Florentine palaces & their stories

by Janet Ross

Never did the Florentines pass such a summer. Every day brought some entertainment more magnificent than that of the day before, and the Palazzo Pitti resounded with music and gaiety. In October arrived the Cardinal Aldobrandini, sent by the Pope to perform the marriage ceremony. Don Antonio de’ Medici met him some miles outside the city at the head of five hundred cavalry, and at the town gate he was received by the Grand Duke under a velvet baldaquin, who escorted him, walking on his left, to the palace. Cannon fired, trumpets sounded and people cheered, as the Cardinal, followed by high dignitaries of the Church and an enormous train of barons and cavaliers, passed through Florence. On the 5th October Ferdinando I., as proxy for the King of France, espoused his niece, Maria de’ Medici, and the inventive talents of Buontalenti and of Giovanni da Bologna were taxed to the utmost to provide extraordinary and unheard-of feasts and entertainments. The former painted and arranged the wonderful scenery for Rinuccini’s Eurydice, which was performed in the big saloon, with music by Jacopo Peri, the inventor of recitative and the forerunner of Pergolesi, Jomelli and Cimarosa.

Eight years later the palace witnessed yet more splendid entertainments in honour of the marriage of Ferdinando’s eldest son Cosimo with Maria Maddalena of Austria, and but a few months afterwards Ferdinando died, and his body lay in state in the large hall of the palace.

During the brief reign of Cosimo II., Giulio Parigi, according to Baldinucci, added to Palazzo Pitti on either side “by a design of regal magnificence.” He increased Brunelleschi’s façade from seven windows to thirteen; and his son, Alfonso, who succeeded him as chief architect under Ferdinando II., again lengthened the palace by two large windows on the ground floor on either side and five on the first, in which state it remained for more than a hundred years, as can be seen in the engraving by Zocchi, done in 1746. It was fortunate that so clever and resourceful a man as Alfonso Parigi was court architect, for Baldinucci tells us that “about 1640 the façade of the oldest part of the Palazzo Pitti, from the second floor upwards, was seen to be out of the perpendicular, inclining towards the Piazza more than 8 inches. This might have been very serious had not Alfonso with talent, knowledge and prompt courage, suggested a radical and efficacious remedy, and effected it by drawing back the colossal wall, faced with huge rustic stones, to its original place; securing it in such manner that it might never again present so alarming a spectacle, and he did it in this way. First he bored the wall of the façade in as many places as were needful for placing certain large iron ties made on purpose by Pietro Zaballi, a famous worker in iron of that time; these were secured with the usual bars, only very big and strong, which afterwards were hidden under the stone facing. He passed the ties under the floors and walls of the passages and rooms of the said second floor, and at the extremities of these same ties, at the back of the building, he placed the wonderful instruments furnished with screws invented by himself. With these, by means of certain levers, first one and then another was tightened and pulled, so that this great force was exercised little by little, and always equally. Thus almost insensibly, with the labour of but few men, the great wall returned to its place, and to insure it for ever from any new danger the ties were clenched also in the courtyard.”

About the same time Ferdinando II. ordered Pietro da Cortona and his scholar Ciro Ferri to fresco the five large rooms on the first floor of the Palace (now part of the picture gallery). “Each room,” Inghirami tells us, “was distinguished by the name of a planet, and alluded to the five principal virtues of his father, the Grand Duke Cosimo II. The first, called Venus, signified benignity; the second, Apollo, stood for splendour; the third, Mars, for strong government; the fourth, Jupiter, for regal majesty and the recompense of merit; the fifth, Saturn, signified prudence and profound knowledge. In such guise the painter united mythology with history. The merit of these inventions is due to Michelangelo Buonarroti, a writer of much merit, surnamed the ‘Younger,’ to distinguish him from the famous artist of this name, who was his uncle.” In these rooms the Grand Duke hung his favourite pictures, and ordered the director Puccini to bring several back from the Uffizi, which had at various times been removed from the Pitti. Among these were the Madonna della Seggiola, and the portrait of Leo X. by Raphael. The beautiful Madonna del Granduca, also by Raphael, was bought by the Grand Duke for 300 zecchins, and the fine pictures inherited by his wife Vittoria della Rovere from her father, the Duke of Urbino, increased the treasures of the gallery, which may be said to have been begun by Ferdinando II.

John Evelyn, who was in Florence in 1644, evidently thought the lengthening of the Palazzo Pitti an improvement, as he writes in his diary that it had been “of late greatly beautified by Cosimo with huge stones of the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders, with a terrace at each side having rustic uncut balustrades, with a fountain that ends in a cascade seen from the great gate, and so forming a vista to the gardens. Nothing is more admirable than the vacant staircase, marbles, statues, urns, pictures, court, grotto, and waterworks. In the quadrangle is a huge jetto of water in a volto of four faces, with noble statues at each square, especially the Diana of porphyry above the grotto. We were here showed a prodigious great loadstone. The garden has every variety, hills, dales, rocks, groves, aviaries, vivaries, fountains, especially one of five jettos, the middle basin being one of the longest stones I ever saw. Here is everything to make such a paradise delightful. In the garden I saw a rose grafted on an orange-tree. There was much topiary-work, and columns in architecture about the hedges. The Duke has added an ample laboratory, over against which stands a fort on a hill, where they told us his treasure is kept. In this palace the Duke ordinarily resides, living with his Swiss guards, after the frugal Italian way, and even selling what he can spare of his wines, at the cellar under his very house, wicker bottles dangling over even the chief entrance into the Palace, serving for a vintner’s bush.”

In honour of the visit of the Princess Anna de’ Medici with her husband, the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and his two brothers, and of the Duke of Mantua and his wife, who was a Medici, splendid festivals were given in the Palazzo Pitti, while a ballet on horseback, led by Cosimo, the youthful heir to the throne, was performed in the amphitheatre in the Boboli gardens by fifty-two cavaliers magnificently dressed and mounted on well-broken horses. Little did the spectators think that the young prince, who made his barb curvet so proudly, would become an odious bigot and the laughing-stock of Europe, on account of his dissensions with his wife, Marguerite Louise of Orleans. The old palace has witnessed many strange scenes, but few stranger than that of a French princess amusing herself by tickling her cook. Vincenzio Martinelli, in letters written in Italian chiefly to English friends, and published in London in 1758, gives a curious description of the tom-boy games of Marguerite Louise. “Cosimo had obliged the Grand Duchess to send back to France all the gentlemen and ladies of her court, and only one Frenchman, a cook, remained. The Grand Duke gave himself up to devotion and solitude and governed his family, as he did his state, like Tiberius, and allowed his wife no amusement save a small concert for two or three hours every evening. The Grand Duchess, who was very young, found these concerts monotonous, or perhaps, being born in France, did not care for Italian music, so as a diversion she used to send for her French cook, who came with his long apron and white cap, just as he was dressed for cooking the dinner. Now this cook either dreaded, or pretended to dread, being tickled, and the princess, aware of his weakness, took great pleasure in tickling him, while he made all those contortions, screams and cries proper to people who cannot bear to be tickled. Thus the princess tickled the cook, and he defended himself, shouting and running from one side of the room to the other, which made her laugh immoderately. When tired of such romps she would take a pillow from her bed and belabour the cook on the face and on the body, whilst he, shouting aloud, hid himself now under, now on, the very bed of the princess, where she continued to beat him, until tired out with laughing and beating she sank exhausted into a chair. While these games were going on the musicians stopped their music, and as soon as the princess sat down they recommenced. This noble amusement continued for some time before the Grand Duke knew of it; but one evening it happened that the cook was very drunk, and therefore shouted louder than usual, and the Grand Duke, whose apartments were five or six rooms distant from those of the Grand Duchess, heard the noise and went to discover the cause. As he entered the room the Grand Duchess was just beating her cook with a pillow on the grand-ducal bed, and the Prince, horrified at so novel a sight, instantly condemned the cook to the galleys (but I believe he was eventually pardoned), and scolding the lady with the utmost severity, with a bearing more princely than marital, he forbad her ever again to indulge in such conduct. The princess resented being thus taken to task in the presence of the musicians, perchance with less consideration than she thought due to her high rank, and was exceedingly angry. After passing the whole night in fury and in tears she determined to return to France, and sent one of her gentlemen to the Grand Duke to inform him of her resolution. He, who desired nothing better, as he feared his family might multiply like that of Priam, coldly replied that the Grand Duchess had better reflect on the consequences of such a step, which he would in no way oppose.” It ended by the Grand Duchess returning to France, leaving two sons and a daughter, who were the last of the great house of Medici.

After the death of Giovan Gastone in 1738, last surviving son of Cosimo III., Tuscany was given by the treaty of Vienna to Francesco, Duke of Lorraine, husband of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, in exchange for his hereditary estates which were ceded to France. Tuscany was then governed by regents, and of one of these, Marshal Botta, Sir Horace Mann writes to his friend Walpole: “He has made sad work in the Palazzo, and in the garden. His arrangement of the pictures is to make it depend, first upon the freshness of the gilding upon the frames, and then upon the position of the figures in each picture, which figures must not turn their back to the throne. Luther and Calvin, by Giordano, were turned out with a most pious contempt, as not worthy to stand in the presence of so orthodox a prince as is coming here. His mother (Maria Theresa) will not permit any picture to hang in her apartment that shows either a naked leg or arm. This ill agrees with the Medici taste, or the collection they have left. Imagine that grave matron (Maria Theresa) running the gauntlet through the gallery. Ah! quelle horreur!... A famous picture, by Titian, was turned out of the room where the canopy is, because the figure almost turned its back to it, and none are to be admitted there but such as respectfully present their faces to it. The picture of Luther and Calvin was dismissed with a Catholick fury, and, I fear, will find no better place than in that horrid ill-painted room of Hell, at the end of the apartment, that the young prince may see how the enemies of the Church ought to be treated. You will think I exaggerate, but what I have said is literally and ludicrously true. Botta tells the Florentines who criticise his operations, that he knows more of architecture and painting than Andrea del Sarto, or their ancestors who invented their Tuscan Order. Such are his occupations, for as to government, célà va son train. Nobody interferes, and nothing can be taxed higher than it is.... The farmers of the revenue, though Tuscans, are more rigorous than the receivers or collectors used to be under the Medici, who were indulgent to their subjects, and spent their revenues amongst them. This will not be the case for some time, though a young prince is coming, for the emperor will still have the principal share.”[57]

Botta had been busy for some time arranging the Palazzo Pitti, which had been untenanted since the death, in January, 1743, of the Princess Palatine, last of the Medici. Like all her family she had artistic tastes, and the Dutch pictures now in the Uffizi were collected by her and left to Tuscany. Huge pier glasses and Rococo furniture were bought to furnish the empty rooms on the first floor (where now the picture gallery is), “but,” writes Mann, “everything is calculated for the Meridian of Germany—nay, of Muscovy. Stoves and chimneys in every room. For the furniture the gout is not less Gothick.”

A few days after the marriage of Leopoldo of Austria with Maria Louisa of Spain, his father died suddenly at Innsbruck, and the fate of Tuscany was changed. The Emperor Joseph II. ordered his brother Leopoldo to be proclaimed Grand Duke, instead of Regent, and Mann writes, “The Florentines seem very sensible of their good fortune in having a prince again to live among them, after thirty years’ bondage under unexperienced Lorrain ministers and others, so little fit and desirous to contribute to their welfare.”...

Though Marshal Botta made “sad work” inside the palace, he employed a good architect, G. Ruggeri, for the outside, who in 1764 began the great loggiata, or projecting colonnade, at the north end of the façade, where now is the entrance to the picture gallery. To him is also due the credit of taking advantage of the steep slope to create the bastion or terrace, but of a different shape from what we now see. The corresponding bastion on the opposite side was added by the Grand Duke Leopoldo I. in 1783 under G. Paoletti, who also designed and half finished the Palazzina della Meridiana, an adjunct to the Palazzo Pitti on the garden side, where he cleverly took advantage of the lie of the land to make the entrance on a level with the second floor of the great palace.