Although he preferred to hoard money rather than to invest it – and instructed Bernardo Buontalenti to make an impregnable safe for him at Forte di Belvedere, the forbidding fortress overlooking the city, which was built to Buontalenti’s designs on the heights of San Giorgio between 1590 and 15959 – Ferdinando I did not hesitate to be lavish when the occasion seemed to demand it. He bought Petraia, a medieval castle, from the Salutati family and instructed Buontalenti to transform it into a magnificent villa with an appropriately splendid garden.10 He built an equally splendid hunting lodge at Artimino, the Villa Ferdinanda, which was also designed for him by Buontalenti.11He continued to pour money into the Pitti Palace and the Boboli Gardens; he enlarged the Uffizi gallery and built the Tribuna; he bought numerous rare manuscripts from Persia and Egypt for the Medici library. He spent a thousand ducats on a colossal and highly intricate gilded sphere, the most complicated construction of its kind ever made, to prove that Ptolemy was right in contending that the moon, sun and stars revolve in circles round the earth and that Copernicus had been wrong to deny it.12 To Giambologna he gave the Palazzo Bellini,13 commissioning him to construct in a foundry there a gigantic equestrian statue of the Grand Duke Cosimo for the Piazza della Signoria.14 On the occasion of his marriage to Caterina de’ Medici’s agreeable granddaughter, Christine of Lorraine, he spent an enormous amount of money as though determined to demonstrate that the House of Medici had lost none of its grandeur, and that the reversal of his brother’s pro-Spanish policy was worthy of a celebration of unparalleled splendour.15
Christine entered the city through a series of magnificent triumphal arches dedicated to Florence, to the glorious history of the Medici and the House of Lorraine. For weeks past scores of architects, painters and sculptors had been working on the construction and decoration of these arches, while hundreds of other artists and craftsmen, cooks and carpenters, mechanics and ropemakers, musicians and singers, soldiers and actors, gardeners and pyrotechnists had been busy preparing as original and elaborate a sequence of parades, receptions, banquets, pageants, plays, musical entertainments and intermezzi as Florence, or indeed, Europe had ever seen. The highlight of these extraordinary wedding celebrations, which marked a vital stage in the development of theatrical production, of ballet and the new dramma per musica, was a musical performance at the Pitti Palace, during which all manner of ingenious scenic devices, from exploding volcanoes to fire-eating dragons, astonished the spectators, and at the climax of which the courtyard was flooded to a depth of five feet so that eighteen galleys manned by heroic Christians could storm a Turkish fort.
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
FERDINANDO II AND THE FRENCH PRINCESS
‘It is her usual conceit to say that she has married beneath her’
TEN 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.