Paul III wished to reconstruct and complete the fortifications of Rome which had been destroyed in 1527. San Gallo had been engaged on them since 1534, but the work had only been actively pushed since 1542. In February, 1545, meetings were held under the presidency of Pier Luigi Farnese in the Castle of St. Angelo to discuss the subject of the fortifications of the Borgo, and to these Michelangelo was summoned. He expressed opinions absolutely opposed to those of San Gallo and enumerated the faults already committed in the works. Hot words were exchanged, and the pope was obliged to command both men to be silent. Soon after this affair Michelangelo made a new design for the fortifications involving the destruction of San Gallo's work, and this was accepted.[87] Michelangelo added to this defeat another more bitter still. San Gallo had built the Farnese palace up to the second story, but his plans for the third story and the cornice did not please the pope, who turned them over to Michelangelo to be mercilessly criticised. A competition was opened in 1546 for the cornice in which Perino del Vaga, Sebastiano del Piombo, Vasari and Michelangelo took part. Michelangelo's design was accepted, and when San Gallo died from this humiliation in October, 1546, the direction of the work on the palace passed at once into his hands. Michelangelo set aside the original plan entirely and built the third story on the court on the Corinthian order. He also built the beautiful cornice, so broad and fine in conception, in which he had possibly the assistance of Vignole or Guglielmo della Porta. Even San Gallo's death did not disarm Michelangelo, who searched relentlessly for the malpractices committed under his predecessor in the work on St. Peter's and who raged against the guilty with a violence which Vasari still echoes when he says, "Michelangelo delivered St. Peter's from thieves and bandits." It is easy to imagine what hatred these proceedings awakened in San Gallo's party, supported by all the contractors and foremen whose faults Michelangelo had denounced and prosecuted. The members of the committee of administration themselves were accomplices.[88] A coalition was formed against him which had for its chief Nanni di Baccio Bigio, the rascally architect whom Vasari accuses of having stolen Michelangelo's plans even before this trouble. From the very beginning of Michelangelo's direction at St. Peter's Nanni spread the rumour that he knew nothing of architecture, that his model was childish, that he squandered the money and hid himself to work at night for fear that his blunders would be seen. It was also rumoured that the cornice of the Farnese palace was in danger of falling. Michelangelo was exasperated. "Who are these rogues, these triple scoundrels," he wrote to the committee of administration, "who, after they had spread lies about my work on the Farnese palace, lied still more in the report that they sent to the committee of St. Peter's?"