Eric Cochrane - Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527-1800

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, CHICAGO 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

1973 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 1973.

Paperback edition 1976

Printed in the United States of America

22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 3 4 5 6 7

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-11150-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-11151-3 (paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-11595-5 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/CHICAGO/9780226115955.001.0001

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-90628

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

FLORENCE

IN THE FORGOTTEN CENTURIES 15271800

A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes

ERIC COCHRANE

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Chicago and London

Al popolo fiorentino e in modo particolare agli abitanti del quartiere di Santa Croce e del rione di Ricorboli, i miei concittadini in affetto

To the people of Chicago and particularly to the residents of the South Side, my fellow citizens by law and by affection.

BOOK I
FLORENCE IN THE 1540s
How Cosimo de Medici turned a worn-out republic into a well-run monarchy

BOOK II
FLORENCE IN THE 1590s
How Scipione Ammirato solved just about all the problems of his age

BOOK III
FLORENCE IN THE 1630s
How Galileo Galilei turned the universe inside out

BOOK IV
FLORENCE IN THE 1680s
How Lorenzo Magalotti looked in vain for a vocation and finally settled down to sniffing perfumes

BOOK V
FLORENCE IN THE 1740s
How Giovanni Lami discovered the past and tried to alter the future

BOOK VI
FLORENCE IN THE 1780s
How Francesco Maria Gianni spent twenty-five years building a model state only to see it torn down in a single morning

PROLOGUE

2. Vasari, Siege of Florence, detail
Palazzo Vecchio

BOOK I

3. Francesco and Iacopo Ligozzi, Election of Cosimo
Palazzo Vecchio

4. Bronzino, Portrait of Cosimo
Uffizi

5. Bandinelli, Ercole, and Cellini, Perseo
Piazza della Signoria

7. Domenico Buti, La Fondaria
Studiolo di Francesco I

BOOK II

8. Villa La Petraia in the late sixteenth century
Museo di Firenze ComEra

11. Ammannati, Fountain of Neptune, detail
Piazza della Signoria

12. Gioco di Calcio, Tapestry
Museo di Firenze ComEra

BOOK III

13. Cecco Bravo, Galileo among the Philosophers
Casa Buonarroti

14. Pietro Tacca, Fountain, detail
Piazza Santissima Annunziata

15. Matteo Rosselli, Cosimo II Being Shown the Telescope
Casino

16. Convent of Maria Maddalena de Pazzi, Borgo Pinti
Portal with coat of arms of Pope Urban VIII

17. Carlo Dolci, Vittoria della Rovere
Palazzo Pitti

18. Pietro da Cortona with Ciro Ferri, ceiling, Sala di Marte
Palazzo Pitti

BOOK IV

19. The Philosophers
Ceiling in the Uffizi Gallery

BOOK V

24. Tito Lessi, Lami with His Friends
Riccardiana

BOOK VI

29. Rustic Concert
Panel in Villa Poggio Imperiale

POSTSCRIPT

30. Luca Giordano, Apotheosis of the Medici
Palazzo Medici Riccardi

NOTE: Nos. 20 (AL 29380), 28 (AL 58027), and 30 (AL 4368) are reproduced by permission of Fratelli Alinari, S.p.A. Nos. 2 (44658), 3 (17360), 4 (12781), 6 (74178), 7 (7170), 13 (106782), 15 (6970), 17 (107654), 18 (107204), 19 (67190), 27 (5298), and 29 (2209) are reproduced by permission of the Assessore alle Belle Arti, Comune di Firenze. No. 5 is reproduced by permission of Alberto Cotogni. Nos. 8, 9, 12, 22, 23, and 25 are reproduced by permission of the Museo di Firenze ComEra. Nos. 21 and 24 are reproduced by permission of the director of the Biblioteca Riccardiana. Nos. 10, 14, 16, and 26 are from photographs by Lydia Cochrane.

PREFACE

To the benevolent reader

I have written this volume more for your pleasure than for your instruction. If you are a professional historian, you will probably not have time to do more than consult it, since it does not pertain directly to any currently accepted field of historical research. If, on the other hand, you belong to that class of readers known as educated laymento the class, that is, for which Guicciardini wrote in the sixteenth century, Galileo in the seventeenth, and the editors of the Saturday Review in the twentieththen you will probably not read this or any other book of history unless the author succeeds in making you want to read it.

I do assume, however, that you are generally curious about how other people have lived, thought, and suffered in other times and places, for that much of the legacy of Renaissance humanism is still alive today. I also assume that you already have some interest in Florence today and some general knowledge of Florence in the past. But I do not assume that you have any more special preparation than what you might have picked up in a college course on European history. Accordingly, I have organized each book not around a historical problem (for example, political conditions, religious reform), but around a representative member of the corresponding generation; and I have thus sought (with, I hope, some scientific as well as rhetorical justification) to treat ideas, events, and impersonal forces as functions, rather than as determinants, of the aspirations, characters, and limitations of individual men. Similarly, I have explained most of the references that might not be clear to you (and you can safely skip over those you do not understand without losing the thread of my argument). I have translated all the prose quotations, taking greater care to reproduce the mood and tone of the original than to find exact, word-for-word equivalents. And I have altered the rhyme and meter patterns of the verse quotations only when forced to do so by the peculiar structure and cadence of the English language. Above all, I have left out what is usually considered to be the sine qua non of historical scholarship: footnotes. Many of my sources are indicated in the text (for example, as Redi wrote to Magalotti in June of 1689). All of them are described in the bibliographical notes to each book. Most readers will not care to know exactly where I got each specific bit of informationor at least they will not care enough to warrant my adding still further to the bulk and price of this volume. Anyone who wants to have a particular page or document number need only write to me at the University of Chicago, and I will be happy to oblige him by return mail.

Yet pleasure would be artificial were it not derived from the truth. Hence I have taken care not only to check on the veracity of everything I have written, but also to submit the penultimate draft of my text to experts in the various subjects it deals with. Delio Cantimori, the pioneer of modern studies in the religious history of sixteenth-century Italy, and Bonner Mitchell, a student of Medici court music, read to a faculty seminar of my own department. My wife, Lydia Goodwin Cochrane, read all the Books for style, clarity, and grammar. My students at the University of Chicago provided me with a critical and exacting audience. John Renaldo helped me to locate some of the illustrations. I am deeply grateful to them all, particularly to those of them who have expressed strong reservations about what I said and how I said it. They have saved me from numerous errors of fact and from even more numerous blemishes of expression.