The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (56 page)

  5.
   The forbidding symbol of despotism, the fortbzza da basso, covered an area of almost 120,000 square metres and is the biggest historical monument in Florence. The foundation stone was laid on 15 July 1534, a date deemed appropriate by the skilful astrologers of Bologna. The convent of San Giovanni Evangelista was demolished in order to clear the site.

  1.
   The Viceroy of Naples conducted his daughter to Florence where he and his suite were lodged in the monastery of Santa Maria Novella. Thereafter the former chapter house in the Green Cloister, which was built and decorated in the middle of the fourteenth century, was known as the
SPANISH CHAPEL
and became the chapel of the Spanish colony in Florence.

  2.
   Cosmopolis became Portoferraio rather more than a century later. The Casa del Ouca at the foot of Colle Reciso is said to be the place from which Cosimo and his architect watched the building in progress. Cellini’s bust of Cosimo, which stood above the entrance to Forte Stella, is now in the Bargello.

  3.
   The great
NEPTUNE FOUNTAIN
in the Piazza della Signoria was intended to symbolize Duke Cosimo’s naval achievements. The design of the fountain was originally entrusted to Bandinelli who died before he could begin it. After a competition had been held, the commission was given to Ammanati. The fountain was finished in 1575. The Piazza, now renamed the Piazza del Granduca, had been repaved in 1543.

  4.
   The
UFFIZI PALACE
was paid for by the various government offices which
originally occupied it. Their names or mottoes still appear over the big doors under the colonnade. After Vasari’s death in 1574 work on the Uffizi was continued by Bernardo Buontalenti and Alfonso Parigi. It has been one of the great art galleries of Europe for three centuries. Many of the finest pieces of the Medici collection were housed in the Tribuna in which Zoffany portrayed numerous well-known English connoisseurs, diplomats and collectors in the painting he did under the patronage of Queen Charlotte between 1772 and 1778. Sir Horace Mann is shown standing beneath the
VENUS DB’ MEDICI,
a Roman copy of a Greek original found at Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli, brought to Florence in the time of the Grand Duke Cosimo III and still in the Tribuna today. Other works of art shown in Zoffany’s picture, like Titian’s
Venus of Urbino
were brought in from other rooms in the Uffizi or from the Pitti Palace for the painter’s purpose.

  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 performanceof
II Hondo 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 Holofemes
, 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 realizeCosimo I’s conception of a huge
CAPPELLA DEI PRINCIPI,
the structure wasnot 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 theGrand Dukes and their wives and sons were temporarily buried in the new andold sacristies. Generations of craftsmen in
pietra dura
were kept intermittentlyat work on the elaborate tombs of the three Cosimos, the two Ferdinandos andthe 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
c
ASTELLO
(see note 6 to
chapter XIII
) were drawn up by Benedetto Varchi forDuke Cosimo I and put in hand by Tribolo, Ammanati and Buontalenti. Butthey 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 bronzeanimals from the grotto are in the Bargello.

  1.
   The putto on the fountain at present in die
COURTYARD OF THE PALAZZOVECCHIO
is a copy of the original by Verrocehio, 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 CAPBILO’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 1593. 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 NAZIONALE 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 pal a zzo bellini 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 ferdinando 1 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,
PaterPatriot
. 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.