The Stones of Florence (21 page)

The Republic that fell to the Spaniards, who took it on behalf of Pope Clement, was not a democracy in the modern sense (the lowest class of workers had no vote and until the final days of the Siege were not allowed to bear arms), and off and on, from the time of Cosimo il Vecchio, it had in fact been governed by the Medici, even though the forms and institutions of a free state had been maintained. When the bastard Alessandro, installed by his supposed father, the pope, in the year following the Siege, received the anomalous title of Duke of the Florentine Republic, this might have appeared to be merely a new name for the same thing. But in reality it was not so. The name announced a changed state of affairs; the power of choice no longer rested with the electorate, which had done its epic utmost in defence of its liberties, causing the whole world to marvel, and had found that this utmost counted for nothing in the cynical world-balance; everyone—the French King, the Venetians, the Duke of Ferrara, Henry VIII of England—had watched, and no one had raised a hand to help. The popular will and its caprices, which had sometimes tolerated the Medici, sometimes chased them out, broken up their statues and effaced their emblems, no longer had sovereignty. It was a sheer waste for Lorenzino, six years after Alessandro’s entry, to assassinate the tyrant; no one knew how to use the opportunity, so inopportunely presented, for regaining the city’s freedom. The usual mood-swing that followed on such actions did not occur. It was a deed for History, conceived as a stage in the Renaissance fashion, not a political act. This point was clearly seen by Alfred de Musset in his play
Lorenzaccio,
where he has Lorenzino
(‘accio’
is a derogatory ending) say:
«Une statue qui descendrait de son piédestal pour marcher parmi les hommes sur la place publique serait peut-être semblable à ce que j’ étais le jour où j’ai commencé à vivre avec cette idée: il faut que je sois un Brutus.»
(‘A statue coming down from its pedestal to mingle on the public square might be like me the day I began living with that idea: “I must be a Brutus.”’) When the marble deed was done, Cosimo I, then a young man of modest demeanour, quietly accepted the post left vacant by his distant relation. He himself proceeded to strike the pose of an absolute monarch, the ruler of a nation-state like France, England, Spain, and when he had defeated Siena (no hard job), he extracted from the pope the title of Grand Duke of Tuscany. Florence as a political entity thereupon ceased to exist.

But Cosimo’s conquering pose was more effective in statuary than in real life, where he must have appeared a poor player on a world stage occupied by Francis I, Henry VIII, and Charles V, whose viceroy’s daughter he married and who relentlessly bled him for money. The title that meant so much to him he secured by turning over to the pope the Protestant reformer Carnesecchi, a guest under his roof and at his table, who was then beheaded and burned, over Cosimo’s weak protests, on the Campo dei Fiori in Rome. By the time Cosimo took power, the real sovereignty of Tuscany and of most of the Italian peninsula had passed to foreigners. Until the unification of Italy, in 1860, the Grand Duchy was governed, not by consent of its subjects, but by consent of the rulers of Europe, who, when the Medici had died out, conferred it on the House of Lorraine, that is, on the Austrians.

The grand dukes who succeeded Cosimo were hardly worthy of being called tyrants. They were, rather, landlords, with the occasional virtues and manifold vices of the breed; under them was a vast and wretched tenantry, who supplied an audience for their monotonous, costly, and uninspired festivities. A few of the grand dukes were enlightened, but the majority were grasping, mean, dissolute, lazy, feeble, dull-witted, provincial, bigoted, or else absentee, like Francis of Lorraine, husband of the Empress Maria Theresa. The Austrians, when they stayed in Tuscany, were the best of the lot. They drained the Maremma, the marshy coastal region extending from Pisa to Grosseto, which had been barren, wild, and malaria-stricken since Roman times; they encouraged agriculture and made economic reforms. Under the Austrians, Tuscany began to revive a little from the torporous decadence it had sunk into. Marital quarrels, pious observances (under the hypocritical Cosimo III, the shops were closed half the year because of the numerous holy days decreed by the sovereign, who was also a great persecutor of the Jews), carousing, and a series of boy ‘favourites’ had marked the reigns of the later Medici grand dukes, whose principal redeeming characteristic (this was finally bred out of the last members of the family) had been the promotion of natural science. One grand duke, Ferdinand II, a pupil of Galileo’s, constructed a liquid thermometer, and his brother, Cardinal Leopold, also Galileo’s pupil, founded the Accademia del Cimento—which means ‘test’, ‘trial’, ‘risk’, in short, experiment—the first academy in Europe for research in experimental physics. Its collection, originally in Palazzo Pitti but now housed in the Museum of the History of Science, contains, not only Galileo’s telescope and the lens through which he first saw the planets of Jupiter—the ‘Medici planets’—but also, in a glass urn, the third finger of his right hand.

The late Medici taste ran to such curios. Their architects had remained true to the old way of building, so that even a fort like the Belvedere, a brown-and-cream sentry box with a clock set in its head and strongly accented windows, monitors the city in the style of a plain fortified farmhouse; but interiors and gardens reflected the real predilections of their owners and the grand-ducal society around them—predilections for the bizarre, the extravagant, coy monstrosities of Nature, metamorphoses, for colossal white statues resembling the huge cut-out milk bottles and ice-cream cones of American billboard display or the Michelin tyre man, for hideous fantasies in
rocaille,
simulated sea shells, and tortured topiary work, for life-size house dogs in stone set out on walls or patches of lawn, anticipating the Victorian stag, for grottoes and caverns with imitation stalagmites and stalactites, for ‘specimen’ trees and malachite, porphyry, alabaster, chalcedony. Eighteenth-century English travellers, like Addison and John Evelyn, were impressed by the grand-ducal zoos (there seem to have been two or possibly three, one near the ‘Belfry’, one near Palazzo Strozzi, and perhaps another near Santissima Annunziata), and the gardens of the grand dukes and their circle often had a zoomorphic character, rhinocerine or hippopotamus-like. The famous Orti Oricellari, for example, where the Platonic Academy had been transferred and where Machiavelli, it is said, read aloud his
Discorsi,
have a statue of the Cyclops, Polyphemus, nearly two hundred and fifty feet high, the one-eyed giant’s cave with a whole cyclops family and feigned stalactites, an enormous mock-Pantheon with imitation classic tombs of the Academicians, and an imitation necropolis. Laboured imitations of Nature’s curiosities, as well as abstract personifications, were introduced into the Tuscan hills: the Medici Villa della Petraia at Castello has in its garden a bronze fountain representing Florence, who is squeezing water out of her hair with her hands, while the Villa di Castello, another Medici property next door, has a grotto with stalactites, bronze animals, and a fishpond with a giant statue that used to be known as ‘The Apennine’. In the Accademia del Cimento’s collection, there are clinical thermometers made in the shape of turtles.

In the Villa Ambrogiana, near Empoli, Cosimo III, according to another traveller’s report, had a special art collection painted for him by ‘one of the best artists in Florence’ that contained lifelike likenesses of one hundred rare animal specimens, ‘quadruped and flying’, among them two two-headed calves and a two-headed sheep, ‘together with a record of when and where they were born and how long they lived’; there were also ‘portraits’(‘
ritratti’)
of fruits of unusual and monstrous size and ‘portraits’ of colossal trees. This collection of monstrosities, which was intended to perpetuate the grand duke’s memory, seems to have disappeared, and the villa is now an asylum for the criminally insane.

The kind of vulgarity in decoration that is today thought of as middle-class seems to stem straight from Tuscany in the time of the Medici grand dukes. From the Florentine
cinquecento
and its highly developed craftsmanship, its skill in the inferior arts of imitation, flowed a torrent of bad taste that has not yet dried up. The interiors of the grand-ducal palaces and villas are sumptuously, stuffily ugly in a way that is hard to connect with a period that was contemporary, after all, with classic Palladio in the Veneto. By one of those peculiar time leaps so characteristic of Florence, one finds oneself, while visiting one of the grand-ducal villas, transported suddenly into the Victorian age or the time of President McKinley; if there had been Toby jugs and Swiss weather clocks available, the grand dukes would certainly have collected them.

The lifting of all restraints in the minor arts of decoration took place in the time of Cosimo I and no doubt had a political meaning—the rejection of the human scale (this was the same as refusing audiences) and the proclamation of complete license on the part of the ruling family and its sycophants. And just at this time, though not without warning, the major arts (excepting architecture) expired. The Florentine
cinquecento,
which had seemed at its beginning the most audacious century of all, suddenly declined into provincialism, and a glance sideward at Venice, where Titian, Veronese, Lotto, and Tintoretto were reigning, could only provoke mournful comparisons. There were many reasons for this. The accession of Cosimo could not have been the cause but was itself a symptom of the same exhaustion that was showing itself in Florentine painting and sculpture.

During the last years of the Republic there had begun the great Diaspora of Florentine artists. It was nothing new for Florentine artists to journey about Italy, studying or executing commissions. Giotto, Uccello, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Andrea del Castagno, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Verrocchio had all done it. Michelozzo had gone into exile with Cosimo il Vecchio; Masolino, after working in Rome and Venice, had been called to Hungary, like the Fat Woodworker. But these voyages were mere business trips, temporary absences from the centre, and the works undertaken by Florentine artists abroad were like the branches of the Florentine banks opened in France, England, Rome, Venice, Flanders; the main office was at home, in the workshops of the streets around the Duomo and the old Santa Croce quarter. Young foreign artists—Piero della Francesca from Borgo San Sepolcro in Arezzo territory, Raphael from Urbino, Jacopo Bellini, founder of the Venetian school, Perugino from Perugia—came here to purchase knowledge of the Florentine ‘way’. Luca Signorelli, from Cortona, leaping beyond the soft Umbrian influences that had formed him, became, in Florence, an epic painter of massive Demeter-like women and naked heroes, like Myrmidons—a titan in the noble Florentine tradition of contest and struggle. Florence learned from itself, reinvesting: the young Michelangelo made drawings of the Giottos in Santa Croce and the Masaccios in the Carmine; Leonardo, so it is thought, was inspired by Ghirlandaio’s ‘Last Supper’ in the Cenacolo of Ognissanti.

Yet the first warning of something different, of a new phenomenon—the genuine migration of talent elsewhere—came from Leonardo, a forerunner in this as in everything else. He appeared in Florence young, left it young, returned for a short stay, during which he painted the ‘Mona Lisa’, and then went off to France, to the court of the French king, who kept him in his château, a royal guest, till he died. One by one, other artists followed his example. Michelangelo went to Rome. Pietro Torrigiani and the Rovezzano sculptors went to England. Jacopo Sansovino went to Venice. The painter known as Il Rosso Fiorentino went to Fontainebleau. Abroad (and the point is stressed by Vasari in his life of Il Rosso), they lived like kings or like
signori
and abroad, therefore, they died. When Michelangelo quitted Florence for good in 1534, four years after the Siege, only one artist of any importance was left in the city—the crazy Jacopo Pontormo.

Vasari makes no bones about the reasons for Il Rosso’s decision to leave:
‘e tòrsi, come diceva egli, a una certa miseria e povertà, nella quale si stanno gli uomini che lavorano in Toscana e ne’ paesi dove sono nati’
(‘to raise himself, as he used to say, out of a certain wretchedness and poverty, which is the common lot of those who work in Tuscany and in their native places’). Again, the famous Tuscan avarice or grudging meanness, reluctant to give a decent living to a native painter. Just then, moreover, times were particularly hard. When Il Rosso left Italy to try his luck in France, the year was 1530. Shortly before, during the Siege, Cellini had deserted the Florentine militia and gone to Rome to work for Pope Clement; the hack Bandinelli had fled to Lucca, where the Medici refugees were, leaving an unfinished block of marble behind him. In the last years of the Republic, as the records show, the chief private commissions had been coming from the Medici and their dependents, including the Servite friars of Santissima Annunziata, Medici mouthpieces, who got their atrium frescoed by the painters then in fashion—Andrea del Sarto, Il Rosso, Pontormo, and Franciabigio—and a new porch begun by Antonio da Sangallo, with the crossed papal keys of Leo X over the entrance. (Owing to the Medici largesse, this church, with its tribune by L. B. Alberti and its baroque decoration, is so rich that it hardly looks Florentine; it is still the fashionable church of Florence, popular with the aristocracy for weddings and masses for the dead, social events to which invitations are issued.) When the Medici were driven out, for the last time, in 1527, their art patronage naturally ceased.

The years between the execution of Savonarola and the Siege were uncertain, fearful years for all the Florentines—artists and citizens, popes and bankers. Leo X is supposed to have been haunted on his deathbed by the horrors of the Sack of Prato, which he himself had licensed. While the German soldiers, wild for
‘Gelt’,
were pillaging Rome, Clement VII was a prisoner in Castel Sant’ Angelo and later had to escape to Orvieto; no such indignity had befallen the papal person since the Middle Ages. At the same time, Henry VIII of England was pestering him for a divorce. The
‘barbari’
were loose in Italy again, and, with them, there returned another medieval scourge, the plague, which in 1527–28 took the lives of 30,000 people in Florence and its suburbs (a quarter of the population) and double that in the
contado.
The gonfalonier Niccolò Capponi, son of the famous Capponi, having remained steadfastly in Florence throughout the plague, when nearly all the well-to-do had fled, was shortly afterward tried for treason, on the suspicion that he had been intriguing with the pope. Despair and the recurring hope of a miracle were the natural response to this incessant mutability of public affairs and private fortunes, and the resigned philosophy of the new dark ages that seemed to be beginning was well expressed by Guicciardini, who said that when he thought of the infinite vicissitudes to which human life was subject he marvelled to see an old man or a good crop.