Numerous were the adventures of Buonaccorso Pitti. Rich, able and of fine presence, he was constantly employed on embassies to divers sovereigns and sister Republics. An inveterate gambler, but with a keen eye to business, generous to his family and friends, but keeping a minute account of his daily expenses, well educated, a good Latin scholar, a bad poet and an amusing boon-companion, Buonaccorso was a typical Florentine of the XVth century. His son, Luca, born in 1398, founder of the splendid palace which still bears his name, began his political career when most lads are still at college, and his enormous wealth gave him considerable power in his native city.
About 1440 Luca Pitti commissioned the great architect Brunelleschi to build for him a palace more magnificent than that of the Medici in Via Larga (now Palazzo Riccardi). “Not only,” writes Machiavelli, “did citizens and private persons contribute, and aid him with things necessary to the building, but communes and corporations lent him help.” As Gonfalonier of Justice he was able to do signal service to Cosimo de’ Medici by causing Girolamo Machiavelli, Carlo Benizzi and Niccolò Barbadori, who had lifted up their voices to warn the Florentine citizens against the ambition of the Medici, to be murdered in prison. Cosimo in return used his influence to obtain a public decree, ordaining that Luca Pitti should be created a Knight of the People in S. Giovanni with great pomp; in memory thereof Luca added the red cross, emblem of the People, to his arms. On the death of Cosimo, who was succeeded by his infirm and gouty son Piero, Luca thought his opportunity had come. Together with a far abler man, Diotisalvi Neroni, he put himself at the head of the anti-Medicean party and Florence was divided into two camps, the party of the Hill, so-called because Luca’s palace stood on the highest point of the city; and of the Plain, because the palace of the Medici was on the flat. But discord soon broke out among the Hill party, as Luca perceived that if the Medici were beaten Neroni, and not himself, would be the head of the Republic; so in 1466 he made peace with Piero de’ Medici after which, as Machiavelli tells us, “friends and relations avoided saluting him in the streets. The superb edifices begun by him were abandoned by the builders, the benefits bestowed on him in the past were changed to injuries, the honours to insults. And many of those who had freely given something of great value now demanded it back, as having been merely lent; others who had been wont to praise him to the skies, blamed him as an ungrateful and violent man. Wherefore too late did he repent that he had not believed Niccolò Soderini, and sought rather to die honoured with arms in hand, than live dishonoured amongst his victorious enemies.”
Brunelleschi’s original design for Palazzo Pitti had only seven windows to the front, and Herr von Fabriczy in Filippo Brunelleschi Sein Leben und Seine Werke writes: “The choice of such dimensions (59 metres wide and 38 metres high) shows that he immediately grasped the advantages of a position on sharply rising ground and knew how to use it as a mighty factor for the desired effect.... In order to gauge the talent with which Brunelleschi turned to signal advantage what in other hands would have been a cause of failure, one need only imagine any one of the Florentine palaces, with the exception of the Palazzo Vecchio, in the place of the Pitti palace, to realize what a miserably meagre impression they would make as the crowning edifice on the summit of the steep hill.”
Vasari tells us “that Brunelleschi began and directed the building up to the second-floor windows,” so it cannot have been roofed in when Luca’s descendant Buonaccorso sold the huge unfinished pile to Eleonora of Toledo, wife of Cosimo I., for 9,000 golden florins (about £5,400) in 1549. In the following spring Niccolò Braccini, better known by his surname of Tribolo, began to lay out the adjacent garden, the Grand Duchess having bought much land to enlarge it. The origin of the name—Boboli—is unknown. Some say it is an Etruscan word, others that a family called Borgoli owned the land, which then became commonly known as Bogoli and, as often happens in Italy, the “g” was changed into a “b.” Or it may be derived from the Tuscan name of the hoopoe—bubula—which frequents the garden in spring uttering its weird note hoop, hoop, hoop, among the ilex groves. However that may be, Tribolo made a wonderful garden that has been the delight of many generations.
The original plan by Brunelleschi having been lost, the famous architect Ammannati was called in. He made considerable changes in the interior, in the windows of the first floor, and, according to an old manuscript, “finished the façade up to the roof.” He also built the magnificent courtyard, but did not change the length or the height of the palace, as is proved by a ground plan drawn twenty-four years after his death, which shows the front with Brunelleschi’s original seven windows. “In June, 1566,” writes Agostino Lapi in his Diary, “was begun the splendid and imperial building of the magnificent Palazzo Pitti of the city of Florence; that is to say, the new part in the courtyard which is opposite the convent and the monastery of Sta. Felicita—the façade and all the part facing the street and S. Spirito being ancient, while the right and left sides of the courtyard are modern and were begun in this century. Nearly all the stone, at least all that is of good quality, used for the ‘bozzi’ and the pilasters and suchlike, was quarried in the courtyard of the palace, the rest came from the Belvedere and other parts of the garden; so that the stone which adorns and beautifies the palace was quarried in the courtyard or in various places in the garden, a thing most convenient for the building. In the courtyard the old building on the side towards the Porta a S. Pier Gattolini was demolished. There were many fine rooms in the said courtyard, and a deep drain more than two feet wide which received all the rain water and that which came from the kitchens and other places, and passing under the said palace it carried off all filth.... Maestro Bartolommeo Ammannati, the principal architect of the new palace, told me that he had found the date of the commencement of the old building, 1466, carved on a stone.”
In July, 1558, the marriage of Lucrezia de’ Medici, Cosimo’s daughter, was solemnized in the chapel of the palace. One hundred and ten ladies, resplendent in brocade dresses and many jewels, were assembled to see the masquerade in five parts acted by young Florentine nobles. First came twelve Indians, alarming, but very gorgeous; then twelve Florentines habited as in ancient times; twelve Greeks in fine armour followed; then twelve emperors blazing with jewels; finally came twelve pilgrims with long mantles of cloth of gold, on which were emblazoned cockle shells of silver, and music proper to the different character of each masquerade was played by hidden musicians.
Later in the same year, Isabella, the most beautiful of Cosimo’s daughters, was married to Paolo Giordano Orsini, Duke of Bracciano. Her beauty was enhanced by her many talents. She was a good musician; spoke and wrote elegant Italian, Latin, French and Spanish; was a poetess and an improvisatrice, and accompanied herself on the lute. Her father doted on her, and opposed her departure for Rome with her husband. The name of the beautiful young Duchess was soon coupled with that of Troilo Orsini, her husband’s cousin, who had been left by him as her guardian. Troilo became jealous of a handsome page, Lelio Torello, whom he stabbed one night in the garden. After the death of Cosimo the scandal reached the ears of Isabella’s husband, who came from Rome, and with the connivance of her brother, the Grand Duke, strangled her at his villa of Cerreto but a few days after her brother, Don Pietro, had killed his lovely young Spanish wife at Cafaggiuolo.
The birth of the only son of Francesco I. and of Joan of Austria, supposed to have been poisoned a few years later by Bianca Cappello, was celebrated with great rejoicings; money was showered down among the crowd from the windows of the Palazzo Pitti, and great butts of wine were broached on the balustrade of the Palazzo Vecchio. Not only did every man drink at will, but Settimanni declares that the Via Vachereccia and the Mercato Nuovo ran with wine as far as the Ponte Vecchio. Poor ugly, misshapen Joan had no happy life with her Medici husband, who was completely under the dominion of the handsome and dissolute Bianca Cappello, to whom he was secretly married in his private chapel very soon after his wife’s death. A few months later the Venetian Republic proclaimed Bianca a daughter of Venice, and the marriage was then solemnized with great pomp in the cathedral, while a tournament was held in the courtyard of the palace in her honour.
Montaigne, who was in Florence in 1580, notes in his delightful Journal: “On Sunday I saw the Pitti Palace, and among other things a mule in marble, which is the effigy of one that is still alive; this honour has been paid on account of its long services in carrying materials for the building, at least so says a Latin inscription. We saw in the palace the Chimæra (antique), which has a head with horns and ears coming out of its shoulders, and a body like a small lion. On the preceding Saturday the Grand Duke’s palace was thrown open and filled with peasants, to whom nothing was closed; they danced in every corner of the large saloon. The concourse of this class of people is, it seems to me, emblematic of their lost liberty, which is thus evoked every year during the principal festival of the town” [24th June, St. John’s Day]. The Grand Duke invited Montaigne to dine at the palace, and he was evidently astonished at seeing Bianca take the place of honour above her husband. “This Duchess is handsome,” he writes, “according to the Italian idea, with an agreeable but imperious countenance, a coarse figure and breasts to match. She seems to have entirely subjugated the Prince, and to have had him under her dominion for a long time.”
Torquato Tasso evidently admired the Grand Duchess, to whom he addressed many madrigals and sonnets, often playing fancifully with her “bel nome” Bianca, and praising her golden hair.