The Sixth Company of the Peruzzi was formed effective July 1, 1335, again under the style Giotto d'Arnoldo de' Peruzzi e compagni. The motivation for establishing what turned out to be the last company, and the reasons for the timing of this event are not immediately evident. There was no hint of a dividend for the foreseeable future; the chairman was not about to die, and there is no evidence that any shareholders had passed away without heirs capable of taking over. Most curious, there is no evidence that the new company was ever capitalized. As we learned in Chapter 4, the preceding company was not formally closed, and final distributions were not made to its shareholders until July 1, 1343, or later. The Sixth Company appears simply to have inherited the account balances from its predecessor without any infusion of fresh capital.

The most likely reason for the formation of the new company is the striking change in the list of its shareholders. Three outsiders (Gherardo Bonaccorsi, Catellino degli Infanghati, and Piero Ubaldini) and one Peruzzi (Rinieri di Pacino) departed without replacement. Earlier, two senior Peruzzi shareholders had died, bequeathing their shares to two heirs each. As a result, the Peruzzi family achieved parity with outsiders at least in the number of shareholders. Also, several other partners, both Peruzzi and outsider, had passed their shares along to heirs. The total effect of all these changes was a radical difference in the makeup of the Sixth Company compared with its predecessor, and even more so with the Fourth Company, which had closed a scant four years earlier.