Part 5

In a letter to Jacopo Antiquario Poliziano, after describing the malady from which Lorenzo had been suffering for some time, continues: “The day before his death, being at his villa of Careggi, he grew so weak that all hope of saving him vanished. Perceiving this, like a wise man, he called before all else for the confessor to purge himself of his past sins. This same confessor told me afterwards that he marvelled to see with what courage and constancy Lorenzo prepared himself for death; how well he ordered all things pertaining thereunto, and with what prudence and religious feeling he thought on the life to come. Towards midnight, while he was quietly meditating, he was informed that the priest, bearing the Holy Sacrament, had arrived. Rousing himself, he exclaimed, ‘It shall never be said that my Lord, who created and saved me, shall come to me—in my room—raise me I beg of you, raise me quickly, so that I may go and meet Him.’ Saying this he raised himself as well as he could, and supported by his servants advanced to meet the priest in the outer room, there crying he knelt.” Poliziano here gives the text of a long prayer which Lorenzo recited and then continues: “these and other things he said sobbing, while all around cried bitterly. At length the priest ordered that he should be raised from the ground and carried to bed, so as to receive the Viaticum in more comfort. For some time he resisted, but at last out of respect to the priest he obeyed. In bed, repeating almost the same prayer and with much gravity and devotion, he received the body and blood of Christ. Then he devoted himself to consoling his son Pietro, for the others were away, and exhorted him to bear this law of necessity with constancy; feeling sure the aid of Heaven would be vouchsafed to him, as it had been to himself in many and divers occasions, if he only acted wisely. Meanwhile your Lorenzo, the doctor from Pavia, arrived; most learned as it seemed to me, but summoned too late to be of any use; yet to do something he ordered various precious stones to be pounded together in a mortar, for I know not what kind of medicine. Lorenzo thereupon asked the servants what that doctor was doing in his room and what he was preparing; and when I answered that he was composing a remedy to comfort his intestines he recognised my voice and looking kindly, as was his wont, ‘Oh Angiolo,’ he said, ‘art thou here?’ and raising his languid arms took both my hands and pressed them tightly. I could not stifle my sobs or stay my tears, though I tried hard to hide them by turning my face away. But he showed no emotion and continued to press my hands between his. When he saw that I could not speak for crying, quite naturally he loosed my hands and I ran into the adjoining room where I could give free vent to my grief and to my tears. Then drying my eyes I returned, and as soon as he saw me he called me to him and asked what Pico della Mirandola was doing. I replied that Pico had remained in town, fearing to molest him with his presence. ‘And I,’ said Lorenzo, ‘but for the fear that the journey here might be irksome to him, would be most glad to see him and speak to him for the last time before I leave you all.’ I asked if I should send for him. ‘Certainly, and with all speed,’ answered he. This I did, and Pico came and sat near the bed, while I leaned against it by his knees in order to hear the languid voice of my lord for the last time. With what goodness, with what courtesy, I may say with what caresses, Lorenzo received him. First he asked his pardon for thus disturbing him, begging him to look upon it as a sign of the friendship—the love—he bore him; assuring him that he died more willingly after seeing so dear a friend. Then introducing, as was his wont, pleasant and familiar sayings, he joked also with us. ‘I wish,’ he said to Pico, ‘that death had spared me until your library had been complete.’ Pico had hardly left the room when Fra Girolamo (Savonarola) of Ferrara, a man celebrated for his doctrine and his sanctity and an excellent preacher, came in. To his exhortations to remain firm in his faith, and to live in future, if Heaven granted him life, free from crime; or if God so willed it, to receive death willingly; Lorenzo replied that he was firm in his religion, that his life would always be guided by it, and that nothing could be sweeter to him than death if such was the divine will. Fra Girolamo then turned to go, when Lorenzo said, ‘Oh, father, before going deign to give me thy benediction.’ Then bowing his head, immersed in piety and religion, he repeated the words and the prayers of the friar, without attending to the grief, now openly shown, of his familiars. It seemed as though all save Lorenzo were going to die, so calm was he. He gave no signs of anxiety or of sorrow; even in that extreme moment he showed his usual strength of mind and fortitude. The doctors who stood round him, not to seem idle, worried him with their remedies and assistance: he accepted and submitted to everything they suggested, not because he thought it would save him, but in order not to offend anyone, even in death. To the last he had such mastery over himself that he joked about his own death. Thus when given something to eat and asked how he liked it he answered, ‘As well as a dying man can like anything.’ He embraced us all tenderly and humbly asked pardon if, during his illness, he had caused annoyance to anyone. Then disposing himself to receive extreme unction he recommended his soul to God. The gospel containing the passion of Christ was then read, and he showed that he understood by moving his lips, or raising his languid eyes, or sometimes moving his fingers. Gazing upon a silver crucifix inlaid with precious stones and kissing it from time to time, he expired....”

The other accounts of the last interview of Lorenzo with Savonarola by various authors—Pico della Mirandola, Cinozzi, Burlamacchi, Barsanti, Razzi, Fra Marco della Casa, etc.—give the more generally accepted story that Lorenzo sent for Savonarola, and said he wished to confess to him. He deplored three great sins: the sack of Volterra; the dowry monies taken from the Monte delle Fanciulle, whereby so many girls were driven to a life of shame; and the blood shed after the Pazzi conspiracy. The friar told him that three things were required of him. “Firstly, a lively faith in the mercy of God.” “I have that,” said Lorenzo. “Secondly, to restore what you have unjustly taken, and to bid your sons make restitution.” This, after some moments of hesitation, Lorenzo also acceded to. Then Savonarola drew himself up to his full height and said, “Lastly, to restore to Florence her liberty.” Lorenzo turned his head away and Savonarola departed without hearing his confession and without giving him absolution. Professor Villari, who may be supposed to understand the manners and motives of his countrymen better than foreigners, does not believe that Savonarola would have gone to Careggi save at the express desire of Lorenzo, who sent for him in order to confess his sins and receive absolution from a man he knew to be honest. Cinozzi gives the words of Savonarola, stating that the conversation was a preliminary to the confession which was never made. He adds: “These words were repeated to me by Fra Silvestro, who died with his superior Fra Ieronimo, and who, as I well believe, had them and heard them from Fra Ieronimo’s own lips.” Professor Villari considers that Poliziano would not have dared to make a genuine report of the scene (supposing he saw it), in order not to cast a slur on the memory of his patron and benefactor, and to avoid giving offence to the Medicean party.

[Illustration: (Drawing of Villa Di Careggi.)]

Various versions also exist of the death of Pier Leoni, who evidently was what we should call the trusted family doctor of the Medici; for when Lorenzo’s daughter Magdalena, married to Francesco Cybo, son of Innocent III, was so ill at Rome, she sent an express messenger to her father to beg him to send Maestro Leoni to see her. Poliziano declares that Piero Leoni killed himself in despair at not being able to save Lorenzo; Piero Ricci (Petrus Crinitus), a contemporary author, also records that he drowned himself in a well near Florence, but other accounts say that he was murdered by some of Lorenzo’s people, who suspected him, unjustly, of poisoning their master. Enemies of the Medici went so far as to accuse Piero de’ Medici of inducing him to administer poison to his father, and then of drowning him in the well of the courtyard at Careggi.

In 1494 the Medici were expelled from Florence and an attempt was made to reconstitute a commonwealth upon the model of Venice. But the internal elements of discord were too potent. The Medici were recalled, again to be expelled in 1527. “Two years later Dante and Lorenzo da Castiglione and a number of youths went in hot haste,” writes Varchi, “and set fire to the villas of Careggi and Castello; the latter, however, did not burn easily, and fearing lest the enemy’s forces should cut off their retreat they fell back. So one of Signor Cosimo’s labourers was enabled to saw some beams in half and put out the fire. They also set fire to the palace of Jacopo Salviati, which was burnt, as well as Careggi.”

Luckily the thick walls of the fine old villa defied the flames, and the first care of Alessandro de’ Medici was to restore it to its pristine splendour; but he was murdered by his cousin Lorenzino before he had time to finish the work. The Grand Duke Ferdinando II, had an especial affection for Careggi, and attempted to resuscitate the Platonic Academy which once flourished there, but in vain. All he could do was to commemorate it in a fresco in the Pitti palace, which represents Plato surrounded by the illustrious men who had formed part of it—

“Mira qui di Careggi all’ aure amene Marsilio, e il Pico, e cento egregj spirti, E di, s’ all’ ombre degli Elisj mirti Tanti n’ ebber giammai Tebe, o Atene.”

(Behold here in the soft air of Careggi, Marsilio, and Pico, and a hundred men of learning, and say whether at Thebes or Athens there were as many in the shade of the Elysian myrtles) is the inscription.

In 1779 Careggi was sold to Vincenzo Orsi for 31,000 scudi. In 1848 it again changed hands and was bought by Mr Sloane, who left it to Count Boutourline, from whose family the present owner, M. Segré, bought the villa a few years ago.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] Benedetto Varchi. _Storia Florentina._ Lib. IX. p. 251 F. Mazzei in a pamphlet, _La Macine a Montughi_, gives another derivation; he says that in 1100 the Marchioness Villa left large estates to her son Ugone in this district, and thence the hill was called _Montem Hugonis_, corrupted into Montui by the common people and into Montughi by writers.

[20] Moreni. _Contorni di Firense._ Vol. I. p. 45, _et seq._

[21] Now belonging to Mr Mason.

[22] Cosimo’s favourite son, who died 1463.

[23] Villa Lemmi. The frescoes by Botticelli, now in the Louvre, were discovered there.

[24] John Addington Symonds. _Renaissance in Italy._ _The Revival of Learning_, p. 320.

[25] Angelo Poliziano. _Carmina_, etc., p. 179.

[26] J. A. Symonds. _Renaissance in Italy._ _The Revival of Learning_, p. 331.

[Illustration: COSIMO PATER PATRIAE,

By MICHELOZZI.

(_Villa di Cafaggiuolo_).]

[Illustration: LORENZO DE’ MEDICI,

By NICCOLÒ FIORENTINO.

(_Villa di Coreggi_).]

[Illustration: MARSILIO FICINO,

By ANONIMO.

(_Villa Medici_).]

[Illustration: (Drawing of Villa Di Rusciano)]

VILLA DI RUSCIANO

About a mile outside the great three-storied gateway of San Niccolò stands the old brown villa of Rusciano, which even in the days of Sacchetti had the reputation of changing masters more frequently than any other in Tuscany. It is first mentioned in 785, when Charlemagne is said to have granted the estate to the church of San Miniato a Monte; three centuries later Pope Nicholas II, gave it to the hospital of St Eusebius, popularly known as San Sebbo; then it belonged to two sisters, Buoninsegna and Princia, who in 1267 sold the house and lands to the nuns of San Jacopo in Pian di Ripoli. After passing through several other hands it was bought by Luca Pitti, who crowned the beautiful hill with what Vasari calls “a luxurious and superb palace,” built, or rather adapted and enlarged for him in 1434 by Brunelleschi, to render it a fitting residence for one who was Gonfalonier of Florence and at the height of his prosperity.

Herr Cornel von Fabriczy[27] considers that only the eastern side of the villa is Brunelleschi’s work, the western being the original building, while the southern façade dates from late in the sixteenth century. One of the glories of Rusciano, much written about by critics, is a most beautiful window looking into the courtyard, but lately covered in. It is said by some to be by Brunelleschi, but the exaggerated consoles ornamented with acanthus leaves, and the pillars at the sides with Corinthian capitals, are not like the work of the great master. The garlands of flowers at the sides, tied in here and there, remind one of those on the monument to Marsuppini by Desiderio da Settignano, as does the delicate frieze at the top. Herr von Fabriczy suggests that this lovely window, which recalls those of the palaces at Urbino and at Gubbio, may perhaps have been designed by Luciano da Laurana, architect to Federigo di Montefeltre, to whom, as we shall see, the villa belonged for a short time. Anyhow this one richly ornamented piece of architecture contrasts strangely with the absolute simplicity, almost amounting to bareness, of everything else in the courtyard. Dr Carl von Stegmann, in his _Architekten der Renaissance_ thinks the frieze and the shape of the capitals are in the style of Desiderio da Settignano, while the garlands of flowers remind him more of the work of Benedetto da Majano. The rooms of the villa are of huge size, and many still retain their fine old wooden ceilings, gigantic beams resting on simply-shaped consoles with curved outlines.

[Illustration: (Detail of carved window frame)]

[Illustration: (Drawing of overlook of town from a garden)]

Luca Pitti would have been a happier man had he taken to heart the wise words of Cosimo de’ Medici. “You,” said Cosimo, “strive towards the indefinite, I towards the definite; you aspire to reach the heavens with your ladder, I place mine on the earth so that I may not climb so high as to fall: and if I desire that the honour and reputation of my house should surpass yours, it seems to me but just and natural that I should favour rather mine own than what belongs to you. Nevertheless let us do as big dogs, which meeting, sniff one at the other and then, both having teeth, separate and go their ways: you to attend to your concerns, I to see after mine own.” But the character of Luca was correctly gauged by that acute and charming lady, Alessandra Macinghi, married to a Strozzi, who calls him, in her letters to her exiled sons after their father’s death which give so vivid a picture of what wives and mothers endured in the good old times, “a vain ambitious man and a weathercock, moreover badly surrounded.” After intriguing against the Medici, and even plotting to assassinate Cosimo’s son Piero, Luca Pitti abandoned the anti-Medicean faction and accepted pardon at the hands of Piero, after which his old friends scorned him and avoided meeting him in the streets.

In the summer of 1472 the Gonfalonier of Florence, Tanai de’ Nerli, received the Captain-General of the Florentine army, Count Federigo di Montefeltre, outside the city gates and escorted him, amid the acclamations of the citizens, to the Piazza, where the magistrates thanked him for his services in conquering rebellious Volterra, and presented him with a richly caparisoned charger and a silver helmet studded with jewels and chased in gold by Pollajuolo, with Hercules trampling on a griffin (the device of Volterra) as its crest. The grateful Republic also bought Rusciano of Luca Pitti and bestowed it on their victorious general together with the freedom of the city. But he does not seem to have inhabited his Florentine villa long, for in the following year it was let to Giuliano Gondi, and towards the end of the fifteenth century Federigo’s successor, Guidobaldo, Duke of Urbino, sold it to the Frescobaldi. After this Rusciano changed hands every few years and was owned by the Covoni, Usimbardi, Capponi, Gerini and many other less illustrious Florentine families, until in 1825 it came into the possession of an Englishman, Mr Baring, and after three more sales the noble old villa now belongs to Baron von Stumm.

The Baron is a master in the art of landscape gardening, and with a northerner’s love for trees has transformed the grounds into a veritable earthly paradise, whence lovely views of Florence, framed by rare conifers and bays, are like so many glimpses of a fairy city. When seen on a morning with deep snow lying on every mountain, while a pale tinge of colour among the vineyards tells of coming spring in the valley of the Arno, and the city, usually so brown and strongly defined upon the river banks, shines white as though reflecting the dazzling snow peaks around, one is tempted to exclaim with Rogers,

“Of all the fairest cities of the Earth None is so fair as Florence. ’Tis a gem Of purest ray.”

All the town lies below us, but unlike the vast unbroken bird’s-eye view from Bellosguardo or San Miniato, here we only feel her presence, and while listening to the midday bells we see, between two clumps of slender bamboo, Palazzo Vecchio looming like some enchanter’s castle out of the thick atmosphere and suffused with rosy hues. The mysterious feeling of the building is enhanced, for the bay and olive trees hide the houses around it and nothing of the modern town is visible.

Such a city, seen from a terrace where a column of purest marble makes the rose tints of the sky more clearly felt, may well inspire her people to weave legends, even in this century of ours, as to her having been built by angels in the night. Between the cypresses the Duomo, sometimes so russet brown above the city it is guarding, to-day is toned and mellowed in the winter sunlight, and the downward markings of its cupola shine like ribs of alabaster. Whiter still and fairer rises the campanile “coloured like a morning cloud, and chased like a sea shell.”

The terraced garden of Rusciano, where granite columns with capitals encircled by dolphins rise amidst palms and magnolias, lies on the southern side of the villa facing the heights of Monticci.

A watch-tower on the slopes, a little village in the plain with pointed bell-tower rising above the jutting roofs of peasant houses low-lying among the fruit trees, hills palely outlined, their cypress-covered summits seen against still paler distance, pine trees along the valley wreathed in mist and nearer, olive trees reflecting, like so many mirrors, the radiant hues of the morning sunlight on each of their small pointed leaves—all these things and many more we see from the garden of Rusciano.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] _Filippo Brunelleschi, sein Leben und seine Werke_, von Cornel von Fabriczy. Stuttgard, 1892.

[Illustration: VILLA DI POGGIO IMPERIALE.]

[Illustration: (Drawing of gardent of Villa Di Poggio Imperiale)]

VILLA DI POGGIO IMPERIALE

About a mile outside Porta Romana on the heights of Arcetri stands the fine Villa Poggio Imperiale, now a school for girls. Formerly it was called Poggio Baroncelli, from the rich and powerful family of that name who owned large possessions on this side of Florence, and turned an old castle into a dwelling-house; but they failed in 1487, when the villa and much of the land belonging to it became the property of Agnolo Pandolfini, whose descendants sold it to Piero d’Alamanno Salviati. In 1548 the Salviati were declared rebels and Cosimo I seized all their possessions.

Cosimo had such an affection for Tommaso, one of the descendants of the Baroncelli, that he insisted on his living in the Medici palace in Via Larga (now palazzo Riccardi, Via Cavour). When in 1569 Pius V gave the Duke Cosimo I, in spite of strenuous opposition on the part of the Emperor Maximilian, the title of Grand Duke of Tuscany, Tommaso Baroncelli rode out to meet him on his return from the coronation at Rome. “Such was his joy,” writes Cosimo Baroncelli (son of Tommaso) in a manuscript history of his family, “on seeing that great Prince his most gracious Lord, that he fainted and would have fallen from his horse if the attendants had not quickly supported him and lifted him from the saddle. They placed him on a low wall near the fountain of San Gaggio where he died, to the very great grief of H.H. and of the whole court; he being singularly beloved for his kind and courteous manners. He died in the year 1569 on the 21st March, the day of St Benedict the Abbot.”

There is a tradition that a duel took place close to the villa in 1312 between four Florentines and four Germans during the siege of Florence by the Emperor Henry VII, but the one between Lodovico Martelli and Giovanni Bandini is historical and has been minutely described by Varchi. “Lodovico di Giovan Francesco Martelli, a youth of great courage, having a secret enmity against Giovanni Bandini, seized a favourable occasion of fighting and if necessary dying, for the love of his city; he sent him a challenge, written by Messer Salvestro Aldobrandini, setting forth that he (Bandini) and all Florentines serving in the enemy’s ranks were traitors to their country, and that he was ready to prove this in the lists fighting hand to hand, leaving the choice of place, of arms and whether on foot or on horseback to him.... Giovanni, who lacked not courage and abounded in wit, tried to evade fighting in so bad a cause, and replied with more prudence than truth, that he was in the enemy’s camp to visit certain friends and not to fight against his country which he loved as well as anyone. This, whether true or false, ought to have sufficed Lodovico; but he being desirous at all costs to cross swords with Giovanni replied in such manner, that not to fail in the honour of a gentleman, on which he particularly prided himself, Giovanni was obliged to accept; it was arranged that each should choose a companion. Giovanni ... chose Bertino di Carlo Aldobrandini, a youth whose beard had but just begun to sprout ... Lodovico chose Dante di Guido da Castiglione, who accepted the risk solely for love of his country.