The House Of Medici
Page 36
5. The original PITTI PALACE was built in the 1450s and 1460s by Luca Pitti who received 20,000 florins from Cosimo as a contribution towards its cost as a reward for his political services to the Medicean party. It was probably designed by Luca Fancelli. After Ammanati had finished his alterations for Duke Cosimo I and Eleonora of Toledo – the courtyard was completed in 1562 – the façade was again widened by Giulio and Alfonso Parigi in the seventeenth century and two new wings were added by Giuseppe Ruggieri in the eighteenth century. At that time it was known as the Grand Ducal Palace. After the Risorgimento, the Pitti was made over to the House of Savoy and was presented to the nation by King Victor Emmanuel III. It now houses five museums. The Museo degli Argenti on the ground floor contains many of the treasures collected by the Medici.
6. The BOBOLI GARDENS still contain works by all these artists as well as by Giambologna, Fancelli, Cioli, Pietro Tacca, Caccini and Romolo del Tadda. The amphitheatre, shaped on a Roman model, was the site of the performance of Il Mondo Festeggiante given to celebrate the marriage of the Grand Duke Cosimo III. The Giardino del Cavaliere is laid out on the site of a bastion built by Michelangelo during the siege of 1529. The terrace beneath was built for Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici.
7. The original PONTE SANTA TRINITÀ was built in the thirteenth century. The statues on Ammanati’s bridge, Spring and Autumn (by Giovanni Caccini), Summer (by Pietro Francavilla) and Winter (by Taddeo Landini) were made for the Grand Duke Cosimo’s marriage in 1608. The bridge was blown up in 1944. It was rebuilt after the war exactly as it had been before, the masons using copies of sixteenth-century tools to ensure its authenticity. The façade of the CHURCH OF SANTA TRINITÀ was commissioned by the Grand Duke Ferdinando I from Buontalenti and completed in 1594.
8. The PONTE ALLA CARRAIA, first built at the beginning of the thirteenth century, was three times destroyed by floods, and once, in 1304, collapsed under the weight of spectators watching a river festival. It was re-built for the fifth time by Ammanati in 1559. The present bridge was built after the last war, its predecessor having been blown up in 1944.
9. The LOGGIA DEI LANZI was originally known as the Loggia dei Signori. It was built towards the end of the fourteenth century to plans drawn by Simone Talenti as a covered area for public ceremonies. Its present name is derived from Duke Cosimo I’s Swiss soldiers, the Landsknechte, who were quartered in barracks nearby. In Duke Cosimo’s time, it became the open-air sculpture gallery that it still is. Cellini’s Perseus was placed there in 1554. Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabines came in 1583 when Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes, which had formerly been placed on the ringhiera of the Palazzo della Signoria, was returned to the Piazza. Behind these two pieces are another Giambologna, a Roman copy of a Greek statue of Menelaus supporting the body of Patroclus and Pio Fedi’s Rape of Polixena. Six Roman statues which the Grand Duke Ferdinando I brought from the Villa Medici in Rome are in the back row.
10. Although work began in 1605, under the direction of Ferdinando I, to realize Cosimo I’s conception of a huge CAPPELLA DEI PRINCIPI, the structure was not finished until 1737, and the decoration of the cupola not completed until 1836. Until ready to receive them in the reign of Cosimo III, the bodies of the Grand Dukes and their wives and sons were temporarily buried in the new and old sacristies. Generations of craftsmen in pietra dura were kept intermittently at work on the elaborate tombs of the three Cosimos, the two Ferdinandos and the Grand Duke Francesco which surround the walls.
The sixteen coats-of-arms inlaid in the floor in marble, coral, jasper, agate, mother-of-pearl and lapis-lazuli are of the cities subject to the Grand Duchy. All the Grand Dukes were buried in the crypt below the mausoleum with their jewelled crowns still upon their heads and their sceptres in their hands. All the Grand Duchesses were also buried here with the one exception of Francesco I’s widow Bianca Capello. When Buontalenti asked Ferdinando I where his sister-in-law should be buried, the Grand Duke, who had detested her, replied ‘Wherever you like, we will not have her amongst us.’ The site of her grave is unknown.
11. The complicated and inventive plans for the GARDEN OF THE VILLA OF CASTELLO (see note 6 to chapter XIII) were drawn up by Benedetto Varchi for Duke Cosimo I and put in hand by Tribolo, Ammanati and Buontalenti. But they were never fully realized. Works by Tribolo, Ammanati and Giambologna can all still be seen in the gardens, though Giambologna’s Fountain of Venus Wringing out her Hair has been removed to Petraia and his bronze animals from the grotto are in the Bargello.
CHAPTER XXI
1. The putto on the fountain at present in the COURTYARD OF THE PALAZZO VECCHIO is a copy of the original by Verrocchio, which is kept in one of the rooms off the Sala dei Gigli. The murals are by Marco da Fienza, Giovanni Lombardi and Cesare Baglioni.
2. BIANCA CAPELLO’S HOUSE is in the Via Maggio (nos. 24–6).
3. VILLA PRATOLINO – designed by Buontalenti and fifteen years in the making – was demolished in 1822 on the grounds that it was too expensive to maintain. Fifty years later the estate was purchased by Prince Paul Demidoff. The Villa Demidoff which replaced Pratolino passed into the hands of Prince Paul of Yugoslavia who restored it and has now sold it. Giambologna’s huge statue, L’ APPENINO, remains in the grounds. Other statues were taken to the Boboli Gardens, like Perseus and the Dragon, which was intended as an allegorical portrait of the Grand Duke Cosimo I.
4. The PALAZZO ANTINORI at the junction of the Via Tornabuoni and the Via Rondinelli was built for the Boni family.
5. The VILLA OF CERETO GUIDI originally belonged to the Guidi. Buontalenti renovated it and built the immense double ramps leading up to it for the Grand Duke Cosimo I in the 1560s.
6. The headquarters of the ACCADEMIA DELLA CRUSCA, which will soon be transferred to the Villa Castello, are at present in the Palazzo dei Giudici.
7. The porcelain made in Florence in the time of the Grand Duke Francesco was the first to be made in Europe, and is now the rarest, there being only about seventy pieces in existence. One of these – a small, misshapen bowl – was sold in New York in 1973 for £180,000, the highest recorded price paid at an auction for European porcelain. Other pieces are in the Louvre, the Musée de Sèvres, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
8. The VILLA MEDICI in Rome, designed by Annibale Lippi for Cardinal Ricci in 1544, was purchased by Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici in 1577. He was the first of several Medici cardinals to live there. The façade and the ground plan of the garden remain unchanged. The figure of MERCURY (c. 1565), now at the Bargello, once formed part of a fountain in the villa grounds. The fountain now in front of the villa originally had a Florentine lily in the centre. This was replaced by the existing stone cannon-ball after Queen Christina, being given permission to experiment with one of the Castel Sant’ Angelo cannon, had fired at random down into the town instead of up into the air. Her shot struck the Villa Medici. Napoleon bought the villa in 1803. It now houses the French Academy.
9. The FORTE DI BELVEDERE, also known as the Fortezza di San Giorgio, now houses numerous murals removed from various buildings in other parts of the city, including those from the Chiostro degli Aranci at the Badia Fiesolana, from the Chiostro Verde at Santa Maria Novella, from the Loggia of the Bigallo in Piazza San Giovanni (by Ambrogio di Baldese and Rosello di Jacopo Franchi) and from Via Pietrapiana (No. 7) by Mino da Fiesole whose house this was. Also stored here is Botticelli’s Annunciation from the church of San Martino in Via della Scala.
10. The VILLA PETRAIA was brought by Cardinal Francesco de’ Medici from the widow of Filippo Salutati in 1595. The courtyard is decorated with frescoes celebrating the history of the Medici family by Baldassare Franceschini, ‘il Volterrano’, who painted them for the Grand Duke Ferdinando I’s son, Don Lorenzo de’ Medici. After the Risorgimento the villa passed into the hands of the House of Savoy and was altered and redecorated by King Victor Emmanuel II.
11. The VILLA FERDINANDA at Artimino, which is
about four miles south-west of Poggio a Caiano, was built in 1594–5. It was sold to Marchese Lorenzo Bartolommei in 1781 and, though restored in the early years of this century, now lies empty.
12. This sphere is now in the MUSEO ZAZIONALE DI STORIA DELLA SCIENZE in the Palazzo dei Giudici overlooking the Arno, next to the Uffizi. The palazzo formerly belonged to the Castellani family whose chapel is in Santa Croce. It takes its present name from the Consiglio di Giustizia which was established here in the time of the Grand Duke Ferdinando I. The museum contains numerous terrestial globes, astrolabes, clocks and maps as well as Michelangelo’s compasses and Galileo’s telescopes.
13. The PALAZZOBELLINI is in Borgo Pinti (no. 26). The Grand Duke Ferdinando I’s bust is over the door.
14. The STATUE OF DUKE COSIMO in the Piazza della Signoria was made by Giambologna in the Palazzo Bellini between 1587 and 1599. The equestrian STATUE OF GRAND DUKE FERDIN ANDOI in the Piazza Santissima Annunziata was begun by Giambologna in the last year of his long life and finished in 1608 by Pietro Tacca who moved into the Palazzo Bellini on his master’s death.
15. Although he decided that the Medici emblem, the palle, was too commercial in its associations and had it replaced by a bee (the ancient symbol of the autarch whose life is busily devoted to his people’s welfare). Ferdinando I nevertheless sought to honour the great founders of the Medici fortunes. At the base of the immense granite COLUMN OF JUSTICE which had been set up in the Piazza Santa Trinità in 1565 to mark the place where a messenger had given Cosimo I news of the victory of Montemurlo, Ferdinando erected four stucco statues. One was a representation of Augustus; another was of Charlemagne; the third was of Cosimo I; and the fourth was of Cosimo the Elder, Pater Patriae. The column came from the Baths of Caracalla and was presented to Duke Cosimo I by Pope Pius IV. It was hauled from Rome to Civitavecchia on rollers, and transported from Pisa to Florence on barges. The porphyry statue, which was placed on it in 1581, is believed to be by Romolo del Tadda.
16. The VILLA OF POGGIO IMPERIALE had once belonged to the Baroncelli and then to the Salviati. It derives its present name from the Grand Duchess Maria Maddalena of Austria who bought it in 1619. It was afterwards the home of Napoleon’s sister, Elisa Baciocchi, and is now a girls’ school.
17. Three hundred volumes of Galileo’s papers are now housed in the BIBLIOTECA NAZIONALE in the Corso dei Tintori where collections of Poliziano’s, Michelangelo’s and Machiavelli’s papers are also kept. Many of the manuscripts and books are from the Grand Ducal Library, the Palatina, formed by Ferdinando II and his brothers, Gian Carlo and Leopoldo.
18. Galileo’s body was removed from the Novices’ Chapel in Santa Croce in 1737 and reburied on the north side of the west door.
CHAPTER XXII
1. The ORIFICIO DELLE PIETRE DURE was moved from the Uffizi in 1796 and is now in the Via degli Alfani (no. 78) where craftsmen still work and are trained.
2. The work of GIOVANNI DA SAN GIOVANNI may be seen on the east wall of Room IV at the Pitti Palace. Assisted by Baldassare Franceschini, il Volterrano, he also painted the Allegory of the Union of the Houses of Medici and Della Rovere in the vault. Lorenzo and the Platonic Academy at Careggi and the Allegory of Lorenzo’s death on the north wall are by Francesco Furini. Lorenzo the Magnificent Receives Apollo on the south wall is by Cecco Bravo. Lorenzo surrounded by Artists, between the windows, is by Ottavio Vannini.
3. Among these latest acquisitions were numerous beautiful pieces of sculpture including the Hermaphrodite, the head of Cicero, and the Idolino. Ruben’s Consequences of War was bought by Ferdinando II. Veronese’s Daniele Barbaro, Portrait of a Man and Holy Family with Santa Barbara were in Cardinal Leopoldo’s collection. Raphael’s portrait of Pope Julius II, Titian’s Recumbent Venus, Magdalena, La Bella and Portrait of a Grey-eyed Nobleman, together with Piero della Francesca’s famous portrait of Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, and his wife Battista Sforza, were all acquired in 1634 on Ferdinando’s marriage to Vittoria della Rovere.
4. Most of these turned-ivory ornaments were brought back to Florence by Prince Mattias de’ Medici from the Castle of Coburg. They are in Room X.
5. The TEATRO DELLA PERGOLA (Via della Pergola, 12) was built by Ferdinando Tacca in 1656. The present building, designed by Bartolommeo Silvestri, is early-nineteenth-century.
6. The Via del Cocomero is now the Via Ricasoli.
7. Gian Carlo’s garden in the Via della Scala, where the members of the Platonic Academy had sometimes held their debates, has now been built over.
8. The enormous, forbidding VILLA AMBROGIANA was originally built as a hunting lodge. The Grand Duke Cosimo III hung its walls with pictures of rare animals and flowers. It is now a mental hospital.
CHAPTER XXIII
1. The VILLA LAPPEGGI stood for longer than eighteen years, though after the Cardinal’s death the second storey had to be removed for fear that the walls supporting it would fall down into the garden. Its shaky structure was badly damaged by an earthquake in 1895 and will soon, by all appearances, collapse altogether.
CHAPTER XXIV
1. It was left to the despised Lorrainers and the ministers of the Grand Duke Francesco’s energetic son, Pietro Leopoldo, to reform the exhausted and oppressed State, the chaotic legislation and the exploited countryside of Florence which were the social and economic legacy of the later Medici. The splendour of their artistic and cultural legacy – the exuberance and elaborate craftsmanship of Florentine baroque art as triumphantly exemplified by such masters as Cosimo III’s sculptor, Giovanni Battista Foggini – has only recently been recognized. The exhibition held in Detroit and at the Pitti Palace in 1974, ‘The Twilight of the Medici’ – which would have made scant appeal to Bernard Berenson – was the first of its kind.
THE PRINCIPAL MEDICI PORTRAITS, BUSTS AND STATUES IN FLORENCE
Subject
Work
Artist
Location
Giovanni di Bicci
Posthumous painting
Bronzino
Medici-Riccardi Palace
Giovanni di Bicci
Painting
Zanobi Strozzi
Medici-Riccardi Palace
Cosimo Pater Patriae
Posthumous painting
Pontormo
Uffizi
Cosimo Pater Patriae
Painting (being presented with model of San Lorenzo by Brunelleschi)
Vasari
Palazzo della Signoria
Lorenzo di Giovanni
Posthumous painting
Bronzino
Uffizi
Piero di Cosimo
Bust
Mino da Fiesole
Bargello
Giovanni di Cosimo
Bust
Mino da Fiesole
Bargello
Lorenzo il Magnifico
Posthumous painting
Vasari
Uffizi
Lorenzo il Magnifico
Fresco (with members of the Sassetti family)
Ghirlandaio
Sassetti Chapel, Santa Trinità
Lorenzo il Magnifico
Fresco (seated before Cardinal Giovanni)
Vasari
Palazzo della Signoria
Lorenzo il Magnifico
Painting
Florentine school, early fifteenth century
Medici-Riccardi Palace
Lorenzo il Magnifico
Death mask
Medici-Riccardi Palace
Piero Francesco di Lorenzo
Painting
Vasari
Palazzo della Signoria
Piero di Lorenzo
Painting
Bronzino
Medici-Riccardi Palace
Piero di Lorenzo
Bust
Verrocchio
Bargello
Giuliano di Lorenzo
Fresco (as boy with tutor, Poliziano)
Ghirlandaio
Sassetti C
hapel, Santa Trinità
(?) Contessina
Bust
Donatello
Bargello
(?) Fioretta Gorini
Painting
Botticelli
Pitti
Pope Leo X
Painting (with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Liugi de’ Rossi
Raphael
Uffizi
Pope Leo X
Fresco (proceeding through Florence)
Vasari
Palazzo della Signoria
Pope Leo X
Fresco (creating thirty Cardinals)
Vasari
Palazzo della Signoria
Pope Clement VII
Painting
Bronzino
Medici-Riccardi Palace
Duke Alessandro
Painting
Vasari
Medici-Riccardi Palace
Ippolito
Painting
Titian
Pitti
Caterina
Painting (aet 21)
Poggio a Caiano
Caterina
Painting (aet 40)
Pourbus
Uffizi
Giovanni di Pierfrancesco
Painting
Vasari
Palazzo della Signoria
Caterina Sforza
Painting
Vasari
Palazzo della Signoria
Giovanni della Bande Nere
Statue