, as has been said, with the design of many
masters, all Greeks. In the same Greek manner and about the same time
were the seven abbeys that Count Ugo, Marquis of Brandenburg, caused to
be built in Tuscany, as can be seen in the Badia of Florence, in that of
Settimo, and in the others; which buildings, with the remains of those
that are no longer standing, bear testimony that architecture was still
in a measure holding its ground, although greatly corrupted and far
removed from the good manner of the ancients. To this can also bear
witness many old palaces built in Florence after the ruin of Fiesole, in
Tuscan workmanship, but with barbaric ordering in the proportions of
those doors and windows of immense length, in the curves of the pointed
quarter-segments, and in the turning of the arches, after the wont of
the foreign architects of those times.

The year afterwards, 1013, it is clear that the art had regained some of
its vigour from the rebuilding of that most beautiful church, S. Miniato
in Sul Monte, in the time of Messer Alibrando, citizen and Bishop of
Florence; for the reason that, besides the marble ornaments that are
seen therein both within and without, it may be seen from the facade
that the Tuscan architects strove as much as they could in the doors,
the windows, the columns, the arches, and the mouldings, to imitate the
good or