The House Of Medici

by Christopher Hibbert

  Some years before he had made a pilgrimage to Rome where he had fulfilled a lifetime’s ambition by being appointed a canon of St John in Lateran which accorded him the right to touch the Volto Santo, the handkerchief that Christ had used on his way to Calvary; and ever since that day when he had held in his hands this sanctified cloth he had become, so it was said, more pious than ever. Having presented the Pope with a painting of the Annunciation worth 200,000 crowns, he had returned to Florence with boxes full of relics, a sacred collection to which he soon afterwards added a piece of St Francis Xavier’s intestines. He would show these relics to privileged visitors with the utmost reverence, and would humbly fall on his knees before them. An English tourist was assured that he

  had a machine in his own apartment whereon were fix’d little images in silver of every saint in the calendar. The machine was made to turn so as to present in front the saint of the day, before which he continually perform’d his offices…He visited five or six churches every day.

  His zeal for gaining converts to the Catholic faith was boundless. He spent hours on end teaching the Christian doctrine with infinite patience to three cheeky little Cossack boys who had been presented to him by the Bishop of Cracow, and he provided handsome pensions to foreign Protestants who abandoned their faith for his own. He was equally zealous in ridding Florence of works of art which he thought might give rise to lascivious thoughts. He had Baccio Bandinelli’s marble statue of Adam and Eve removed from the Cathedral, and he even considered having the nude statues on display in the Uffizi hidden from view when told by priests that some people found them disturbingly erotic. His own life was ascetic in its self-restraint: he ate only the plainest food, and nearly always alone; he drank nothing but water; he went to bed very early and rose soon after dawn; he never went near a fire. He had outgrown most of his faults, except bigotry; yet few people had ever learned to love him. Now that he was over eighty he was treated with a kind of wary respect. No longer did the mob gather threateningly beneath his windows, shouting for bread, plastering insulting placards onto the palace walls. But on those rare occasions when he left the palace in a slow-moving, two-horse carriage, surrounded by Swiss guards with halberds, footmen and pages, though men bowed to him, there was no cheering. And when at last he died, on 31 October 1723, there was little grief.

  Florence had other causes for sorrow. The city was a sad place now, poor, gloomy and disconsolate. Tourists reported it as being full of beggars, vagabonds and monks, passing in dreary procession beneath dark buildings with windows of torn oiled paper. A generation before, Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, lamented the pitiable condition into which it had fallen. ‘Florence is much sunk from what it was,’ he wrote, ‘for they do not reckon there are above fifty thousand souls in it…As one goes over Tuscany, it appears so dispeopled that one cannot but wonder to find a country that hath been a scene of so much action now so forsaken and so poor.’ Subsequent travellers were similarly dismayed. ‘The declining state of this city is very visible,’ reported one of them,

  a great deal of the ground within the walls being unbuilt, and many of the houses ill-inhabited, 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 friars in one procession.

  Despite the burdensome taxation imposed upon the people by Cosimo who had authorized a new form of income-tax on his deathbed, the State was almost bankrupt. So were many of the noble families whose ancestors had been so rich and so hospitable. Now guests were rarely invited to anything more exciting than a card party or a conversazione, at which nothing except lemonade, coffee or tea would be served with an occasional ice-cream – the nobles finding it difficult enough to pay for their own food, which was often brought in from some nearby cook-shop, let alone for the numerous servants who hung about their gateways in the hope of better times.

  Better times could hardly be expected under Cosimo’s successor, Gian Gastone, fifty-two was not expected to overcome his indolence, his alcoholism or his taste for slovenly lubricity. He began his rule well enough, displaying a genuine concern for the welfare of the people and disdaining to spend money in the flamboyant manner of most of his relations. He reduced the intolerable level of taxation and lowered the price of corn; he discontinued public executions and provided the city’s beggars with a decent workhouse; he freed die government from the stranglehold of the Church which under Cosimo III had gripped it so tightly; he restored to scientists and scholars the freedom that had lately been denied them; and he rescinded the laws which had been passed against the Jews. But soon his constitutional sloth overcame him and he took to spending most of his time in bed; the crafty Giuliano Dami kept unwanted visitors at bay, and dealt with the craftsmen and antiquaries who relied on the Grand Duke’s lazy good nature to sell him objects that no discriminating collector would ever wish to possess.

  Giuliano Dami also provided Gian Gastone with that motley troupe of young companions, male and female, but mostly rowdy boys, who were collectively known as Ruspanti after the coins – the ruspi – with which they were paid for their services. These Ruspanti, often handsome youths from the poorest Florentine families, were required to entertain the Grand Duke by rollicking about in his room, shouting insults and obscenities, and, when his fancy ran that way, drawing him into their horse-play. Sometimes he would give a splendid dinner, calling them by the names of his ministers or other leading citizens of Florence, proposing toasts to these suddenly transmogrified celebrities. Then, after the meal was over, he would persuade them for his pleasure to make love to each other. Every month the number of Ruspanti grew until by the end of 1731 there were nearly four hundred of them. As they grew in numbers, so also they grew more troublesome and violent, raising riots in the Boboli gardens, and raiding the cookshops and the stalls in the market when their wages were in arrears.

  Gian Gastone’s sister-in-law, Violante, who had chosen to remain in Italy after the death of Prince Ferdinando, tried to interest the Grand Duke in less degrading pleasures than the Ruspanti afforded him. She organized banquets to which she invited the most amusing and accomplished people to entertain him. He merely got incapably drunk, swearing and belching as he ate his food, making occasional comments of indescribable lewdness. At one peculiarly embarrassing dinner, after vomiting into his napkin, he took off his wig and wiped his mouth with it.

  Most of his meals, however, were eaten in bed; dinner at five o’clock in the afternoon, supper at two in the morning. Before dinner he would receive those few official visitors to whom he accorded admittance. Propped against pillows, surrounded by freshly picked roses to give sweetness to the fusty air of the bedroom, he wore a shirt covered with snuff, a long cravat and a nightcap. Rarely did he emerge from the room and then only to disprove rumours that he was dead. Thus, he appeared on St John the Baptist’s Day in 1729. Having got drunk beforehand to make the ordeal more tolerable, he lolled about in his carriage, poking his head from the window from time to time in order to be sick into the street. At the Porta al Prato he stumbled out to watch the horse races during which he shouted obscenities at his pages and the ladies around him; then, having fallen asleep, he was conveyed back to the Pitti Palace in a litter. Thereafter he scarcely ever left it. Once he was carried in a sedan-chair to the notorious baths at San Sperandino; and once, wearing a straw hat and a dressing-gown, he was taken in a litter to the villa of Poggio Imperiale. But most of his days he spent in bed where, in June 1737, he was found dying by the Prince de Craon, representative of Maria Theresa’s husband Francis, Duke of Lorraine, whom the European powers – without bothering to consult Gian Gastone – had decided should be his heir. ‘The Grand Duke is in a pitiable condition,’ the Prince de Craon reported to the Duke of Lorraine. ‘He could not get out of bed; he had a long beard; his sheets were very dirty, his eyesight weak, his voice low and muffled. Altogether he had the air of a man who had not a month to live.’ The Prince was right. The Grand
Duke Gian Gastone died on 9 July 1737 at the age of sixty-five.

  The six thousand Austrian troops of the new regime had already crossed the frontier, and all important appointments in the government had been assigned to foreigners. Tuscany was to become a mere appendage of the Austrian empire, while the Medici’s last representative, Anna Maria, the Electress Palatine, was permitted to live out her days in her apartments at the Pitti Palace.

  A tall, dignified, rather haughty and stiff-backed old lady, she had strongly disapproved of her younger brother’s conduct and had, after many painful interviews and insulting dismissals, prevailed upon him to accept the ministrations of the Church before he died. She was profoundly religious herself, and on the rare occasions when she drove out of the Palace courtyard, ‘with guards and eight horses to her coach’, observers could be fairly sure that she was either going to Mass, to donate money to one of her favourite charities, or to inspect progress on the family mausoleum at San Lorenzo, work on which had been abandoned but was now resumed again at her expense. She received few visitors, and when she did so, as the poet Thomas Gray discovered, she remained standing and unsmiling beneath a black canopy in a comfortless room full of silver furniture. She was always very conscious of the fact that she was the last of the Medici.

  So were the people of Florence. Resentful and humiliated to be once again ruled by foreigners whose cannon in the city’s fortresses were turned against them, they looked back to the great days of the Medici with pride and a sense of loss. They watched with deep regret as the Medici balls were taken down from public buildings and replaced with shields emblazoned with fleurs-de-lis, an eagle and the cross of Lorraine. They were outraged when they heard that the celebrations of the birthday of Cosimo Pater Patriae, of the elevation of Pope Clement VII, of the election of Duke Cosimo I, and all the public holidays connected with the Medici were to be abolished. They would have given two-thirds of all they possessed to have the Medici back, the French scholar Charles de Brosses 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.’ When Anna Maria died in February 1743, at the age of seventy-five, all the town was in tears for the loss of her, the British envoy’s assistant reported:

  The common people are convinced she went off in a hurricane of wind; a most violent one began this morning and lasted for about two hours, and now the sun shines as bright as ever – this is proof. Besides, for a stronger, just the same thing happened when John Gaston went off. Nothing can destroy this opinion which people think they have been eye-witnesses to…On the Monday morning her Confessor by a stratagem was carried to her, for she would not have him sent for and…he was bid to tell her she must soon die, to which she answered by asking him with some emotion, ‘Who told you so?’ He replied: ‘Her physicians.’

  ‘Very well, then let us do what there is to be done; and do it quickly.’ So they brought her the Communion…She was sensible to the last, but she did not speak for about an hour and a half before she died…She has lain in state in the great hall of the palace since Thursday morning, and is to be buried tonight…[So] the poor remains of the Medici is soon to join her ancestors.

  The family mausoleum at San Lorenzo is not, however, her true memorial. In her will she bequeathed to the new Grand Duke and his successors all the property of the Medici, their palaces and villas, their pictures and statues, their jewels and furniture, their books and manuscripts – all the vast store of works of art assembled by her ancestors, generation after generation. She made one condition: nothing should ever be removed from Florence where the treasures of the Medici should always be available for the pleasure and benefit of the people of the whole world.1

  NOTES ON BUILDINGS AND WORKS OF ART

  CHAPTER 1

  1. The PALAZZO DELLA SIGNORIA, or Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of the city’s government, was begun in 1299 and enlarged and altered at various times up till the end of the sixteenth century. The courtyard was rebuilt by Michelozzo Michelozzi in the 1440s. The Sala del Maggior Consiglio was formed to accommodate the Grand Council in the time of Savonarola. During the reign of Duke Cosimo I, who moved here from the Medici Palace in 1540, the palace was remodelled and redecorated by Giorgio Vasari. When Duke Cosimo took up residence in the Pitti Palace, he handed over the Palazzo della Signoria to his son, Francesco, for whose bride, the Archduchess Joanna of Austria, the courtyard was specially decorated.

  2. There has been a bridge where the PONTE VECCHIO now stands since Roman times. The present structure, which replaced a twelfth century bridge destroyed by the floods of 1333, was built in 1345. At that time most of the shops on the bridge were occupied by tanners and pursemakers. The butchers who succeeded them were replaced by goldsmiths and jewellers at the end of the sixteenth century on the orders of Grand Duke Ferdinando I.

  3. ORSANMICHELE derives its name from the ancient oratory of San Michele in Orto which originally occupied the site. The present building, started in 1336, was designed for use as a communal granary as well as a chapel. The statues in the niches along the outside walls were commissioned by the city’s guilds. The original of Donatello’s marble St George which was made for the Armourers’ Guild, and a copy of which stands in the most westerly niche on the northern wall, is now in the Bargello.

  4. The MERCATO VECCHIO was demolished at the end of the nineteenth century to make way for the present Piazza della Repubblica.

  5. VIA CALIMALA which literally means Street of Ill Fame is perhaps a corruption of the Roman Callis Major.

  6. The church and convent of SANTA CROCE in the Piazza Santa Croce was built between 1228 and 1385. In 1863, the distinctive marble façade was added to a seventeenth-century design. The tombs of Michelangelo and of Cosimo de’ Medici’s friends Leonardo Bruni, Carlo Marsuppini and Vespasiano da Bisticci are all here; as also are the chapels of several of the leading families of Florence, including those of the Bardi family into which Cosimo married. The Novices’ Chapel was built for Cosimo by Michelozzo in about 1445.

  7. The BARGELLO known as the Palazzo del Podestà in the fifteenth century was originally built as the city hall in 1254–5. It was reconstructed in the middle of the fourteenth century when the stairway in the courtyard was built. In 1574 it became the residence of the Chief of Police. It is now the Museo Nazionale and contains many busts and statues of the Medici family as well as works of art commissioned by them.

  8. The Alberti family palace in the Via de’ Benci (no. 6) is now the MUSEO HORNE. The Alberti were responsible for the chancel in Santa Croce.

  9. The PALAZZO RUCELLAI, which was finished in the 1450s, is in the Via della Vigna Nuova (no. 18). It was built by Bernardo Rossellino after a design by Leon Battista Alberti. Alberti was also commissioned by Giovanni Rucellai to design the façade of the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella which contains the Rucellai chapel. Part of the restored Rucellai gardens, the ORTI ORICELLARI, can be seen between the railway station and the Porta al Prato.

  10. Niccolò da Uzzano lived in the Via de’ Bardi in the palace now known as the PALAZZO CAPPONI (no: 36).

  CHAPTER II

  1. The number of palle (or balls) on the MEDICI EMBLEM was never fixed. Originally there were twelve; but there were usually seven in Cosimo de’ Medici’s time – as on the shield on the south-east corner of the Medici palace – though there are only six at the corners of Verrocchio’s roundel in the chancel at San Lorenzo. There are eight on the ceiling of the old sacristy at San Lorenzo, five on Duke Cosimo’s tomb in the Capella dei Principi and six on the Grand Duke Ferdinando’s arms on the entrance to the Forte di Belvedere.

  2. Work on the Cathedral of SANTAMARIA DEL FIORE, known as the DUOMO, was begun towards the end of the thirteenth century to a design by Arnolfo di Cambio. Brunelleschi’s dome was not finished until 1436 and the exterior was still not completed when he died ten years later. The neo-Gothic façade is late-nineteenth-century (see note 13 to Chapter XIII).

  3. The V
ia Porta Rossa was then dominated by the PALAZZO DAVANZATI (no: 9). At that time it was owned by the Davizzi who had built it in about 1330. It is now a museum.

  4. The MERCATONUOVO, now known as the Straw Market, was built by Giovanni Battista del Tasso in 1547–59.

  5. The FLORENTINE LILY appears less frequently on the buildings of Florence than the palle of the Medici. One example is on the fifteenth-century doorway of the old Mint behind the Loggia dei Lanzi.

  6. The Dominican church and monastery of SANTA MARIA NOVELLA was begun in the middle of the thirteenth century and finished in the sixteenth. The apartments which were built for Pope Martin V overlook the Chiostro Grande. The interior of the church was redecorated by Vasari in the 1560s. The Rucellai, Bardi and Strozzi all built chapels here. A chapel in the Chiostro Grande was redecorated for the visit of Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici, Pope Leo X, by Jacopo Carrucci Pontormo and Ridolfo Ghirlandaio in 1515.

  7. The grim, late-thirteenth-century palace of the Spini family, now the PALAZZO SPINI-FERRONI is on the corner of Via Tornabuoni and Lungarno Acciaiuoli by the Ponte Santa Trinità. The next palazzo downstream is the fourteenth-century Palazzo Gianfigliazzi (see note 2 to chapter XVII). A few doors further down (Lungarno Corsini, 10) is the seventeenth-century PALAZZO CORSINI whose picture gallery is open to the public.