Carlo, a man of violent temper, was condemned to death for murdering his servant, but was pardoned by Cosimo I. on the condition that he married his mistress Eleonora degl’Albizzi, of whom the Grand Duke was tired after she had borne him a son. Niccolò Panciatichi, a member of the Academia della Crusca who won some fame as a writer, inherited the palace from his uncle the Cardinal, and married the rich heiress Caterina Guicciardini. He increased the fine library, collected many valuable pictures, and probably placed the Madonna and Child, of the school of Mino da Fiesole, on the corner of the palace. His grandson Niccolò was a great botanist (a taste inherited by the Marchioness Paulucci, his great-granddaughter) and his garden at the Villa La Loggia, where exotic and rare plants were cultivated with wonderful success, was celebrated. In 1762 he married Vittoria, the last of the great Portuguese family of Ximenes d’Aragona, who brought him a large fortune, besides the Marquisates of Esche in Bavaria, of Saturnia in Southern Italy, a palace in Florence, etc. The Panciatichi then added her name and her arms to their own (see p. 398). PALAZZO PANDOLFINI _Via S. Gallo. No. 74._ This beautiful, but unfinished, palace was begun by a son of Pandolfo Pandolfini, who went to Naples in 1465 as ambassador of the Florentine Republic. He was so popular there, and became such a favourite with the King, that his son Gianozzo, described as a “jocund and liberal man, honoured by all who knew him,” was made Bishop of Troia. When the Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici became Pope he summoned Gianozzo Pandolfini to Rome, and created him Governor of Castel Sant’Angelo. But Florence was the place he loved, and he often came to stay in a house he had hired in the Via S. Gallo from the monks of Monte Senario. After improving the house, and turning part of the orchard into a garden, he wanted to buy it, but the monks refused to sell, alleging that in the orchard stood an oratory, or small church, which had once formed part of a convent of Benedictine nuns. Leo X. came to the aid of his friend the Bishop, and by a Papal Bull, dated 28th May, 1517, followed by a Brieve in Feb. 1520, conceded to him, and approved of the sale to him, of the house, land and church, allowing him to suppress and transfer the latter elsewhere if it so pleased him. The Pope at the same time sent some fine marbles from Rome to be used in the decoration of the house. Thereupon Bishop Pandolfini addressed himself to his “most dear friend Raffaello da Urbino,” who, as Vasari tells us, “made for him a design for the palace he wished to build in Via S. Gallo, and Giovanfrancesco da San Gallo was sent from Rome to begin the work, which he did with all possible diligence.”