though Pope Leo X. made preparations for the immediate execution of the works. The finest building of Lorenzo’s time in Florence was erected, not for him but for a family which, although connected with his, was destined to maintain a long struggle with it—namely, the Strozzi. Considering how intimate Lorenzo was with the brothers Da Majano, it seems strange that he employed them so little. There is no authentic record of Giuliano having been employed in Florence except as a worker in wood. He was engaged on the choir-stalls in Sta. Maria del Fiore in 1471 and the following years, and in the audience-chamber of the palace of the Signoria (finished ten years later), where his younger brother Benedetto executed the marble doors, and where he was associated with Francesco di Giovanni, called Francione, master of Baccio Pontelli, who did a great deal of work at Rome and Urbino.[167] Giuliano’s works in Rome, where, according to Vasari, he built—under Paul III.—the palace of San Marco and a galleried court, now no longer in existence, are buried in impenetrable obscurity. It is certain that he was there in the time of Sixtus IV., and also that he began the stalls in the choir of Perugia Cathedral, which were finished in 1491 by Domenico del Tasso, one of the Florentine family of wood-workers and architects.[168] It is needless to repeat how the calling and labours of architect and wood-worker (_magistri lignaminum_, _legnaiuoli_) merged one into the other, even in the next century, like those of sculptor and goldsmith. In his latter years Giuliano was more abroad than at home. In 1478 he was at Recanati, in the States of the Church, building a palace for Antonio Giacomo Venier, Cardinal of Cuença, who appealed to Lorenzo that he might urge the dilatory artist to go on with his work:[169] ‘As the said Master Giuliano is a most devoted servant of your Magnificence and eulogist of your excellent qualities, and apparently cannot be moved unless stirred up by you, we beg you to address him on the subject, and to see that he goes to Recanati at the appointed time to finish what he has begun.’ In the spring of 1481 Giuliano was passing through Urbino, where the palace of Federigo of Montefeltro made such an impression on him that he induced Lorenzo to ask the duke for a drawing of it. This the duke had executed by Baccio Pontelli, who continued the beautiful work of Luciano Lauranna. ‘My lord the duke,’ wrote Pontelli to Lorenzo,[170] ‘answered very graciously that I was to make the drawing, but that he would prefer sending your Magnificence the house itself, that you might rule in it as in your own.’ It was doubtless Lorenzo’s doing that Giuliano was summoned to Naples. This must, therefore, have happened after the reconciliation in 1480. Notwithstanding the many commissions he received there—for King Ferrante and his eldest son were both much given to building, and after the expulsion of the Turks from Otranto