Part 21

There is a little of everything in the _Zibaldone_, town gossip, reflections on the commercial superiority of Venice, copies of letters, philosophical discussions, quotations from Aristotle, Boethius, Dante, S. Bernard and Seneca, followed by moral and religious maxims taken from sermons, an account of his forbears and their doings, excellent advice as how to bring up children, and a description of his various buildings. Near the end of the book his reasons for being thankful to God, are so typical of a Florentine of the fifteenth century that I give them in full:

“First I thank him for having given me life and made me a rational and an immortal creature, for he might as easily have made me a mortal beast without intelligence.

“Secondly I must thank him for causing me to be born in a place where the true faith exists, that is in Christendom, and I must add in the midst of the faith, that is near Rome, the residence of our Holy Lord Pope and of his honourable brethren the cardinals, representing Christ with the apostles; for he might have caused me to be born a Turk, a Moor, or a barbarian, in which case I should have been irremediably lost.

“Next I thank him for being born in Italy, which is the most worthy and the noblest portion of all Christendom, and in the province of Tuscany, which is reputed as amongst the worthiest provinces of Italy and in which is part of the city of Rome which once dominated the world: and in addition to have caused me to be born in the city of Florence, which is reputed the most worthy and the most beautiful birthplace there is, not only in Christendom but in the whole world.

“Then I thank him for causing me to live many years in perfect health, for I am sixty years of age and do not think that in all my life I spent a month in the house on account of illness, and it seems to me that health is the greatest grace that one can receive.

“And then I thank him for the good fortune he has conceded to me in my business, for I have increased and multiplied exceedingly the small substance that was left to me, so that I find myself to-day with considerable riches, fine prospects, great credit and a good reputation. And not only has he conceded unto me grace in acquiring, but also in spending these riches well, which is not a less virtue. And I consider that having spent my riches well does me more honour than having made them, and gives me more satisfaction, particularly with regard to the buildings I have made; my house in Florence, my place at Quaracchi,[86] the façade of the church of Sta. Maria Novella and the loggia which is begun opposite my house, and also the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, like to that at Jerusalem of Our Lord Jesus Christ, made in S. Pancrazio, and the hangings of golden brocade for the same church.

“Also I have to thank him for causing me to be born of a good face, that is of noble blood with high connections, and for giving me a fine family, that is seven children, two male and five female, all of whom have married into noble houses.

“Also I have to thank him for being born in the present time, which all competent persons say is, and will be regarded as, the finest period of our city since it was created, for the reasons that are set forth in this book; and more particularly for living in the time of the magnificent citizen Cosimo de’ Medici, who was and is so rich, has so much knowledge and tact, so high a reputation and so numerous a following, both outside and within the city, that in all Christendom there has never lived such a citizen or one with so many good qualities as have been and are in him; and among other graces vouchsafed to me by God is that he has made me a relation of the said Cosimo, because Nannina his grandchild, daughter of Piero his son, is the wife of Bernardo my son, to whom was born on the 1st June, 1468, a son named Cosimo.

“Also I thank him for many other benefits and gifts too numerous to recount. Then I must thank him for guarding and defending me from many evils and annoyances and adversities which I might have had and have not had.

“Also I thank him for granting my desire of seeing our city at peace in my day without any fear of war, for ten or more years, from 1454 to 1464, during which time I experienced perfect tranquillity of mind, and reflected on the great anguish we endured in past times by reason of wars and fear of wars.

“Also I thank him for an admirable mother he gave me, named Caterina, who having four male children when our father, Pagolo, died, and being nineteen years of age, would not abandon us, but strenuously resisted the wishes of her mother and her brothers that she should marry again; and he left her with me for a long time, as she lived more than eighty years and was a great consolation to me.

“Also I thank him for the most worthy wife he gave me named Jacopa, daughter to Messer Palla di Nofri Strozzi, who was a most dear wife to me by reason of her great love for me and the good rule she kept in our house and family; she was given to me for a long time as she lived about fifty-five years, passing from this life on the 24th April, 1468, and this I consider the greatest loss that I ever had or could have.”

The marriage of Giovanni’s son Bernardo with the fascinating Nannina de’ Medici, sister of Lorenzo the Magnificent, was celebrated with extraordinary magnificence. The whole street and the loggia, which was enlarged for the occasion so as to cover the small triangular square in front of the palace, were hung with blue cloth and decorated with garlands of flowers and leaves. A stand, raised a foot and a half from the ground, was erected, and for three days every Florentine of note was entertained at the bridal feast, eating, drinking, dancing and listening to music. 1,004 wax candles were made on purpose to burn for twelve hours each, and 3,686 golden florins were spent by Giovanni in honour of his Medici daughter-in-law.

Bernardo was a man of inordinate ambition, and when Piero de’ Medici refused to listen to his advice, he became one of the most violent of his antagonists. In 1502 he strenuously advocated the appointment of a Gonfalonier for life, hoping the choice would fall upon himself: but when Piero Soderini was elected, he again joined the Medicean party, and the plot against Soderini was hatched in the Oricellari gardens. He is described by contemporaries as difficult to get on with. He scouted every plan that did not originate with himself, decried every form of government because he was not the chosen head, and was swayed by personal dislikes and a passion for popularity. But if he failed as a statesman his learning was undeniable. The oration _de auxilio Typhernatibus adferendo_, to induce the Florentines to succour Città di Castello, was published in London in 1733 as a model of elegant Latin, and at the same time his _de Bello Gallico_, which Erasmus declares might have been written by Sallust, went into a second edition. Muratori has published his _de Urbe Roma_, which is highly praised as a description of ancient Rome.

The celebrated Platonic Academy, instituted by Cosimo the Elder, met in the Rucellai gardens during the exile of its founder, whence its name of Academia degl’Orti Oricellari.

Of the six children of Bernardo Rucellai and Nannina de’ Medici two merit especial mention: Palla, who took the lead in turning the Gonfalonier Piero Soderini out of the Palazzo della Signoria, and thus paved the way for the return of the Medici to Florence; and then repenting of having placed his country under such tyranny, voted against the election of Cosimo I. to the throne, and is said to have been poisoned by him; and the more famous Giovanni, author of _Rosmunda_, _Oreste_, and _Le Api_. Giovanni, born in 1457, had Francesco da Diacceto as his master in philosophy and literature, and he was brought up with his cousin, Giovanni de’ Medici, afterwards Leo X., Bibbiena and Machiavelli, in the society of such men as Poliziano, Marsilio Ficino, the Pulci and Pico della Mirandola. Palla and Giovanni were sent to France to finish their education, and a charming letter written from Avignon by the latter is still extant.[87] “I seem to be in the Promised Land,” exclaims the young Florentine, “abounding in every good thing that can be desired in this world. Among others I find myself opposite a house which is intimately connected with that of Madonna Laura of Petrarch. And there, amidst other noble ladies, is one whose like mine eyes have never beheld; verily nothing save the name is lacking in her, so that the sonnets should hit the mark. And if, on my return, I appear to thee another Petrarch, do not be astonished, for love is the cause of all things; and if God (_ut Platoni placet_) _non est mirandum_ if it works miracles. Also here kisses are allowed, as glances are at home, only I find they have a far sweeter flavour than in other places. Her name, to tell thee all, is Anna, and had I more time I would send thee something to prove what I have told thee. I have seen the effigy of Madonna Laura, which is indeed most beautiful, and worthy to be loved by such a man as was Petrarch. I wished to have her copied from the picture to send thee; but there is not to be found a man capable of doing it in the way I desire. Still I hope to send thee a sketch if fate so wills it. I have already learned to say _nani_ and _oi_ (yes and no), and I can give a kiss without smacking my lips.” When Giovanni de’ Medici became Pope, young Giovanni Rucellai followed him to Rome and entered the Church. He was for some time Papal Nuncio in France and afterwards Clement VII. made him Castellano of S. Angelo.

Giovanni Rucellai’s _Rosmunda_ shares with the _Sofonisba_ of Trissino the glory of being the first Italian tragedy. It depicts the well-known story of Alboin, who turned the skull of his wife’s father into a wine-cup, out of which he forces her to drink. When Giovanni died in 1526 he bequeathed to his brother Palla and to his friend Trissino a poem on bees. An eyewitness related to Scipione Ammirato how “these two friends when together in a room would jump upon a bench, declaim passages out of their tragedies, and then call upon the audience to decide which was the best. In one of these contests Rucellai inadvertently got upon the bench with his braces undone, and Trissino in a loud voice exclaimed: ‘Now see the man who would contend with me! Like a child he does not know how to fasten his braces.’” The _Api_ was published in 1539, and Trissino undertook to see his friend’s work through the press. “It is,” writes Symonds, “no mere translation from Virgil; and though the higher qualities of variety, invention and imagination were denied to Rucellai, though he can show no passages of pathos to compete with the ‘Corycius senex,’ of humour to approach the battle of the hives, no episode, it need hardly be said, to match with ‘Pastor Aristaeus,’ still his modest poem is a monument of pure taste and classical correctness. It is the work of a ripe scholar and a melodious versifier, if not of a great singer; and its diction belongs to the best period of polite Italian.”

Giovan Battista, great-grandson of Pandolfo, a favourite of Cosimo I., acted as one of the Captains in the game of calcio, celebrated in the annals of Florence for its magnificence, which was played in honour of the marriage of Cosimo’s son Francesco de’ Medici by the young Florentine nobles. Giovanni, his grandson, studied mathematics under Galileo at Pisa, and was a remarkable linguist; like so many of his family he was a fine musician and a good artist. He gave wonderful _feste_, what we should now call garden parties, at Il Pratello, the Rucellai villa near Campi, sending _tessere_ with one of the many emblems of the family to his guests, instead of invitations. By the kindness of the Countess Edith Rucellai I am enabled here to reproduce one with the emblem adopted by Bernardo after his marriage with Nannina de’ Medici--the Medicean ring and three ostrich feathers, white, green and red, denoting faith, charity and hope. Other emblems used by the family, such as a compass, a cupid, a peacock and poppies, are to be seen on the municipal palaces in towns where the Rucellai were Vicarii or Governors for Florence, on the façade of Sta. Maria Novella, of the Rucellai palace, and of their loggia. The oldest, Fortune standing in a ship and holding up a sail to catch the wind, alludes to the great commercial gains which had enriched the house.

[Illustration]

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.

[Illustration: 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.”

In July the following year Charles Edward acknowledged his natural daughter by Mrs. Walsingham, under the title of Lady Charlotte Stuart, Duchess of Albany, and Mann reports: “She is allowed to be of a good figure, tall, and well made, but that the features of her face resemble too much those of her father to be handsome. She is gay, lively, very affable, and has the behaviour of a well-bred Frenchwoman, without assuming the least distinction among our ladies on account of her new dignity.... The new Duchess has appeared at the Theatres (which were crowded on her account) with all her father’s jewels, which are very fine.... Poor Count Albine,” writes Sir Horace again in December, “decays every day, visibly. His daughter did well to come in time to reap his succession, for which she will not wait long. The faculties of his mind are as weak as his body.”