Not satisfied with building a palace, Giovanni also occupied himself with churches, for Vasari writes: “Wishing to ornament the façade of Sta. Maria Novella in marble at his own expense, Giovanni di Paolo Rucellai consulted with Leon Battista, his intimate friend, and having obtained, not only advice, but a design from him, resolved to do the work in order to leave a memorial of himself, and it was finished, to the great satisfaction of all, in 1477.” The Rucellai were always great patrons of the church of Sta. Maria Novella. Albizzo di Naddo di Giunta left in 1334 one hundred and sixty florins to build a tomb for himself outside the chapel of All Saints and to pay for the painting of the chapel itself. It was restored a hundred years later by Andrea Rucellai, whose name can still be traced on the marble stoop at the door. Another of the family, Gugliemo, gave the marble pulpit designed by Brunelleschi, and beneath it he made a vault, in which he was buried in 1477. He was so rich that he owned a large fleet of ships and was deputed by the Republic to receive Galeazzo Sforza, Duke of Milan, when he came to Florence. The indolence his brother Piero, Gonfalonier of Justice in 1455, became proverbial. No letter was ever read or answered by him, and Lorenzo the Magnificent, when he did not wish to reply to any document used to say, “I shall do as did Piero di Cardinale.” Giuliano Bugiardini painted the martyrdom of S. Catherine for the altar of the chapel of the same name in Sta. Maria Novella for Palla Rucellai. “He kept it twelve years,” writes Vasari, “and in all that time never could finish it, as he lacked the invention and the knowledge for representing the various incidents that occurred in that martyrdom; and as he was always changing, trying how to arrange the wheels and how to represent the lightning, and the fire that burned them, he undid one day what he had done the day before.... Palla, who often asked him to finish the picture, at length bethought him to take Michelangelo to see it, and Bugiardini told him with how much labour he had painted the lightning, which falling from heaven had shattered the wheels and killed those who turned them; and the sun, which shining from a cloud liberates S. Catherine from death. He then begged Michelangelo, who could not control his laughter on hearing the woes of poor Bugiardini, to tell him how _he_ would arrange eight or ten principal figures in the foreground of the picture; a row of soldiers on guard who, in the act of escaping, fall down wounded and killed; because he did not know how to fore-shorten them in such way as to get them all into so restricted a space. So Buonarroti, out of complaisance, and having compassion on the poor man, took a piece of charcoal and sketched a row of marvellous naked figures, fore-shortened in various attitudes, some falling back and others forward, both dead and wounded, drawn with the knowledge and the excellence which pertains to Michelangelo.”