...within a museum-piece, for the buildings themselves, Giorgio Vasari's finest work, are a faint echo of Michelangelo's incomparable Medici chapel and entrance to the Laurentian library, who himself respects and adopts Brunelleschi's cool, austere, and restrained use of pietra serena -- for me, the aesthetic embodiment of conservatism in its elegance, restraint, and modest self-confidence.