Yet Almeni was right. The Duke was to get married again – not to Eleonora degli Albizzi but to another young mistress, Camilla Martelli, who had also borne him a child. She was tall, grasping, selfish and ill-tempered, and she wore her husband out. To escape from her he took to shutting himself up with scholars who were required to read to him, or to spending his evenings with his daughter, Isabella Orsini, at the Medici Palace. It was here one evening that he was seized by an apoplectic fit; a second attack cost him the use of his arms and legs and eventually his voice. After this he spent most of his time dozing in a chair, sometimes mumbling incoherently. One evening after dinner he suddenly took it into his head to get into his coach and go to watch a calcio match. It was a cold day and it was raining. For two hours Cosimo sat at a window occasionally looking down at the players, but mostly in a kind of faint. For two months he lingered on, unconscious for days on end, until at last, on 21 April 1574, at the age of fifty-five, he died. His body was laid out in the great hall of the Pitti Palace in the full grand-ducal regalia, while the church bells tolled. The next day ‘all the shops were closed… and wherever one went, the palace was hung all over with black, and black hangings reached all the way across the Piazza dei Pitti’.
Yet Cosimo’s death was not generally regretted. He had been rather less unpopular of late, able to ride around the city, so the Venetian ambassador noticed, ‘alone in his coach with but a single lackey’. He was known to have been an active member of the fraternity of San Martino who were pledged to give anonymous help to the poor, and he was given some small credit for having encouraged and patronized the traditional popular entertainments of the Florentines, the pageants, the horse-races and the games of calcio, and for having added to their number by inaugurating chariot races in the Piazza Santa Maria Novella where posts still mark the limits of the course. He was given rather more credit for having released Florence from her former dependence on Spain, for having provided her with a small but efficient fleet, and for having extended so far the boundaries of the State. But although the government was stable, justice impartial if severe and finances sound, Cosimo was more widely blamed for having denied Florence her former freedom than he was praised for having given her stability. People were far more ready to point accusing fingers at his spies and prisons, his heavy taxes and unscrupulous use of monopolies in private trading than they were to give him credit for the improvements he instigated in the farming, draining and irrigation of Tuscany, for building canals and promoting olive plantations and silver mines, for the development of Pisa and Leghorn, or for having achieved some sort of political unity between these and other Tuscan towns. If someone mentioned his encouragement of Bartolommeo Ammanati who, after the devastating floods of 1557, built the lovely Ponte Santa Trinità7 and rebuilt the Ponte alla Carraia;8 or his patronage of Giorgio Vasari, who decorated so much of the Palazzo Vecchio, and of the Flemings known in Florence as Giovanni Rosso and Niccolò Fiamingo, who set up a tapestry factory in the city under his auspices; or his payments for portraits, murals and allegorical paintings by Agnolo Bronzino; or his patience with Benvenuto Cellini whose fine Perseus, commissioned by the Duke, was set up in the Loggia dei Lanzi in 1554;9 there was sure to be someone else to grumble about the cost of the alterations to the Pitti Palace, and of the private corridor between the Pitti and the Palazzo Vecchio (in the hasty construction of which five men were killed), the expensive adornment of the Boboli Gardens, the grandiose scheme for the huge baroque mausoleum at San Lorenzo where the later Medici were to be buried in such gloomy pomp,10 Pontormo’s decoration of the villa of Castello and Tribolo’s fountains in its ornate gardens,11 the lavish expenditure on the park at Poggio a Caiano, and on the wall round the huge wood known as the Pineta. If an admirer were to speak approvingly of his promotion of Pisa University and the Studio Fiorentino, of his invitation to such gifted men as Benedetto Varchi to come back to live in Florence, of his encouragement of Italian music, of scientists and botanists and of Etruscan archaeology, of his improvement of Florence’s herb gardens, his foundation of Pisa’s School of Botany, and his introduction into Tuscany of medicinal plants from America and of farm crops from the Orient, of his connoisseurship of antiques, medals and Etruscan workmanship, a detractor would undoubtedly contrast the golden age of the Republic under Lorenzo il Magnifico with the dark times now sure to follow under the new Grand Duke Francesco.
XXI
THE HEIRS OF COSIMO
‘Such entertainments have never been seen before’
FRANCESCO HAD neither his father’s taste for business nor his industry. Irresponsible, taciturn, wayward yet withdrawn, he was ‘of low stature’, the Venetian ambassador reported disapprovingly, ‘thin, dark complexioned and of a melancholy disposition’. ‘He shows little grace in his dress,’ another ambassador wrote, ‘and he is quite as graceless in his bearing.’ He was ‘a man of quiet thoughts’ who spoke with ‘care and circumspection’. ‘Much absorbed by the love of women’, he set ‘little store by virtue’.
His wife, the Archduchess Joanna of Austria, who was as pale, thin and charmless as Francesco, was miserably homesick living in Tuscany. Ill and unhappy, ignored by her husband, and condemned by the Florentines for her Austrian hauteur, she never felt at home in Florence. Her father-in-law was kind to her in his way. He had the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio specially decorated for her: the lunettes were painted with murals of Austrian towns by pupils of Vasari, and Verrocchio’s gay fountain of the little urchin with a spouting fish was brought down from the Careggi villa where it had been set up in the garden by Lorenzo il Magnifico.1 But Joanna was not to be comforted. She died in 1578 at the age of thirty, a year after the birth of her one sickly son Filippo, who was also to die soon afterwards. Apparently unmoved by her death, Francesco resolved to marry his mistress, Bianca Capello.
Bianca was an attractive, well-educated Venetian noblewoman who, to the dismay of her family, had secretly married a clerk in a Florentine company. Obliged to leave Venice she had come with her husband to Florence where Francesco, catching sight of her one day as he rode beneath her window, had fallen in love with her. A meeting had been arranged; she had become his mistress; her husband had been placated with a lucrative appointment in Francesco’s household and had been given a palazzo conveniently situated near the Pitti Palace for the regular visits his master made to his wife.2Francesco also built a country villa for Bianca, the charming Villa Pratolino whose amazing garden so much impressed Montaigne, a guest there in 1581.3 As well as bronzes by Giambologna and fountains by Ammanati, there were grottoes with movable scenery by the ingenious Bernardo Buontalenti. There were organs, musical waterfalls and all manner of mechanical figures. There were promenades of ilex and cypress, mazes of box-hedges cut into fantastic shapes and arcades formed by jets of water which, rising above the head, fell into little streams on either side of the path. In one corner, passing an aviary and a labyrinth, the visitor came upon Vulcan and his family, standing in a grotto, the walls of which were covered with coral and shells and ‘copper and marble figures with the hunting of several beasts, moving by the force of water’. In another corner, near a lawn from whose surface water spouted from unseen sources, a shepherdess walked out of a niche in a wall to fill her bucket with water from a well to the accompaniment of a bagpipe played by a satyr.