Francesco Rucellai, a cousin of Giovanni Battista, from whom the present branch of the family descends, began life as a page to the Grand Duke Ferdinando II., and was Vicario of the Upper Val d’Arno in 1658. A man of considerable culture, and gifted with charming manners, he was made a member of all the learned academies of Florence, and wrote a history of his native town in nine large volumes and one of his own family, from which I have quoted. His grandson Giulio studied law at Pisa in 1736, and became a Senator and legal adviser to the Grand Duke Giovan Gastone, last of the Medici. Enlightened, patriotic and liberal, he determined to curb the power of the clergy and to abolish the Inquisition. Several times the Pope demanded the dismissal of so obnoxious a minister, and when Francis I. of Lorraine became the ruler of Tuscany he renewed his request. But Rucellai was too necessary a man. He steadily withstood the pretensions of Clement XII. to nominate bishops, a right that had been exercised by the Grand Dukes for two hundred years; and at length, after the well-known case of the poet Tommaso Crudeli, the last inmate of the prisons of the Inquisition in Tuscany, he succeeded in suppressing the tribunal. Soon afterwards he framed a law obliging the clergy to contribute their quota to the general taxation, and on the 2nd March, 1769, by his advice, the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo proclaimed the celebrated law against mortmain. Ten years later the right of asylum, that fertile source of scandal and incentive to crime, was done away with, the jurisdiction of the bishops was limited to purely spiritual matters and, in order to protect young girls from being forced to enter a convent against their will, no woman under thirty was allowed to take the vows. The large sums arising from the sale of suppressed convents Rucellai used in founding schools for poor girls.
He adopted his orphan nephew Giovanni Pietro, who became a member of various Florentine academies, was an admirable musician, and painted well in tempera. Count Cosimo Rucellai has a curious collection of small family portraits which were probably copied by Giovanni from old frescoes and pictures which no longer exist.
PALAZZO SALVIATI
(NOW A SCHOOL OF THE SCOLOPI FRIARS) Via del Corso. No. 4.
Jacopo Salviati bought the house of Folco de’ Portinari, where Beatrice was born, together with several others, and where they stood he built a large palace. This great and powerful family descended from a doctor, Messer Salvi, whose son Cambio was the first of sixty-three Priors and of twenty-one Gonfaloniers of Justice of his house. Lotto, another son, was a great jurist, and his descendant Jacopo Salviati played an important part in Florence in the XVth century. After subduing the Counts Guidi and the Ubertini in 1404 he was solemnly knighted by the Signoria, became Commissary of the Pisan war, and his name appears in every embassy of that time. Bernardo, his son, was father of Francesco the Archbishop of Pisa who joined in the Pazzi conspiracy against Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici, and was hung from a window of the Palazzo Vecchio (see p. 373). His grandson Jacopo, husband of Lucrezia de’ Medici, daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent, was the only man who dared raise his voice at the court of Clement VII. against creating the bastard Alessandro de’ Medici Lord of Florence, and against building the fortress of S. Giovanni. It was then that he uttered the prophetic words, “God grant that Filippo [Strozzi] in advocating the building of this fortress is not digging his own grave.” A cousin of his married Laudomia de’ Medici, and their son Giuliano, after insulting the name of his mother’s family and helping the mob to destroy their arms in 1527, became the intimate associate of the Duke Alessandro, and is famous, or rather infamous, for his behaviour to Luisa Strozzi (see p. 335).
Maria Salviati, a daughter of Jacopo, married Giovanni de’ Medici delle Bande Nere, and their son Cosimo, afterwards Duke of Florence, was born in her father’s palace. There is a tradition that Giovanni ordered the child to be thrown from a first floor window into the courtyard, where he caught him in his arms, and foretold that the boy would become a great man because he showed no fear. Maria’s brother Alamanno left a very large fortune, and his descendant Jacopo was created Duke of Giuliano by Urban VIII., and for his sins married Veronica Cybo, daughter of the Duke of Massa and Carrara. “Donna Veronica was endowed with but small beauty,” writes a contemporary, “but per contra with a most violent and imperious temper and a jealous disposition. Her husband, poor man, had small joy with her.” Duke Jacopo, handsome, gay, an elegant poet and a gallant soldier, met the beautiful Caterina Canacci, surnamed “the fair Cherubim” on account of her golden hair and wonderful colouring, and fell desperately in love with her (see p. 62). The Duchess’ vengeance was a terrible one, and only her high birth saved her from condign punishment. The Salviati family is extinct, and their title is borne by a younger member of the princely family of the Borghese of Rome, one of whom married Anna Maria, only daughter of Duke Averardo Salviati, about 1790. The palace was bought by the Da Cepperello family, and now belongs to the Scolopi friars, who have their school there.
PALAZZO SAN CLEMENTE.
PALAZZO SAN CLEMENTE
Via Gino Capponi. No. 11.
A palace built by Don Luigi di Toledo was bought by the Guadagni family in the XVIth century, and Gherardo Silvani was commissioned to enlarge it, incorporating part of the old palace in the new one. Silvani succeeded in making a handsome building, and the trim garden with pleached hedges suits the stately loggie and arched corridors.
This was the house about which the Pretender and Lord Cowper went to law. That delightful old gossip Sir Horace Mann writes to Walpole in 1776: “The quarrel was about a house, which he [Charles Edward] wanted to buy; but some obstacles obstructed the conclusion of the bargain. In the mean time Lady Cowper wanted a more proper house than her own to lay in; and proposals were made to the proprietor, to have it for a certain number of months, and he inclined to let it to Lord Cowper. This displeased the Comte Albanie, and the dispute was carried to a publick tribunal, which decided in the Comte’s favour. This displeased the Great Duke, who favoured the Cowpers. In short, the whole town took part in it, but I dissuaded my Lord from making an appeal to another court, so that the Albanies now reside in it; though the contract heightened the price considerably. What the Comte complained of most was, that he should meet with so rebellious an opposition from one of his own subjects. The ladies still vye with each other in beauty, so that they can never more be friends.” The following year Sir Horace again mentions the Pretender: “I have told you how dangerously ill the Count Albanie has been. His physicians sent to inform me that a mortification had begun in his legs, that his body was swelled, and that the affanno was great, so that he thought him to be in the most imminent danger. This account was sent post to Rome to his brother and the Countess.... He made a will in a hurry; and it has been said, in joke, that he has bequeathed his three kingdoms to the son of the Great Duke, in example of what King Theodore did, by leaving his crown to his creditors.... I formerly gave you an account of the fracas in the Pretender’s family, by the elopement of his wife, whom everybody then pitied and applauded. The tables are now turned. The cat, at last, is out of the bag. The Cardinal of York’s visit to his brother gave the latter an opportunity to undeceive him, by proving to him that the complaints laid to his charge, of ill-using her, were invented to cover a plot formed by Count Alfieri, who (by working up Tragedies, of which he has wrote many, is most expert, though he always kept behind the curtain) had imposed upon the Great Duke, the Pope and the Cardinal, and all those who took her part. All that he said on that subject, at a time that he thought himself and was supposed by everybody to be in the most imminent danger, made a great impression on his brother, who, on his return to Rome, exposed the whole to the Pope, and obtained an order from him to Count Alfieri to leave the Pope’s state in fifteen days. Not content with that satisfaction, the imprudent Cardinal (for a more silly mortal never existed) published the whole of the Countess’s intrigues with Alfieri. This has exasperated all the Roman Nobility against the Cardinal, insomuch that, instead of considering the delinquencies of the parties, their wrath is turned against the publisher of the scandal; and they compassionate the situation of the disconsolate lady who, I really believe, will marry the Count a week after she becomes a widow.”