Florence

by Christopher Hibbert

  The older he grew the more fanatically religious he became, astonishing Edward Wright by going to ‘five or six churches every day’. ‘I was told he had a machine in his own apartment, whereon were fix'd little images in silver, of every saint in the calendar,’ Wright wrote. ‘The machine was made to turn so as to present in front the saint of the day, before which the Duke continually performed his office… His zeal was great for gaining proselytes to the Roman Church.’

  When Cosimo died, at the age of eighty-one in 1723, his elder son Ferdinando had already been dead for ten years, not greatly mourned by his father. He had been a good-looking young man, intelligent and amusing, resembling his high-spirited mother rather than the lugubrious Grand Duke. A gifted musician himself, he was a generous patron of composers and performers as well as a master impresario, producing operas by Alessandro Scarlatti at Pratolino and corresponding with Jacopo Peri, Bartolomeo Cristofori, Bernardo Pasquini and George Frideric Handel, all of whom he invited to Florence. He assembled a large collection of musical instruments, bought pictures by Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, purchased Parmigiano's unfinished Madonna dal Collo Lungo, employed both Sebastiano Ricci and Giuseppe Maria Crespi at the Pitti Palace, and in 1701, in the cloisters of Santissima Annunziata, organized the first formal exhibition of paintings to be held in Florence.

  Yet Ferdinando was a grave disappointment to his father. For one thing he was far too attached to his uncle, Francesco Maria, a wildly extravagant man with an infinite capacity for self-indulgence who filled his villa of Lapeggi with young men who waited upon him at table dressed as girls. For another thing, Ferdinando was overfond of young men himself, particularly of a Venetian castrato who exercised great influence over him. Grumbling about these unsuitable attachments, the Grand Duke eventually prevailed upon his son to agree to marry Princess Violante Beatrice of Bavaria, a sixteen-year-old girl, plain and shy, who, of course, interested Ferdinando not in the least, though she fell deeply in love with him. The day they were married was so cold that two soldiers on guard at the Porta San Gallo froze to death; and on her return to the Pitti Palace after her wedding in the cathedral the Princess buried her face in her muff, almost in tears, complaining that she had never been so cold in all her life. Not long afterwards her husband left for Venice where he contracted syphilis from a lady of noble family. He returned to Florence with a young mistress, already a dying man, soon lapsing into epilepsy and dementia, nursed by his devoted wife, his memory gone.

  His brother, Gian Gastone, now the Grand Duke's heir, was an introspective, unhappy man who passed a lonely existence away from the court, devoting himself to archaeological and botanical studies and to learning foreign languages. At the behest of his father he married the daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Lauenburg, a stupid and argumentative woman of remarkable ugliness who spent most of her time ‘holding conversations in the stables' and who refused to leave her dank and gloomy castle near Prague for Florence, where, her confessor told her, she would be sure to be murdered as all the wives of the Medici were, sooner or later.

  Having spent most of his time in Bohemia drinking and gambling with his Italian attendants, in gazing mournfully out of his window across a slough of hovels and sedge beds, or in the arms of a pretty, crafty groom, Gian Gastone left his wife in her grim valley and, taking the groom with him, returned to Florence, where he succeeded his father as Grand Duke at the age of fifty-two. For a time it seemed that he might prove to be a competent ruler. Taxation was reduced; the government was freed from the stranglehold of the Church; scientists and scholars were released from the restrictions formerly imposed upon them; anti-Semitic legislation was rescinded; public executions were discontinued. But it was not long before Gian Gastone lost interest in the affairs of Florence and disappeared from public view into a private life of alcoholism and slovenly lubricity.

  Caption

  Prince Ferdinando (1663 – 1713) and his sister, Princess Anna Maria Luisa (1667 – 1743), with their governess. A portrait by Justus Sustermans in the Museo Stibbert.

  Frequently and incapably drunk, swearing and belching his way through meals which he usually ate in bed, he surrounded himself with hordes of handsome youths – known as ruspanti after the coins which were paid for their services – who romped and rioted about the Pitti Palace and, when required, coupled in his presence. Rarely was the Grand Duke seen outside the palace walls and, when he was, he was usually as drunk as he was on St John the Baptist's Day 1729, a festival he celebrated by being drawn through the streets in a carriage, poking his head through the window from time to time to be sick, clambering out at the Porta al Prato to watch the horse-races, and shouting obscenities at his pages and the ladies around him before being conveyed back to the palace fast asleep in a litter.

  Gian Gastone's dissolute behaviour, which contrasted so strongly with the propriety of his father, seems to have infected Florentine society in general. A slight though momentarily alarming earthquake in the summer of 1729 was interpreted as a warning from on high. Thirty foreign women whose morals were notorious were banished from the city; but a contemporary diarist considered that Florentine women were just as much at fault. So, according to a German who visited the city soon afterwards, were many Florentine men: ‘They are, even to a proverb, addicted to that atrocious and unnatural vice which brought down divine vengeance on Sodom and Gomorrah. Thus it is not at all strange that, with such lascivious inclinations, the Florentines should not have the best eyes: immoderate and frequent sexual acts being very pernicious to the sight.’

  Without troubling to consult the Grand Duke or the Florentine people, representatives of the European powers met to discuss what had become known as the Tuscan Succession. The House of Medici now being all but extinct, the House of Este had come forward as claimants; so had the Emperor Charles VI; so had Philip V of Spain, who was dominated by his wife, Isabella Farnese, niece and stepdaughter of the Duke of Parma, an ambitious woman determined to find territories in Italy for her sons. Eventually the succession was settled in favour of the Empress of Austria's husband, Francis, Duke of Lorraine, whose representative, the Prince de Craon, formerly the Duke's tutor, arrived in Florence – closely followed by six thousand troops and various glum, pedantic foreigners assigned to take the place of Florentine funzionarii in government offices – even before the death of Gian Gastone, the last of the Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany, in 1737.

  Gian Gastone's sister, Anna Maria, a tall, proud, stiff-backed old lady with a deep, masculine voice, was allowed to live out the few remaining years of her life in the Pitti Palace. The widow of the Elector Palatine, who had infected her with a venereal disease which was held responsible for the miscarriages that marred her early life, she received her visitors beneath a black canopy in a comfortless room full of silver furniture. Having, to her eternal credit, made a will leaving the entire property of her family, their palaces and villas and all the treasures which they contained to the new Grand Duke and his successors, on condition that nothing was ever removed from these incalculably valuable collections or taken beyond the borders of Tuscany, she died on 18 February 1743. She was buried in a tomb in the Cappella dei Principi engraved with the words, Ultima Della Stirpe Reale Dei Medici, the ‘Last of the Royal Medici Line’.

  The Florence now occupied by foreigners was a sad place, poor and disconsolate, full of vagabonds and beggars and of monks passing in dreary procession beneath dark buildings with windows of torn oiled paper. The state was almost bankrupt. So were many of the noble families whose ill-paid servants hung gloomily about their palace doorways. Guests were now rarely invited to anything other than a card party or conversazione, and rarely offered refreshment other than lemonade or coffee, or, perhaps, ice cream. ‘The declining state of this city is very visible,’ reported one visitor, ‘a great deal of the ground within the walls being unbuilt, so that it is not very populous. Nor are the inhabitants useful, the clergy making up the bulk of the people… I counted above four thousand monks and f
riars in one procession.’

  The citizens, resentful of being once again ruled by foreigners – and of being curtly informed that all holidays associated with the Medici were to be abolished – watched in silence as the occupying forces took down the Medici balls from public buildings and replaced them with shields bearing Austrian eagles and crosses of Lorraine. Disillusioning as their recent experiences of the family had been, they would have given two thirds of all they possessed to have the Medici back, Charles de Brosses, the French scholar and future president of the Parliament of Burgundy, decided after a visit to Tuscany at this time, ‘and they would give the other third to get rid of the Lorrainers… They hate them.’ They showed their resentment by sullen looks and muttered grumbles, occasionally erupting into violence, as they did in a riot in 1738 when two foreign soldiers were attacked and beaten after a rag collector's nose had been cut off in a scuffle.

  Soon after this riot, in January 1739, the Grand Duke Francis himself arrived in Florence. Although he had aroused much resentment by authorizing the removal to Austria of such works of art as were deemed to belong to him – and the auctioning of the contents of various Medici properties, extending even to pots and pans – it was agreed, after prompting by an influential senator, founder of the celebrated porcelain business, Carlo Ginori,27 that the Grand Duke's formal entry should be celebrated in the traditional Florentine manner with parades and processions, balls and pageants, firework displays, the decoration of buildings and the erection of a monumental triumphal arch.28

  The design of this arch was entrusted to an obscure architect from Lorraine, J. N. Joadot, and four hundred men were set to work upon the monument, labouring day and night to get it finished in time. It was not finished in time. Indeed, when the Grand Duke and Duchess arrived outside Florence at the Villa Corsi, the by-no-means-imposing edifice had had to be given at least an appearance of completion by means of plaster and painted canvas. Fortunately they had been delayed at the Villa Corsi, where they had been entertained to luncheon; and it was dark by the time they arrived in the Piazza San Gallo, now the Piazza della Libertà. It was also very cold; and many of the spectators, tired of waiting, had gone home.

  The guns in the Belvedere obediently boomed in the bitter night air; fireworks flashed in the sky above the Arno; fountains poured forth wine; pergolas of lanterns, flares and torches lit the way along which the procession passed down the Via Maggio to the Pitti Palace after a Te Deum in the Duomo. But the reception was far from being the triumph which Carlo Ginori had planned.

  The Grand Duke Francis and Maria Theresa nevertheless appeared to enjoy their three months' stay in Florence. Holding court in the Pitti Palace, they went on sightseeing expeditions, visiting churches and chapels, museums and galleries and showing particular interest in the Opificio delle Pietre Dure and the workshops of the Uffizi that produced the kind of objets d'art of which Francis was later to become a connoisseur and collector as Emperor in Vienna. They remained in Florence for the Carnival, during which they gave three masked balls in the Palazzo Vecchio, once dashing off to change their costumes when, disguised as bats, they were recognized too soon. They attended an exciting game of football, which was still played each year by teams representing the four quarters of the city. And when they left at the end of April, accompanied by an immense convoy of wagons, each drawn by several pairs of oxen and piled high with goods and valuables appropriated from Medici houses in Florence, they promised to return.

  They never did return. Thereafter for twenty-seven years, Florence was governed by Regents, first by Count Emmanuel de Richecourt, a vain, authoritarian Bavarian already an elderly man at the time of his appointment, and then by General Antonio Botta-Adorno, a hard-headed Lombard who, although an Italian, had been so oppressively severe as commander of Austrian troops in Genoa that he had provoked a violent insurrection in the city and had been obliged to withdraw his soldiers from it.

  Under both these Regents, Florence was persistently and relentlessly plundered for the sake of Vienna and for the Austrian armies kept so long in the field by Maria Theresa and her husband. Cart after cart and line upon line of pack-animals rattled and clattered through the Porta San Gallo on their way north, laden with treasure and goods to support the imperial economy. From time to time there were public protests and demonstrations in the city; but the government in Vienna continued to make their demands upon the resources of Tuscany and encouraged the Regents in the furtherance of their policies.

  Taxation was steadily increased; the number of bankruptcies soared; aristocratic families, withdrawing from commercial enterprises most of what remained of their capital thus invested, put their money into land, into the redecoration of their palaces, into the most extravagant entertainments for others of their kind and the purchase of ornate carriages ‘like portable sitting-rooms’.

  Occasionally an imperial decree, usually prompted by the Regents' Florentine advisers, would offer some relief: in 1764, for example, during a serious food shortage in Florence, the Grand Duke supplied funds for the purchase of grain. Indeed, even the most antagonistic of his government's critics had to concede that not all the policies of the Reggenza were deleterious, for in its time the powers of the Inquisition were curbed and its prison closed down; the civil and criminal jurisdictions of the feudal landlords were abrogated; ecclesiastical institutions were deprived of certain archaic tax advantages; and the civil service was reformed by new policies of recruitment.

  In 1765 the Emperor Francis I, Francis III of Lorraine, died suddenly after a night at the opera. He was succeeded as Emperor by his eldest son, Joseph, and, as Grand Duke of Tuscany, by his younger son, Peter Leopold, who was married at the age of seventeen to the Spanish Infanta, Maria Luisa. The Florentines had grounds for hope that, now the regency was at long last ended, the young Grand Duke and Duchess, who were to come and live amongst them, would pay attention to the people's needs.

  18

  TOURISTS AND TUFT-HUNTERS 1740 – 88

  ‘A scene of enchantment, a city planted in a garden.’

  WILLIAM HAZLITT

  A few days before the accession of Peter Leopold as Grand Duke of Tuscany, James Boswell arrived in Florence on his Grand Tour. He found the city had more English and Scottish residents than any other he had yet visited. Travellers from other countries came in by every coach; but few settled here for long, and many rushed off after the briefest visits, though not many so hurriedly as Mozart, who stayed only long enough to give a concert at the Villa Poggio Imperiale1 – and to make friends with another musical prodigy, the English boy, Thomas Linley, who was in Florence receiving violin lessons from Pietro Nardini – before moving on to Rome.2

  British visitors, however, as Boswell found, were more inclined to remain in Florence, as though reluctant to leave a city in which they felt so much at home. Among the residents at this time was Boswell's cousin, Earl Cowper, who had come out long before and, having fallen in love with a married marchesa, had never gone home again. He confessed to Boswell that the marchesa no longer held charms for him, but he had decided to stay on anyway at the Villa Palmieri, since he had made many friends in Italy and had none in England.3 He later married an attractive young Englishwoman and was made a Count of the Holy Roman Empire purely because, so it was said, the Grand Duke was so very fond of his wife. He became the Grand Duke's musical adviser and ‘lived in a very grand way’.

  Also living in Florence at this time were the extremely rich Earl Tilney of Castlemaine who followed Cowper's example by entertaining on a most lavish scale; the Marquess of Hertford's son, Lord Beauchamp; Johann Ludwig, Baron von Wallmoden, reputedly the son of King George II by his German mistress, the Countess of Yarmouth; the tall and swarthy Colonel Isaac Barré, who had fought beside General Wolfe at Quebec and

  The Piazza Santa Trinita by Giuseppe Zocchi (1711 – 67).

  had subsequently become a fiery orator in the House of Commons; the amiable and impractical poet, Robert Merry, whose affair with
Lady Cowper greatly annoyed the Grand Duke; and, among many others – several of whom are to be seen in Zoffany's picture of the Tribuna4 – two young naval officers, the Hon. Keith Stewart, son of the Earl of Galloway, and the Hon. Peregrine Bertie, son of the Earl of Abingdon.

  Also to be seen in this group portrait by Zoffany is Sir Horace Mann, who had been appointed British Resident in Florence in 1740 and was to remain there, becoming increasingly Italian in his manners, for over forty years. Considered by the poet, Thomas Gray, as ‘the best and most obliging person in the world’, and described by the historian, Edward Gibbon, as ‘an agreeable man, quiet and polished but somewhat wrapped up in a round of important trifles’, Mann was sixty-four years old at the time of Boswell's arrival in Florence, vain, affected and excessively well groomed.

  The son of a prosperous London merchant, he had, as a young man, become an intimate friend of Horace Walpole, son of the Prime Minister; and it was through this friendship that Mann had obtained his appointment in Florence. He had originally come out as assistant to Charles Fane, England's ‘Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of Florence's but he had soon been entrusted with most of the envoy's work, since Fane was a remarkably lazy man who was also extremely touchy, once taking to his bed for six weeks, so Walpole related, because the Duke of Newcastle forgot to put ‘very’ before ‘humble servant' at the end of a letter. Mann succeeded Fane in 1740 and thereafter at his house, the Palazzo Manetti in Via Santo Spirito (known also as the ‘King's Arms’),5 he entertained a constant stream of English visitors, putting several of them up in a smaller guest-house he maintained, the Casa Ambrogi6 opposite the Pitti Palace. He provided them with excellent dinners, as well as a ‘sixpenny pharo table' on Monday evenings, allowed them to fish in the Arno from the windows of the Palazzo Manetti, invited them to his box at the opera and arranged for them to witness various ceremonies at the Pitti Palace, such as the washing of the feet of poor old women by agitated ladies of the court, who scoured away ‘with a fervour and devotion according to the extent of their own crimes’. He ensured that they got the best seats at horse-races and games of palio, and introduced them to his friend, the painter and caricaturist, Thomas Patch, who had had to leave Rome hurriedly in 1755 when his homosexuality had landed him in trouble. In addition Mann found time to write letters, not only on official business, but also more intimately to his friend Walpole, on a scale, so Walpole said, ‘not to be paralleled in the history of the post office’.