COSIMO DE’ MEDICI now became Duke of Florence, and Guicciardini prudently made sure that the new young ruler took up residence in the Palazzo Medici. Cosimo had been just seven years old when his heroic father Giovanni de’ Medici delle Bande Nere died in battle, after which he had been brought up by his mother Maria, née Salviati, at Il Trebbio in the Mugello. He had later followed a peripatetic education in Venice, Bologna, Naples and Genoa. His ambition had been to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a soldier; temperamentally he was very much the opposite of his romantic, dashing father, but Cosimo would always retain something of the military about him. He was stiff of bearing, gave orders rather than instructions, and believed in respect for rank, rather than cultivating popularity. Where his father had cut a poetic figure, Cosimo remained distinctly prosaic: a moderately good-looking young man, with his hair cut short, displaying little by way of personality.
Yet in many ways Cosimo was what Florence needed, and during his early years as duke he would quickly grow in stature from an inexperienced young man into a determined ruler. He would listen carefully to the advice of Guicciardini, but followed this less and less as he developed his own ideas.
The first challenge to Cosimo’s rule came in 1537, the year of his accession, when Filippo Strozzi led an army supported and financed by the exiles in a march on Florence. Strozzi had made the mistake of judging that Cosimo’s rule would be no more popular than that of his predecessor Alessandro; in fact Cosimo was not particularly popular, but the citizens of Florence were now in the mood for a period of stable rule. When Strozzi’s army reached Prato, he confidently expected the Florentines to rise up spontaneously against their Medici ruler; but there was no uprising, and instead Vitelli was despatched at the head of the Florentine militia, considerably strengthened by the Spanish garrison from the Fortezza da Basso. The opposing forces met at Montemurio, outside Prato, the result being a swingeing defeat for Strozzi and the army of the exiles. Many members of the leading exiled families were captured and paraded humiliatingly through the streets of the city before the jeering populace, though this was only the beginning, for the captives were now tried and sixteen of them were summarily executed. The rest, including Strozzi himself, received lengthy prison sentences; as it turned out, few would finish their terms, for many quickly disappeared, while others died after torture. Filippo Strozzi fell on his sword, in the Roman fashion, leaving behind a note quoting Virgil: ‘Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor’ (‘Some avenger will arise from our bones’).
Fig 17 Cosimo I Duke of Florence: bust by Cellini
Cosimo and his adviser Guicciardini were determined that this would not happen, and set in motion a process of hunting down enemies in exile. Some years later Lorenzino de’ Medici would be stabbed with a poisoned knife in Venice; and the remaining Strozzi, Pazzi and other exiled families soon learned to watch their backs at all times. At home, Cosimo quickly began establishing his own autocratic rule. It did not take him long to decide that Guicciardini’s advice was not needed any more, and his adviser was encouraged to retire to his country villa near Arcetri, south of Florence. During Guicciardini’s remaining years he would write the work for which he is remembered, his justly celebrated History of Italy, one of our main windows on the age, through which he lived. Here the author unexpectedly reveals himself as a patrician who perhaps ultimately believed in democratic rule in the Ancient Greek style, such as he had encountered in his humanist education. Guicciardini’s conclusions have the seasoned insight one would expect of a man who had served as an ambassador, had been the closest councillor of two popes (Leo X and Clement VII) and had advised two rulers (Alessandro and Cosimo). As such, his History of Florence is not only more reliable but superior in judgement to that produced by Machiavelli, his earlier contemporary. Guicciardini was not entirely scrupulous, either in his life or in his History, but his advice (and his writing) was not Machiavellian. Nonetheless, it was the Machiavellian approach that Cosimo de’ Medici now chose to adopt, regardless of the advice of his experienced former mentor; and this was precisely what was needed if Florence was to survive in the world of sixteenth-century Italian politics.
Cosimo was determined to establish himelf as ruler of Florence, rather than merely rule the city: a subtle but fundamental shift. Previously those who had ruled the city, either well or badly, had emerged more as leaders than as rulers; they were the head of an efficient party machine, which supported them. Cosimo, Duke of Florence, would establish himself as a sovereign ruler, who was supported by an efficient professional bureacracy consisting of institutions rather than councils. Again, the transformation is subtle, but represents a distinct sea change. Previously, the administration consisted of factions, jockeying for power; now it became a bureacratic monolith; others had previously delegated, while Cosimo took an intense and detailed interest in the workings of his administration. Initially, his rule would be one of cold calculation. He was not afraid to instil fear, for he felt himself above popularity; and it seemed that the time was ripe for such rule. The citizens of Florence had suffered deeply: they had been shamed, bewildered and humiliated – the Republic of Christ had been followed by the siege, then had come a decadent tyranny. A beaten populace acquiesced to Cosimo’s autocracy: the republican spirit of old was now a spent force.
Guicciardini had already begun to fall out with Cosimo before he was encouraged to retire. For him the last straw had been Cosimo’s willingness to accept that Florence was now little more than a vassalate of the Emperor Charles V, its defence and even its government dependent on the Spanish troops in the Fortezza da Basso, who received their orders from elsewhere. But the young Cosimo was wise enough to see that there was little alternative for the moment; instead he would bide his time – the ruler who had ascended as an inexperienced young man was quick to mature. A later description of Cosimo by the Venetian ambassador indicates the man he was rapidly becoming: ‘He is unusually large, very sturdy and strong. His expression is gracious but he can make himself terrible when he wishes. In toil or in taking exercise he is indefatigable and delights in recreations that call for agility, strength or dexterity . . . he recognises no one, [has a] habitual severity . . . he is never familiar and keeps himself aloof save when business makes this impossible.’
Cosimo’s policy resided in several closely interlinked ideas; his prime intention was always the greater glory of Florence and the Medici (which he saw as largely identical). In foreign policy, this would require the gradual withdrawal from control by the Emperor Charles V. Internally, it required an efficient government by a civil service, rather than the jealousies of ruling factions and families who hoped that one day they might rule; once this hope was extinguished, the families worked together to support Cosimo, competing only to serve him. Such an administration also introduced the spread of efficient rule throughout the region under Florentine control. Cosimo would preside over a Florence that gradually transformed itself from a city state to a full-blown sovereign territory with an integrated administrative structure. His period as ruler marked a rite of passage for Florence’s government – a transformation that was taking place to a greater or lesser extent throughout Europe, for now it was government’s turn to experience a Renaissance. Certain ancient civic ideals, such as those of Cicero, were indeed adopted by some administrators; and many (including Cosimo, Duke of Florence) would strive for an autocracy mirroring the Roman Empire. But in reality the practice of government also underwent a Reformation: outmoded medieval attitudes and practices were discarded, in favour of a reformed administration working according to a fixed agenda. In Cosimo’s case this may be seen quite clearly; what in the time of Lorenzo the Magnificent had been a series of gestures, designed to further Medici rule, now became a recognisable policy, designed to further the inseparable interests of the duke and his dukedom.
Despite Cosimo’s wish for independence, he saw that Florence’s interests were for the time being best served by continuing the close alliance with Charles V, and with this in mind he approached the emperor with a suggestion that he be allowed to marry Charles V’s daughter Margaret, Alessandro’s widow. This was seen by Cosimo as a purely dynastic match, undertaken to give an element of continuity and to retain a beneficial alliance. Yet Charles V had other ideas; he knew that he could rely on Florence, though he was less sure of the new pope Paul III, so instead he married Margaret to Pope Paul III’s grandson.
Cosimo next approached Don Pedro of Toledo, Charles Vs viceroy in Naples, requesting permission to marry his only daughter, the seventeen-year-old Eleanor of Toledo; this request was granted. Don Pedro had acquired vast riches from the New World, and Eleanor brought with her a suitably munificent dowry; though as the Medici only continued to act as bankers in private trading, there are no libri segreti available to put a precise figure on this dowry, whose bounty would have included particular articles of treasure beyond exact price. The marriage in 1539 at the Medici family church of San Lorenzo in Florence was a suitably lavish occasion, and the people of the city were encouraged to participate with free cakes and wine; this was the first big public celebration that Florence had witnessed in many long years.
After his marriage, Cosimo moved from the Palazzo Medici on the Via Larga to the Palazzo Vecchio in the centre of the city. Cosimo had two reasons for taking up residence here: not only would he and his family be more easily guarded by the Florentine militia, but he would also be able to supervise more closely the administration that was housed in the same building.
In 1542 the uneasy truce between Francis I of France and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V once again gave way to open hostility. Cosimo was quick to pledge his support for Charles V, who made known his need for money to hire an army; at once Cosimo made available a large sum from his dowry, and in return the grateful emperor withdrew his Spanish garrison from the Fortezza da Basso, as well as from similar garrisons at Livorno and Pisa. Cosimo immediately began integrating the administration of these cities with that of Florence, at the same time building up the Tuscan defences. As Charles V’s ally, he also undertook to march on Siena, Florence’s long-standing enemy to the south, where Strozzi’s son Piero had taken up residence with the intention of using the city as a base to launch another attack on Florence.
The war between Siena and Florence would result in a bitter three-year conflict. Piero Strozzi eventually fled to France; imperial Spanish troops, nominally under Florentine control, laid waste much of Siena’s surrounding countryside; and the city was then besieged. By the time Florence was finally victorious, the population of the city of Siena was reduced from 16,000 to 6,000; slaughter, disease, flight and banishment had all but destroyed this small city and its surrounding territories.
Many in Florence saw this victory as futile, when the city was worth less than 60,000 florins a year to the dukedom. Cosimo thought otherwise, for this was the largest addition Florence had ever made to its territory, and it was even guaranteed by Charles V. Siena’s complex and ramshackle ‘democratic’ government had for centuries been the cause of crippling internal strife and external foreign adventures, usually at Florence’s expense, but now the city’s government was integrated into the stable and efficient Florentine administration. In effect, on a small scale, Siena became part of a Florentine empire; to this growing empire was also added the island of Elba, off the southern Tuscan coast, which Cosimo purchased from Genoa in 1548, with the intention of turning it into the dukedom’s naval base. Cosimo’s ambitions included Florence becoming a sea power, while the mercantile navy was also developed, with the expansion of the port city of Livorno. In a move to recruit new citizens and attract international trade, Cosimo I (as he was now significantly known) declared Livorno to be a city where all forms of religious worship would be tolerated; as a result, the city began to attract Turks, Jews and even persecuted English Roman Catholics. (By the following century, Livorno would have the largest Jewish population in the western Mediterranean.)
Unlike any Medici since Cosimo Pater Patriae, Duke Cosimo I set himself a strict daily routine. This would begin with him rising before dawn to study the latest reports from various councils and other city administrations. Cosimo was a great believer in keeping files and records, frequently instigating statistical surveys, censuses and reports suggesting future developments. One result of this would be a network of canals that soon began spreading through the Tuscan countryside, both for irrigation and for navigational purposes. He also revived the flagging fortunes of the universities at Florence and Pisa, introducing sweeping reforms; in a significant move, he particularly encouraged study of the sciences. Even in humanist studies, these were still known as natural philosophy, though in fact learning was now on the brink of the great divide that would one day separate humanist studies (the humanities) from the sciences.
Cosimo would often work through the heat of midday, but in the late afternoon he insisted on taking regular exercise. In winter, he would go riding; in bad weather, he would train at weight lifting; but in summer, his routine would include a swim in the Arno. On one occasion this nearly cost him his life, when unknown assassins had placed rows of spikes and blades beneath the surface of the water at the very spot where he usually dived into the water; fortunately one of his attendants caught sight of a blade glinting in the sunlight. There were various assassination attempts, and Cosimo never went out without several accompanying bodyguards, who were taken from the city’s brigade of Swiss Guards, which had replaced Charles Vs Spanish garrison. In another significant change, these troops were moved from the Fortezza da Basso to a barracks right by the Piazza della Signoria, a building that became known as the Loggia dei Lanzi (the last word being the Italian corruption of Landsknechte, as the Swiss were misleadingly known). A trumpet call from the guards at the ducal apartments in the Palazzo Vecchio, and the Swiss Guards would come running.
However, Eleanor of Toledo quickly tired of the poky rooms and chambers of the Palazzo Vecchio; she had no wish to live in a miniature palace next to a barracks of drunken mercenaries. Worse still was the cage of lions behind the palazzo in the Via dei Leoni; these would frighten her by roaring in the night, and in hot weather their stench was unbearable. Eleanor was a proud Spanish aristocrat, who had grown up in a genuine Neapolitan palace, furnished with all the accoutrements and treasures of viceroyalty, and she was unwilling to settle for less simply because she was married. There was only one residence in Florence that lived up to such expectations, and this was the vast, incomplete Palazzo Pitti – the grandiose folly which had witnessed the ruin of the ambitious Luca Pitti in the time of Piero the Gouty. In 1549, Eleanor of Toledo purchased the Palazzo Pitti, paying a mere 9,000 florins out of her personal fortune; whereupon architects and designers were immediately set to work to make a palace fit for a duchess of viceregal blood. Cosimo himself supervised the laying out of the gardens on the large plot of land at the back, which had been purchased from the Bogoli family. In a corruption of this name, these gardens would become known as the Boboli Gardens – remaining to this day a green haven of shady walks, statues and distant hillside views, all within a mile of the city centre. These still bear the impact of Cosimo’s interest in botany, for he not only encouraged the study of science, but practised it in his own small way himself.
Cosimo and Eleanor, together with their growing family, eventually moved into the Palazzo Pitti in 1560, whereupon its official title became the Ducal Palace. Cosimo was as much a family man as was possible for a person of his cool, aloof temperament, and Eleanor accepted these very Spanish characteristics. The only difficulty was Cosimo’s mother, Maria de’ Medici, née Salviati, who insisted on maintaining her own apartment in the Ducal Palace; Cosimo would become incensed at her fussing interference, while she and Eleanor simply could not get on with each other.
Together Cosimo and Eleanor would have half a dozen children, of whom they were both very fond in their different ways. Eleanor established a distinctly Spanish ambience in the Ducal Palace, and her three daughters were brought up in chaste seclusion, rarely leaving the confines of the building. In keeping with Medici tradition, Cosimo took great pains to cultivate the friendship of a series of popes, ensuring that his second son Giovanni was made a cardinal at seventeen, while his third son Garcia became one some years later. But despite this large family the atmosphere behind the vast austere façade of the Ducal Palace had none of the spontaneity and joie de vivre that had characterised the Palazzo Medici in its heyday.
Yet not all was autocratic gloom, and Cosimo did his best to continue the Medici tradition of providing novel entertainment for his citizens, both to amuse them and to distract them from any rebellious inclinations. Perhaps reflecting his Roman aspirations, Cosimo introduced chariotracing in the large open space in front of the Santa Maria Novella church, and this quickly proved a popular success.
Also in the Medici tradition, Cosimo established himself as a patron of the arts, though this was evidently more through a sense of duty than aesthetic pleasure. For the most part, artists were simply given commissions as the need arose, rather than ones that showed any understanding of their talents. It was Duke Cosimo I who commissioned the posthumous portrait of Cosimo Pater Patriae by Jacopo da Pontormo, which took its place in the portrait gallery of the Ducal Palace (see colour plates); and to this was added the duke’s own formal and curiously characterless portrait painted by Bronzino: the aim was to establish a Medici tradition, reflecting the greatness of a dynasty. Botticelli, Leonardo and Raphael were long dead; and Michelangelo, whose fame had made him the richest artist of them all, was now a crotchety old man in Rome, constantly revising his final unfinished sculptures. The High Renaissance was over, and art was now entering a period of more mannerist baroque.
The atmosphere of the artistic scene in Florence would be enlivened by the return of Cellini to the city early in Cosimo’s reign. According to Cellini himself, he was very close to the duke and his Spanish duchess, and Cosimo’s ‘usual reserve and austerity’ would melt in the artist’s company. For once, it appears that Cellini’s claims are true; something about this incorrigible and not altogether charmless braggart seems to have penetrated Cosimo’s reserve, though even Cellini concedes that there were occasions when Cosimo was less than amused by his antics, with the result that he received several severe reprimands and warnings.
The work that Cosimo commissioned from Cellini would prove amongst the artist’s best. To begin with, there was the obligatory grand bust of Cosimo as an Ancient Roman, complete with armour; though despite its evident flattery, this bronze head does hint at something of Cosimo’s emotional coldness and contained anger (see page 331). But Cellini’s finest work for Cosimo was undoubtedly his full-length bronze of the Ancient Greek Perseus, the slayer of Medusa, the mythical female Gorgon, whose gaze turned men to stone. Cellini depicts Perseus in his winged helmet, sword in hand, holding aloft the freshly decapitated head with its dribbling entrails. This was a popular Renaissance subject, and its mythical resonance is open to wide interpretation; for Cosimo, it represented not only Florence’s victory over its enemies, but also how authority would slay the hideousness of public disorder and dissent.
Work on this masterpiece was interrupted by a typical escapade, when Cellini was forced to flee Florence to evade a charge of immorality, involving an outraged mother and her handsome young son. Unusually, this appears to have been a false charge, cooked up by some of the artist’s many enemies; and Cellini returned when things had blown over, made his humblest apologies to the sorely tried Cosimo, and completed his Perseus as speedily as possible.
The other renowned artist to be befriended by Cosimo was Giorgio Vasari, who had trained under Michelangelo. Vasari would also paint a self-serving portrait of Cosimo, this time surrounded by the artists who enjoyed his patronage, all in somewhat subservient positions. This was at least better than the portrait that Vasari was commissioned to paint celebrating the victory over Siena. He produced an initial design, showing Cosimo surrounded by his councillors planning the victorious campaign, but Cosimo was dismissive, using the royal ‘we’ to inform Vasari: ‘We acted entirely alone in this matter. You can fill up the places of these councillors with figures representing Silence and some other Virtues.’ Such megalomaniac claims are given the lie by Cosimo’s major commission to Vasari: to design a grand building to house the administration of the Florentine state. This was the Uffizi (meaning ‘Offices’), whose imposing colonnaded wings would enclose a long courtyard leading from the edge of the piazza beside the Palazzo Vecchio; this is now the world-famous Uffizi Gallery, which houses so many of the Renaissance masterworks commissioned by the Medici.
Of lesser architectural importance, but some historical interest, is the work Vasari attached to this building.This is the raised and enclosed passage way now known as the Corridoio Vasari, which linked the Uffizi and the Palazzo Vecchio to the duke’s new residence nearly half a mile away across the river in the Ducal (Pitti) Palace. It crossed the river by way of a roofed corridor above the shops of the Ponte Vecchio, giving the duke speedy and unimpeded passage to his administrative offices: a means of checking up on things at any moment, as well as a handy escape route.
However, Vasari’s masterpiece was undoubtedly his Lives of the Artists, a literary work that gave vivid contemporary descriptions of so many of the great Renaissance artists, as well as deep insights into their work and character. The first edition of Vasari’s Lives appeared in 1550, and the acclaim that greeted it made Cellini so jealous that he immediately began work on his own rather less reliable Autobiography. Vasari’s Lives contains a portrait gallery of genius, warts and all, but in passing it also shows the pervasive effect of Medici patronage, which to a greater or lesser extent affected so many of these artists. This was of course intended; Vasari dedicated the book to Cosimo and meant it to be a glorification of the Medici family, whom he served in so many capacities. Vasari was responsible for almost the entire extensive artistic and architectural programme of Cosimo, acting virtually as his minister of arts. Besides glorifying the unique contribution of Florence (and the Medici) to the creative flowering that we call the Renaissance, Vasari’s Lives was also the earliest attempt to come to terms with the Renaissance itself: what it meant, what it had achieved and what in fact it was. This was just the first in a long process of definition and reassessment that has continued to this day – for this was the age which in so many ways gave birth to our modern world, and how we see ourselves remains reflected in how we see this beginning. This surely is the most pertinent distant mirror of our age.
Cosimo’s last years were to be very different, for in his forties his temperament began to mellow, and this made it particularly difficult for him to endure the succession of personal misfortunes that suddenly befell him. In 1562 the forty-year-old Duchess Eleanor, and her two sons Cardinal Giovanni and the teenage Garcia, all died during a malaria epidemic. As if this was not enough, Cosimo’s two teenage daughters also died, one of whom was Cosimo’s favourite, Maria. In 1564 Cosimo himself became ill and handed over the reins of power to his twenty-three-year-old heir Francesco. Yet there was some good news: in 1569, Cosimo’s cultivation of Pope Pius V finally reaped its hoped-for reward, and he was raised to the rank of Grand Duke of Tuscany. The choice of Tuscany, rather than Florence, was his own, intended to indicate that Florence was now a sovereign territory. Cosimo’s new rank entitled him to be addressed as Vostra Altezza (‘Your Highness’): the Medici in Florence were now sovereigns, just one rank below royalty. The extension of Florentine power was also demonstrated two years later, when the Turks were defeated by the navies of the Holy League at the Battle of Lepanto, in the southern Adriatic. The new Florentine navy, created by Cosimo, played a vital role in this great battle, which checked Turkish naval power in the region.
Yet the victory proved of little comfort to the new grand duke, who had by this stage shut himself away in a chamber of his huge empty palace, where he lived in grief-ridden isolation, often staring for hours on end at the sole picture on the wall, a portrait of his beloved daughter Maria. However, this spell of self-imposed solitude would not prove permanent; in an effort to rouse himself from his sorrows, Cosimo gradually resumed his sporting habits: hunting, swimming and weight lifting. But now that he had relinquished his power, there was nothing else to occupy his mind – so he took to womanising.
Eventually Cosimo decided to marry a young woman called Camilla Martelli, who had become one of his mistresses. His remaining family was horrified; no sooner had the Medici become grand dukes than the leader of the family was undermining their status by marrying a commoner. The marriage proved a disaster, as Camilla turned from a loving mistress into a shrewish, nagging wife, and life in the Ducal Palace soon became a succession of inelegant shouting matches involving all of the family. Cosimo retired once more to his solitary chamber, and in April 1574 he finally died of apoplexy, at the age of fifty-five. His official reign had lasted thirty-seven years, longer by far than any of his Medici predecessors; he had not been popular, but he had left a flourishing and prosperous Tuscany, whose capital city was a rather dull and provincial Florence. The high artistic drama of the Italian Renaissance had now come to an end, and a hiatus would ensue before the next momentous stage, which would see the Medici returning to their role as godfathers.