hung over the gate of the Pitti Palace, indicating that wine could be bought there in the same way as from other lesser palaces in the city; and they remembered with gratitude that, as a young man of twenty, he had remained in Florence in 1630 during an outbreak of plague when others who could afford it had fled.
This plague had been a terrifying calamity. Victims had developed a sudden high fever and racking headaches followed by the eruption of immense, evil-smelling boils, and then delirium. The dead were carried away in carts, with tinkling bells warning the people not to approach. The corpses were then tipped into common graves round which fences were erected to protect the gravediggers from ravenous dogs. All manner of precautions were taken to prevent the spread of the pestilence: coins were rinsed in tubs of vinegar; streets were regularly swept and washed; houses fumigated, floors scrubbed; the mattresses of the dead and their very beds were thrown on to bonfires. People starved themselves, purged themselves, washed themselves in water boiled with herbs, rubbed their skins with the venom of trapped snakes. Masses were said in the piazzas for those who dared not venture into the churches. Sacred relics were paraded through the streets and prayers were offered up for deliverance. Yet, month after month, the pestilence persisted, and before it was over in 1633 at least seven thousand Florentines had perished.
Commending his behaviour during this plague, the Florentines also recognized that while not much of a connoisseur himself and readier no doubt to spend money on plays at the theatre in Via della Pergola20 – and on masques, tableaux vivants, costume parades, ballets on horseback and musical pageants in the Boboli Gardens – the Grand Duke Ferdinando II, encouraged by his brothers, Gian Carlo and Leopoldo, both cardinals, was prepared to act the part of patron of scientists, artists and craftsmen as a good Medici should.
He took an interest in the scientific academy, the Accademia del Cimento, founded by Leopoldo, which began to meet at the Pitti Palace in 1657;21 he also interested himself in Leopoldo's collection of self-portraits, now housed in the corridor that links the Uffizi to the Palazzo Pitti,22 and in the remarkable collection of ivory ornaments assembled by another brother, Mattias.23 And he went out of his way to encourage the artistic activities of his brother, the handsome, dashing reprobate Gian Carlo, who lived in a lovely villa in a delightful garden off Via della Scala, where he made love to a succession of mistresses, often, so it was said, to several at once, and had at least one tiresome rival drowned in a carp pond. It was Gian Carlo who invited the artist Salvator Rosa to come to Florence; and it was he who, having given money for the building of the theatre in Via della Pergola, rented a palazzo for another company in Via del Cocomero, for which Ferdinando Tacca was asked to design sets and scenery.24
Caption
A view of Florence from the Pignone by Gaspare Vanvitelli (1653–1736) in the Galleria Palatina.
The Grand Duke himself promoted the Florentine craft of pietre dure and, to provide space for the family's ever-increasing collection of paintings and sculptures – including the works brought to Florence as a dowry by his wife – he made extensive alterations to the Pitti Palace, providing it with new galleries decorated by some of the most accomplished artists of his time, among them Pietro da Cortona, who painted the Baroque murals in the Sala della Stufa, and Giovanni di San Giovanni, who worked in the Museo degli Argenti sitting in a tub suspended from the ceiling, his gouty legs swathed in bandages.
Foreign visitors to Florence in these years were much taken with the city, and several decided to settle here. There was a contented colony of English Roman Catholics which included Tobie Matthew, the wayward, witty son of the Archbishop of York, who had written complacently in 1608, ‘I live in Florence in an excellent coole terrene, eate good melons, drink wholsome wines, look upon excellent devout pictures, heer choyse musique.’ He and his companions inspected the treasures and curiosities of the Medici then on display in the Pitti Palace, strolled down the bay and myrtle terraces and past the statues and fountains in the Boboli Gardens, marvelled at the mosaics of polychrome marble, lapis lazuli and mother-of-pearl in the Cappella dei Principi in San Lorenzo, took riding lessons from the celebratedRustico Piccardini, made the rounds of the sights which were already becoming traditional – paying more attention to curiosities, objets d'art and objects of virtue than to the works of the early Florentine artists, which were not then much admired – and threw themselves wholeheartedly into the pleasures of the city's festivals, the procession of black-faced puppets around the lantern-lit streets on Twelfth Night, the costume parades and the balls and receptions of the Carnival, the festivities of Corpus Christi and St John's Day when the squares were filled with flowers, and candles glittered in palace windows and when, in the Piazza della Signoria, stalls were set up for the sale of cakes and wine, and meat and vegetables were cooked in huge pots set upon open fires.
‘The beauty and security of the place, and purity of the language’ were good reasons for travellers to visit Florence, Sir Henry Wotton, sometime English ambassador in Venice, observed. Other travellers praised the city's inns. Fynes Moryson, whose Itinerary Containing his Ten Yeeres Travell was published in 1617, described them as ‘most neate’, their tables invitingly spread from morning to night with white cloths, glasses of ‘divers coloured wines’ and dishes of fruit, all gaily decorated with flowers and fig leaves:
At the table they touch no meate with the hand, but with a forke of silver or other metall, each man being served with his forke and spoone, and glass to drinke… And as they serve small peeces of flesh (not whole joints as with us) so these peeces are cut into small bits, to be taken up with the forke… In Summer time they set a broad earthern vessel full of water upon the Table, wherein little glasses filled with wine doe swimme for coolnesse.
These were the years when, as Sir Harold Acton has observed,
the characteristics of Florentine life were an extensive gaiety and Bohemianism; and these gave birth to the best literature of the age, to that burlesque poetry and prose which is still so kicking, so alive. Everywhere you looked there was evidence of this gaiety: on the steps of Santa Maria del Fiore, before Santa Croce or on the bridge of Santa Trinita, when the improvvisatori sweated verses from every pore… One might go so far as to say that no serious matter was dealt with, no problem solved without a reaction of rollicking repartee. The general feeling was… ‘Eat, drink and play at leisure; for after death's no pleasure.’ There was an epidemic of bisboccia, a term whose syllables express the sense: gross feeding, heavy drinking and a prompt answer to the calls of lust.
The result, instead of an abatement of vigour, was a fermentation in every field, fanned by science into general fecundity. Sweet music was now composed for every instrument; painters frescoed the interiors and exteriors of whole churches and palaces with their riotous visions: complicated perspectives swarming with foreshortened and elongated figures in ecstatic attitudes – deceptive tricks of chiaroscuro, bituminous shadows and sudden shafts of light. The most esteemed painters and architects were those who could work fastest.
Some foreign students, caught up in this excitement, remained for long periods in Florence. Nicholas Stone the Younger, the mason and sculptor, was one of these. In his diary for August 1638 he made entries on successive days: ‘I drew after the head of Antonino Pio… I drew after a great head of Cicero; the great Duke [Ferdinando II] came in the gallery; looked on my drawing; told me I was a gallant huomo… I drew after the same head; the great Duke came thaire with his brother, who overlooked all my drawings… I drew after a piece of Carace… I drew a folliage for memory.’
A few years later that indefatigable sightseer, John Evelyn, came to Florence and was much taken by the city's ‘fowre most sumptuous bridges’, by the Column of Justice in the Piazza Santa Trinita and the ‘most remarkable’ porphyry statue adorning it, the Church of Santo Spirito ‘where the Altar and Reliquary is most rich and full of precious stones’, the Strozzi Palace, ‘a Princly piece of Architecture if any in th
e World be’, the Pitti Palace, ‘of late infinitely beautified’, the Boboli Gardens, ‘full of all Variety, hills, dales, rocks, Groves, aviaries, vivaries, fountaines… and what ever may render such a paradise delightful’.
Delightful as Florence may have appeared to John Evelyn, the Grand Duke Ferdinando II's son, Cosimo, did not seem to find it so. Plump, priggish and gloomy, with large and heavy features and drooping eyelids, he was ‘dominated by melancholy to an extraordinary degree’, the Lucchese ambassador reported. ‘The Grand Duke is affable with everyone, as ready with a laugh as with a joke, whereas the Prince is never seen to smile.’ He exhibited ‘symptoms of a singular piety’.
His father, hoping to enliven him, considered that he should be married as soon as possible and that there could be no more suitable bride than the King of France's young cousin, Marguerite-Louise d'Orléans, a healthy girl, sprightly and energetic. The girl herself had other ideas. She was in love with another of her French cousins, Prince Charles of Lorraine, and dreaded the idea of leaving France for marriage to a fat and mournful Italian, heir to a now impoverished duchy.
In Paris, however, the marriage was as much favoured as it was in Florence, since King Louis XIV's powerful minister, Cardinal Mazarin, had hopes of becoming Pope and was anxious to obtain the support of the Medici. Marguerite-Louise, then fifteen years old, knelt before her cousin the King of France, and begged him to save her from her impending fate. Her passionate pleas were in vain: Cardinal Mazarin had his way. In the spring of 1661, having been married by proxy to Cosimo in Paris, she left for Florence, ‘crying aloud for everyone to hear’.
She was as miserable in Florence as she had feared she would be, thoroughly disliking her unresponsive, inappetent husband, finding fault with everything Tuscan because it was not French, rarely going out in public and then always masked, affecting to believe that the Florentines, notoriously skilled in such mysteries, were concocting poisons to kill her and insisting that all her food be tasted first by her steward. Homesick, bored and sulky, she was asked how she liked Florence. She grumpily replied she would have liked it much better had it been nearer Paris.
Extravagant as well as pert, spending huge sums of money on her clothes, on her table and her French attendants, she was ‘deaf to protests’, the Venetian ambassador reported. ‘It is her usual conceit to say that she has
The Grand Duke Cosimo III (1642 – 1723) as a Canon of the Lateran. A portrait by an unknown artist in the Museo Mediceo.
married beneath her, into a family vastly inferior to her proper merit; and this pricks the family at the most delicate point of their sensibilities.’ By the end of their first month together her husband, to whom she rarely spoke, had ‘couched with her only three times’, another observer, the Bishop of Béziers, reported. ‘Every time he does not go, he sends a valet to tell her not to wait up for him.’
Refusing to mend her ways, and having, in her own words, ‘tried in vain for twelve long years to change her feelings’, she was at last permitted to go home to France. There she took to wearing thick rouge and a yellow wig, indulged herself with several lovers, including a renegade monk and a groom who cracked nuts for her between his teeth, chased an abbess who criticized her conduct down the corridors of her convent with a hatchet in one hand and a pistol in the other, and wrote repeated letters to Florence demanding money, though she had taken an immense sum with her when she left, as well as wall hangings, beds and numerous valuable articles from the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano, where she had lived with an extremely large household numbering over 150 servants and attendants.
At the time of her departure her husband was thirty-two, excessively fat, since he was an inveterate trencherman, consuming gargantuan platefuls of the richest delicacies. More than ever given to pious interjections, he was, however, not quite as priggish as he had been in the past, capable even, when troubling himself to exercise it, of a certain charm of manner. His father had died in 1670, and had been buried near his father and grandfather in the great baroque Cappella dei Principi at San Lorenzo;25 and, as Grand Duke, Cosimo III had immediately shown himself determined to stamp out immorality in Florence as well as the prevalent heresies.
In obedience to the wishes of the Inquisition, scientists and philosophers were no longer afforded the protection they had been accustomed to receive from his predecessors; and a strict watch was kept upon the instruction given at the University of Pisa to Florentine students, who were expressly forbidden to attend any academic institutions beyond the borders of Tuscany. Whereas his great-grandfather Ferdinando I had promised religious toleration to Jews and encouraged them to settle in Leghorn – which consequently even today has a higher proportion of Jews than any other Italian city – Cosimo persecuted them severely, imposing fines on Christians who employed them. Jews who consorted with Christian prostitutes were also heavily fined, while the prostitutes themselves – compelled to identify themselves by wearing yellow ribbons in their hats or hair and to buy licences to walk abroad at night – were whipped through the streets with a placard reading ‘For Whoredom’ hung over their breasts. Constantly badgered by officials of the Office of Public Decency, who hid in doorways to catch them out in some infringement of the law such as not carrying a lighted torch, prostitutes were in perpetual danger of being thrown into the fearful prison, the Stinche, where many ended their days.
Innocent girls caught singing the traditional songs of the May Day festival were also liable to be whipped, and the Calendimaggio itself was banned as a pagan celebration. The traditional ceremonies of Lent were observed with exceptional diligence. The seven thorns from Christ's crown were borne in procession through the streets from the church of San Piero Maggiore;26 and in another procession were borne all the many objects connected with the Crucifixion, each carried separately in the hands of a long line of mourners – nails and hammers, vinegar and sponge, spear, purple robe and dice – followed by an image of Christ under a black canopy and of the Blessed Virgin, also in black, holding a white handkerchief. There were also processions of chanting flagellants as in the days following the Black Death. A solemn sermon against blasphemy was preached in Santo Spirito, and the city's prostitutes were summoned, under threat of grave penalties, to attend a Holy Week sermon in Santa Maria del Fiore. After the Matins of Darkness clergy and congregation alike beat the floor of the church with willow rods, creating that unearthly noise intended to represent nature's protest at Christ's sacrifice. On Good Friday, as the people were leaving the churches at three o'clock, vergers followed them with wooden clappers, signalling to all in the streets to kneel and pray. The Grand Duke himself, as custom and duty dictated, worshipped in seven churches, going from one to the other on foot. Punishments for the disobedient were severe. In the Grand Duke Cosimo's day, indeed, men could be and sometimes were stretched on the rack for illicit sexual intercourse and beheaded for buggery: the severed heads of sodomites were occasionally displayed on the wall of the Bargello. Public executions became commonplace. Murderers were not merely executed but afterwards quartered; and Cosimo would have had one particular murderer tortured with red-hot pincers had not the magistrates advised against it ‘because of the disgust that it would give the city’.
The city was, in fact, already disgusted with Cosimo's rule. All over Tuscany trade was declining, and the population of the whole area was being constantly decreased by malaria, plague and food shortages due to a backward agriculture. There had been repeated crop failures since 1619, which had seen the worst harvests ‘in the history and memory of past times’; wool production, which had fallen by half in the first half of the seventeenth century, was still declining; the families which had been proud to run merchant houses in the past now considered commerce beneath them. ‘Florence is much sunk from what it was,’ wrote Gilbert Burnet, whose account of his travels in Italy was published in 1686. ‘They do not reckon there are above fifty thousand souls in it [plague and malaria had both taken heavy toll and, in one particularly virulent e
pidemic of influenza, some 8,000 people had died in Florence in a single week]… 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.’ A French visitor, François Maximilien Misson, agreed:
Although Florence is certainly one of the finest cities in the world, and has the advantage of a most delicious situation, yet it must appear a very sad and melancholy place to those who are accustomed to enjoy the pleasures of society. Sir D., who, you know, has resided here for several years, is not able to express his uneasiness under the intolerable constraint and eternal ceremonies of this place, and particularly exclaims against the invisibility of the beautiful sex.
There were but two reasonable hotels in the 1670s and only one pensione; and visitors invited to stay in a private house or palace might well regret accepting the invitation: in the house of Lorenzo Magalotti, secretary of the Academy of the Cimento, a family goat wandered about from room to room until it died after drinking the contents of a chamber-pot – not Lorenzo's pot, he was careful to point out, since drinking the contents of that could have done the goat nothing but good.
Scarcely a month passed without the imposition of some new tax, while the existing rates, from which the clergy were largely exempt, were perpetually being increased. Cosimo also raised money by selling merchants exclusive rights to deal in certain essential commodities such as flour or salt, and then, for a fee, issuing tradesmen with special licences enabling them to evade the monopoly. Severe punishments were imposed upon those who tried to find ways round the regulations. Extracting salt from fish brine, for instance, was declared a capital offence. Occasionally the money raised by taxes was used to buy a work of art to add to the Medici collections; but more often than not it was spent on some expensive present for a distinguished foreign visitor, on a holy relic of dubious provenance or on the expensive delicacies served at the grand-ducal table, where capons, weighed in front of him, were sent back to the kitchens by Cosimo if they did not turn the scales at twenty pounds.
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