A few years later the same building witnessed the extraordinary effects of Savonarola's oratory, when such was the terrible picture he drew of the fate of unregenerate sinners that his listeners' hair was said actually to rise with fright.

Savonarola came towards the end of the Renaissance, to give it its death-blow.

By contrast there is a tablet on the right wall of the cathedral in honour of one who did much to bring about the paganism and sophistication against which the impassioned reformer uttered his fiercest denunciations: Marsilio Ficino (1433-1491), the neo-Platonist protege of Cosimo de' Medici, and friend both of Piero de' Medici and Lorenzo.

To explain Marsilio's influence it is necessary to recede a little into history.

In 1439 Cosimo de' Medici succeeded in transferring the scene of the Great Council of the Church to Florence.