The Fourteen repealed all the Duke’s laws, and with that odd childishness that sometimes shows itself in the Florentine character, spent twenty golden florins to have him and his chief advisers painted “in ignominious fashion” on the tower of the palace of the Podestà and elsewhere. The day of S. Anna was decreed a public festival, and on that day the banners of the Guilds are still hung round Or San Michele in remembrance of the deposition of the tyrant of Florence. They also demolished the fortified porch, built by the Duke in front of the great door of the palace, and restored the ringhiera. Signor Gotti, in his exhaustive work on the old palace, thinks that about the same time the two stone lions, which were gilt, said to have been sculptured by Giovanni de’ Nobili, were placed on either side of the entrance. Matteo Villani speaks of four others, which the Priors, in 1353, “having little else to attend to on account of the leisure born of peace, caused to be carved of granite and gilded at great expense, and placed on the four corners of the palace of the People of Florence. This they did for a certain vanity that obtained at that time, instead of having them cast in bronze and then gilt, which would have cost but little more than the granite, would have been beautiful, and have lasted for many centuries; but small things and great are continually being spoilt in our city by the avaricious whims of the citizens.”[106] Three years later the Signoria decided to build a loggia, a necessary adjunct in those days to a palace, on the southern side of the Piazza where the houses and tower of the Mint stood. But the project, according to Matteo Villani, met with considerable opposition among the citizens, who declared that “a loggia was suitable for tyrants, not for the People,” and it remained in abeyance until, owing to incessant rain, the installation of the new Priors on the 1st January, 1374, could not take place on the ringhiera, and the ceremony was performed in the small church of S. Piero Scheraggio. The building was then confided to the _Opera del Duomo_, and the _Operai_ named an overseer--_Capudmagister operis Loggie_. According to Vasari, Andrea Orcagna was ordered to make a design, and the work was given to him. But Dr. Carl Frey, in his critical and learned work on the Loggia de’ Lanzi, writes: “But can the Loggia be attributed to Orcagna? When the building was begun in 1376 Orcagna had already been dead seven or eight years, so that we can only suppose that he may have made the design in 1356, when the idea was first started. Although Orcagna was probably in Florence about that time there are many reasons against this. To begin with, the first building was evidently intended to have been far smaller, as in the documents of 1356 the erection of a loggia on ground belonging to the Commune is mentioned: _in domibus comunis predicti positis prope plateam populi Florentie, que vulgariter appellantur