These secretaries worked inordinately long hours, as he did himself. He was up and dressed at dawn, reading and answering the correspondence which he allowed no one else to see, marking documents, compiling reports, writing instructions for his secretaries to copy, impatient to be out-of-doors, complaining when heavy rain kept him at his desk, ‘I am sitting here like a falcon on its perch.’ His paperwork finished, he would go to Mass, usually in the Cathedral, sometimes in the church of the Santissima Annunziata; and afterwards he would play tennis or go out for a walk or a ride in the town, not for pleasure but for exercise. If on foot he always walked fast, wearing a coat of mail under his jerkin, a sword and a dagger hanging from his belt, and with ‘numerous small stiletti, with very sharp points, almost as fine as needles, stuck into the lining of his scabbard as into a needle-case’. He was invariably accompanied by a Swiss bodyguard.
Cosimo had good reason to fear assassination. Several attempts were made on his life; and the savage punishments inflicted on the would-be assassins did not deter others from trying to murder him. One Giuliano Buonnaccorsi, who had planned to shoot him from a window, was tortured with red-hot pincers, dragged round the streets by his ankles, disembowelled and tossed into the Arno. Yet soon afterwards Cosimo’s agents discovered another plot to kill him by submerging a chevaux de frise of swords and spikes beneath the waters of the Arno at the place where he used to dive in for a swim during the summer months.
Ever since 1546 Cosimo had been thinking of bringing all the scattered judicial and administrative offices of Florence, as well as the city’s major guilds, under one roof near the Palazzo Vecchio and hence under his own closer, more personal and efficient control. He appointed Giorgio Vasari his architect, and work on the huge new building, the Uffizi, began in 1559.4 A year later the Duke and his family moved from the Palazzo Vecchio across the Arno to the Palazzo Pitti, the vast palace which Luca Pitti had begun to build a hundred years before. The Duchess had bought the palace from the Pitti family for 9,000 florins in 1549, and instructions had been given to Bartolommeo Ammanati to enlarge and embellish it.5 Work was still being carried out on the great courtyard and on the new ‘kneeling windows’ on the ground floor of the façade when the family moved in, as the Duchess had refused to consider delaying her departure from the Palazzo Vecchio. She had been impatient to enjoy the more spacious splendour of the Pitti Palace, to be able to walk in lovely gardens with magnificent views instead of up and down the small enclosed terrace at the Palazzo Vecchio which was all the space she had there for her rare plants and flowers.
Behind the Pitti Palace, or the Ducal Palace as it was now officially known, were acres of land stretching south to the heights of San Giorgio and west almost as far as the Porta Romana. These had been bought from a variety of families including the Bogoli, and it was by a corrupt form of their name, Boboli, that the gardens laid out there were subsequently known. For ten years up to his death in 1550 the landscaping had been in the hands of Niccolò Pericoli Tribolo, who had designed the big amphitheatre and the pond behind it to be known as the Neptune Pond. Since then the work had been in the hands of Buontalenti, Giulio and Alfonso Parigi, and of Baccio Bandinelli, who had designed an elaborate rustic grotto at the Duchess’s suggestion.6
The Duchess’s impatience to move to the new palace was aggravated by her failing health. She was now ‘always indisposed’, the Venetian ambassador reported, suffering from a chronic cough and ‘every morning bringing up her food’. She feared she did not have long to live, and her fears were justified. Within less than two years of leaving the Palazzo Vecchio, a fortnight after the death of her favourite son, Garzia, she too died, ‘grieving and despairing, refusing to be guided by physicians as was her wont’. Cosimo was with her at the end, holding her in his arms. As when Maria died he refused to be comforted, shutting himself away from everyone to grieve alone, instructing his eldest son, Francesco, not to attempt to console him for that would only make his loss all the more unbearable. He never fully recovered from it, and in June 1564 he delegated most of his duties to his heir.
There were rumours that in his prolonged grief he sought distraction by ‘indulging in a thousand follies, little suited to his rank and still less to his years [43]…making love to many women, and especially to one of the leading ladies of Florence’. Certainly, he took as mistress a beautiful young woman, Eleonora degli Albizzi, whom it was believed he might marry, and by whom he had a son. One of the Duke’s favourite servants, Sforza Almeni, warned Francesco that his master was considering getting married again, which led first to a row between father and son and then to another between Cosimo and the servant. ‘Sforza,’ he said to him, ‘Get out of my sight. Get out now. And never count on me for anything whatsoever again.’
Supposing that the Duke would soon overcome his anger and forgive him, Almeni did not leave Florence. He even went so far as to return to the Pitti Palace where, at sight of him, Cosimo lost control of himself, and shouting, ‘Traditore! Traditore!’ lunged at him with a hunting spear which he drove clean through his body. Afterwards his one regret was that he had degraded himself by stooping so low as to kill a man ‘so mean’.
Yet Almeni was right. The Duke was to get married again – not to Eleonora degli Albizzi but to another young mistress, Camilla Martelli, who had also born him a child. She was tall, grasping, selfish and ill-tempered, and she wore her husband out. To escape from her he took to shutting himself up with scholars who were required to read to him, or to spending his evenings with his daughter, Isabella Orsini, at the Medici Palace. It was here one evening that he was seized by an apoplectic fit; a second attack cost him the use of his arms and legs and eventually his voice. After this he spent most of his time dozing in a chair, sometimes mumbling incoherently. One evening after dinner he suddenly took it into his head to get into his coach and go to watch a calcio match. It was a cold day and it was raining. For two hours Cosimo sat at a window occasionally looking down at the players, but mostly in a kind of faint. For two months he lingered on, unconscious for days on end, until at last, on 21 April 1574, at the age of fifty-five, he died. His body was laid out in the great hall of the Pitti Palace in the full grand-ducal regalia, while the church bells tolled. The next day ‘all the shops were closed…and wherever one went, the palace was hung all over with black, and black hangings reached all the way across the Piazza dei Pitti’.
Yet Cosimo’s death was not generally regretted. He had been rather less unpopular of late, able to ride around the city, so the Venetian ambassador noticed, ‘alone in his coach with but a single lackey’. He was known to have been an active member of the fraternity of San Martino who were pledged to give anonymous help to the poor, and he was given some small credit for having encouraged and patronized the traditional popular entertainments of the Florentines, the pageants, the horse-races and the games of calcio, and for having added to their number by inaugurating chariot races in the Piazza Santa Maria Novella where posts still mark the limits of the course. He was given rather more credit for having released Florence from her former dependence on Spain, for having provided her with a small but efficient fleet, and for having extended so far the boundaries of the State. But although the government was stable, justice impartial if severe and finances sound, Cosimo was more widely blamed for having denied Florence her former freedom than he was praised for having given her stability. People were far more ready to point accusing fingers at his spies and prisons, his heavy taxes and unscrupulous use of monopolies in private trading than they were to give him credit for the improvements he instigated in the farming, draining and irrigation of Tuscany, for building canals and promoting olive plantations and silver mines, for the development of Pisa and Leghorn, or for having achieved some sort of political unity between these and other Tuscan towns. If someone mentioned his encouragement of Bartolommeo Ammanati who, after the devastating floods of 1557, built the lovely Ponte Santa Trinità7 and rebuilt the Ponte alla Carraia;8 or his patronage of Giorgio Va
sari, who decorated so much of the Palazzo Vecchio, and of the Flemings known in Florence as Giovanni Rosso and Niccolò Fiamingo, who set up a tapestry factory in the city under his auspices; or his payments for portraits, murals and allegorical paintings by Agnolo Bronzino; or his patience with Benvenuto Cellini whose fine Perseus, commissioned by the Duke, was set up in the Loggia dei Lanzi in 1554;9 there was sure to be someone else to grumble about the cost of the alterations to the Pitti Palace, and of the private corridor between the Pitti and the Palazzo Vecchio (in the hasty construction of which five men were killed), the expensive adornment of the Boboli Gardens, the grandiose scheme for the huge baroque mausoleum at San Lorenzo where the later Medici were to be buried in such gloomy pomp,10 Pontormo’s decoration of the villa of Castello and Tribolo’s fountains in its ornate gardens,11 the lavish expenditure on the park at Poggio a Caiano, and on the wall round the huge wood known as the Pineta. If an admirer were to speak approvingly of his promotion of Pisa University and the Studio Fiorentino, of his invitation to such gifted men as Benedetto Varchi to come back to live in Florence, of his encouragement of Italian music, of scientists and botanists and of Etruscan archaeology, of his improvement of Florence’s herb gardens, his foundation of Pisa’s School of Botany, and his introduction into Tuscany of medicinal plants from America and of farm crops from the Orient, of his connoisseurship of antiques, medals and Etruscan workmanship, a detractor would undoubtedly contrast the golden age of the Republic under Lorenzo il Magnifico with the dark times now sure to follow under the new Grand Duke Francesco.
XXI
THE HEIRS OF COSIMO
‘Such entertainments have never been seen before’
FRANCESCO HAD neither his father’s taste for business nor his industry. Irresponsible, taciturn, wayward yet withdrawn, he was ‘of low stature’, the Venetian ambassador reported disapprovingly, ‘thin, dark complexioned and of a melancholy disposition’. ‘He shows little grace in his dress,’ another ambassador wrote, ‘and he is quite as graceless in his bearing.’ He was ‘a man of quiet thoughts’ who spoke with ‘care and circumspection’. ‘Much absorbed by the love of women’, he set ‘little store by virtue’.
His wife, the Archduchess Joanna of Austria, who was as pale, thin and charmless as Francesco, was miserably homesick living in Tuscany. Ill and unhappy, ignored by her husband, and condemned by the Florentines for her Austrian hauteur, she never felt at home in Florence. Her father-in-law was kind to her in his way. He had the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio specially decorated for her: the lunettes were painted with murals of Austrian towns by pupils of Vasari, and Verrocchio’s gay fountain of the little urchin with a spouting fish was brought down from the Careggi villa where it had been set up in the garden by Lorenzo il Magnifico.1 But Joanna was not to be comforted. She died in 1578 at the age of thirty, a year after the birth of her one sickly son Filippo, who was also to die soon afterwards. Apparently unmoved by her death, Francesco resolved to marry his mistress, Bianca Capello.
Bianca was an attractive, well-educated Venetian noblewoman who, to the dismay of her family, had secretly married a clerk in a Florentine company. Obliged to leave Venice she had come with her husband to Florence where Francesco, catching sight of her one day as he rode beneath her window, had fallen in love with her. A meeting had been arranged; she had become his mistress; her husband had been placated with a lucrative appointment in Francesco’s household and had been given a palazzo conveniently situated near the Pitti Palace for the regular visits his master made to his wife.2 Francesco also built a country villa for Bianca, the charming Villa Pratolino whose amazing garden so much impressed Montaigne, a guest there in 1581.3 As well as bronzes by Giambologna and fountains by Ammanati, there were grottoes with movable scenery by the ingenious Bernardo Buontalenti. There were organs, musical waterfalls and all manner of mechanical figures. There were promenades of ilex and cypress, mazes of box-hedges cut into fantastic shapes and arcades formed by jets of water which, rising above the head, fell into little streams on either side of the path. In one corner, passing an aviary and a labyrinth, the visitor came upon Vulcan and his family, standing in a grotto, the walls of which were covered with coral and shells and ‘copper and marble figures with the hunting of several beasts, moving by the force of water’. In another corner, near a lawn from whose surface water spouted from unseen sources, a shepherdess walked out of a niche in a wall to fill her bucket with water from a well to the accompaniment of a bagpipe played by a satyr.
The Florentines detested Francesco’s mistress, Bianca Capello, for whom this Villa Pratolino had been built, maintaining that she was a witch, that she possessed the evil eye, that she had poisoned the wretched Joanna of Austria. When – her husband having been disposed of – Francesco married her at a wedding which was alleged to have cost no less than 30,000 florins, the people’s indignation was unbounded.
Yet outraged as they were by Francesco’s behaviour, there were other members of his family whose shameful conduct disgusted them even more. The most iniquitous of all was his younger brother, Pietro, who at the time of Francesco’s succession was twenty years old. An emotionally unstable parasite and profligate, Pietro not merely neglected his wife, Eleonora, but openly insulted her. She consoled herself with various lovers, including Bernardino Antinori, who was first imprisoned in his palace for killing one of his rivals in a duel and then exiled to Elba after his mistress had been seen walking up and down the street beneath his windows in the hope of catching sight of him.4 He was later brought back to Florence to face trial and execution by strangulation in his cell in the Bargello. The distracted grief displayed by Eleonora on learning of her lover’s fate so infuriated Pietro that he summoned her to Cafaggiolo where he strangled her, with the evident approval of the Grand Duke.
It was not the only murder in Francesco’s family. His sister, Isabella, was quite as unhappy in her marriage as her brothers had been and took for a lover her husband’s cousin, Troilo Orsini. Her husband, Paolo Giordano Orsini, a violent, vindictive man, had himself fallen desperately in love with Vittoria, the young and passionate wife of Francesco Accoramboni. They had taken it into their unbalanced minds to rid themselves of both Isabella and Accoramboni and then to marry each other. First Vittoria had her husband killed by professional murderers at the Villa Negroni. Then Orsini, having paid other assassins to kill his cousin, Troilo, murdered his wife at their villa of Ceretto Guidi near Empoli.5 He did so in a peculiarly macabre way: having waited until they had finished dinner, he signalled for four accomplices in the room above to let down a rope through a hole in the ceiling. Pretending to kiss her, he strangled his wife with the rope which the accomplices then pulled back into the room above. Announcing that Isabella had died of a sudden apoplectic seizure, Orsini soon afterwards married Vittoria, ignoring a papal ban imposed upon the marriage by Gregory XIII, and took her off to his castle at Bracciano. The horrifying affair might there have ended had not Gregory XIII died and been succeeded by Sixtus V. The new Pope was not only a relentlessly severe pontiff, determined to repress the disorders and lawlessness which had become so scandalous in the times of his predecessor, but was also the murdered Francesco Accoramboni’s uncle. Rather than attempt to defend himself at Bracciano against the Pope’s troops, Orsini fled to Venice where he died. He left a will bequeathing his great wealth to Vittoria who was consequently stabbed to death in Padua by her husband’s aggrieved brother who had hoped to be his heir.
His reputation sinking ever lower in a sea of scandal, the Grand Duke Francesco retreated from the world into the isolated privacy of Pratolino where he fed his goldfish and his Swedish reindeer, planted the rare shrubs that were sent to him from India and talked of cosmography, chemistry and the secrets of nature. Whole days were spent in his garden house at Pratolino and in the laboratory which Vasari built for him at the Palazzo Vecchio where, towards the end of his life, he even held meetings with his Ministers, unwilling to leave the chemical and other scientific experim
ents which so absorbed him. He had other interests, too, which kept his mind from business: on the third floor of the Uffizi, which had been completed by Bernardo Buontalenti and Alfonso Parigi after Vasari’s death in 1574, he created an art gallery and established studios for young artists. In 1583, he also established the Accademia della Crusca (the Chaff), an academy for ridding the Tuscan language of its impurities, and, indeed, for maintaining the supremacy of Florence as the only worthy arbiter of Italian literary taste – a function the Accademia performed so vigorously that it had the playwright, Girolamo Gigli, expelled from the Duchy for the unpardonable affront of declaring that Saint Catherine of Siena was a better writer than that great Florentine of blessed memory, Giovanni Boccaccio.6 But it was chemistry and alchemy, smelting and glass-blowing, gem-setting and crystal-cutting that occupied most of Francesco’s time. He became, indeed, an acknowledged expert: he was adept at making vases from molten rock crystal and precious metals; he invented a new way of cutting rock crystal and a revolutionary method of making porcelain which enabled Tuscan potters to produce exquisite wares comparable to those imported from China.7 He also developed ingenious methods of manufacturing fireworks and imitation jewellery. Yet even his scientific experiments brought him vilification rather than credit: locked up there in that noisome laboratory he was manufacturing poison to be used by that witch, Bianca. The notion seemed only too credible when in October 1587 they both suddenly died – in fact, of malarial fever – on the same day.
Francesco’s brother and successor, Ferdinando I, who assured his people that the deaths had been due to natural causes, had spent most of his life in Rome. He had gone there in 1563 as a fifteen-year-old cardinal, and within ten years had become an influential member of the Sacred College. Though he had little taste for religious life he founded the missionary society of the Propaganda Fide and proved himself a capable administrator. He also found ample opportunity to indulge his enthusiasm for classical statues of which he assembled a large collection, mostly Roman copies of Greek originals, including the Venus de’ Medici. He bought a villa on the Pincio in which to display them,8 and on his brother’s death brought many of them back with him to Florence where six statues of Roman women, restored by Carradori, were placed inside the Loggia dei Lanzi.
The House Of Medici Page 29
