le
to achieve before the tribunal, he began to effect with individuals,
talking now to a Consul, now to a Warden, and likewise to many citizens;
and showing them part of his design, he induced them to determine to
allot this work either to him or to one of the foreigners. Wherefore the
Consuls, the Wardens of Works, and those citizens, regaining courage,
assembled together, and the architects disputed concerning this matter,
but all were overcome and conquered by Filippo with many arguments; and
here, so it is said, there arose the dispute about the egg, in the
following manner. They would have liked Filippo to speak his mind in
detail, and to show his model, as they had shown theirs; but this he
refused to do, proposing instead to those masters, both the foreign and
the native, that whosoever could make an egg stand upright on a flat
piece of marble should build the cupola, since thus each man's intellect
would be discerned. Taking an egg, therefore, all those masters sought
to make it stand upright, but not one could find the way. Whereupon
Filippo, being told to make it stand, took it graciously, and, giving
one end of it a blow on the flat piece of marble, made it stand upright.
The craftsmen protested that they could have done the same; but Filippo
answered, laughing, that they could also have raised the cupola, if they
had seen the model or the design. And so it was resolved that he should
be commissioned to carry out this work, and he was told that he must
give fuller information about it to the Consuls and the Wardens of
Works.

Going to his house, therefore, he wrote down his mind on a sheet of
paper as clearly as he was able, to give to the tribunal, in the
following manner: "Having considered the difficulties of this structure,
Magnificent Lords Wardens, I find that it is in no way possible to raise
the cupola perfectly round, seeing that the surface above, where the
lantern is to go, would be so great that the laying of any weight
thereupon would soon destroy it. Now it appears to me that those
architects who have no regard for the durability of their structures,
have no love of lasting memorials, and do not even know why they are
made. Wherefore I have determined to turn the inner part of this vault
in pointed sections, following the outer sides, and to give to these
the proportion and the curve of the quarter-acute arch, for the reason
that this curve, when turned, ever pushes upwards, so that, when it is