Nine years later there followed the great plague, of which Boccaccio has left us so terrible an impression.  In this dreadful calamity, which swept away nearly two-thirds of the population, the Compagnia di Or San Michele grew very wealthy, many citizens leaving it all their possessions.  No doubt very much was distributed in charity, for the Company had become the greatest charitable society in the city, but by 1347, so great was its wealth, that it resolved to build the most splendid shrine in Italy for the Madonna di Or San Michele.  The loggia was not yet finished, and after the desolation of the plague the Commune was probably too embarrassed to think of completing it immediately.  Some trouble certainly seems to have arisen between the Guild of Silk, who had charge of the fabric, and the Company, who were only concerned for their shrine, the latter, in spite of their wealth, refusing in any way to assist in finishing the building.  Whether from this cause or another, a certain suspicion of the Company began to rise in Florence, and Matteo Villani roundly accuses the Capitani della Compagnia of peculation and corruption.  However this may be, by 1355 Andrea Orcagna had been chosen to build the shrine of Madonna, which is still to-day one of the wonders of the city.  It seems to have been in a sort of recognition of the splendour and beauty of Orcagna’s work that the Signoria, between 1355 and 1359, removed the corn-market elsewhere, and thus gave up the whole loggia to the shrine of Madonna.  Thus the loggia became a church, the great popular church of Florence, built by the people for their own use, in what had once been the corn-market of the city.  The architect of this strange and secular building, more like a palace than a church, is unknown.  Vasari, as I have said, speaks of Taddeo Gaddi; others again have thought it the work of Orcagna himself; while Francesco Talenti and his son Simone are said to have worked on it.  The question is to a large extent a matter of indifference.  What is important here is the fact that it is to the greater Guilds and to the Parte Guelfa that we owe the church itself—­that is to say, to the merchants and trades of the city—­while the beautiful shrine within is due to a secular Company consisting of some of the greatest citizens, and to a large extent opposed to the regular Orders of St. Dominic and St. Francis.  It is, then, as the great church of the popolo that we have to consider Or San Michele.  Here, because their greatest and most splendid deed, the expulsion of the Duke of Athens, had been achieved on St. Anne’s Day, July 26, 1343, they built a chapel to St. Anne, and around the church on every anniversary, above the fourteen niches which hold the statues presented by the seven greater arts, by six of the fourteen lesser arts, and by the Magistrato della Mercanzia, that magistracy which governed all the guilds,[95] their banners are set up even to this day.