There is no place to draw a line and claim that there the story ends. Symbolic markers abound: Cosimo’s “retirement” in 1564 from daily governance (ceded to his son Francesco); his acquisition of the grand ducal title in 1569 from Pius V (with subsequent imperial ratification); his triumphal coronation in Rome in 1570; and Francesco’s smooth succession after Cosimo’s death in 1574 - all signs of the acceptance of the new order in the city, dominion, and wider Italian and European world. There was one more (alleged) conspiracy, uncovered in 1575, involving Orazio Pucci (whose father was convicted and executed in the 1559 Pucci plot), several members of the Capponi family (including two grandsons and a grandnephew of Niccolo Capponi), Piero Ridolfi (Filippo Strozzi’s grandson), and a descendant of Machiavelli. Beyond the government’s accusations, executions, and tenacious pursuit of those who fled, the reality of this conspiracy is murky. It may have been real; but it also brought in more than 300,000 scudi in confiscated property and disposed of potential enemies from families with a history of opposition to the Medici: a timely reminder, at the beginning of Francesco’s reign, that opposition would continue to be punished harshly and swiftly.753 But those who once called themselves the “ottimati” had already absorbed the message. The ruling house put distance between itself and the “nobility” in a variety of ways, including its marriages. Cosimo originally sought marriage to Alessandro’s widow, the emperor’s natural daughter, and had to settle for the daughter of the Spanish viceroy in Naples. But in 1565 Francesco married the archduchess Joanna of
Austria, daughter of Emperor Ferdinand I and sister of Emperor Maximilian II. And in 1600 Grand Duke Ferdinand married his brother’s daughter Maria to King Henry IV of France. Royal and imperial marriages likewise symbolized a new era.
Perhaps more significant than boundaries between eras, however, was Cosimo’s deliberate cultural policy of linking his new order to the republican past. Even as he buried the republic, he allowed its memory to be preserved. His historians presented the principate as the necessary consequence and predestined successor to the republic: not only in the anti-republican polemics of Filippo de’ Nerli, but also in works more sympathetic to the republic by former republicans Bernardo Segni (Niccolo Capponi’s nephew) and Benedetto Varchi, who made their peace with Cosimo and wrote histories of the last republic and the transition to the principate without renouncing their, or Florence’s, republican past. Later Jacopo Pitti wrote his admiring life of the republican military hero Antonio Giacomini, dedicated to and perhaps commissioned by Cosimo, and a fiercely pro-republican history of the city up to the last republic.754 Imagined continuity, or evolution, in political history had its counterpart in the Accademia Fiorentina’s simultaneous cultivation of Florence’s glorious literary past through public lectures on Dante and Petrarch and its defense of the modern vernacular as constitutive of the cultural identity and even the legitimate borders of the duchy.755
A more complex dialogue between republican past and ducal present occurred in what the principate did and did not do to Florence’s urban fabric. The most significant additions were the Fortezza, which predated Cosimo, and Giorgio Vasari’s two major architectural projects: the Uffizi, in which the ducal offices were concentrated (including the formerly independent guilds that once had their own meeting halls); and the above-ground corridor that connects the ducal residence at Pitti to the Uffizi and Palazzo Vecchio. Otherwise, Cosimo left the spatial and architectural configuration of the city largely as it had evolved under the republic. Some spaces were symbolically appropriated: the Loggia dei Lanzi and the piazza in front of Palazzo Vecchio were filled with new sculptures exalting Cosimo’s virtues.756 And the hall in Palazzo Vecchio built in 1495 for the Great Council and trashed by the Medici regime of 1512-27 was redecorated by Vasari and his assistants with paintings that glorified Cosimo as a new Augustus bringing his city to its golden age.757 But the piazza, the loggia, the old Palazzo, and even its huge hall, all creations and landmarks of the republic, were allowed to remain, transformed, but recognizably what they had always been.
A chief architect of the remembrance of the republican past was Vasari, who, in his Lives of the Florentine artists, invented the powerful framework in which the history of Florence’s artistic production has for centuries been seen as a story of continuity and accumulating legacies punctuated by moments of revolutionary transformation that fulfilled, rather than repudiated, the past.758 In another work, the Ragionamenti, Vasari dramatized the significance of the decision to let the monuments of the republican past survive the transition to the principate. The Ragionamenti are a long dialogue, written after the war against Siena, in which Vasari explains to Cosimo’s son Francesco the rationale for his remodeling of the interior of Palazzo Vecchio and the meaning of the paintings with which he decorated its many rooms, especially the great hall. As they discuss the narrow passageways and irregularly shaped spaces of the old palace, Vasari has the young prince ask why he did not recommend tearing it down and replacing it with something “modern” that would have displayed the skills of Florence’s builders. Vasari’s answer makes of the palace and the decision not to destroy it a synecdoche of the larger policy of cultural and political continuity with the republican past. Cosimo’s concern, says Vasari, was not to “alter the foundations and the maternal walls of this place, because in their old form they established the origin of his new government.” The “maternal walls” of the old order were thus the womb from which Cosimo’s government was born. Vasari makes the link to politics explicit: just as the duke “preserved the old laws of this republic and added to them new ones for the well-being of his citizens,” he similarly preserved the palace while “imposing order and measure on its old, distorted, and irregular” spaces and walls, to show that he knew how to bring perfection to architecture as much as to government. For he who knows how to bring to new life something broken and near death “without destroying very much” merits more praise than one who simply razes the old and builds anew. Moreover, Vasari tells Francesco, many of his new paintings depict the “honorable actions of the republic,” and “it seemed inappropriate” to paint them “on new walls and stones that had not been witnesses to the valor of the Florentines as these old [stones and walls] were, since, from the time they were built in 1298,” the Florentines had honorably fought their enemies and subdued the surrounding territories.
Nor, Vasari continues, could Cosimo have ignored what he owed to his family and the greatness they acquired during the republic. The “fateful stones” of the old palace “acknowledged the wisdom, goodness, and love that the great Cosimo vecchio bestowed on them and on the patria, and they were thus always devoted to him, hoping that he who would one day share his name and surpass him in virtue would renovate them and make them more beautiful.” Vasari even asserts that the many objects brought to Palazzo Vecchio from Palazzo Medici after the family’s expulsion in 1494 have changed the “nature” of the building, which “used to be so volatile because of its old forms of government, and has now become secure and no longer unstable.” Therefore Duke Cosimo did not want any architect to suggest altering its old form and preferred instead that “on these stones, honored by so many victories old and new, every sort of embellishment be carried out” to “bear witness to the faith of this place” with paintings in honor of the gods on the upper level and the “illustrious men of the Medici family” beneath “with an abundance of portraits of distinguished citizens and fathers of this republic.”759
At the end of the dialogue Vasari tells Francesco that after “reading the histories old and new of this city” in order to depict the republic’s conquest of its neighbors and the history of the Medici family, and considering the travails and difficulties of those times and the peace and concord “which we enjoy in this current state,” it occurred to him that “the many exertions of the citizens of bygone days and of your ancestors were almost a ladder leading our lord Duke Cosimo to this present glory and happiness.”760 Vasari’s image mirrored Cosimo’s strategy of rooting himself and his principate in the republican past. Not the least of the duke’s achievements was to have preserved so much of that past, even as he firmly put it in the past. He was perhaps less likely to acknowledge that the motivation behind this strategy was an unspoken recognition that his and his principate’s legitimacy was grounded in the republic, in its independence, its legal and institutional framework, its laws and statutes, its territorial conquests, its cultural achievements, and all those “exertions of the citizens of bygone days.” Indeed, in the controversy of the early 1560s between Florence and Ferrara over whose ambassadors should have precedence in diplomatic ceremonies, against the argument that the Este had been dukes for much longer and that the Medici had come to power violently against a republic whose existence they terminated, the Florentines countered that Cosimo was in fact heir to a republic, changed only in externals, whose origins went back to the Romans.761 Cosimo regarded the republican past ambivalently: on the one hand, he needed it to bolster a legitimacy weakened not only by his state’s violent origins but also by his status as a creature, indeed a vassal, of the emperor; on the other, he was wary of it because he feared its resurrection. One wonders if Cosimo ever read what Machiavelli says in the Florentine Histories (2.34) about another duke, Walter of Brienne, who tried to make the Florentines accept his lordship. If so, he may have remembered the moment in which the priors go to Brienne to persuade him that he can never succeed in extinguishing the Florentines’ desire for liberty “because one often sees liberty retaken by those who had never known it, only because of the memory of it left by fathers who loved it. . . . And if their fathers ever forget it, the public buildings, the offices of the magistrates, and the banners of free institutions will recall it.”
World History
