The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (44 page)

Entertainments such as this, the inspiration of many a fête performed at Versailles for the pleasure of Louis XIV, were Ferdinando’s speciality; and he lost no opportunity in using them to exalt the Medici and his own policies in the eyes of Florence and of the world. The finest of all his court festivals were those over which he presided on the occasion of the marriage of his niece, Maria, to Henry of Navarre, whose triumph over the Catholic League and accession to the French throne owed much to Medici money. As well as the familiar horse races and tournaments, processions and pageants, firework displays and water fêtes, there were marvellously inventive performances at the Uffizi of Giulio Caccini’s
Il Rapimento di Cefalo
with settings by Buontalenti and of
L’Euridice
by Jacopo Peri, whose now lost
Daphne
, which has been called the first opera, was also performed at the Uffizi under Ferdinando’s auspices. And on 5 October 1600, when Maria de’ Medici and King Henry IV of France were married by proxy in the Cathedral, a stupendous banquet was given in the Palazzo Vecchio where each extravagantly shaped and decorated dish formed part of a fantastic allegory upon the martial brilliance of the French King and the outstanding virtues of the House of Medici into which he had so wisely married.

After Ferdinando’s death in 1609, his nineteen-year-old son, Grand Duke Cosimo II, increased the family’s reputation for lavish entertainments. When he was married to the Emperor Ferdinand II’s sister, the Archduchess Maria Maddalena, there was so spectacular a
display on the Arno that observers claimed nothing like it had ever before been seen. The stage was the whole stretch of river between the Ponte alla Carraia and the Ponte Santa Trinità, which was embellished with statues for the occasion. The audience, sitting in immense grandstands erected on the Lungarni, were treated to a performance of the
Argonautica
in which Jason, avoiding the hazards presented by gigantic dolphins, lobsters and fire-spitting hydra, sailed round an artificial island, captured the Golden Fleece and presented the Archduchess Maria Maddalena with six red apples symbolic of the Medicean
palle
.

Cosimo II also shared his father’s taste for building. He extended the Palazzo Pitti, and reconstructed yet another villa for his family, the villa of Poggio Imperiale near Arcetri.
¹⁶
Here he set up a telescope which Galileo Galilei had brought with him to Florence and here Galileo himself was offered sanctuary.

Galileo was born at Pisa in 1564 the son of a poor descendant of a Florentine noble family. He had wanted to be a painter, but his father had discouraged him and he had studied medicine instead. Turning to mathematics and physics, he had exasperated his tutors at the University of Pisa by his constant questioning of their assertions, his maddening presumption and quick temper. He had been offered a chair, but his colleagues, unable to tolerate his sarcasm and independence, had made it clear to him that his resignation would be welcome. He had gone to the University of Padua where he had remained for eighteen years until Cosimo II, who had once been a pupil of his, invited him to come to Florence where he could continue his studies and experiments in peace, free from the interference of his detractors and the accusations of the Church. Galileo accepted the offer and spent the last years of his life under the protection of the Medici. The satellites of Jupiter, whose discovery he had made known to the world in a book published in 1610, he called
Medicea Sidera
.
¹⁷
He long outlived his indolent patron, Cosimo II, who died at the early age of thirty, having achieved very little worthy of record; but when Galileo himself died in 1642 and the Church forbade any monument to be erected to his memory, Cosimo’s son, Ferdinando II, had him buried in the Novices’ Chapel at Santa Croce.
¹⁸

XXII

‘
It is her usual conceit to say that she
has married beneath her
’

T
EN YEARS
old when his father died, Ferdinando II was an easygoing, agreeable boy who gave as little trouble to his tutors as grounds for hope that he would be much credit to them. At the age of seventeen he went abroad on a continental tour, leaving Florence in the care of his mother and grandmother, neither of whom, perpetually quarrelling with each other and their council, appears to have either regretted his absence or to have welcomed his return. The people of Florence, however, grew more kindly disposed towards him the better they got to know him. In 1630, when he was twenty, he and his brothers stayed in Florence throughout an outbreak of the plague, doing all they could to help the stricken people, while most others who could afford to do so fled from the city. He did not look like a hero: in his portraits by the court painter, Justus Sustermans, he is seen adopting a commanding patrician pose which contrasts almost absurdly with the bulbous nose, the fleshily jutting Habsburg mouth and the black moustache whose thick ends rise upwards, like arrow-heads, towards the soft and heavy-lidded eyes. He was rather fat and extremely good-natured, more attracted to handsome young men than to women, fond of hunting and fishing and of playing games like bowls, provided he was allowed to win – sometimes losing his temper when he did not win, a spectacle all the more disconcerting on account of his usual placidity and courtesy.

His style of life was entirely without ostentation – wicker-covered bottles 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 – yet Ferdinando was never mean. He spent as much on pageants, masques and spectacles as any of his predecessors; and, encouraged by his brother Leopoldo, he was a generous patron of scientists and men of letters. In 1657 the justly celebrated academy, Del Cimento (the Test) – whose motto was ‘
Provando e Riprovando
’ and whose emblem was a furnace with three crucibles – began to meet at the Pitti Palace; and although it was to survive for only ten years, dissolving in a welter of recrimination, jealousy and discord, its publications made important contributions to scientific knowledge. Ferdinando and Leopoldo, both disciples of Galileo, took a real interest in its proceedings, composing its quarrels, signing its correspondence, following closely the work of Evangelista Torricelli da Modigliana, inventor of the barometer, experimenting themselves with telescopic lenses and all manner of scientific instruments, and commissioning those thermometers, astrolabes, quadrants, hygrometers, calorimeters and other ingenious mechanical devices which visitors to the Pitti Palace saw displayed in such profusion.

Fascinated as they were by these devices, their interests ranged over a much wider field. Leopoldo, indeed, was a true polymath. He spent four hours each day ‘up to his neck in books’. He read everything that came to hand, ‘books of criticism, gallantry, satire and curiosities… manuscript reports on the geography, customs, and inhabitants of countries… in every part of the world’. The secretary of the Cimento wrote to an agent commissioned to buy books for Leopoldo:

You may forward documents of natural history like that [description] of a fish I sent you, or that [account] of a strange pregnancy… or like that skeleton so similar to a human one that [was] found at Castel Gandolfo; information about medals, newly-discovered statues, cameos and other ancient relics, architectural designs, stories with a bit of spice – anything will do.

For ‘like a little boy with a piece of bread’, Leopoldo always kept
‘a book in his pocket to chew on whenever he [had] a moment to spare’.

Ferdinando was both more selective and more practical, his main interest, apart from the experiments conducted by the Cimento, being the development of the Florentine craft of creating mosaics in
pietra dura
. Scores of craftsmen were kept busily at work in this intricate manufacture, assembling ornaments and bas-reliefs and elaborately decorating furniture in marble, ivory, crystal, gold, brightly coloured minerals and semi-precious stones.
¹
To contain these works, and the family’s ever increasing collection of paintings and sculpture, Ferdinando was obliged to make extensive alterations to the Pitti Palace and to provide it with suitable galleries which he had adorned with murals by some of the most accomplished artists of his time – Cirro Ferri, Francesco Furini, Pietro da Cortona who painted the fine Baroque murals in the Sala della Stufa, and Giovanni da San Giovanni who worked in the Museo degli Argenti sitting in a tub suspended from the ceiling, his gouty legs swathed in bandages.
²
In the galleries thus beautifully decorated, visitors were able to inspect the latest additions to the Grand Ducal collections.
³

As a ruler, Ferdinando’s policies were largely governed by a desire to avoid all trouble and unpleasantness. He was drawn into a brief war with the Pope’s tiresome Barberini relatives, but otherwise contrived to face every threat to Florence’s peace and security with mollifying complaisance. Rather than offend the Pope he declined to advance his claim to Urbino on the death of Duke Francesco Maria II, allowing the Duchy to become a part of the Papal States. Similarly he gave way to the Pope by agreeing that the officials of the Board of Health should kneel in submissive apology for having obliged various monks and priests to abide by the laws of quarantine during an outbreak of plague. He adopted the same placatory attitude towards the highly censurable activities of various members of his unruly family. He had no trouble with the good-natured, accommodating Leopoldo, who, on the dissolution of the scientific academy, Del Cimento, left for Rome to become a cardinal. Nor did Ferdinando have any difficulty with his other brother, Mattias, who served with some credit as a general in the Thirty
Years’ War during which he assembled that remarkable collection of ivory ornaments which is one of the minor marvels of the Pitti collection,
⁴
and after which he formed an equally extraordinary collection of human deformities including a hideous dwarf with ‘thinly scattered tusks for teeth’ and an appetite so enormous that he could gobble up forty cucumbers, thirty figs and a water melon as
hors d’ œuvres
before a massive dinner. Ferdinando did, however, have trouble with his brother, Gian Carlo, a cardinal like Leopoldo, but a man of far less disciplined instincts.

Gian Carlo was not without taste. He invited Salvator Rosa, whom he had met in Rome, to come to Florence where he was paid an annual income to paint for the Court while remaining free to accept commissions from other patrons. Gian Carlo also provided funds for a company of actors to build a theatre in the Via della Pergola;
⁵
and for another company he rented a palazzo in the Via del Cocomero for which Ferdinando Tacca was asked to design sets and scenery.
⁶
But Gian Carlo’s true interests were not so much painting and the theatre as food, which he consumed in immense quantities, and women, whom he pursued with the insatiable lust of a satyr. Expelled from Rome for refusing to be accompanied by older and less libidinous cardinals on his visits to Queen Christina of Sweden, he returned to Florence still young, rich and good-looking, exquisitely dressed, his hair long and curly, determined to devote himself to pleasure. He moved into a beautiful villa built in the middle of an entrancing and exotic garden off the Via della Scala.
⁷
Here he made love to a succession of mistresses – often, it was said, to several at once – and had at least one tiresome rival drowned in a carp pond. He once ordered the release of a notorious murderer, whose wife he had immediately taken to bed when she had come to him on her husband’s behalf, and threatened to cut off the Sheriff’s head if his order was not obeyed. The Sheriff appealed to the Grand Duke who stood in silence for a few moments before resignedly declaring, ‘Obey the Cardinal, since he is my brother.’ Everyone knew that Ferdinando was frightened of Gian Carlo, and when the news was brought that he had died of apoplexy, Ferdinando received it with evident relief, rather than sorrow.