13. The CATHEDRAL FAÇADE was accordingly left unfinished. A temporary façade was erected in 1515 for the occasion of the entry of Leo X as described in Chapter 17. In the time of the Grand Duke Ferdinando I another attempt was made to find a suitable design. Buontalenti, Giambologna and Lodovico Cardi all submitted models. So did Cosimo I’s gifted illegitimate son, Don Giovanni de’ Medici who helped also with the designs for the church of San Gaetano, the Cappella dei Principi at San Lorenzo and the Forte di Belvedere. Nothing came of the new proposals for the Cathedral façade, however, and eventually it was covered by a canvas curtain. When the wind tore this curtain down in the 1680s, Duke Cosimo III sent to Bologna for craftsmen to cover the brown stone with frescoes. These frescoes slowly crumbled away and were replaced in the late nineteenth century by the marble and mosaics which are there now.
CHAPTER XIV
1. Although the Medici collections, the richest ever assembled in Renaissance Italy, were widely dispersed, some of the treasures were later recovered. For example, four exquisite vases, two of jasper, one of agate and one crystal, all on gold or silver stands, with precious stones and bearing Lorenzo’s name engraved on their bases, were examined in 1502 by Leonardo da Vinci on behalf of Isabella d’Este who had heard they were for sale. For some reasons, perhaps because of the high price demanded, she did not buy them; and they were afterwards acquired once more for the family by Duke Cosimo I. Various statues found their way to the Rucellai gardens, the Orti Oricellari.
CHAPTER XVI
1. THE TOMB OF PIERO DI LORENZO DE’ MEDICI in the abbey of Monte Cassino was designed by Antonio and Francesco da Sangallo. It was in the choir of the old church.
2. In particular BOTTICELII expressed Florence’s tragedy in the Derelitta (now in the Pallavicini collection at Rome), the Story of Virginia (in the Galleria dell’ Accademia Carrara at Bergamo) and in The Tragedy of Lucrezia (in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston). The two latter were probably painted for the Vespucci, who lived in the Via de’ Servi.
CHAPTER XVII
1. The miraculous image of the Madonna is in the church of SANTA MARIA DEL IMPRUNCTA. The church which was originally built in the thirteenth century was rebuilt in the fifteenth and after being severely damaged in the war, has now been restored. The marble predella of the Madonna is by a follower of Donatcllo.
2. Filippo Strozzi’s second wife was Selvaggia de’ Gianflgliazzi. The family chapel of the Gianfigliazzi is in Santa Trinità. The PALAZZO GIANFIGLIAZZI is in Lungarno Corsini (no. 2). This is where the Countess of Albany, wife of the Young Pretender, lived and where Byron and Stendhal both stayed. Sir Horace Mann’s house was nearby. On the opposite bank of the Amo, in Lungamo Guicciardini, was Charles Hadfield’s famous inn where in the middle of the eighteenth century hundreds of Englishmen stayed while visiting Florence on the Grand Tour. Many of them were painted here by Thomas Patch, who lived in Florence from 1755 until his death in 1782.
3. Orders were immediately given to the Florentine sculptor, Baccio Bandinelli, to prepare with all speed a copy of the marble group of Laocoön which might pass for the original. The original had been discovered by a man digging in his vineyard near the Baths of Trajan in January 1506. Pope Julius II bought it for 4,140 ducats and had it transported to the Vatican along roads strewn with flowers.
4. Michelangelo had competed against Giuliano da Sangallo, Jacopo Sansovino and Baccio d’Agnolo, but his winning design was never realized. After he had spent the best part of two years at the Carrara quarries, contending with all sorts of technical difficulties, the project for a new façade at San Lorenzo was abandoned.
5. Various complimentary allusions to Pope Leo X and the Medici were made in the STANZE DI SAFFAELLO. In the Stanza of Heliodorus, for example, Raphael was induced to change the meeting of Attila and St Leo into an allegory of the Battle of Ravenna, and to show the Pope, in the character of St Leo, riding the white palfrey which had been his mount on that momentous occasion. The features of Leo X are also to be seen in the Stanza dell’ Incendio which was painted by Raphael’s assistants as the Pope’s diningroom in 1514–17.The pictures here represent scenes from the lives of two popes of the eighth and ninth centuries, Leo III and Leo IV. The fresco on the wall opposite the window shows the great fire of 847 which threatened St Peter’s with destruction and which was halted, so it was said, when Pope Leo IV made the sign of the cross into the flames. Like St Leo in the Stanza of Heliodorus, Leo IV is here represented as Leo X.
CHAPTER XVIII
1. The villa which Raphael designed for Clement VII on die Monte Mario above the bend of the Tiber at the Ponte Molle was blown up, before it was finished, by the Pope’s enemy. Cardinal Colonna, during the sack of Rome in 1527. It was rebuilt for Margaret of Austria and became known as the VILLA MADAMA.
2. The NEW SACRISTY AT SAN LORENZO, known as the Medici Chapel, was completed by Michelangelo in 1534. Lorenzo and Giuliano are buried by the Madonna and Child near the entrance door. The sarcophagus of Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, is in the right. The Duke is portrayed as an officer in the service of the Church with a male statue of Day and a sleeping female Night reclining at his feet. On the left is the tomb of Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, the dedicatee of Machiavelli’s The Prince, portrayed as a soldier, his eyes cast down in thought. Below him are statues of Dawn and Dusk. The decoration of the chapel was not finished when Michelangelo left Florence in 1534. Plans for tombs for Lorenzo il Magnifico and Giuliano, as well as for Pope Leo X, were never realized. In the seventeenth century the Prince of Denmark came to Florence to see this chapel which he described as being ‘one of the most magnificent pieces of art in the world’.
3. Michelangelo’s superb entrance and staircase to the biblioteca lauren-ziana were largely finished by the time the artist left Florence. They were completed by Bartolommeo Ammanati and Giorgio Vasari in accordance with plans and instructions which Michelangelo left behind. The library was opened to the public in 1571.
CHAPTER XIX
1. MICHELANGELO’S David, which was finished in 1504, had been commissioned soon after Piero Soderini became Gonfaloniere in 1501. Although Botticelli wanted it placed in the Loggia dei Lanzi, and others proposed the steps of the Cathedral as a more suitable position, it was eventually placed in front of the Palazzo della Signoria where one of the arms was broken in a riot in 1527. The statue continued to stand in front of the Palazzo until 1873 when it was replaced by the copy which stands there now. The original – the gilding of the hair and the band across the chest long since worn away by sun, wind and rain – is in the MUSEO DELL’ ACCADEMIA (Via Ricasoli, 52).