The Palazzo Vecchio’s ground floor is a series of thoroughfares in which people are passing continually amid huge pillars and along dark passages; but our way is up the stone steps immediately to the left on leaving the courtyard where Verrocchio’s child eternally smiles, for the steps take us to that vast hall designed by Cronaca for Savonarola’s Great Council, which was called into being for the government of Florence after the luckless Piero de’ Medici had been banished in 1494.  Here much history was made.  As to its structure and its architect, Vasari, who later was called in to restore it, has a deal to say, but it is too technical for us.  It was built by Simone di Pollaiuolo, who was known as Cronaca (the Chronicler) from his vivid way of telling his adventures.  Cronaca (1454-1508), who was a personal friend and devotee of Savonarola, drew up his plan in consultation with Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo (although then so young:  only nineteen or twenty) and others.  Its peculiarity is that it is one of the largest rooms in existence without pillars.  From the foot of the steps to the further wall I make it fifty-eight paces, and thirty wide; and the proportions strike the eye as perfect.  The wall behind the steps is not at right angles with the other—­and this must be as peculiar as the absence of pillars.

Once there were to be paintings here by the greatest of all, for masters no less than Leonardo and Michelangelo were commissioned to decorate it, each with a great historical painting:  a high honour for the youthful Michelangelo.  The loss of these works is one of the tragedies of art.  Leonardo chose for his subject the battle of Anghiari, an incident of 1440 when the Florentines defeated Piccinino and saved their Republic from the Milanese and Visconti.  But both the cartoon and the fresco have gone for ever, and our sense of loss is not diminished by reading in Leonardo’s Thoughts on Painting the directions which he wrote for the use of artists who proposed to paint battles:  one of the most interesting and exciting pieces of writing in the literature of art.  Michelangelo’s work, which never reached the wall of the room, as Leonardo’s had done, was completed as a cartoon in 1504 to 1506 in his studio in the hospital of the dyers in Sant’ Onofrio, which is now the Via Guelfa.  The subject was also military:  an incident in the long and bitter struggle between Florence and Pisa, when Sir John Hawkwood (then in the pay of the Pisans, before he came over finally to the Florentines) attacked a body of Florentines who were bathing in the river.  The scene gave the young artist scope both for his power of delineating a spirited incident and for his drawing of the nude, and those who saw it said of this work that it was finer than anything the painter ever did.  While it was in progress all the young artists came to Sant’ Onofrio to study it, as they and its creator had before flocked to the Carmine, where Masaccio’s frescoes had for three-quarters of a century been object-lessons to students.