Florence

by Christopher Hibbert

  Although he had promised ‘to do what was just’, this was more in line with what the Emperor wished to be told. He declined to accept the exiles' charges and authorized the resumption of preparations for the marriage of his fourteen-year-old natural daughter, Margaret, to the exonerated Duke Alessandro de' Medici. The Duke, however, had not long to live.

  The boon companion of his dissipations and frolics in the recent past had been a distant cousin, three years younger than himself, Lorenzino de' Medici. Lorenzino was a strange young man, thin, remote and unpredictable. He had left Rome with a reputation for wild behaviour when drunk, and in Florence he had soon become a familiar and detested figure as he galloped through the streets with Alessandro, often on the same horse, sometimes wearing women's clothes, shouting insults at the passers-by. It was said that the two men occasionally shared a bed; it was certain that they went whoring together and that Lorenzino acted as his cousin's pimp. It was also clear that Lorenzino resented Alessandro's power and rank, and that he longed to achieve fame or, failing that, notoriety himself. He decided to do so by tyrannicide.

  Since Alessandro was usually surrounded by guards, the assassination would have to be carefully planned, the victim unprepared, alone and unarmed. Lorenzino arranged this in his familiar role as pimp, offering to bring to his house a Florentine lady of exceptional beauty and virtue who was unaccountably fond of an aged and uninteresting husband. The conquest of such a woman would be a triumph of seduction. Alessandro was accordingly induced to wait in Lorenzino's house for the arrival of this paragon while his guards were left outside. He took off his breastplate, undressed, lay on a bed and was almost asleep when Lorenzino and a hired assassin burst into the room and plunged their daggers into his stomach and neck. Spattered with blood, Lorenzino then galloped away to Venice by way of Bologna, his hand, from which Alessandro had almost bitten off a finger in the attack, encased in a glove.

  It was not until the next morning that Alessandro's guard asked how much longer they were expected to wait outside Lorenzino's house, not until that evening that Alessandro's body was found, and not until the following day that the murder became known to the opponents of the regime. By then the palleschi, supporters of the Medici, led by Cardinal Cibò and Francesco Guicciardini, were in full control of the city. Alessandro Vitelli, the captain of the Duke's bodyguard, who had been away from the city with several of his men when the murder was committed, had now returned to Florence; and Machiavelli's distinguished friend Francesco Vettori, who might have inspired a successful anti-Medicean revolt had he known of the intended assassination, now accepted that the time for such an uprising had passed. When approached by a party of would-be revolutionaries, he contented himself with expressions of vague support and then left for Guicciardini's house to throw in his lot with the palleschi.

  A meeting of the palleschi was held next morning in the Palazzo della Signoria, now more generally known as the Palazzo Vecchio. Cardinal Cibò proposed that Alessandro's illegitimate four-year-old son, Giulio, should be created Duke with the cardinal himself as regent. This answer to the succession naturally did not recommend itself to others of the palleschi present. Guicciardini had another candidate to suggest. This was Cosimo de' Medici, a direct descendant of Giovanni di Bicci. His mother was Maria Salviati, Lorenzo il Magnifico's granddaughter and it was in the Palazzo Salviati in Via del Corso that Cosimo had been born.7 His father was Giovanni di Giovanni de' Medici, known as Giovanni delle Bande Nere, a courageous warrior who had been mortally wounded while attempting to halt the march of Georg von Frundsberg's Landsknechte on Rome. His great-uncle, Pope Leo X, had stood as his godfather and it was at his suggestion that he had been christened Cosimo, ‘to revive the memory of the wisest, the bravest and most prudent man yet born to the House of Medici’.

  Cosimo was at that time a politically inexperienced seventeen-year-old youth and Guicciardini had selfish reasons for adopting him as his candidate, since he hoped to marry him to one of his daughters and thus rule Florence in his name. But Cosimo had personal qualities that recommended him to leading palleschi other than Guicciardini. He was tall, good-looking and athletic, and although patchily educated during a boyhood of constant travelling, knowledgeable and acute.

  Even so there were several palleschi who opposed his selection. One of these, Palla Rucellai, declared that he ‘wanted neither dukes nor lords nor princes in this republic' and, picking up a white bean to throw into the urn on the table, added, ‘Here is my vote and here is my head!’

  So the argument continued; Guicciardini, who had already taken it upon himself to summon his protégé to Florence from his villa Il Trebbio in the Mugello, angrily protested that he would never again tolerate ‘a mob of ciompi’ getting the upper hand in Florence, while others maintained that a ruler of more experience than the youthful Cosimo ought to be found. Eventually the inconclusive discussions were brought to a sudden end by the intervention of Alessandro Vitelli, captain of the guard, who had been won over to Guicciardin's side by the promise that he would be made lord of Borgo San Sepolcro, once Cosimo had been installed as Duke. Instigating a noisy scuffle beneath the windows of the room where the meeting was taking place, Vitelli induced his soldiers to shout, ‘Cosimo! Cosimo! Cosimo! Cosimo, the son of the great Giovanni, for Duke of Florence!’ Vitelli himself called out, ‘Hurry up! Hurry up! The soldiers can't be controlled any longer.’

  The discussion was over; and Cosimo de' Medici entered upon his family's great inheritance.

  16

  THE GRAND DUKE COSIMO I 1537–74

  ‘It was said of him in Florence that he doffs and dons the Duke whenever he pleases.’

  THE VENETIAN ENVOY

  ‘They have mounted a man on a splendid horse – then told him he must not ride beyond certain boundaries,’ commented Benvenuto Cellini, that most versatile, most quarrelsome and boastful of Florentines, who, having fulfilled several commissions for Pope Clement VII and others for Alessandro de' Medici, was now living in Rome. ‘Just tell me who is going to restrain him when he wants to ride beyond them? You can't impose laws on a man who is your master.’ At first, though, Cosimo de' Medici was far from being master. While recognized as Alessandro's heir, he was not yet given the title of duke and was required to act in association with what were referred to as certain ‘magnificent counsellors’. Moreover, the military commander, Alessandro Vitelli, had occupied the Fortezza da Basso, taking there with him both Cardinal Cibò and his little charge, Alessandro de' Medici's illegitimate son, Giulio, together with Alessandro's widow and most of the treasures which Vitelli's soldiers had looted from the Medici Palace.

  Cosimo's ‘magnificent counsellors’, Francesco Guicciardini and Francesco Vettori and the other leading palleschi, soon discovered how masterful Duke Cosimo could be, how vain were their hopes of ruling Florence in his name, how unlikely it was that he would, as Benedetto Varchi put it, ‘devote himself to enjoyment and employ himself in hunting, fowling and fishing (sports wherein he greatly delighted) whilst Guicciardini and a few others would govern and, as the saying goes, suck the state dry’.

  Secretive and cold in manner, brusque to the point of asperity, often so ungracious as to appear gratuitously insulting, the young Duke trusted no one. He permitted the various councils of the state to remain in existence but, convinced that ‘no two Florentines ever contrive to agree about anything’, he allowed them little real authority. He listened quietly to the advice his mother and his gifted secretary, Francesco Campana, gave him, but he made up his own mind and kept his feelings hidden even from them. Francesco Vettori eventually faded into the background; Guicciardini retired to his villa to revise his monumental Storia d'Italia; Vitelli was dismissed and went off sulkily to Rome; while Cardinal Cibò, having spread rumours in Florence that Cosimo had employed a poisoner to murder the little boy Giulio, was also sent packing from the city.

  Cosimo dispatched his other enemies with a ruthlessness which apparently left him quite unmoved. In July 1
537 at Montemurlo, near Prato, he routed an army raised by fuorusciti, exiles from Florence plotting his overthrow, then had sixteen leaders of the captured rebels, several of them young men from Florence's leading families, paraded before him. They were beheaded one after the other in the Piazza della Signoria on four consecutive days. Other defeated rebels died in prison; yet others were tracked down and murdered in foreign cities. Lorenzino de' Medici, Alessandro's murderer, who had published his Apologia, a justification of tyrannicide, was stabbed to death with a poisoned dagger on a bridge in Venice.

  In Florence, opposition to Cosimo's regime was savagely punished. Troublemakers were removed from the city to the fearful dungeons of Volterra or quickly assassinated. Even the Dominicans, accused of making ‘public professions of dissent’, were expelled from San Marco on political grounds.

  To their sad objections, the Duke protested, ‘Tell me, fathers, who built this monastery? Was it you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who put you in this monastery then?’

  ‘Our ancient Florentines, and Cosimo the Elder of blessed memory.’

  ‘Right. Well, it's the modern Florentines and Cosimo the Duke who are kicking you out.’

  Celebrations were held in Florence after Cosimo's victory over the fuorusciti at Montemurlo – loaves of bread were thrown to the crowds from the windows of the Palazzo Medici and wine poured out from fountains. There were similar festivities when, after a lengthy and enormously expensive war, the loss of many lives and the devastation of its contado, the Duke was at last acknowledged as master of Siena. The bells were rung once again, cannon roared and bonfires were lit when in 1569 Cosimo became Grand Duke of Tuscany. Yet, as an observer noticed, there was ‘little real joy to be discerned in the faces of the people’.

  In the early months of the Duke's reign he had enjoyed the support of large numbers of the lower classes, who had hoped for more prosperous days under a new regime. He had been supported, too, by the members of a reconstituted militia and by several of Florence's most patrician families; but, as the years passed, much of this support withered away. He was certainly not a man to cultivate it. Increasingly withdrawn as he grew older, and often sunk in impenetrable gloom, he was rarely seen to smile or to take any evident pleasure in life except when hunting. On occasion he seemed to welcome overtures of friendliness, even familiarity; but then, as a Venetian envoy noticed, he would suddenly turn away with ‘his accustomed severity, so much so that it was said of him in Florence that he doffs and dons the Duke whenever he pleases’. Only with his wife, and with his daughters when they were young, did he seem to be at ease. Indeed he appeared to be devoted to his wife, Eleonora di Toledo, the extremely rich daughter of the Spanish viceroy at Naples, though she was as demanding as he was himself, capricious, arrogant and extravagant.

  He lived in constant fear of assassination, marching about the city surrounded by his Swiss bodyguard, with a sword and dagger hanging from his belt, wearing a coat of mail under his jerkin and ‘with numerous small stiletti, with very sharp points, almost as fine as needles, stuck into the lining of his scabbard’. His precautions were justified: several attempts were made upon his life, despite the punishments inflicted upon the would-be assassins, one of whom was tortured with red-hot pincers, dragged round the streets by his ankles, disembowelled and then hurled into the Arno.

  Yet towards the end of Duke Cosimo's life it was grudgingly conceded that he had earned a high reputation in Italy, that he had won the people's respect, if not their love, that he had not ignored the interests of the lower classes, and that his rule, tyrannical though it was, had not been altogether unjust and had certainly been efficient. It was also acknowledged that Florence's finances were sound and her government stable, and that – although taxes were heavy and ducal monopolies were used unscrupulously in private trading – farming and irrigation in Tuscany had been much improved, canals had been built, silver mines and olive plantations promoted. The state, under the Duke's careful and industrious guidance, had acquired a creditable fleet, whose galleys had not only protected the shores of Tuscany from Turkish marauders and Barbary pirates but had also played a prominent part in sweeping the Turkish navy from the eastern Mediterranean in the battle of Lepanto in 1571.

  Expecting nothing from the ‘despicable’ Archbishop of Florence, Andrea Buondelmonti – who had paid himself back for the price of his office by selling pardons for breaches of the Lenten fast and was generally regarded as absurd as well as corrupt after preaching a sermon in which he heatedly complained that a pair of his stockings had been stolen – Cosimo set himself the task of trying to make the Church as efficient as the state and cleansing it of such offensive accretions as the canons of San Lorenzo, dirty and lazy, who had allowed Michelangelo's statues to be discoloured by smoke from the fires of charcoal burners.

  Duke Cosimo was also given credit in Florence for having encouraged and patronized the traditional popular entertainments of the citizens – their feasts and pageants, their horse-races and their games of football – and for having added to their number by inaugurating chariot races in the Piazza Santa Maria Novella where obelisks still mark the turning-points of their course.1

  The Duke was, moreover, known to take a far more than passing interest in music and science, in archaeology and agriculture, in horticulture and botany. He was largely responsible for the improvement and enlargement of Florence's herb gardens and for the introduction into Tuscany of medicinal plants from America and of farm crops from the Orient. He was an active member of the fraternity of San Martino – an organization pledged to give help to the deserving poor – as well as a generous benefactor of the Confraternity of the Misericordia,2 of the Studio Fiorentino and of Pisa University. He was also a connoisseur and collector of medals and artefacts of Etruscan workmanship. He regularly visited the workshops of Florence's painters and sculptors to see their work in progress and to assure them of his interest in it. He also called upon writers and scholars to assure them of his support and to encourage them to advise their friends to come to work in Florence, as the aged historian Paolo Giovio did, after much persuasion by Cosimo himself.

  While never a friend of artists in the manner of Cosimo il Vecchio, he was undoubtedly an open-handed and discerning patron. He tried to get the Venetian painter, Titian, to come to work in Florence and Michelangelo to return there; he commissioned work from Niccolò Pericoli, Il Tribolo, from the grumpy, grasping Baccio Bandinelli,3 and from the lonely and withdrawn Jacopo Pontormo, one of the earliest of Florentine Mannerists, who may have been apprenticed to Leonardo da Vinci and who had certainly been employed in the workshop of Andrea del Sarto. He commissioned both portraits and allegorical pictures from the ‘sweet, courteous’ Agnolo Tori di Cosimo di Mariano, known as Il Bronzino, whose portrait of the Duke's wife, Eleonora, with their son, Giovanni, is one of the finest examples of Mannerist portraiture and whose portrait of the wary-looking, mournful Duke himself hangs in the Uffizi.

  The Duke also encouraged Benvenuto Cellini, who returned to Florence in 1545, and commissioned from him Cellini's two best-known sculptures, the bronze Perseus in the Loggia dei Lanzi and the huge bust of Cosimo in the Bargello.4 The Duke also commissioned work from Giambologna, the Mannerist sculptor who settled in Florence in 1557 and remained there for the rest of his life, executing numerous works for the Medici family, including the fine equestrian bronze of Duke Cosimo in the Piazza della Signoria, several delightful pieces of garden sculpture, and the colossal Appennino for the Medici villa at Pratolino.5 Giambologna was responsible,

  Caption

  Eleonora of Toledo (1522–62), wife of the Grand Duke Cosimo I, and their son, Giovanni; a portrait by Bronzino in the Uffizi.

  A bronze relief by Giambologna believed to have been presented by Prince Francesco de' Medici to his prospective brother-in-law, the Emperor Maximilian II, in 1565. The iconography is complex and obscure, but it is supposed that it refers to the plans for the marriage of Prince Francesco in
to the imperial household.

  too, for some of the bronzes in the Neptune Fountain which was commissioned for the Piazza della Signoria from Bartolommeo Ammannati, yet another sculptor drawn to Florence by the work to be had there in Duke Cosimo's time.6

  Architect as well as sculptor, Ammannati was asked by Duke Cosimo to rebuild the Ponte Santa Trinita after the devastating floods of 1557 as well as the Ponte alla Carraia, and, having reconstructed the Palazzo Giugni7 on the corner of Via dei Cerchi,8 to enlarge the already immense Pitti Palace for the ducal family.

  The Duke and Duchess lived at first in the Medici Palace, which they then made over to their daughter, Isabella, whose husband, the violent and vindictive Paolo Giordano Orsini, having fallen in love with someone else, later strangled her with a rope which accomplices let down to him through a hole in the ceiling as he made a pretence of kissing her passionately. After leaving the Palazzo Medici her parents lived for a time in the Palazzo della Signoria, which they transformed into a ducal palace with apartments for the Duchess on the upper floors, for the Duke on the lower, and for the by then irritatingly fussy and untidy Duke's mother, Maria, on the floor between.9 The Duchess was not happy, however, in the Palazzo della Signoria, where, in place of a garden, she had to be content with a small enclosed terrace for her flowers and rare plants. In 1549, therefore, she bought the Pitti Palace and moved into it some years later, though builders were still at work in the courtyard and on the new windows on the ground floor of the façade, while the extensive gardens behind the palace resembled a building site.