Florence
Page 14
As well as pietra forte, the softer grey sandstone known as pietra serena – a favourite stone of Brunelleschi, who used it extensively in San Lorenzo, Santo Spirito and elsewhere – was also required for the Strozzi Palace and this, too, was to be found in large quantities not far away, especially on the hillside between Fiesole and Settignano, where the quarries, so Michelangelo said, were ‘continually worked by sculptors and stonecutters for the most part born there’. Nor was timber difficult to come by, since Tuscany was still densely wooded in parts, as indeed it was to remain until the middle of the nineteenth century; nor were supplies of sand and gravel, brought down from the Arno valley in carts which returned with waste from the building sites; nor was iron ore, which came from mines on the island of Elba; nor was glass, though this was not yet widely used for windows, translucent oiled cloth still generally taking its place; nor were bricks, which were used far more extensively in Florence than the appearance of the city suggests, though not until the Palazzo Grifoni2 was built, after the middle of the sixteenth century, was brick used on the façade of a building in Florence as it had been elsewhere in Italy, Renaissance architects in the city preferring to conceal brick walls behind stone. The great number of bricks used in building construction came from numerous kilns just outside the city walls, as, for instance, those beside the road leading out of Porta San Niccoló, still called Via della Fornace, and from a few kilns just inside the walls, these being frowned upon by the authorities because of the danger of fire.
The Pazzi family emblem of two dolphins, from a spandrel in the Pazzi Chapel at Santa Croce.
Just as Cosimo de' Medici had had his family emblem as well as his personal insignia prominently displayed upon his palace, so Filippo Strozzi ordered that the emblem of his family, the crescent, and his own insignia, the sheep and the falcon, should be displayed upon his. Indeed, these emblems and insignia can be seen in all manner of places on and in the Palazzo Strozzi, on spandrels, corbels and lanterns. Yet, while the Strozzi laid themselves open to mockery because of the display of their emblems, other families were quite as determined to mark their palaces with their own insignia, the Pazzi with their dolphins, the Ricasoli with their roses,3 the Rucellai with their Sails of Fortune,4 the Alberti with their crossed chains,5 the Bartolini with their poppies.6 Matteo Palmieri, a philosopher of old merchant stock, outdid them all by having a bust of himself placed on his façade.
While many fine palaces were built to grace Florence in the fifteenth century – it has been estimated that over a hundred were begun in the second half of the century alone – the city had losses to count as well as gains. Many smaller houses were destroyed in the process and whole neighbourhoods changed their characters. Streets which had formerly contained craftsmen's shops and studios were now occupied entirely by buildings on a far more monumental scale, earlier legislation controlling the size of new structures being abandoned in favour of a Florence worthy of what was considered its heroic Roman past or of a new Athens on the Arno.
The first of these Florentine palaces to be built in the second half of the fifteenth century was the Palazzo Rucellai, in Via della Vigna Nuova. The Rucellai family, whose great wealth was based on the famous Florentine red dye, the oricello, from which their name (originally Oricellari) was derived, were one of the city's oldest and most respected merchant families, even more proud of having ‘spent money well, above all on building’, as Giovanni Rucellai put it, than of having earned it. Their family chapel7 is in Santa Maria Novella, whose façade, decorated with both the name and the emblem of the Rucellai, was commissioned by Giovanni from Leon Battista Alberti, architect also of the Rucellai Chapel8 adjoining the church of San Pancrazio9 and of the Rucellai palace.
Alberti, born into a Florentine family far older than the Rucellai, was the ideal of Renaissance versatility, philosopher, poet, painter, musician, mathematician, architect, athlete and composer of erotic verse. He had a high regard for birth and for riches. No one who was poor, he said, would ever ‘find it easy to acquire honour and fame by means of his virtues’, since poverty ‘threw virtue into the shadows’ and subjected it ‘to hidden and obscure misery’. It was natural that Giovanni Rucellai, versatile, too, in his own way, a poet and dramatist as well as a merchant, and a man who shared his views and greatly admired his talents, should turn to Alberti for his palace to grace the city of his birth and ‘the sweetest country of the universe’. For his own part Alberti was anxious to create such a house as would suit such a city, a house ‘easy of access, beautifully adorned, delicate and polite rather than proud and stately’.
Alberti, who had spent several years in Rome as a secretary in the Papal Chancery, offered Giovanni Rucellai a far more classically inspired design than Michelozzo's for the Palazzo Medici. Beneath a classical cornice, the façade, reminiscent of the Roman Colosseum in its use of the three orders, was to be divided horizontally and vertically by entablatures and pilasters marking the heights of the three storeys. Along the whole of the façade there was, as at the Palazzo Medici, to be a long seat intended for the convenience of servants awaiting the emergence of their masters and mistresses but more often to be used by shoppers and idle passers-by; and the stone back to this seat was to be carved in the Roman diamond pattern derived from opus reticulatum.
Although classically inspired, the palace was to be clearly identified as the property of the family that brought it into existence: the friezes were to be carved with Rucellai badges rather than the usual decorative motifs of a classical order, while above the doors at first-floor level were to be prominently displayed Rucellai coats of arms. Later there were to be references to other families to which Giovanni Rucellai was connected and whose eminence cast added distinction upon his own: the Medici into which his son married and the Strozzi from which his own wife came.
While the Palazzo Rucellai was nearing completion in the 1450s, equally imposing palaces were being planned or taking shape in other parts of Florence. In Via del Proconsolo, Jacopo de' Pazzi – whose father had commissioned the lovely Pazzi chapel next to Santa Croce from Brunelleschi10 – began to build the palace later known as the Palazzo Pazzi-Quaratesi.11 To the north of the Palazzo della Signoria, the Palazzo Gondi12 was built for Giuliano Gondi, head of a family whose history could be traced back to the days of Charlemagne. The design by Giuliano da Sangallo – the oldest of a large and distinguished family of Florentine architects who was also responsible for the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano13 – is reminiscent of that of the Palazzo Medici, although the rusticated stone blocks of Michelozzo's building are here replaced by smoothly rounded stones, which were also a feature of the Palazzo Strozzi.
When work began on the Palazzo Gondi, about 1490, a far larger palace, the Pitti Palace, was almost finished on the other bank of the Arno. This was designed, possibly by Luca Fancelli , one of Alberti's assistants, for Luca Pitti, the vain, avaricious and garrulous busybody who fancied himself as the panjandrum of the Medicean party and who high-handedly dispossessed the owners of the properties on his chosen site and made little effort to rehouse the families who had lived there. The Pitti Palace was much extended in later years after it had been acquired by the Medici, but even in Luca Pitti's day it was overpoweringly grandiose, with strongly rusticated storeys forty feet high. It was built of vast blocks of pietra forte, some nearly four tons in weight, quarried from what were to become the Boboli Gardens – not so much stones, in the words of Hippolyte Taine, as ‘chunks of rock and almost sections of mountains’. Never before, Niccolò Machiavelli was later to remark, had a private citizen of Florence built a palace for himself in isolation from his neighbours on the slopes of a hill.14
While the Pitti Palace was still being built, Cosimo de' Medici was already living in the Palazzo Medici. He had become an old man, often crippled by arthritis and by gout, a complaint with which his two sons, Piero and Giovanni, were also afflicted. One day the Milanese ambassador called at the Medici Palace and found the three men in bed, all suffer
ing from gout and each one as bad-tempered as the other.
Cosimo was devoted to the younger of his two sons, Giovanni, a shrewd and ugly man, generally most cheerful and always extremely fat; and he was devoted also to Giovanni's son, Cosimino. And when this little boy died and, shortly afterwards, Giovanni died too, from a heart attack, Cosimo never recovered from his grief. As his servants carried their gouty old master through the rooms of the palace which had once contained a household of fifty people, he was heard repeatedly to murmur, ‘Too large a house now for so small a family.’
He had lost none of his sardonic humour. His wife, the stout, managing, unimaginative Contessina, upbraided him for crying out every time he was carried in his chair towards a doorway as though his painful foot had already been knocked against the jamb. ‘Why do you scream so?’ she asked him. ‘Nothing has happened.’
‘If anything had happened,’ he replied, ‘there wouldn't be any use crying out.’
When it was proposed to him that a measure should be introduced making it illegal for priests to gamble, he had suggested that it would be better to begin by forbidding them loaded dice; and when his wife asked him why he sat so long with his eyes shut, he answered her sadly, ‘To get them used to it.’
He closed them for the last time on 1 August 1464, ‘aged a little less than seventy-six years in his villa called Careggi’. It was afterwards maintained in Machiavelli's Istorie fiorentine that the funeral, which took place the next day, was ‘conducted with the utmost pomp and solemnity, the whole city following his corpse to the tomb’. In fact, in accordance with his own wishes, there was little display. His contemporary, the silk merchant Marco Parenti, said that his body was ‘accompanied only by the priests of San Lorenzo and the friars of San Marco and the Abbey of Fiesole (churches he had built), and a few citizens who were relatives and friends’. The Signoria, which had already described him as Capo della Repubblica, later issued a public decree conferring upon him the title Pater Patriae; and these words were inscribed on his marble memorial directly above his tomb in the chancel at San Lorenzo, a memorial designed by Andrea del Verrocchio, the only one ever to be placed there.15
‘His life was full of honour, commented Pope Pius II by way of epitaph. ‘His honour extended beyond his own city to Italy, indeed to the whole world.’
10
WIVES AND WEDDINGS 1464 – 72
‘I always kept my papers not loose in my sleeve, but locked up in my study, into which I never allowed my wife to enter, either alone or with me.’
LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI
‘Since he died, things continue smoothly,’ wrote one Florentine citizen in the month of Cosimo's death, ‘and I believe that those who have been in power will continue to be so. May God keep them united and let them manage well.’ There were others, however, who were hoping for a change of regime. ‘It appeared to the Florentines,’ commented the silk merchant, Marco Parenti, ‘that from Cosimo's way of governing they had experienced a certain subjection and servitude from which they believed his death would liberate them.’ Certainly, long before Cosimo died several of his leading rivals had been considering how best to take over the government of Florence once his invalid son, Piero, became head of the Medici family. One of the most influential of the enemies of the Medici was Niccolò Soderini, a gifted orator from an old family which produced no fewer than sixteen Gonfalonieri, an idealist with an almost mystical reverence for the city's constitution as it had existed in the time of his forebears. He abhorred the system whereby accoppiatori had been allowed to take over the selection of the priori and vehemently pressed for the reinstitution of election by lot so that no single family such as the Medici would henceforth be able to pack the Signoria with their friends and allies. Within less than a year of Cosimo's death, Niccolò Soderini had managed to enlist sufficient support to get the accoppiatori temporarily abolished; and on 1 November 1465 he himself walked in solemn procession in his new red robes of office to the Palazzo della Signoria as the duly elected Gonfaloniere, while his admirers shouted their approval and placed a crown of olive leaves upon his head.
Once in office, however, he showed himself to be a philosopher rather than a politician. His speeches, not always entirely coherent, were much admired for their passionate sincerity; but when he proposed some measure which, in pursuit of the revival of an imagined past, seemed to threaten the oligarchy, all those whose fortunes depended upon its continuance, whether Mediceans or not, combined to defeat him. After his two months' office was over he led his fellow priori out of the Palazzo – on which was posted a large placard reading ‘Nine Fools are Out’ – as determined as ever to loosen the grip of the Medici family upon the government of Florence, but more ready to listen to those who believed that it would have to be broken by force.
These proponents of forceful action became known as the ‘Party of the Hill’, since they centred round Cosimo's former henchman, the rich, ambitious Luca Pitti, whose vast palace on the rising ground of the Oltrarno was now nearing completion. Two other leading members of the Party of the Hill were Cosimo's erstwhile friend Agnolo Acciaiuoli, the loquacious and highly cultivated former Florentine ambassador in Paris who, from being one of Cosimo's closest friends, had become one of his severest critics, and Diotisalvi Neroni, also a diplomat, who had served as ambassador in both Venice and Milan.1
The Party of the Hill seized their opportunity to act against the Party of the Plain when the Medici's principal foreign ally, Francesco Sforza, died in Milan, to be succeeded by his son, Galeazzo Maria, a sinister young man with a reputation for acts of appalling cruelty. Luca Pitti and his friends argued that the alliance with Milan must now be broken and that Florence should return instead to its old close friendship with her sister republic, Venice. Piero de' Medici maintained, as his father Cosimo had done, that the Milanese alliance was essential to Florence's prosperity.
Piero was a far more able man than his critics allowed, scrupulous, methodical and resolute, as well as patient and courteous. His portrait bust carved when he was thirty-seven by Mino da Fiesole gives an authentic impression of power and authority.2 Known as Il Gottoso, Piero was often incapacitated by illness, by arthritis as well as gout, and was constantly plagued by eczema, yet he had been elected a priore in 1548, was Gonfalionere a few years later, the last Medici to serve in that office, and had been Florentine ambassador in Venice, Milan and Paris where King Louis XI, impressed by his qualities, had granted him permission to decorate one of the balls of the Medici arms with three of the lilies of the House of Valois.
He was clearly determined that the Medici should maintain their position as the leading family in the republic of Florence, the position which they had so unquestionably held in the time of his father. He adopted the word Semper as his motto; while on Donatello's Judith Slaying Holofernes he had this inscription incised: ‘Kingdoms fall through luxury, cities rise through virtues. Behold the neck of pride severed by humility. Piero, son of Cosimo de' Medici, has dedicated the statue of this woman to the liberty and fortitude bestowed on the Republic by the invincible and constant spirit of its citizens.’
Piero's qualities were complemented by those of his wife, the mother of his five healthy children, the charming and gifted Lucrezia Tornabuoni, whose rich father was owner of a fine palace in one of Florence's principal streets.3 Lucrezia was a clever as well as a delightful and affectionate woman, a poet of more than average ability, a capable businesswoman and something of a scholar. This was not so unusual in a Florentine woman then as it would have been a hundred years earlier.
In the Middle Ages few women were taught to perform other than domestic tasks, and few could read or write unless they were nuns. They were subservient first to their fathers, then to their husbands or the mother superior of their convent. At home submissive, when walking abroad they were expected to be discreet and demure, taking care not to meet men's eyes, perhaps to wear a topaz, a precious stone that quelled passion and desire. Not all that much had changed
. Most women were still largely valued for their dowries and their capacity for child-bearing. They still enjoyed little legal independence; the ancient rite of morgenabio emphasized the tradition that a husband bought his wife. When the daughter of a house agreed to accept a suitor's hand, the bridegroom presented her family with six rings in token of his purchase, two when his offer for her was accepted, two on the day of the wedding, and two on the following morning. Once a marriage had taken place it was generally understood that there were matters in which the wife should not presume to interfere, rooms which she might not enter. Lucrezia de' Medici's daughter-in-law was to complain that a dress she wanted to wear was kept in a cupboard to which her husband had the only key. ‘Never touch the box or purse or other place in which he keeps his money,’ one Florentine mother advised her daughter. ‘And if it so happens that for any reason you do touch it… put it back carefully… Also, I command you to be discreet, and not to desire to know too much… for it is most unseemly for women to know as much as men about masculine affairs.’
Cosimo de' Medici's friend, Vespasiano da Bisticci, went so far as to say that women should consider nothing but God and their own husbands; and Cosimo himself never allowed his wife into his study, in obedience to a custom which Leon Battista Alberti's experience suggested was quite usual: ‘I always kept my papers not loose in my sleeve, but locked up in my study, into which I never allowed my wife to enter, either alone or with me.’
Upper-class wives, however, had become much more independent in Lucrezia Tornabuoni's time, not least in their determination not to be dictated to in matters of dress. They paraded about the streets in all manner of styles and colours, with painted lips and plucked eyebrows, in dresses of silk and velvet adorned with sparkling jewels and silver buttons, trains trailing behind long and pointed shoes. Marco Parenti's libro di ricordanze, listing the clothes and materials which formed part of his wife's dowry, gives a good idea of the sumptuousness of a lady's attire. As well as embroidered handkerchiefs, pairs of hose, shoes and slippers, linen collars and belts, the bride's mother provided her with gowns trimmed with fur, woollen dresses, a white and blue silk dress with green velvet sleeves, yard upon yard of rich red damask, seventeen embroidered shirts, twenty-four bonnets.