The Palazzo Pitti had already been despoiled of many of its valuable contents accumulated by the Medici, and Leopoldo I. though an able administrator and lawgiver, must have been sadly lacking in taste, as during his reign many of the fine old ceilings were abolished in favour of sham vaults made of lath and plaster. On succeeding his brother as Emperor of Austria in 1790, his second son, Ferdinando, was made Grand Duke of Tuscany, and when General Napoleon Bonaparte came to Florence in 1796, Ferdinando III. asked him to dine, and received him with almost royal honours. Not long afterwards General Sérurier occupied Lucca, where he levied a tax of seven millions, and a few days later he requested the Grand Duke of Tuscany to supply him with the same amount—but as a loan. Convinced that it would never be repaid and unwilling to burthen his people with heavy taxes, Ferdinando III. emptied the coffers of the state, took the reserve of silver bars from the mint and, to make up the sum, melted down a quantity of gold vases and plate which he collected from the various grand ducal villas, and from the Palazzo Pitti.
Three years later the French troops entered Florence with General Gaulthier at their head. He dismounted at the Palazzo Riccardi, and immediately sent a company of soldiers with colours flying and band playing to mount guard at the royal palace. At eight o’clock next morning the Commissary-General for Tuscany, M. Reinhard, drove to the Palazzo Pitti and presented his credentials from the Directoire to the Grand Duke Ferdinando, with an order that he was to leave Tuscany at once. The Grand Duke met him on the threshold, received the letter, turned on his heel and re-entered the palace without saying a word. The night was spent in hurried preparations for departure, and before sunrise next morning a sad little procession of court coaches left the Palazzo Pitti. That afternoon a tree of liberty was set up in the Piazza Sta. Croce, and another in the Piazza Sta. Maria Novella, amid the shouts of half drunken French soldiers.[58]
A new kingdom—Etruria—was then created by Napoleon and bestowed on Don Lodovico of Bourbon, son of the Duke of Parma, married to a daughter of Charles IV. of Spain. The bridegroom and bride went to Paris, and were received by the First Consul and his wife Josephine with great honour. They became so intimate that the young King of Etruria lost his shyness, and amused the court after dinner by turning somersaults and playing leap-frog with the officers. Murat, the brilliant husband of Caroline Bonaparte, Napoleon’s favourite sister, went to Florence in January, 1801, to prepare for the sovereigns of the new Kingdom of Etruria, which the Tuscans declined to believe in. Every Friday, when the fattori, country priests and peasants, came in to the market at Florence (as they do to this day), they looked to see if the arms of Ferdinando III. were still above the portal of the Palazzo Vecchio, and returned home declaring that the King of Etruria was an invention of the French, in order to remain a little longer in “la bella Firenze.”
The manner of proclaiming the King was original and worthy of his reputation for turning somersaults. On the evening of the 28th July came news that the sovereigns were at Parma on their way to Florence. A serenade was immediately improvised, and Murat was greeted with shouts of “Viva la Francia, Viva Giovacchino,” to which he answered, “Viva l’Etruria, Viva il Re d’Etruria.” He then went to the Pergola, where the favourite Nunziatina Pastori was dancing in a ballet called the “Kingdom of Terpsichore.” As he entered the royal box she improvised a new pas (no doubt already carefully rehearsed beforehand), and bounded on to the stage holding three cards, on which something was written which she carefully concealed from the public and from her companion, a well-known dancer named Berti, who represented Mercury. Mercury chased Terpsichore and when at last he caught her, she drew a dart from his belt and threw it at the cards she had let fall in her flight. Escaping from Mercury, she seized the card pierced with his dart and showed it to the house. On it was written Viva Lodovico I. Re d’Etruria in large letters. She was greeted with tremendous applause and Murat exclaimed, “Qu’elle est charmante, la petite Nunziatine, qu’elle est jolie; c’est touchant, n’est ce pas, cette façon d’annoncer l’arrivée du Roi d’Etrurie.”
At last, on the 10th August, the King and Queen entered Florence in great state, and greeted their new subjects from the balcony of the Palazzo Pitti. Soon afterwards Murat and his beautiful wife left with an immense suite for Bologna, to the delight of the Florentines who hoped to be delivered from the French occupation which was eating up the country.
The young sovereigns found an exhausted treasury and an impoverished peasantry, and were forced to make a loan of 800,000 francs at the enormous interest of 37 per cent., to pay which they pledged the revenues of the post-office and the custom house. Lodovico had never been strong. He died in May, 1802, leaving Maria Louisa Regent, who presented the little King to his subjects from a window of the Palazzo Pitti. In the autumn Pauline Bonaparte and her husband, Prince Borghese, came to Florence, and nothing was spoken of but the beauty and grace of the woman of whom Canova declared “that her figure, the shape of her skull, and the way her head was set on her shoulders, had never been equalled since the days of Diana and Calypso.” The Queen of Etruria received her with royal honours, and memoirs of that time describe her entrance into the throne room as a wonderful sight. Dressed in flowing white robes and covered from head to foot with jewels, Pauline slowly walked, or rather glided, towards fat little Maria Louisa who, weighed down by a heavy black velvet dress, looked anything but royal. In 1807 the Emperor Napoleon curtly signified to the Queen that Etruria had ceased to exist, and now formed part of the French Empire. Her prayers and entreaties were in vain, and on the 10th December again a sad little procession left the palace, escorted by French cavalry.
General Menou, who now governed Tuscany, made himself ridiculous by his passion for an awkward and vulgar dancer, to whom, when at last convinced that dancing was not her strong point, he had singing lessons given in his apartments in the Pitti palace, at which he assisted. He ostentatiously attended mass and affected great deference to the clergy, but his conversion to Islam in Egypt, where he had changed his name to Abdallah and married a Turkish lady, Zebedeeh el-Bahouad, had made too great a sensation for his new-born piety to have much effect.
The Emperor’s sister Elisa, married to Felix Baciocchi, who was already Princess of Piombino, was created Grand Duchess of Tuscany in March, 1809. She despatched her favourite equerry, Cenami, to Florence with orders to turn General Menou and his mistress out of the Palazzo Pitti, and prepare for her arrival. But with Napoleonic impulsiveness she left Lucca the following evening with her husband, escorted by a few French soldiers, and at daybreak entered the Palazzo Pitti. The shutters were thrown open and Elisa walked proudly through the magnificent rooms which were now to be her home. An officer was sent to order a salvo of twenty-one cannon to be fired as an intimation to her astonished subjects of her arrival. That evening she went in state to the Pergola and was vociferously cheered. Her likeness to the Emperor was remarkable, and she held herself majestically. “Of all our three sisters,” said Joseph Bonaparte, “Elisa was the one who, morally and physically, most resembled Napoleon.”
Elisa soon won the hearts of the people, but many of the aristocracy and the higher bourgeosie, encouraged by the clergy, held aloof. She was much annoyed at the position held by the Countess of Albany, who was treated as the widow of a royal personage, and openly professed Alfieri’s sentiments about France and encouraged seditious language at her house. So Elisa privately obtained from Fouché, then head of the police, an order of banishment against the Countess, and charged General Menou to tell her of the decree, and to express the sorrow and astonishment of the Grand Duchess at so stringent a measure. Menou suggested to the Countess to ask for an audience, which was arranged with some difficulty as she insisted on being received as the widow of the King of England. She drove up to the Palazzo Pitti in her state coach, and was conducted through a suite of rooms into a small boudoir where Elisa, under pretence of sudden indisposition, lay in bed. She only saluted the Countess, in return for her formal curtseys, by an inclination of the head, and after listening to her with assumed interest and sympathy brusquely exclaimed, “Why, dear Countess, was Alfieri so declared an enemy of France?” “You show me that he was perfectly right,” answered the Countess of Albany, rising, and turning her back on the Grand Duchess, she walked out of the room without another word. Two days later she was exiled, and all Florence took her part. A magnificent fête was given at the Pitti palace to celebrate the victory of Wagram. The gardens were illuminated and a balloon, in the shape of the imperial eagle holding a thunderbolt, was sent up; but the court of the Grand Duchess was forsaken, and the common people amused themselves by making a cock drunk and hunting it through the streets.
The disastrous retreat of the Grande Armée from Moscow was followed by General Nugent’s proclamation to the Italian people, promulgated at Ravenna on the 10th December, 1813, and the advance of the Neapolitan troops under Murat, who appeared at the gates of Florence on the 13th January, 1814. He was received with shouts of joy by the populace, who rushed to the Palazzo Pitti, and would have forced an entrance but for the intervention of the Syndic. Like the Queen of Etruria, the Grand Duchess had to fly, but her escort were forced to draw their swords to protect her from the mob. In September Ferdinando III. re-entered Florence, to the joy of the Tuscans, sick to death of foreign rulers, who hoped for a period of peace and quiet under a prince born in the Pitti palace, whom they regarded as a Florentine. In 1818 he bought so many pictures at the Gerini sale that another room, the Hall of the Iliad, frescoed by Sabatelli, was added to the great Pitti gallery. In 1824 he was succeeded by his son, Leopoldo II., under whose reign the architect P. Poccianti made great changes in the palace. Various small rooms were conveted into the fine atrium, or entrance hall, leading into Ammannati’s superb courtyard, and at an enormous expense the great staircase was built, in lieu of the old, narrow, steep one.[59] The superb gallery was thrown open to the public on Sundays and holidays in 1833.