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.
The Grand Duke found his wife, Vittoria della Rovere, hardly less troublesome than Gian Carlo. She was a prim and interfering woman, plain and fat, who early on in her married life developed a double chin far more uncompromising than her husband’s. She found it extremely difficult to bear him an heir: her first child, a boy, survived for less than a day, her second for only a few minutes. It was not until 14 August 1642 that she finally gave birth to a baby strong enough to live. This was the future Cosimo III, but his advent did not improve the uneasy relationship between his parents. Soon after his birth his mother came upon her husband fondling a handsome page, and for weeks she declined to speak to him. When she decided to try to come to terms with him, he declined to be reconciled, and it was almost twenty years before their quarrel was properly made up. A second son, Francesco Maria, was born in 1660; yet the marriage remained an unhappy one.