In the year 1466, Bianca’s younger sister, Nannina, married Bernardo Rucellai. His family,[114] which has been supposed to come from Germany, was called Alamanno. They are first met with in the second half of the thirteenth century as members of the woollen guild, having risen to their position by industrial activity, as the name itself intimates; for Rucellai is nothing but a corruption of Oricellari, and at the present day one of the streets of a new part of Florence is called from the Latin name of the turnsole Oricella, or Roccella Tinctoria. The Florentine tradesman discovered in the East that the dye of this plant, treated with acids, gives a beautiful violet. The dyeing-works of Alamanno brought him and his descendants rich gain. His well-earned wealth was speedily followed by civic honours, and after 1302 a share in the highest offices of state. The fourteenth century witnessed the rise and fall of several of the Rucellai, till they attained the highest respect and great wealth at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Giovanni Rucellai, the grandson of a man who had played some part in the times of the Duke of Athens, was born in 1403. His mother, Caterina Pandolfini, a widow after three years of wedlock, brought the boy to Palla Strozzi, who assigned him a post in his bank, and grew so fond of him that he gave him his daughter Jacopa in marriage when he had attained the age of twenty-four. The events which expelled Palla and his sons did not leave his son-in-law unmolested. Though Giovanni Rucellai was not banished, he was excluded from all offices, and remained out of the administration up to the last days of Cosimo, when the latter deemed it advisable to procure adherents in the family he had until then oppressed. This did not, however, prevent him from increasing his wealth and making use of it for the general good, in which he was aided by the genius of Leon Battista Alberti. He completed the marble façade of Sta. Maria Novella, on which his name may still be read. He erected a chapel near the church of San Pancrazio, with an exact imitation in marble of the Saviour’s tomb, as measured and copied by his orders in Jerusalem. This is still to be seen, though the church has long been disused for Divine worship. His family palace, already mentioned, in the Via della Vigna Nuova, with the Loggia opposite, now unfortunately walled up, is the most graceful example of the transition style from the ancient severity of the immense freestone façade to the antiquated ornaments of the Renaissance. He and his son will be mentioned later. The latter was born in 1448, a few months before Lorenzo de’ Medici, whose grandfather, by becoming his sponsor, gave public expression to the reconciliation of the two families. Near relationship, however, could not make him feel attached to the family whose blood flowed in the veins of his children.