The presence now of all those busy-tongued people — bargaining or gossiping, whichever they were — gave its own touch to the peculiarly noble effect of the piazza, as it rose before me from the gentle slope of the Via Borgo dei Greci. I was coming back from that visit to Santa Croce, of which I have tried to give the sentiment, and I was resentfully tingling still with the cold, and the displeasure of a backward glance at the brand-new ugliness of the façade, and of the big clumsy Dante on his pedestal before it, when all my burden suddenly lifted from me, as if nothing could resist the spring of that buoyant air. It was too much for even the dull, vague rage I felt at having voluntarily gone through that dreary old farce of old-master doing again, in which the man only averagely instructed in the history of art is at his last extreme of insincerity, weariness, and degradation, — the ridiculous and miserable slave of the guide-book asterisks marking this or that thing as worth seeing. All seemed to rise and float away with the thin clouds, chasing one another across the generous space of afternoon sky which the piazza opened to the vision; and my spirit rose as light as the lion of the Republic, which capers so nimbly up the staff on top of the palace tower.
There is something fine in the old piazza being still true to the popular and even plebeian use. In narrow and crowded Florence, one might have supposed that fashion would have tried to possess itself of the place, after the public palace became the residence of the Medici; but it seems not to have changed its ancient character. It is now the starting-point of a line of omnibuses; a rank of cabs surrounds the base of Cosimo’s equestrian statue; the lottery is drawn on the platform in front of the palace; second-rate shops of all sorts face it from two sides, and the restaurants and cafés of the neighbourhood are inferior. But this unambitious environment leaves the observer all the freer to his impressions of the local art, the groups of the Loggia dei Lanzi, the symmetrical stretch of the Portico degli Uffizzi, and, best of all, the great, bold, irregular mass of the old palace itself, beautiful as some rugged natural object is beautiful, and with the kindliness of nature in it. Plenty of men have been hung from its windows, plenty dashed from its turrets, slain at its base, torn in pieces, cruelly martyred before it; the wild passions of the human heart have beaten against it like billows; it has faced every violent crime and outbreak. And yet it is sacred, and the scene is sacred, to all who hope for their kind; for there, in some sort, century after century, the purpose of popular sovereignty — the rule of all by the most — struggled to fulfil itself, purblindly, bloodily, ruthlessly, but never ignobly, and inspired by an instinct only less strong than the love of life. There is nothing superfine, nothing of the salon about the place, nothing of the beauty of Piazza San Marco at Venice, which expresses the elegance of an oligarchy and suggests the dapper perfection of an aristocracy in decay; it is loud with wheels and hoofs, and busy with commerce, and it has a certain ineffaceable rudeness and unfinish like the structure of a democratic state.
XXVII
WHEN Cosimo I., who succeeded Alessandro, moved his residence from the family seat of the Medici to the Palazzo Vecchio, it was as if he were planting his foot on the very neck of Florentine liberty. He ground his iron heel in deeply; the prostrate city hardly stirred afterwards. One sees what a potent and valiant man he was from the terrible face of the bronze bust by Benvenuto Cellini, now in the Bargello Museum; but the world, going about its business these many generations, remembers him chiefly by a horrid crime — the murder of his son in the presence of the boy’s mother. Yet he was not only a great warrior and wild beast; he befriended letters, endowed universities, founded academies, encouraged printing; he adorned his capital with statues and public edifices; he enlarged and enriched the Palazzo Vecchio; he bought Luca Pitti’s palace, and built the Uffizzi, thus securing the eternal gratitude of the tourists who visit these galleries, and have something to talk about at the table d’hôte. It was he who patronised Benvenuto Cellini, and got him to make his Perseus in the Loggia de’ Lanzi; he built the fishermen’s arcade in the Mercato Vecchio and the fine loggia of the Mercato Nuovo; he established the General Archives, and reformed the laws and the public employments; he created Leghorn, and throughout Tuscany, which his arms had united under his rule, he promoted the material welfare of his people, after the manner of tyrants when they do not happen to be also fools.
His care of them in other respects may be judged from the fact that he established two official spies in each of the fifty wards of the city, whose business it was to keep him informed of the smallest events, and all that went on in the houses and streets, together with their conjectures and suspicions. He did not neglect his people in any way; and he not only built all those fine public edifices in Florence, — having merely to put his hand in his people’s pocket and do it, and then take the credit of them, — but he seems to have loved to adorn it with that terrible face of his on many busts and statues. Its ferocity, as Benvenuto Cellini has frankly recorded it, and as it betrays itself in all the effigies, is something to appal us still; and whether the story is true or not, you see in it a man capable of striking his son dead in his mother’s arms. To be sure, Garzia was not Cosimo’s favourite, and, like a Medici, he had killed his brother; but he was a boy, and when his father came to Pisa to find him, where he had taken refuge with his mother, he threw himself at Cosimo’s feet and implored forgiveness. “I want no Cains in my family!” said the father, and struck him with the dagger which he had kept hidden in his breast “Mother! Mother!” gasped the boy, and fell dead in the arms of the hapless woman, who had urged him to trust in his father’s mercy. She threw herself on the bed where they laid her dead son, and never looked on the light again. Some say she died of grief, some that she starved herself; in a week she died, and was carried with her two children to Florence, where it was presently made known that all three had fallen victims to the bad air of the Maremma. She was the daughter of a Spanish king, and eight years after her death her husband married the vulgar and ignoble woman who had long been his mistress. This woman was young, handsome, full of life, and she queened it absolutely over the last days of the bloody tyrant. His excesses had broken Cosimo with premature decrepitude; he was helpless in the hands of this creature, from whom his son tried to separate him in vain; and he was two years in dying, after the palsy had deprived him of speech and motion, but left him able to think and to remember!
The son was that Francesco I. who is chiefly known to fame as the lover and then the husband of Bianca Cappello, — to so little may a sovereign prince come in the crowded and busy mind of after-time. This grand duke had his courts and his camps, his tribunals and audiences, his shows of authority and government; but what we see of him at this distance is the luxurious and lawless youth, sated with every indulgence, riding listlessly by under the window of the Venetian girl who eloped with the Florentine banker’s clerk from her father’s palace in the lagoons, and is now the household drudge of her husband’s family in Florence. She is looking out of the window that looks on Savonarola’s convent, in the tallest of the stupid, commonplace houses that confront it across the square; and we see the prince and her as their eyes meet, and the work is done in the gunpowdery way of southern passion. We see her again at the house of those Spaniards in the Via de’ Banchi, which leads out of our Piazza Santa Maria Novella, from whence the Palazzo Mandragone is actually in sight; and the marchioness is showing Bianca her jewels and — Wait a moment! There is something else the marchioness wishes to show her; she will go get it; and when the door reopens Francesco enters, protesting his love, to Bianca’s confusion, and no doubt to her surprise; for how could she suppose he would be there? We see her then at the head of the grand-ducal court, the poor, plain Austrian wife thrust aside to die in neglect; and then when Bianca’s husband, whom his honours and good fortune have rendered intolerably insolent, is slain by some of the duke’s gentlemen, — in the narrow street at Santo Spirito, hard by the handsome house in Via Maggio which the duke has given her, — we see them married
, and receiving ih state the congratulations of Bianca’s father and brother, who have come on a special embassy from Venice to proclaim the distinguished lady Daughter of the Republic, — and, of course, to withdraw the price hitherto set upon her head. We see them then in the sort of life which must always follow from such love, — the grand duke had spent three hundred thousand ducats in the celebration of his nuptials, — overeating, overdrinking, and seeking their gross pleasures amid the ruin of the State. We see them trying to palm off a supposititious child upon the Cardinal Ferdinand, who was the true heir to his brother, and would have none of his spurious nephew; and we see these three sitting down in the villa at Poggio a Caiano to the famous tart which Bianca, remembering the skill of her first married days, has made with her own hands, and which she courteously presses the Cardinal to be the first to partake of. He politely refuses, being provided with a ring of admirable convenience at that time in Italy, set with a stone that turned pale in the presence of poison. “Some one has to begin,” cries Francesco, impatiently; and in spite of his wife’s signs — she was probably treading on his foot under the table, and frowning at him — he ate of the mortal viand; and then in despair Bianca ate too, and they both died. Is this tart perhaps too much for the reader’s digestion? There is another story, then, to the effect that the grand duke died of the same malarial fever that carried off his brothers Garzia and Giovanni, and Bianca perished of terror and apprehension; and there is still another story that the Cardinal poisoned them both. Let the reader take his choice of them; in any case it is an end of Francesco, whom, as I said, the world remembers so little else of.
It almost forgets that he was privy to the murder of his sister Isabella by her husband Paolo Orsini, and of his sister-in-law Eleonora by her husband Pietro de’ Medici. The grand duke, who was then in the midst of his intrigue with Bianca, was naturally jealous of the purity of his family; and as it has never been denied that both of those unhappy ladies had wronged their husbands, I suppose he can be justified by the moralists who contend that what is a venial lapse in a man is worthy death, or something like it, in a woman. About the taking-off of Eleonora, however, there was something gross, Medicean, butcherly, which all must deprecate. She knew she was to be killed, poor woman, as soon as her intrigue was discovered to the grand duke; and one is not exactly able to sympathize with either the curiosity or the trepidation of that “celebrated Roman singer” who first tampered with the letter from her lover, intrusted to him, and then, terrified at its nature, gave it to Francesco. When her husband sent for her to come to him at his villa, she took leave of her child as for the last time, and Pietro met her in the dark of their chamber and plunged his dagger into her breast.
The affair of Isabella Orsini was managed with much greater taste, with a sort of homicidal grace, a sentiment, if one may so speak, worthy a Roman prince and a lady so accomplished. She was Cosimo’s favourite, and she was beautiful, gifted, and learned, knowing music, knowing languages, and all the gentler arts; but one of her lovers had just killed her page, whom he was jealous of, and the scandal was very great, so that her brother, the grand duke, felt that he ought, for decency’s sake, to send to Rome for her husband, and arrange her death with him. She, too, like Eleonora, had her forebodings, when Paolo Orsini asked her to their villa (it seems to have been the custom to devote the peaceful seclusion of the country to these domestic rites); but he did what he could to allay her fears by his affectionate gaiety at supper, and his gift of either of those stag-hounds which he had brought in for her to choose from against the hunt planned for the morrow, as well as by the tender politeness with which he invited her to follow him to their room. At the door we may still see her pause, after so many years, and turn wistfully to her lady in waiting:—” Madonna Lucrezia, shall I go or shall I not go to my husband? What do you say?”
And Madonna Lucrezia Frescobaldi answers, with the irresponsible shrug which we can imagine: “Do what you like. Still, he is your husband!”
She enters, and Paolo Orsini, a prince and a gentleman, knows how to be as sweet as before, and without once passing from caresses to violence, has that silken cord about her neck —
Terrible stories, which I must try to excuse myself for telling the thousandth time. At least, I did not invent them. They are all part of the intimate life of the same family, and the reader must group them in his mind to get an idea of what Florence must have been under the first and second grand dukes. Cosimo is believed to have killed his son Garzia, who had stabbed his brother Giovanni. His son Pietro kills his wife, and his daughter Isabella is strangled by her husband, both murders being done with the knowledge and approval of the reigning prince. Francesco and Bianca his wife die of poison intended for Ferdinand, or of poison given them by him. On these facts throw the light of St Bartholomew’s day in Paris, whither Catharine de’ Medici, the cousin of these homicides, had carried the methods and morals of her family, and you begin to realize the Medici.
By what series of influences and accidents did any race accumulate the enormous sum of evil which is but partly represented in these crimes? By what process was that evil worked out of the blood? Had it wreaked its terrible force in violence, and did it then no longer exist, like some explosive which has been fired? These would be interesting questions for the casuist; and doubtless such questions will yet come to be studied with the same scientific minuteness which is brought to the solution of contemporary social problems. The Medici, a family of princes and criminals, may come to be studied like the Jukes, a family of paupers and criminals. What we know at present is, that the evil in them did seem to die out in process of time; though, to be sure, the Medici died with it That Ferdinand who succeeded Francesco, whichever poisoned the other, did prove a wise and beneficent ruler, filling Tuscany with good works, moral and material, and, by his marriage with Catharine of Lorraine, bringing that good race to Florence, where it afterwards reigned so long in the affections of the people. His son Cosimo II. was like him, but feebler, as a copy always is, with a dominant desire to get the sepulchre of our Lord away from the Turks to Florence, and long waging futile war to that end. In the time of Ferdinand II., Tuscany, with the rest of Italy, was wasted by the wars of the French, Spaniards, and Germans, who found it convenient to fight them out there, and by famine and pestilence. But the grand duke was a well-meaning man enough; he protected the arts and sciences as he got the opportunity, and he did his best to protect Galileo against the Pope and the inquisitors. Cosimo III., who followed him, was obliged to harass his subjects with taxes to repair the ruin of the wars in his father’s reign; he was much given to works of piety, and he had a wife who hated him, and finally forsook him and went back to France, her own country. He reigned fifty years, and after him came his son Gian Gastone, the last of his line. He was a person, by all accounts, who wished men well enough, but, knowing himself destined to leave no heir to the throne, was disposed rather to enjoy what was left of his life than trouble himself about the affairs of state. Germany, France, England, and Holland, had already provided him with a successor, by the treaty of London, in 1718; and when Gian Gastone died, in 1737, Francis II. of Lorraine became Grand Duke of Tuscany.
XXVIII
UNDER the later Mcdici the Florentines were drawing towards the long quiet which they enjoyed under their Lorrainese dukes — the first of whom, as is well known, left being their duke to go and be husband of Maria Theresa and emperor consort Their son, Pietro Leopoldo, succeeded him in Tuscany, and became the author of reforms in the civil, criminal, and ecclesiastical law, which then astonished all Europe, and which tardy civilization still lags behind in some things. For example, Leopold found that the abolition of the death penalty resulted not in more, but in fewer crimes of violence; yet the law continues to kill murderers, even in Massachusetts.
He lived to see the outbreak of the French revolution, and his son, Ferdinand III., was driven out by the forces of the Republic in 1796, after which Tuscany rapidly underwent the Napoleon
ic metamorphoses, and was republican under the Directory, regal under Ludovico I., Bonaparte’s king of Etruria, and grand ducal under Napoleon’s sister, Elisa Bacciocchi. Then, in 1816, Ferdinand III. came back, and he and his descendants reigned till 1848, when Leopold II. was driven out, to return the next year with the Austrians. Ten years later he again retired, and in i860 Tuscany united herself by popular vote to the kingdom of Italy, of which Florence became the capital, and so remained till the French evacuated Rome in 1871.
The time from the restoration of Ferdinand III. till the first expulsion of Leopold II. must always be attractive to the student of Italian civilization as the period in which the milder Lorrainese traditions permitted the germs of Italian literature to live in Florence, while everywhere else the native and fc eign despotisms sought diligently to destroy them, instinctively knowing them to be the germs of Italian liberty and nationality; but I confess that the time of the first Leopold’s reign has a greater charm for my fancy. It is like a long stretch of sunshine in that lurid, war-clouded landscape of history, full of repose and genial, beneficent growth. For twenty-five years, apparently, the good prince got up at six o’clock in the morning, and dried the tears of his people. To be more specific, he “formed the generous project,” according to Signor Bacciotti, by whose “Firenze Illustrata” I would not thanklessly profit, “of restoring Tuscany to her original happy state,” — which, I think, must have been prehistoric. “His first occupation was to reform the laws, simplifying the civil and mitigating the criminal; and the volumes are ten that contain his wise statutes, edicts, and decrees. In his time, ten years passed in which no drop of blood was shed on the scaffold. Prisoners suffered no corporeal penalty but the loss of liberty. The amelioration of the laws improved the public morals; grave crimes, after the abolition of the cruel punishments, became rare, and for three months at one period the prisons of Tuscany remained empty. The hospitals that Leopold founded, and the order and propriety in which he kept them, justly entitled him to the name of Father of the Poor. The education he gave his children aimed to render them compassionate and beneficent to their fellow-beings, and to make them men rather than princes. An illustrious Englishman, then living in Florence, and consequently an eye-witness, wrote of him: ‘Leopold loves his people. He has abolished all the imposts which were not necessary; he has dismissed nearly all his soldiers; he has destroyed the fortifications of Pisa, whose maintenance was extremely expensive, overthrowing the stones that devoured men. He observed that his court concealed him from his people; he no longer has a court. He has established manufactures, and opened superb roads at his own cost, and founded hospitals. These might be called, in Tuscany, the palaces of the grand duke. I visited them, and found throughout cleanliness, order, and delicate and attentive treatment; I saw sick old men, who were cared for as if by their own sons; helpless children watched over with a mother’s care; and that luxury of pity and humanity brought happy tears to my eyes. The prince often repairs to these abodes of sorrow and pain, and never quits them without leaving joy behind him, and coming away loaded with blessings: you might fancy you heard the expression of a happy people’s gratitude, but that hymn rises from a hospital. The palace of Leopold, like the churches, is open to all without distinction; three days of the week are devoted to one class of persons; it is not that of the great, the rich, the artists, the foreigners; it is that of the unfortunate! In many countries, commerce and industry have become the patrimony of the few: in Tuscany, all that know how may do; there is but one exclusive privilege — ability. Leopold has enriched the year with a great number of work-days, which he took from idleness and gave back to agriculture, to the arts, to good morals.... The grand duke always rises before the sun, arid when that beneficent star rejoices nature with its rays, the good prince has already dried many tears.... Leopold is happy, because his people are happy; he believes in God; and what must be his satisfaction when, before closing his eyes at night, before permitting himself to sleep, he renders an account to the Supreme Being of the happiness of a million of subjects during the course of the day!”’
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1234