But the Florentine Republic was to have a more glorious sunset. In 1527, while the imperial troops sacked Rome, the Florentines for the third time expelled the Medici and re-established the Republic, with first Niccolò Capponi and then Francesco Carducci as Gonfaloniere. In this sunset Machiavelli died; Andrea del Sarto painted the last great Florentine fresco; Michelangelo returned to serve the State in her hour of need. The voices of the Piagnoni were heard again from San Marco, and Niccolò Capponi in the Greater Council carried a resolution electing Jesus Christ king of Florence. But the plague fell upon the city; and her liberty was the price of the reconciliation of Pope and Emperor. From October 1529 until August 1530, their united forces–first under the Prince of Orange and then under Ferrante Gonzaga–beleaguered Florence. Francesco Ferrucci, the last hope of the Republic, was defeated and slain by the imperialists near San Marcello; and then, betrayed by her own infamous general Malatesta Baglioni, the city capitulated on the understanding that, although the form of the government was to be regulated and established by the Emperor, her liberty was preserved. The sun had indeed set of the most noble Republic in all history.
Alessandro dei Medici, the reputed son of Lorenzo by a mulatto woman, was now made hereditary ruler of Florence by the Emperor, whose illegitimate daughter he married, and by the Pope. For a time, the Duke behaved with some decency; but after the death of Clement in 1534, he showed himself in his true light as a most abominable tyrant, and would even have murdered Michelangelo, who had been working upon the tombs of Giuliano and Lorenzo. "It was certainly by God's aid," writes Condivi, "that he happened to be away from Florence when Clement died." Alessandro appears to have poisoned his kinsman, the Cardinal Ippolito, the other illegitimate remnant of the elder Medicean line, in whom he dreaded a possible rival. Associated with him in his worst excesses was a legitimate scion of the younger branch of the house, Lorenzino–the Lorenzaccio of Alfred de Musset's drama–who was the grandson of the Lorenzo di Pier Francesco mentioned in the previous chapter.[26] On January 5th, 1537, this young man–a reckless libertine, half scholar and half madman–stabbed the Duke Alessandro to death with the aid of a bravo, and fled, only to find a dishonourable grave some ten years later in Venice.
THE DAWN
By Michelangelo
Florence now fell into the hands of the ablest and most ruthless of all her rulers, Cosimo I. (the son of Giovanni delle Bande Nere), who united Medicean craft with the brutality of the Sforzas, conquered Siena, and became the first Grand Duke of Tuscany. At the opening of his reign the Florentine exiles, headed by the Strozzi and by Baccio Valori, attempted to recover the State, but were defeated by Cosimo's mercenaries. Their leaders were relentlessly put to death; and Filippo Strozzi, after prolonged torture, was either murdered in prison or committed suicide. A word will be said presently, in chapter ix., on Cosimo's descendants, the Medicean Grand Dukes who reigned in Tuscany for two hundred years.
The older generation of artists had passed away with the Republic. After the siege Michelangelo alone remained, compelled to labour upon the Medicean tombs in San Lorenzo, which have become a monument, less to the tyrants for whom he reared them, than to the saeva indignatio of the great master himself at the downfall of his country. A madrigal of his, written either in the days of Alessandro or at the beginning of Cosimo's reign, expresses what was in his heart. Symonds renders it:–
"Lady, for joy of lovers numberless
Thou wast created fair as angels are;
Sure God hath fallen asleep in heaven afar,
When one man calls the bliss of many his."
But the last days and last works of Michelangelo belong to the story of Rome rather than to that of Florence. Jacopo Carucci da Pontormo (1494-1557), who had been Andrea del Sarto's scholar, and whose earlier works had been painted before the downfall of the Republic, connects the earlier with the later Cinquecento; but of his work, as of that of his pupil Angelo Bronzino (1502-1572), the portraits alone have any significance for us now. Giorgio Vasari (1512-1574), although painter and architect–the Uffizi and part of the Palazzo Vecchio are his work–is chiefly famous for his delightful series of biographies of the artists themselves. Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571), that most piquant of personalities, and the Fleming Giambologna or Giovanni da Bologna (1524-1608), the master of the flying Mercury, are the last noteworthy sculptors of the Florentine school. When Michelangelo–Michel, più che mortale, Angel divino, as Ariosto calls him–passed away on February 18th, 1564, the Renaissance was over as far as Art was concerned. And not in Art only. The dome of St Peter's, that was slowly rising before Michelangelo's dying eyes, was a visible sign of the new spirit that was moving within the Church itself, the spirit that reformed the Church and purified the Papacy, and which brought about the renovation of which Savonarola had prophesied.