A Mattress Maker's Daughter: The Renaissance Romance of Don Giovanni de’ Medici and Livia Vernazza [19 halftones ed.] 9780674369092

Citation preview

i tatti studies in italian r enaissance history

Sponsored by Villa I Tatti Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies Florence, Italy

A Mattress Maker’s Daughter T h e R e n a iss a n c e R o m a n c e o f D o n G i o v a n n i d e ’ M e dici and L ivi a V e r n a z z a

Br en da n Dool e y

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2014

Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dooley, Brendan Maurice, 1953– A mattress maker’s daughter : the Renaissance romance of Don Giovanni de’ Medici and Livia Vernazza / Brendan Dooley. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-72466-2 1. Medici, Giovanni de’, 1567–1621—Relations with women.  2. Vernazza, Livia, 1590?–1655.  3. Princes—Italy—Biography.  4. Soldiers—Italy—Biography.  5. Women—Italy—Biography.  6. Mistresses—Italy—Biography.  7. Couples—Italy—Biography.  8. Renaissance— Italy—Biography.  9. Italy—Social life and customs—16th century.  10. Social change—Italy—History—16th century.  I. Title. DG738.29.M43D66 2014 945'.07092—dc23 2013031633

Non bene Mar s bellum posita nisi veste ministro “I, Mars, cannot make war well unless I remove my clothes.” Inscription on Venetian bas-relief attributed to Antonio Lombardo

Contents

List of Illustrations Preface Prologue

ix xi 1



1. The Family Business

13



2. The Mattress Maker’s Daughter

66



3. The Heart of Combat

100



4. Writing the Passions

151



5. A Place for Things

183



6. Mind over Matter

216



7. Durable Goods

246



8. Time and Memory

282

Postscript

315

Notes Acknowledgments Index

323 433 435

Illustrations

1.1 Cristofano dell’Altissimo, Portrait of Giovanni delle Bande Nere 15 1.2 Copy from Bronzino, Portrait of Cosimo I 16 1.3 Santi di Tito, Don Giovanni de’ Medici 27 1.4 Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Francesco I 30 1.5 Scipione Pulzone, Portrait of Ferdinando I 33 1.6 Don Giovanni de’ Medici, facade design for Santa Maria del Fiore 35 1.7 Jacopo Chimenti detto Empoli, Wedding of Maria de’ Medici 43 1.8 Peter Paul Rubens, The Disembarkation of Marie de’ Medici 44 1.9 Don Giovanni de’ Medici, design for Cappella dei Principi 50 1.10 Buonsignori map of Florence, detail showing Parione 59 2.1 Lafrery map of Genoa, showing Sant’Andrea parish 72 3.1 The Venetian attack on April 1, 1617 127 3.2 The Venetian attack in June 1617 133 3.3 Pietro Tozzi, Don Giovanni de’ Medici 146 5.1 Plan of Palazzo Pitti, showing Don Giovanni’s rooms 189 5.2 Drawing of Villa Le Macine 200

illustrations x

5.3 Don Giovanni de’ Medici, design for a fountain 5.4 Giusto Suttermans, Portrait of Cosimo II de’ Medici with Wife Maria Maddalena of Austria and Their Son Ferdinando II de’ Medici 7.1 Santi di Tito, Portrait of Cristina of Lorraine

201

211 260

Preface

Montughi, June 28, 2010 Thinking the object of our quest might lie in the villa itself, we made our way to Montughi by the gently winding road out of Florence in the direction of viale Gaetano Pieraccini toward Careggi and the main hospital of Florence. Villa “Le Macine” was unmistakable by the plaque, affixed to the wall probably long after Livia Vernazza and Don Giovanni de’ Medici sojourned there. In the vicinity were traces of some other previous owners. Not Giovanni Francesco Maria, the couple’s son. He lived there after his parents were both dead and made a deal with the Celestine fathers to whom Livia left the property, keeping just the house while the Celestines kept the gardens. But he made his mark elsewhere, not here; and so did some other owners, including a certain Captain Francesco Cardi da Cigoli and members of the Strozzi family. Eventually the villa passed into the Casamorata family, who gave the name to the street where it now stands and, to Florentine music, a composer. Just beyond the villa this road intersects with another, commemorating another previous owner: the Livorno-born actor Ernesto

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Rossi. By his time, the villa had already played a distinguished role in the history of the performing arts. We came looking for more evidence of a long-lost love affair, more insight into why a Medici prince formed a liaison with a mattress maker’s daughter, against his family and a disapproving world, and how they managed to survive. Perhaps engaging with their things ourselves we could understand what their things meant to them and how possession and ownership bound their souls one to another. Sharing some of their spaces perhaps we could sense their freedoms and their constraints. Pieraccini for us was far more than a street name. He was the author of a multivolume study of the Medici family, written in the early twentieth century to demonstrate how personality and medical condition affected political behavior. He was also commemorated because of his role in public health and his term as postwar mayor of Florence. By the time “his” street was built alongside the hospital that he helped plan, all that remained of Livia was her legend, which he contributed at least to embellishing, if not actually forming. Around the villa we found no sign of the dramas of love and death mentioned in the documents. Livia’s coat of arms, improvised by Giovanni to exalt her parentage, was no longer prominently displayed on a corner of the structure. The garden was no longer a respite for weary socialites or a refuge for an outcast. There was nothing left of the fine fountain or the wall in which it was built; fruit trees were few, the rose bushes were small and new, and there were no vegetables. There was a palm in one corner, possibly planted during the fashion for trees that hearkened back to Italy’s brief African empire. The whole area had been developed well after Florence ceased being the first capital of the new Italian state. Rather than sweeping over a distant horizon, the vista stopped short at the surrounding constructions crowded into the available space during the building boom of the “Italian Miracle” in the 1950s. Venturing inside, we discovered a setting for dramas of another kind, not dreamed of by Livia and Giovanni. There had never really been any signs here of the studies that made Giovanni famous in his time, or the disagreements with Galileo that earned him a place in science history textbooks. This was supposed to be Livia’s villa, not his;

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but there were also no signs here of the woman whose legend charmed the imagination of Gabriele D’Annunzio, Italy’s national poet. Gone were the paintings on the walls, by the finest Renaissance and early Baroque hands, Italian and Transalpine; gone were the fine Persian rugs, the rich tapestries, the ornate oak and walnut consoles, chests, tables, chairs, now replaced by utilitarian objects mostly of steel and plastic, resistant to use and mishandling by the legions of young people who now frequent these halls. No small, well-furnished kitchen served up simple but elegant dishes based on ingredients grown on the estate, flavored with herbs and spices from the garden, to be washed down with the products of the attached vineyards, now nowhere to be seen. A university department devoted to “Sciences of Education” now held courses in “social pedagogy” on these premises, terminating in a BA degree qualifying the candidate as a “Professional Educator.” There was much here worthy of pondering in the context of our two protagonists. We looked at some of the brochures. The innovative style of teaching placed “the student at the center of the formative processes.” Each one was assigned a tutor, who, with the professor, would accompany the student in “activities of analysis, of comprehension, of maturation.” User-friendly education in an open society promised each young citizen a chance for self-fulfillment, perhaps the chance that would make their lives. The same approach characterized the kind of childhood education that was the subject of the courses. Seminars proposed “What game shall we play?” based on the notion that “children’s games are a form of knowledge and experimentation with reality.” And again, students would be taught to pay attention to the child, as the child has something to say—even when silent. “The language of children” is something adults ought to learn, while taking account also of “nonverbal communication.” Stepping out again into the warm afternoon, we reflected upon what we had just seen and heard. The principles of the new program seemed to enshrine values and prospects that our society, long since the time of Livia and Giovanni, had come to hold in high regard. Young people should no longer have to run away or remain unheard; nor should they sacrifice themselves on the altar of convention, or be disgraced. Children may behave like children until they find their own road in life. Since

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childhood happens only once, and since so much of what comes later depends on how it was, expertise moves in where the family moves out, while a society informed by more insight, more tolerance, and more humanity beckons forever in the distance, sometimes more in view, sometimes less. Homeward bound for the center of Florence, we thought that perhaps our short excursion did not yield all we could have hoped—or perhaps it did.

g The following chapters enter the world of Livia and Giovanni, so distant, so unfamiliar, by the few remaining passageways making it intelligible, possibly still fascinating, certainly instructive. Discovering the garden of Le Macine in its prime, and the people who enjoyed it in their youth and advancing age, and the circumstances that brought them here and to their other haunts—between Careggi and San Miniato, between porta al Prato and porta San Niccolò, between Florence and Venice, between Italy and Europe—and their thoughts and preoccupations, their missions and objectives, their triumphs and disasters, reveals the ways of a remote cosmos, focused through the lens of a single half-forgotten episode, and a memory’s strange career over five hundred years. I hope the reader may find the journey enjoyable as well as worthwhile.

A Mattress Maker’s Daughter

Prologue

The first time Don Giovanni mentioned Livia Vernazza to his family

was in the account of a street brawl that nearly ended in homicide. He had been entertaining some friends at the palazzo in Parione, along the Arno River on the western edge of Florence, late one night in early July, 1611. The weather was hot; the guests were restless. Geography and climatology supply what the document does not. Evening breezes would have been seeping in while the river gurgled past the south window, bearing various trade-​related discharges. The advancing stench from the rotting animal carcasses in the city dump just downriver from Parione would have enveloped the palazzo in the same asphyxiating miasma noted by observers many decades later in this part of town.1 No wonder Giovanni gave up on sleep and headed for the door. Although he did not pronounce her name in his account to his half-​ brother, the grand duke of Tuscany, their liaison was well enough known for his reader to recognize Livia as the “young lady” who “is my friend.” A few details seemed calculated to shock a prudish imagination:

prologue 2

Your Most Serene Highness must know that yesterday after dining at my house, completely undressed, wearing only a cape of Flanders silk over my shirt, in the company of Signor Don Garzia Montalvo and Signor Vincenzo Martelli, who were also in their shirts and stockings, without coats, after dinner Signor Vincenzo went about his business and I, along with Signor Don Garzia retired to my rooms, and as there was a young lady present, who is my friend, I said I did not know how I would get to sleep.2

The term “undressed,” in its ambiguous syntax, seemed calculated to scandalize the grand duchess with whom the report would no doubt have been shared. Giovanni apparently put the question to Don Garzia: what to do now? Don Garzia, his companion on many a venture, both of virtue and of mischief, proposed a carriage ride. Giovanni liked the idea, and a conveyance was prepared. Although his account is detailed, some interpretation is needed in order to make sense of the outcome. He specifies that he packed the weapon only as an afterthought, so he did not simply go looking for trouble. “Only when I was already in the carriage I had my old butler hand me my short sword.”3 The grand duke would surely know that the deserted city was a dangerous place after sundown, when those who circulated were only night watchmen and criminals—or persons able to defend themselves against both. The insulation between ruler and ruled over the past century had not yet become so absolute as to remove all awareness of actual urban life. But were Giovanni’s innocent intentions merely a pose? He tried to emphasize spontaneity. Dressed just as they were, “in this good company, slowly slowly, without any servants, we proceeded to San Giovanni.”4 As they moved down via Tornabuoni and turned into via de’ Cerretani, what was going through his mind? Perhaps he thought of her—the person whose name he would not pronounce to his Medici relations. In the document he called her a “friend,” but his reader would know Livia was more than that. “Friend” here in Florence was a loaded term—not just because the literary folk related this, as so many other things, to the ancient Romans. Friendship was bound up with

prologue 3

pleasure, passion, and survival: the main themes of life. He could not do without her and vice versa, although the relationship seemed hopelessly lopsided because of the difference in rank. As his more or less exclusive concubine and muse since 1609, she owed him everything, and from what she gave him she got much in return, as a protégée in every sense, pampered and protected. He showered her with gifts, lodging her in his own palazzo and acquiring her one of her own, across the street. He may have thought that somewhere in this night was a prize he could win for Livia to stoke their fantasies and rekindle their desires. What did he see in her? The following chapters will put the question in different ways. Apart from the natural beauty, noted by all observers, perhaps her pathetic story was at least part of the attraction. The evidence suggests that he viewed himself as a kind of chivalric figure, a rescuer of ladies in distress. Was he intrigued by the complex personality? Just below the surface of her demeanor, we seem to discern profound fears—fears that her youth might one day fade, that the improbable fable might end. She liked to repeat the adage: “there is nothing sweet without there being also bitterness.”5 Wherever she went she brought along her premonitions of disaster. Her longings, springing from a far different corner of the social and mental world, somehow eventually coincided with his own. There was more. Among the multitude of his preoccupations, perhaps Giovanni was conceiving yet another deeper reason why a prince bearing the name of Medici should befriend a mattress maker’s daughter. He knew he was her bridge to a new world, but in an odd way, was she also this for him? Arriving in the piazza the trio would have encountered a shadowy expanse populated by looming presences, including barely visible figures sculpted on the monuments—duomo, bell tower, baptistry—and live figures in motion. “There were many people” even at this late hour, Giovanni reveals, but the usual crowds were obviously not milling about buying and selling goods or passing through to the other areas of the city where business was done in the daytime. The night belonged to the strong or to the furtive. There would have been other carriages bearing other privileged parties sharing the need to stir up some air. Their lanterns and the stars above would have provided almost the

prologue 4

only light, and the moon was on the wane.6 A few torches perched on outsized brackets underneath the windows of major palaces would be paying feeble homage to official rules about keeping a minimum of illumination in the city center.7 Youths from some of the best families would be clustered here and there, distinguished by the muted finery of their casual dress. As the carriage rounded the baptistry, from one of these clusters someone emerged, approached the carriage, poked his head inside, and said, “have a good ride.” Friend or foe?8 Giovanni took the youth’s remark for a provocation. No one with innocent intentions poked their head inside a carriage. And “have a good ride” (“andate a buon viaggio”) carried insinuations in regard to his concubine that he could not tolerate. We imagine him shouting snatches of repartee to Livia and Don Garzia across the dim interior as he did a mental run-​through of the reasons for his spontaneous indignation. Any noble youth in Florence, by good breeding or simply by good sense, should have known enough to behave deferentially toward him, the grand duke’s uncle. Just months away from taking up his generalship with the Venetian forces in Friuli, he was as famous for his Medici background as for his quick temper. Those travelling in the same coach deserved to be treated with respect, whoever they might be. As it happened, they were persons with dignity all their own: Don Garzia, the ex-​secretary to Giovanni’s brother Pietro de’ Medici, who had died in Spain in 1604, and Donna Livia. The insult was not only to Giovanni and to his male friend, but to Livia and all she represented: the woman whom he helped to form a new identity and a new existence, and to whom he dedicated his possessions and his life. Such effrontery (Giovanni wrote) could not be excused by mere ignorance, since the youth “had a good look to see who we were.” If not, the quick conference with friends, observed during the next minutes, surely informed him about his indiscretion. In the rumor-​soaked world of Renaissance Florence, Giovanni’s liaison with Livia was no secret. The combined effects of curiosity, envy, and admiration amplified the few available details regarding Livia’s troubled background: the humble origins, the failed marriage in Genoa, the flight to Florence, the refashioning into a salon attraction. There were all the ingredients of a good scandal in the making, or a salacious novella for any

prologue 5

would-​be Boccaccio. Perhaps the youth acted with such condescension due to the very presence in the carriage of a woman of Livia’s reputation. In that case severer measures were in order if the offense was repeated. Giovanni was ready with the punishment. He remarked to Don Garzia (the document reports) “strange new manners people have these days.”9 At the time of the action he may not have known that the youth belonged to the Buontalenti family (no relation to the architect)—this seems to be a detail added in retrospect to his account. Instead, he said to Don Garzia, “must be some kind of drunkard.” Giovanni was still fuming as the carriage slowly rounded the baptistry six times. On the last circuit they passed by the Loggia del Bigallo, the gothic entryway to the rooms of the Misericordia charity association whose members offered first aid to the needy—not at this hour. They passed the stone benches, and one in particular, which Giovanni calls the “Pancaccia,” where street gossipers joined merchants to exchange the latest news during the daytime. No sooner did the coachman obey the order to turn and head for home than the same Buontalenti youth once more approached, this time with two companions. He followed the carriage for a short distance and (specified Giovanni) “placed his hand upon the woodwork.” In a voice audible above the general murmur of the crowds, he said, “It’s time to go now, take my advice.”10 That was enough. “I jabbed my sword in the direction of that person, and he withdrew,” Giovanni clarified, “then I immediately opened the door and leapt out of the carriage.”11 A picaresque scene ensued. “Since the carriage was in motion and I was wearing slippers, my cape got tangled and I almost fell down but put my knee to the ground, and at the same time the other two youths who were with the first one came at me with their knives, one of which I parried with my left arm and the other with my scabbard.” He tore himself away and soon he was upon the first youth, whom he whipped to the ground with several quick blows of his scabbard and prepared to finish off for good. Don Garzia, fearing a tragedy, climbed out and dashed after his friend, dodging the flailing arms and legs, almost getting himself hurt before subduing Giovanni and letting the offender escape alive. Back in the carriage, the three friends headed for home and rest.

prologue 6

The day following the episode, Giovanni wrote his nephew grand duke Cosimo II a full account of what happened—naturally, with no apologies for his own behavior. In his view, he was perfectly in the right, and the Buontalenti youth was in the wrong. He may even have relished the idea that this latest report about his outrageous conduct would only provoke a few sighs of resignation at court. There had been a similar incident one night in Florence when he was only twenty—it probably came to mind now, as it would to the minds of his audience. The only difference was the condition of the victim: the unfortunate Florentine watchman who pronounced a few stupid words in Giovanni’s direction paid for his impudence with his life. Then in 1604 there was the famous homicide in Flanders. That time Giovanni directed Cosimo Baroncelli, his faithful squire, to claim that the assassin was someone else, but he never bothered to deny his own involvement.12 Why should he? He had been busy enjoying the delights of an Antwerp bordello and ordered his servant to quiet a group of musical merrymakers on the street below, who probably knew what was going on above. An altercation occurred, which degenerated into mortal combat. Who actually pulled the trigger on the miscreant made no difference. Death or the threat of death seemed to follow Giovanni wherever he went, even into the halls of state. In 1608, the year he met Livia, he quarreled with Concino Concini, the favorite of his niece Maria de’ Medici, queen of France. Unable to risk an open challenge, he was said to have had assassins sent up especially from Florence.13 Unfortunately (depending on the viewpoint), they botched the hit. This was not the first forgiveness letter he had penned in recent years. As he reread the words and sanded away the wet ink, he may have reflected that he had always been more contrite about his habitual gambling than about any violent outbursts, for a good reason: he occasionally needed money. He could not regard wagering on papal elections as being any more unacceptable than betting on his chances for a cardinalship, in spite of the illegality.14 The only evil in gambling was bad luck: elites all over Europe were unanimous about that. As one who lived by who he was and not by what he had, he showed his worth every time he conspicuously frittered away a fortune; and the excitement of intense anticipation was no substitute for the thrill of battle

prologue 7

unless the stakes were high and the players powerful enough to enforce payment. Even at the front, in the absence of other more intense stimuli, gambling passed the time—the more, the better. His gambling operations at the siege of Ostend in the Flanders wars, not only on the game of Faro but also on the outcome of the siege itself, reached dizzying proportions. When his gambling partner died, leaving both in debt, he demanded a quick bailout from the ducal treasury, knowing it would have to be paid to avoid disgrace to the family.15 Flouting convention was a point of pride: not only in his romantic attachments but also in his intellectual pursuits, as later chapters will show. He let local booksellers know he wanted almost anything prohibited by law. Not that he intended to fight a campaign for freedom of thought. Far from it. He enjoyed discovering and discussing magic, alchemy, and the darker arts partly because they were off-​limits to others. He hired a local Jewish leader as his librarian and instructor in Cabala, fully aware that cohabitation between Jews and Christians was becoming more severely limited by grand ducal policy, in compliance with the Church. His nature prevented him from avoiding conflicts, even with the best. The rivalry with Galileo was not about innovations in mathematics and natural philosophy or, much less, about supporting traditionalism and the local Aristotelians at court and in the university. The problem was another: the upstart mathematician challenged Giovanni’s personal prerogative to determine truth and falsehood. A few weeks after the midnight carriage ride, he would have another chance at his rival, who dared to cross him in a controversy about falling bodies. He had little to gain by reciting mere facts about his actions. If he bothered to set pen to paper, he needed a deeper motive. Prestige, status, privilege: he knew as well as the rest of his clan, all depended upon impressions—impressions that must be made and repeated as often as necessary until they sank into the marrow of society. The twenty-​one-​year-​old grand duke, a ruler since 1609, was now mature enough to appreciate the finer points of privilege in a Renaissance state, particularly with reference to Giovanni himself. It was time to remind him (just as he had reminded the Buontalenti youth) “who he was.” Considering who he was, he had a right to drive through the

prologue 8

streets of Florence after curfew with whomever he wished. By implication, he also had the right to form any liaisons, including with the beauty he kept by his side, raising them to his own level or casting them down at his whim, and to do anything else his noble heart commanded. There had been a time when such reminding was unnecessary. But that privilege was gone. Until recently, despite his misdeeds, he had a place that no one could deny—son of Cosimo I, he was a minor notable in his own right. His rank and role went unquestioned, and he was free to do as he pleased. Now he could not even enjoy the woman of his choice except as an affront to the Medici family matriarchs. Defying his sister-​in-​law Cristina of Lorraine, the grand duchess whose opinions were now seconded by the newly arrived Maria Maddalena of Austria, wife of the young grand duke Cosimo II, cannot have been so odious to him per se. But Florence was a small world, and as the arbiters of family values, the two women could make life miserable for Livia and obstruct his plans for her. And those plans were growing vaster and more extravagant by the minute. He obviously needed a wider stage for his pursuits, in public and in private.

g As he posted the letter, he may have wondered why so few letters from the grand duke were coming back. Insufficient recognition and lack of gratitude were becoming constant afflictions. He deeply resented his trouble in getting what seemed to come so easily to others. So far he had done what was necessary and gained few tangible rewards. He still had almost nothing to show for the many missions endured as a special ambassador, representing the Medici family and the state, carrying news or gathering information among the courts of Europe, perhaps showing concern and zeal for things and people he secretly disdained. In part because his mask was wearing thin, we may surmise, his activities were being taken up by a growing staff of career specialists on the long-​term tasks of regular diplomacy, such as Curzio Picchena and Belisario Vinta, who owed their survival and their prestige entirely to

prologue 9

their jobs.16 Maybe he faulted the regime for preferring them to him. He had equally little to show for a lifetime spent as the family’s soldier of fortune. Time after time he had gone into the field with a Tuscan regiment to remind neighbors that the Medici were a fighting race, risking life and limb for the Catholic cause, to which the family was bound by credo and by marriage. But there could be no more joy in it, if the only thanks he got were a few distracted words of encouragement from a grand duke or duchess. The quieter pursuits quite likely gave him no greater satisfaction, though he could still hold his own with the best in brilliant conversation. The best were getting better, and his long-​promised discoveries and creations were still just words. For turning promises into productions, there was no competing with the likes of Galileo, whom Cosimo was trying to lure back to Florence from the University of Padua. Nor, as an architect, was he obviously the equal of the inspired Bernardo Buontalenti, whose massive new monuments were filling the city. In short, he was good at too many things and not good enough at one alone. Surely his whole education, he may have thought, could not be at fault. For maintaining his freedom of action here in Florence, the prospects did not look bright. Far too much power was concentrated in the dynasty for even the old elite to compete, much less a natural son like him. It was small consolation that people with the surnames Capponi, Guicciardini, and Antinori, and the other greats whose elegant palaces dotted the cityscape, were reduced to fawning sycophants. He would have known all the stories about how Cosimo the Elder, the first great Medici power broker back in the fifteenth century, rose stealthily to preeminence, outside the civic offices but able to control them by financial clout, using skilful negotiation to keep the lid on discord among the oligarchs.17 There had still been some semblance of a Florentine republic. By the time his father Cosimo I came along, there was a whole new list of role models: not Cosimo the Elder but the hereditary kings of France and Spain, whose massive war chests and sprawling colonial empires were reshaping the political landscape of Europe. He never, so far as we know, commented on his half-​brothers’ mad dreams for a royal crown to appear somewhere on the horizon since Florence had

prologue 10

made the grade of a grand duchy and could aspire to something even better. The trend, however, was clear: citizens were supposed to become subjects and courtiers—too bad he could be neither. If he considered the matter at all, he probably preferred the Medici family of the past to the Medici family of the present. They, not he, had changed. In the exclusive club of the hereditary monarchs, to which they obviously wished to belong, brains were always trumped by blood; policy was always trumped by legitimacy; commerce and banking, the very wellsprings of Medici money, were always trumped by feudal landholding.18 If they had no feudal landholding the family had better buy, steal, or marry some. The same went for legitimacy: they had to acquire this too. Recent history was against them. After the family had been ejected from Florence for misgovernment in the fifteenth century, the main hereditary line of Cosimo the Elder had given out. The descendants of the cadet branch headed by the condottiero later known as Giovanni delle Bande Nere, leader of a famous troop of soldier-​ ­adventurers, took over, beginning with Cosimo I.19 Historians, poets, and painters got the job of constructing, embellishing, and promoting a fictionalized genealogy.20 Giovanni may have once had the sensation of fitting in by virtue of his father’s attempts to guarantee his future, in spite of having been born out of wedlock. Now he was not so sure. Maybe he would have found the Florentines of the past, at least, those of the age of Cosimo I, more congenial than the present ones. Not since the days of Savonarola, the monk who abolished carnival back in the Quattrocento, had his fellow countrymen shown such religious devotion—this time, apparently destined to last more than a season. If he looked around Europe he would have seen the same thing everywhere: new confessional passions in politics, new grassroots religious trends. A rigid morality seemed to be setting in.21 No wonder rulers were paying more attention to public misbehavior than ever before and attempting to make some show of actually defending the faith rather than simply paying it lip service. Under the circumstances, he would be forced to admit: the Medici family’s recent emphasis on holiness was a brilliant move. Catholic rulers had solid practical reasons to stop assuming people might behave well for conscience’s sake and step up repression and enforcement. They also had plenty of new

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laws to enforce. In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, they must now defend orthodoxy as defined by the authorities of the Roman Church. The story was, to create a community pleasing to God, they must crush sinfulness and nonconformity, or there would be plagues and strife. Their growing bureaucracies must therefore engage censors, inquisitors, and police to keep strict discipline. Government was easier now, based on the twin pillars of fear and faith. Maybe he thought the libertine rebels against this trend were not so wrong after all. Break the rules, pay the consequences. The family sought advancement within the community of European dynasties in an age that prized legitimacy and orthodoxy. Obviously he could not (at least not openly) commit the same indiscretions that had been the hallmark of Medici behavior in years gone by.22 His father Cosimo I’s consorting with Protestants was as inconvenient a memory as were the numerous concubines and their several children (including him). His half-​brother the grand duke Francesco I’s dallying with Bianca Cappello, the eloped Venetian conveniently freed from her first youthful marriage by the mysterious murder of the spouse, and over whose head there hung suspicions of further dallying of her own with other lovers besides Francesco, had all largely taken place during Francesco’s first marriage with Johanna of Austria. Already by the 1570s, Pietro, another son of Cosimo, had to be shunted to a semi-​permanent post in Spain after murdering his wife Dionora de Toledo because of suspicions that she had a liaison with a youth of the Antinori family, also killed. Even crimes of honor were beginning to require a heavy dose of amnesia. Sooner or later his relatives would turn on him. To deplore the consequences of a loss of favor, all he had to do was to observe his nephew Don Antonio. This son of his half-​brother Francesco I had been invested at a tender age with the newly created principate of Capestrano in the kingdom of Naples by a pact with Philip II of Spain, and groomed for the grand ducal ­succession in Florence.23 When Francesco and Bianca died, Ferdinando forced him to renounce all pretensions including the investiture and accept instead an appointment to the crusading order of Santo Stefano and a vow of chastity. Don Antonio thus slipped to the edges of the Medici universe, where Don Giovanni must have felt himself headed now.

prologue 12

Perhaps Giovanni shared the general suspicion, carefully cultivated by Ferdinando, that Antonio was not really the son of Francesco and Bianca at all and therefore had no rights whatsoever. In the haste to combine the new wedding, so it was said, Bianca had tried to cover the embarrassment of a faked pregnancy by either substituting a baby conceived with her previous husband or by acquiring the child of another couple. Giovanni, at least, was a Medici through and through. All he wished was to enjoy Livia with his honor intact. If this seemed impossible, he could chalk it up to the new climate. What may have disturbed him more was knowing how appearances deceived. But he was not fooled. Let the grand dukes, grand duchesses, and their minions (he may have thought) present themselves as protectors of the faith and of a strong and Catholic state, to the delight of the present generation of Florentines. Referring to Ferdinando, Filippo Salviati had effused about “the great devotion and piety of our Most Serene grand duke.”24 How much was propaganda? Under the cloak of religious zeal, Giovanni knew how they, their circle, and their fellow dynasts around Europe cunningly deployed the new weapon of hypocrisy for eliminating rivals. The strategy applied equally within families and among states. Perhaps he could sense they were about to make him their next target. Already middle-​aged, he had let time slip by, while those in charge took him for granted and other men passed ahead of him in honor and prestige. Clearly there was no career left in Tuscany doing any of the things he most enjoyed. At some point he decided the dead end must become a pathway to something else. The Republic of Venice had always impressed him, first when he went there as a child in great pomp to bear the good tidings of the marriage of Bianca Cappello. Worldly, rich, and tolerant, bustling with trade in goods and ideas, here was a place where his lifelong search for self, status, and security might fittingly resume. A generous offer of employment from the Venetian government was now tipping the scales in favor of expatriation. To his new home he would move his things, his thoughts, and his mistress—but not without concluding the last items of business with his impossible family.

1 The Family Business

As he prepared for the transfer to Venice, Giovanni may have won-

dered why being a Medici was such hard work. Perhaps he thought about his childhood, and how he became a Medici in the first place. Since he never recorded his early experiences, we have to rely on accounts by family friends or associates to understand the facts at his disposal when he reflected upon his life. For instance, there was the bathing lesson described in the obituary by his close friend Giovan Battista Strozzi. Giovanni, so the story goes, had been watching on shore as Cosimo I and Francesco, his father and half-​ brother, current and future grand dukes at that time, swam in the Arno River. The year was 1574, just three years after the Turks were routed with Medici money at the battle of Lepanto. The location was upriver from the tanneries that turned the water brown, where the artist Domenico Cresti, known as Passignano, painted bathers a few decades later having a summer frolic. Around San Niccolò the river flowed by a massive old guard tower marking the city wall, and in the hottest weather, merry groups of youths struck athletic poses or sat on the short partition, dangling their feet in the mill run that followed

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the river. His father’s very presence guaranteed a well-​behaved crowd: this rite of passage by the youngest son deserved a respectful audience. Next came a fatherly taunt: did he know how to swim? “Would he be able to do as we do?”1 If Giovanni was terrified, he seems to have put on a brave face. Suddenly he threw himself in, clothes and all (“at the deepest part,” Strozzi specified). Since no one ran to help, Cosimo must have made some sign commanding forbearance. Giovanni “aided himself by feet and hands as swimmers do,” finally dragging himself shoreward to safety. If he then got a quick embrace under the approving gaze of the onlookers, signifying that he had passed the test, this detail is lost. Sink or swim: Giovanni knew the policy well. Another incident from around the same time involved a surprise for his father, organized by his half-​brother Francesco. Giovanni was visiting the old gothic Medici palace along the river in Pisa, where Cosimo had come to monitor progress on public works, including the new university buildings. One afternoon, the eyewitness reports, he appeared at the doorway of the main hall in a full suit of armor, pike in one hand and mace in the other. We can picture him waddling clumsily across the room toward the seated patriarch under the gazes of court and kin. Francesco had put him up to this, and the secretary, Antonio Serguidi, was supposed to report back to Florence about reactions to the ingenious mis en scène. His seventh birthday would not be for another few months, but the gift of metal clothes was intended as much for the father’s amusement as for his own use, and no one knew how long the aging Cosimo would last. He achieved the intended effect, or so it seemed: Cosimo, wrote Serguidi, “was so pleased that wept tears of joy, seeing [the boy’s] gravity and skill in that armor.”2 Giovanni may have wondered, why the tears? He had no doubt heard all about the half-​mad condottiero who had been Cosimo’s father (Figure 1.1). Even if he saw some of the portraits around Pitti, he would have been too young to appreciate the crazed expression in the eyes of Giovanni delle Bande Nere, as his grandfather would eventually be known. The resemblance to the man who loved only war and died from it when Cosimo was his very same age then was slight. Peeking out from under his own little helmet would have been the father’s softer

Figure 1.1. ​Cristofano dell’Altissimo, Portrait of Giovanni delle Bande Nere. (Uffizi)

Figure 1.2. ​Copy from Bronzino, Portrait of Cosimo I. (Uffizi)

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look (Figure 1.2), or perhaps the mother’s. Maybe Cosimo was ­wondering whether Giovanni could hope for a better destiny from the profession of arms. As the child submitted moments later to having the heavy burden peeled off his back, perhaps he thought, where is my reward? That came later. Within less than a year Cosimo was in the grave, having sired over a dozen children in and out of wedlock. Giovanni hardly knew him, although he benefitted immensely from some of Cosimo’s final acts. Official recognition as a legitimate offspring, the endowment of property, and incomes sufficient for a life of privilege: with such advantages, he was off to a good start.3 From experiences like these, Giovanni had learned to be a Medici. Then what happened? Faced with the prospect of leaving Florence, maybe never to return, with Livia as his only trophy, he probably asked himself: how could he have degenerated so quickly from insider to outsider? The change was astounding even by his own family’s standards. Known for overwhelming conquests and exquisite vendettas, they should have cast him among the punishers, not as a victim. Year after year he had weathered their various seasons of homicidal self-​ destruction: too shrewd to eliminate, too useful to suppress. His talent and intelligence, plus the material advantages he got from his father, ­supposedly fit him for a unique task: strengthening the profile of the family and the state. Now he was struggling just to avoid ostracism. Something had gone terribly wrong, and the reasons lay deep in the past.

g He could hold nothing against his mother, Eleonora degli Albizi, of a Florentine patrician family and Cosimo’s penultimate mistress. She remained in Cosimo’s affections only until Camilla Martelli took her place; and while this last mistress became the last wife, she instead was wed to a Medici courtier to save appearances. The man in question, one Carlo Panciatichi, looking for a reprieve from a murder charge plus the promised ten thousand scudi dowry, had no intention of keeping house with her. At the Medici villa in Castello, therefore, she remained mostly on her own except for the company of the son, Giovanni, whom

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she reputedly adored from his first breath. But she could not be allowed to keep him as long as anyone at court thought she might use him as merchandise in some embarrassing vendetta against the grand duke who scorned her. On a somewhat paradoxical pretext referring to her morbid attachment to the infant, now four or five years old, she was forced to give him up.4 Another five or six years went by and she became a test case for new inventions in legal casuistry to be applied to inconvenient women. Accused of infidelity to Carlo, she transferred to the convent of the nuns from Foligno located at St. Onofrio in Florence by order of Medici officials, remaining until her death. Perhaps some bitter­ ­ ess tugged at a corner of Giovanni’s mind, although he would have n shared the view that her sequestration was necessary for the family and the state. He knew he had been wrested from his mother’s arms, but he would only really remember growing up at Pitti. There among the others of the Medici brood, in a sprawling dynastic residence set to rival all the others of modern times, he experienced a world within a world. The building site for the planned enlargements would soon be crammed with even more Medici family and retinue than had once crowded into Palazzo Vecchio. The secluded location across the Arno had been good enough, but Cosimo deprecated the Pitti family’s original mansion. 5 Everything must always be bigger, better, more befitting the world-​ changing role the family wanted to play. Giovanni would have passed his time moving among the endless salons with their warm bright colors and stone-​cold floors. The child care from the legions of servants no doubt left its mark, but probably not the names—they would remain buried in the court rolls and payment lists: wet nurses, deputy wet nurses, matrons and under-​matrons, governesses, masters of various subjects, physicians of various types. Of his early education within the walls of Pitti, besides basic skills, what elements would remain in his mind? The rudiments would have come from the old family servant Ostilio Guelfi, noted in the court rolls as Giovanni’s “governor”—that is, a kind of guardian. Spiritual elevation would have come from two regular canons of the nearby church of S. Maria Soprarno, possibly in the company of his half-​sister Virginia, Cosimo’s daughter by Camilla Martelli and one year his

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junior.6 Perhaps somewhat more distinctly he would remember Baccio Baldini, his father’s personal physician and to him, a tutor.7 And rather than by the lessons regarding the virtues of Cosimo, about which Baldini had published an entire book, perhaps he would have been impressed by the lessons on human destiny. “This malevolent and impious notion that Fate and Fortune have power over men’s operations and force free will to do this or that, often causes men to be less prudent concerning what they must do,” noted Baldini in another book, dedicated, fittingly enough, to Bartolomeo Panciatichi, Eleonora degli Albizi’s father-​in-​law, and abounding in citations from ancient and modern authors, including those of the Florentine tradition from Dante onward.8 Giovanni, possibly taking the cue from such learning, would spend a lifetime attempting to build a future by using his intelligence. His other lessons from Baldini would have included a broad sampling of knowledge in the arts and sciences and some rigorous drilling in verbal skills. He would not simply be an admirer of culture like his father, a man of “mediocre learning” even in the opinion of the flatterers, or his grandfather, who knew only war. Rather, he would try to become a participant in this as in every other aspect of Florentine life.9 We can imagine his frame of reference growing quickly beyond the palace walls. Sometime between the 1570s and the 1580s, he would have begun to notice that his surname and the city were practically synonymous. He would sense the eerie quiet on the political front, his father’s legacy after the Medici takeover following the Italian wars. Republicans were almost extinct, and those famous discussions and debates about consensus-​based government that he had read about in books from Machiavelli’s time were nothing but a reverberation. Even the Rucellai family became obedient courtiers, they whose gardens had once been a breeding ground for rebels. Other major families followed the same route rather than seeking advantages in civic unrest. He was eight years old in 1575 when the last gasp of rebellion took place. He would have heard (from Grand Duke Francesco, his half-​brother?) about what transpired in the so-​called Pucci conspiracy: about how Orazio Pucci attempted to elevate a family grudge into something more substantial and rounded up a group of supporters, hoping to succeed where the

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Pazzi conspiracy had failed in the previous century.10 He very likely agreed with the outcome. Any attempts to murder Medici family members ought to be suppressed. What better test for the forces of order that Francesco was developing in concert with all the other rulers of the time? Likewise, here was a good excuse to add another family’s property to the vast Medici domains. If he ever doubted the potency of fear and convenience as human motivations, all he had to do was look around him. Florentines, once a fractious and irritable people, gave in to Medici rule, apparently in view of the many evils that might befall them due to instability and weakness in a better-​armed world. So much for fear. What about convenience? By taking over Siena and turning the duchy into a grand duchy Cosimo surely benefited all Florentines. Maybe they would share even more benefits if Francesco became a king—not of Corsica, which had been a possibility under Cosimo, but of some more famous place. Giovanni was on the only side that mattered in Florence, and he knew it. He would have concurred in the widespread judgment of art being a chief glory of Florence, visible in all the public spaces. And he would have known the artistic scene first-hand. Bustling by him in the corridors of Pitti with brush or chisel in hand or a roll of projects, he would have met Cigoli, Santi di Tito, Ligozzi, and other painters, the sculptors Giambologna and Ammanati, and the multitalented Buontalenti, all at work on Medici business. The palace was rapidly filling up with the best past and present productions.11 We may wonder exactly when he began to look at artworks with a critical eye, and what judgments he would have made of what he saw. We know he joined the new Academy and Company of the Arts of Design, promoted by his father in collaboration with the painter-historian Giorgio Vasari.12 Activities would likely have seemed more geared toward celebrating past accomplishments than toward inspiring new ones. After Michelangelo’s body had been returned to Florence from Rome in 1564, the Academy had overseen the solemn burial under an impressive monument in the church of Santa Croce. Vasari provided the rationale in his history of developments from Cimabue onward, published in the definitive edition the year after Giovanni was born, replete with reminders that art could

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aspire no higher, and that Michelangelo’s contemporaries had badly deviated from the path set by the Quat­trocento greats.13 Things were surely not as bad as Vasari suggested. But current Florentine painting must have seemed somewhat retrospective by comparison with the more adventurous new trends in Bologna and Rome and elsewhere.14 For the moment, Giovanni seems to have directed his attention chiefly to music instead. Scholars he knew were joining forces with musicians he had met, as the basics of opera coalesced around him.15 Did it occur to Giovanni that the same vein Florentine creativity so clearly delineated by Vasari in regard to the visual arts of the Quattrocento might be evident in the acoustic arts of his own time? The research into Greek music theory by Girolamo Mei and Galileo Galilei’s father Vincenzo may have seemed no less esoteric than the few speculative attempts to perform ancient music. But already as a toddler, he would have heard some of the more unusual sounds emanating from the so-​called Florentine Camerata, a group of writers and musicians centered in the Bardi palace, including the same Vincenzo along with the singer-​composer Giulio Caccini. The newly developing style of monody was supposed to make texts more dramatically intelligible than did the prevailing style of polyph­ ­ony. A new world of sound was only just being discovered, and no one knew what delights it might bring. He could scarcely have imagined then how deeply he would become involved in the new compositions that became a hallmark of Florentine pageantry, as an observer, writer, and stage designer. New performance trends came and went. He left the playing to the professionals, although he possibly strummed a few notes for his closest friends on the “Spanish” guitar later mentioned in the list of debts against his estate. He commissioned it from a luthier called “Mateo di Giorgio,” noted in the documents as “a German,” apparently a foreign artisan pressed into the service of the latest-​arriving fad from Naples, where some said the instrument was first developed. The repertory was not large, although any compositions from its direct ancestor, the Spanish vihuela, could easily be transposed. Maybe what he liked about it was that it was the instrument of choice among the wandering

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troops of commedia dell’arte players now seen in every city. Was it another transgression on his part, mixing the water and wine of popular and elite?16 With so much to be curious about and so little time, philosophy and natural knowledge had to be squeezed in somehow. Keep­­ing track of the names of the major trends was challenge enough, given the ­contrasting views and fierce debates. He had a privileged vantage point on new knowledge in the making, right there at Pitti.17 He would have run into Andrea Cesalpino from time to time, head of the new university botanical gardens, and the family physician. Perhaps he heard about herbs not mentioned in Celsus or Dioscorides and cures not found in Galen and Hippocrates, as well as about the reasons for not throwing out the Ancients just yet.18 When he was growing up, while Galileo was still in school people thought the earth was the center of the universe.19 Mastering the mathematics necessary to make sense of a moving earth was far beyond most Florentines, and Copernicus was still just a funny name. But Aristotle-​bashing was a regular pastime among scholars, and the Aristotelian cosmos was showing signs of stress: the reliance on logic over quantification, the annoying incompatibility with Christianity, the question-​begging mechanics, the irksome definition of matter. Maybe he shared a few scholars’ view that simply turning to Plato or the pre-Socratics would not do.20 There had to be a better plan; and while ages-old intellectual icons were falling fast, Ptolemy, articulator of the geocentric world view, was the first to go. Perhaps more than knowledge itself, what he wanted were the results of knowledge: the esteem of others, the ability to solve problems real or imagined. As a youth, plodding through the dense prose in those awful tomes probably made his head spin—a single volume of the work on mathematical proportions by master mathematician Girolamo Cardano weighed as much as a small child. He may have asked himself, was there no other way? At least by the works of his hands, he could advance from concept to execution in an instant, perhaps even change the world with a single gesture. Such was the work of the conquerors and other warriors in his classical readings. Whenever the choice was to fight or to study, he chose the former. Very likely, the route to immortality

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was much more tangible on the battlefields of his imagination than in the libraries there. Yet he was torn between the two interests, and from the evidence at hand, there seems to have been no one in his environment to help him somehow fuse them. Maybe if he had been able to put the question to the only father he had ever really known, his elder half-​brother Francesco, he would have set his life on a different path. Later he would discover that Francesco was experiencing serious problems in the desperate attempt to match the legacy of Cosimo I. Only later he would begin to understand the difficulties Francesco faced in attempting to match the legacy of Cosimo, who died in 1574. The severe regime of work just barely sufficed for maintaining the territories already gained,. The Habsburg spouse, Giovanna d’Austria, dutifully produced, if not princes enough to guarantee the succession, at least princesses enough to ensure the alliances; alas, she was neither a beauty nor a wit, Finally there was some relief when a brilliant concubine, Bianca Cappello, taught him to enjoy the fruits of his position; but would she bring salvation or damnation? If Giovanni had been Francesco, perhaps he too would have believed that the secrets of nature might offer some answers about the road to happiness, and if not, about the way to more power. No wonder Francesco seemed so drawn to that strange figure, the emperor Rudolf II, who was turn­­ing the court of Prague into a Mecca for occult investigations of every sort.21 Giovanni was a witness as Francesco’s obsessions gradually grew into manias. News about the well-​furnished museum and alchemical foundry in Prague only triggered more activity in Florence, all focused on the same goal. The natural history specimens, the alchemical operations, the metallurgical processes, the mineralogical investigations, and the days and nights spent in the company of artisans and books were all supposed to help carry the grand duchy to heights unreached by Cosimo—or at least to leave a mark on history as yet unmade. Francesco’s workroom in Palazzo Vecchio obviously had to be greater than their father’s studiolo (“little study”) upstairs; and Giovanni may have admired the thought-​provoking decorations: earth, air, fire, water— the four elements providing the basic substance for every operation; Jupiter and Mars, the ruling planets; Francesco himself, depicted as an

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artisan, stirring some mixture over the laboratory stove while watching the percolations in a nearby alembic, perhaps attempting one of the operations outlined in the discourse on alchemy dedicated to him by Francesco di Vieri, or in one of the various manuscripts inherited from Cosimo’s secret collection.22 Perhaps the two half-​brothers occasionally walked together from Palazzo Pitti to the workroom, along Vasari’s specially built corridor over Ponte Vecchio and through the Uffizi. Did Giovanni agree with the distinguished visitors who came away impressed not just by the studies but by the time spent on them in lieu of other things? “Excessive,” Michel de Montaigne proclaimed, after paying respects in November 1580.23 Giovanni’s real school was the grand ducal court itself, not just his half-​brother. His teachers were all those around him. Some lessons would have been more memorable, perhaps not for the best reasons. Did he discover that Montaigne, author of an essay “on the art of conversing,” spoke more eloquently than the other various major dignitaries and statesmen.24 His assessment alas has gone unrecorded. Maybe the details were less crucial than the general impression: to craft a life could be as demanding as to craft a work of literary prose and required nearly as much grounding in the ancient classics. Did he find that Ulisse Aldrovandi, the Bolognese naturalist on tour to view the collections, brought the best gifts? Of the more exotic specimens there would have been beautiful engravings, rather than, say, the actual armadillo from New Spain, or the tropical toucan.25 Easily transportable items, like the bezoar stone from the stomach of a llama for emergency snakebite relief, might have provided more delight. No more detailed reaction has been recorded either in this regard or in regard to the various artists who came and went on any given day, their different levels of familiarity with the grand duke indicating the different degrees of regard in which they were held: Ignazio Danti over Bartolomeo Ammanati, Bernardo Buontalenti over everyone else. In regard to Buontalenti, we can only judge the cause by the effect, namely, that Giovanni one day would beat the master: so those frequent meetings about massive building projects around the city must have trailed off into private conversations, maybe even lessons, to the extent that Giovanni would one day beat the master at his own game.26

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Before he met Livia, whenever he thought of womanhood, with all due respect to the little princesses who had been his playmates, perhaps he thought of Bianca Cappello, Francesco’s second wife. If so, he was not the only one. Tasso once exclaimed, “Goddess or woman she equally resembles” in one of fifty songs in her honor.27 The darling of poets and artists, recipient and subject of their works, she was as compelling a presence to her admirers as she was repellent to her detractors—usually those who disparaged female assertiveness of any kind. The youthful elopement from Venice with a Florentine male somewhat too conveniently eliminated after Francesco set eyes on her, the secret Medici marriage announced only six months after the death of the previous grand duchess, Giovanna d’Austria, all added to her infamy as well as to her glamour. The Venice connection added an exotic flavor to cultivated conversations. When she was in the room, Giovanni may have first heard pronounced the name of Jacopo Sansovino, architect of Piazza San Marco and the Rialto Bridge, or of Aldus Manutius, printer and editor of the classics. She kept her own mini-​court, centered in the palace built for her by Buontalenti in via Maggiore (now “via Maggio”) around the corner from Pitti.28 Anything he learned of her famously refined entertainments would have likely derived from reading accounts about them in the novels by Celio Malespini, includ­ ­ing cruel jokes played on unsuspecting servants tricked into falling down artificial precipices and veritable Hells of writhing devils to delight the dinner guests.29 He was still too young. His first diplomatic assignment, at age twelve, was about her. The year had been 1579. In the company of the Florentine ambassador, he was supposed to make the official announcement of Bianca’s marriage and serve as a spokesman for a new alliance between the Medici and the Venetian patrician in-​laws. In return he was to receive the Senate’s congratulations and Bianca’s official designation as a “daughter of the Venetian Republic,” a title previously conferred on the Queen of Cyprus in the fifteenth century.30 There was more beneath the surface, of course. The real point was to effect a political reconciliation after the earlier scandalous elopement, quiet suspicions about the assassination of the first husband, and banish all talk about a loose woman. Very likely, he barely grasped the insinuations being made around him at

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the time, while burying them deep in his brain for further contemplation later on. The term “adventuress” to him would have had only a dictionary definition. The religious education maintained his innocence about some matters, not about others. His childish simplicity had probably been his greatest asset under the circumstances, and the main reason why he did his job with such memorable brio: “in such a manner,” the ambassador reported, “that he left behind him a good impression and a great desire” to see him again—as happened in fact. 31 He had liked Venice so much then that he eventually ended up settling there. There was no getting around the fact: despite all his other activities, the fields where he seemed to excel with the least effort were the military arts. Fortunately, nobility was still defined par excellence as a m ­ ilitary profession, and true virtue was what might be gained in military pursuits. It was his trump card when all else failed. Hunting was the usual introduction, and he began on the expeditions to Pratolino, Francesco’s favorite among the Medici villas because of the plentiful game. Next came human quarry. He became such an expert swordsman that a fencing master dedicated a manual to him. 32 At the riding school next to the Botanical Gardens, he would have met dozens of other knights in training from the noble families of Florence and elsewhere, permanently maiming a few of them, by accident or by design. Discretion ruled: no one would tell. Francesco had the new jousting lists built there especially so the “most noble youth of Florence might decorate themselves with equestrian splendor” (said the inscription, now lost) “and especially his brother Giovanni,” who enjoyed the expert instruction of a famous riding master called Rustico Piccardino. 33 Soon he would be fighting on his own. If ever he cast his mind back along the course of his life, he would have found that the end of the 1580s offered a sunny resting place for his thoughts. At that happy time, he embodied everything that his family did best, and his ambitions matched the role. He surely had no need to prompt Santi di tito, his portraitist, to deliver a portrait glowing with youthful self-assurance: the portrait would speak for itself (Figure 1.3). Not that he ever wished to remain stuck in that time; surely he knew that experiences belonged where they occurred. However,

Figure 1.3. ​Santi di Tito, Don Giovanni de’ Medici. (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale)

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perhaps he had an inkling of what the present historian perceives: that the realities of his situation had dictated the direction he would have to go, and not always to his advantage.

g Francesco, his surrogate father, made things very clear: sooner or later, he would have to go to war. As a legitimized—not legitimate—child, for all intents, an orphan, outside of the line of succession to the grand ducal throne, the career options were limited, and some were out of the question. The most recent playing around with scenography, such as during the festivities for the wedding of Virginia de’ Medici to the duke of Modena, was a fine ornament to a complete personality, and a significant help to the family, but could never be a proper profession for a gentleman.34 That left the military or the Church. The choice was obvious. The one portrait that has survived from the period, evinces worldliness, not otherworldliness; boldness, not holiness. The change in climate and a little hardship, Francesco determined, would do him good, add strength and sinew to that lanky frame. Other engagements would have to wait. In making the journey in September 1587 to try his fortunes in the Flanders wars, he was in good company. Youths from many of the great houses were on hand for the action.35 The time was right, especially considering the perilous juncture in European affairs, and the temporary shortage of bellicosity in Italy after the warring states, exhausted, finally concluded the peace of Cateau-​Cambrésis back in 1559. For claiming the necessary prize of honor, the New World was an option only for the noble poor or desperate. He accordingly joined the Catholic forces led by Alessandro Farnese, governor of the Spanish Netherlands, fighting on behalf of Philip II. The mission was to seize what territory they could from the secessionist Dutch Republic and defend the rest from further attacks. Philip’s developing plans called for mastery over Europe, including a vast strategy to neutralize England by invasion. Just when Giovanni arrived, there were orders to divert the army of Flanders toward the coast and float it out on barges to join the Spanish

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Armada.36 In the midst of catastrophic information deficits between Spain and Flanders, the plan seemed more and more obviously impossible as time went on. If the news from Spain arrived in agonizing gasps, so did the news from Florence. The next family tragedy caught him off guard. As far as we can tell, for many weeks he made nothing of the silence at the other end. Only on the 19th of November, did he become aware that Francesco had died back on October 20th—shortly followed by Bianca Cappello, both in mysterious circumstances (Figure 1.4). Giovanni’s grieving was weeks behind the times; there was no catching up. The rest of the family had already been able to adjust to the idea. The sense of displacement seems to have been compounded by a feeling of general bewilderment. If not of self-​pity, at least a few notes of uncertainty slipped in between the lines of his letter to his other half-​brother Ferdinando, the new grand duke, still a cardinal of the Church: “I have lost a patron, a father, and a brother, who I am certain loved me and would have shown this in his own way whenever the occasion demanded.”37 He did not say so, but he probably wondered whether he would also be able to depend on Ferdinando to maintain the fragile understanding he had enjoyed, concerning his ambitions and his monthly upkeep. He did not ask much: just a basic agreement with his choices and some aid in the pursuit of a career. But he would obviously have to try still harder to please his unyielding world, if the right moment would only arrive. He was as surprised as everyone else about the double death of Francesco and Bianca, and no doubt the same disturbing questions occurred in his mind. Who stood to gain from the coincidence? The only possible answer was the unthinkable one: Ferdinando.38 Ambi­ tious, worldly, and unscrupulous, here was a far different man from the older, more cautious sibling. If the grand duchy now fell on him rather than on some spurious son of the dead couple—namely, Don Antonio— this could only be the result of careful forethought and astute planning. Whether Antonio was really the son of Bianca made no difference now. Ferdinando had him quickly sidelined and disinherited. To avoid further suspicions about the deaths, he ordered the bodies hastily

Figure 1.4. ​Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Francesco I. (Uffizi)

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­ ispatched—Bianca’s to a common grave. Giovanni probably sensed d that the waters in which he needed to navigate had suddenly become as dangerous at home as they were abroad. He kept to the field despite a case of spotted fever that took a serious turn. Rather than utilizing his room in Antwerp, he stayed at camp. Constant riding for days in the rain with no warmth or shelter was nothing like the hunt, a more leisurely exercise. What is more, close to the action meant close to the mud, the troops, and the small creatures scurrying or crawling amid the filth. If bad air meant bad health (a point on which the learned seemed to agree with the worldly-wise) in this grey-​green swamp of rotting corpses, horse manure, and brackish pools, there was little to be hoped. Bad smell signaled bad food, bad beer, bad wine—but how to distinguish merely “bad” from inedible or undrinkable? It was only a matter of time before the invisible and undetected enemies of health invaded the bodies of the unsuspecting. When his health finally broke only a few months into the campaign, he was not alone. The whole army seemed to have become a sick hoard as the contagion spread back and forth between army and town, until there was no telling which was sicker. Typhus, as the modern diagnosticians later dubbed the disease then contaminating the streets of Antwerp, was supposedly incurable. Giovanni almost did not survive. Cinchona bark, the early fever remedy par excellence, ancestor of modern quinine, had not yet made its way to Europe from the Jesuits in Peru. Dr. Nunhes, the Portuguese physician, had his own quirky ideas: mild liquors taken orally and “warm pigeon blood applied to the head and feet”—to no avail. 39 Likewise, heavy sweating of an already scalding patient (at considerable expense in firewood), had no immediate effect. The doctors called for a priest; Giovanni called for pen and paper and wrote his last will, leaving the furniture and other personal effects to his servants.40 The recovery after two weeks seemed miraculous, but by that time he had spent most of the Flanders escapade shivering in his room and grumbling about the disastrous course of events. By the time he regained strength and spirits, the Armada was wrecked, but the wars raged on.41 After a no more successful participation in the much smaller battle of Bergen-​ op-​Zoom, he barely managed to take his honor home intact.

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Back in Florence in 1589, he quickly readjusted to civil life—no doubt helped along by the festivities for the marriage of his half-​brother Ferdinando (Figure 1.5).42 Now an ex-​cardinal and the new head of state, Ferdinando had arranged a spouse, and the attendant formalities, in record time. Suspicions of fratricide were suppressed. The grand­­ daughter of Henry II of France and her dowry of 600,000 ducats signified key acquisitions also in terms of power; to celebrate, there would be jousting, feasts, musical performances, and exhibitions, reportedly on a scale never seen before or since. The respite from those months of boredom and bad weather in Flanders soothed body and soul. In the midst of these activities Giovanni could meet all the cronies of his prewar years, and thankfully, the whole extravaganza had been organized while he was away. Thus, when Girolamo Bargagli’s comedy, La Pellegrina—“The Pilgrim”—was enacted, with none too subtle reference to the new grand duchess Cristina of Lorraine and her transit from Blois through the cities of Tuscany and finally into Florence, including marvelous intermezzi conceived by the best scenographers in town, all he had to do was watch. But he could hardly resist getting once again into the thick of Florentine culture as a doer, not a watcher. With court activities mostly centered now at Pitti, there were new concerns about security. Giovanni saw a chance to show his merit. Just a glance along the southern horizon would have been enough to convince him that this side of the city was more exposed than the north, where the Fortezza da Basso had been built after the siege of Florence as a bulwark against any further attack. Michelangelo’s hastily conceived fortifications here on the south side had withstood the imperial advance in 1530, but there was no telling what might happen in the event of another threat after a half-​century of developments in ballistics. The new aptly dubbed Forte Belvedere would be situated on a hilltop overlooking the city and the countryside. Giovanni handed round the requisite designs and sketches, following every move he had seen Buontalenti make on other occasions. Some observers even thought his teacher was really the minor partner on the project. According to contemporary diarist Agostino Lapini, both he and Buontalenti were “inventors and principal architects,” while “the design and the model”

Figure 1.5. ​Scipione Pulzone, Portrait of Ferdinando I. (Uffizi)

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derived from Giovanni alone.43 Nobody could take principal authorship away from him for the fortress chapel, which according to the documents the new grand duchess specifically requested from him. To her he promised to “show the design, which if it is to your taste, will be immediately executed.”44 No one, not even Buontalenti, must get in the way of this latest demonstration of his growing off-​the-​field expertise. When the time came to put a Medici signature on the Florence cathedral, he returned to the drawing board (Figure 1.6). Partly from his own conviction about the interconnection between life and war and partly from Buontalenti’s training, he would have known that civil and military architecture obeyed the same principles. Again, like Buontalenti, he easily moved between the sacred to the profane, just as between the utilitarian and the beautiful. While working on the cathedral between 1590 and 1591, he was taking up his first major commissions for fortifications in the new port of Leghorn as well as in picturesque hill towns like Pitigliano, Sorano, and Sovana, defending tiny knots of families around the Tuscan countryside.45 The cathedral was a special challenge. After Arnolfo di Cambio completed the nave in the thirteenth century, the west front remained largely a bare brick work-​in-​progress.46 Nothing could be saved from the existing lower bands where Arnolfo had placed late gothic elements: everything was so hopelessly out of date that it all had to go, and down it came. Giovanni evidently took courage from Buontalenti’s uncertain vacillation, beginning back in 1586, between one version and another of how the new front might look. Especially the last Buontalenti sketch, inspired by the death of Francesco, may have looked like it would never pass muster with the new grand duke. And sure enough, the idea of a Venetian-​inspired modern front with a handsome sarcophagus of the previous grand duke set squarely in the middle underneath the Medici arms was far too much for Ferdinando, who preferred something more flattering to himself or at least to no one in particular. Giovanni had the answer: a simple classical design, worlds away from Buontalenti’s morbid catafalque. Two orders of Corinthian square pilasters (not Buontalenti’s three), four simple sculpture niches (not Buontalenti’s seven) on the lower order, and perhaps a nod to the recent work of Della Porta in Rome: surmounting the top order over the central light,

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Figure 1.6. ​Don Giovanni de’ Medici, façade design for Santa Maria del Fiore. (Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, modello 135)

a round pediment within a shallow pointed pediment. Maybe the double-​pedimented look was too Roman; maybe Ferdinando simply lost interest. In any case, the project was killed and nothing was done for nearly three hundred years. To build a masterpiece worthy of his self-concept, Giovanni would have to wait. Writing came less spontaneously to him than drawing, perhaps because he cared about it so much. Putting words on paper, he found, needed time and inspiration. He chose his literary associations

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s­ crupulously, giving his full respect, but not his full attention, to the experts in the newly founded Crusca Academy, supposedly responsible for enforc­­ing Tuscan as the literary language of Italy and eventual compilers of the first Italian dictionary. Whether “navile” for “ship” was, properly speaking, a Tuscan word or an illegal borrowing from Venetian or, worse yet, Genoese, probably seemed to him trivial compared to the questions of life and death that usually occupied his mind. In any case, no trace of his involvement has remained. Possibly he preferred the Florentine Academy, the other bastion of Tuscanism; but again, the records do not show whether he attended meetings, although he received a dedication by the Giunti printing firm of an edition of speeches in the Academy by Benedetto Varchi, a Renaissance humanist.47 More is known about his engagement with the least conventional of the groups on the literary scene, the Alterati (“Excited Ones”), which had begun as a drinking society (hence their symbol, a wine barrel) and was now evolving into a serious literary academy.48 The documents show he read his own works there and listened to those by others. Good models among his contemporaries were not hard to find, and the current god of literature, Torquato Tasso, was a personal acquaintance. After the first encounter when he was nine, he had been a test audience for the Aminta pastoral drama in the very year, 1581, when Tasso’s renowned Jerusalem Delivered was being published.49 Later, they had met in Mantua, where Giovanni was able to discern signs of incipient madness, while noting that the poet seemed otherwise “very sensible and moderate when reasoning for a while about poetry or other curious things.”50 Giovanni had never taken sides, so far as we know, in the recent discussions about the relative merits of Tasso or Ariosto as the modern master of heroic verse.51 Which was the better interpreter of his two favorite themes of love and war was a question he apparently considered to be not worth quarreling about. If anything, Tasso’s Counter-​Reformation sympathies may well have made Ariosto appear to be slightly more audacious, like the difference between Michelangelo and the Carracci in painting; but at least Tasso was a god one could talk to (Ariosto being long dead). Meeting major literary luminaries, anyone knew, was not the same as producing major works, but Giovanni could take some satisfaction in being targeted specifically by Tasso as

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an object of the “second medicine,” Tasso’s play on words for the last round of Medici flattery, to be presented by the poet in person in 1590, in flight from a few maligned former patrons and a host of personal demons.52 If Giovanni liked architecture because of the discipline, perhaps the same went for poetry. Vitruvius codified the construction of column, pediment, and arch; Aristotle and Horace codified rhyme, meter, and rhetorical figure. There could be no order without legislation, in art as in life. Inside and outside the rules lay the space of the inventor. 53 He could say, Thundering ray that from the sky descends and with such flame and splendor doth surround the shining orb to which the hour is bound and thence its wand’ring glory earthward sends. 54

The image of a divine light filling the sun he found nowhere in Petrarch, the master of the sonnet, nor even in his beloved Tasso, who had been fixated on the notion of Apollo’s chariot derived from Ovid’s Meta­ morphoses. The sun sailing across the sky did not have to be a natural fact in order to look good in verse. Soon he would contend with Galileo, but not about that. Next would come: Tell the fatal hour when the sky inspires here below with martial ardor who with greatest force and greatest furor will crush the realm of every enemy.

Henry IV, the first Bourbon king of France, his hero of the moment, would be grateful for the allusive poetical gift of this poem, when he sent it soon after the coronation in 1590. Still lacking a major masterpiece, Giovanni was particularly vulnerable to challenges in the fields that he considered to be his particular expertise. Around the court, he was called a “man of letters,” but the epithet may have begun to sound more like a taunt.55 With so little to show for himself except hopes and expectations, perhaps he felt somewhat overshadowed by the ever-​productive Galileo, whom he had recommended for the post at Pisa in 1589. Perhaps he once relished the

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friendly disagreements and debates. His behavior suggests that as time went on the contradictions on matters of military architecture were becoming an embarrassment. Eventually there was a clash, but the details are only sparsely reported in the documents. Galileo’s first two biographers, Niccolo Gherardini and Vincenzo Viviani, both writing at a distance of many years, suggest that sometime around 1591 Giovanni proposed an engineering plan using certain machines, and Galileo predicted the plan would fail, using a battery of mathematical proofs— as happened in fact.56 They report the events differently. According to Gherardini, there was “a certain construction [to] be built in Pisa, I do not know whether of fortifications or something else.”57 According to Viviani, there was an operation “to dredge the harbor at Leghorn.”58 The accounts are both plausible enough to suggest two separate events. By 1590–91 Giovanni was certainly collaborating with Buontalenti on the Fortezza Nuova in Leghorn. Sometime between the two projects of the arsenal and the Fortezza, the dredging of the port may well have been discussed, and there may well have been a Galileo consultation as Viviani claims.59 As for Gherardini’s version, the only precise information we have on military matters in Pisa in those years is a series of letters from Grand Duke Ferdinand I, who stayed there to over­ ­see emergency grain shipments to Florence and paid for a model of a new kind of artillery developed in Germany.60 Yet we know from Don Giovanni’s correspondence that the grand duke immediately sent him on a tour of Tuscan fortifications upon his return from Antwerp. Among the locations where he filed a report over the next two years were Radicofani, Pitigliano, Sorano, Sovana, Grossetto, Castiglione, Massa, Rossignano, and Pisa.61 Whatever may have happened, was Giovanni so deeply upset as to provoke Galileo’s eventual move to Padua in 1592? The only clue is the reference in a letter by Guidobaldo del Monte, who in December of that year, commiserates with Galileo about the low salary at Pisa and notes that there is a powerful faction (“una contingente”) preventing any advancement.62 Have historians been correct to interpret this faction as involving Giovanni? Probably many other factors also influenced the move, just as many other factors may have influenced Giovanni’s antipathy; meanwhile Giovanni waited for the next contest.

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The Galileo matter was not the only frustration of those years. There was also the matter of Tommaso Campanella. Giovanni had good reason to expect a major role when the famous occult philosopher sought temporary refuge in flight from the Neapolitan inquisitors in 1592. His shared interests were well enough known, and he may well have been consulted (as he had been in the case of Galileo) concerning the possible appointment to the faculty at Pisa, which prompted Ferdinando I to make the first inquiries with the Florentine ambassador in Naples. If not for him, would the court have known about Campanella’s situation in those last months in jail, confined on well-​ founded suspicions of commerce with the devil? But if he had anything at all to do with the offer of protection, the visit scheduled for the following year, and the seminar in the Laurentian Library, he was never asked to any meeting (according to Campanella’s own recollection). Instead, top participants included the librarian Baccio Valori, the count of San Secondo Ferrante de’ Rossi, and Ferdinando I’s minister Lorenzo Usimbardi.63 Indeed, to Ferdinando, not Giovanni, Campanella dedicated On the Sensitive Faculties of Things, completed in these months and lost to Roman officials in an ambush in Bologna, never to be found again. Giovanni would have been the better man to appreciate the ideas there—profoundly anti-​Galileian but not conservative in any way, owing to the great difference between mathematical and philosophical ways of thinking. Perhaps this latest obfuscation was dictated by protocol; if so, it was one too many.

g Frustrations in war, frustrations in peace: maintaining the usual façade of arrogant serenity must not have been easy. Just keeping pace with his own myth was a full time job. At home and in the field, Giovanni demanded of himself what he thought others expected: perfection. He was the ideal prince, the man with impeccable credentials (except for that one aspect of illegitimacy, which was not his fault and had been corrected). He was, as Tasso had put it, “a new monster” born to add by his accomplishments even more luster to his stupendous family.64 But what was the point if the family seemed oblivious to him,

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to see him only as a relic of the boy wonder he had once been, and nothing more? The atmosphere around him was changing, and so must he. What changed, however, was his personality, not (on the whole) his behavior. The seamless self-​satisfaction of his youth, the dauntless certainty that the world would always go his way because of who and what he was, seemed to shift to the earnest striving of his maturity. His contacts with others grew more abrasive, and the polished surface began to reflect an image of desire—for what, or whom, was not yet clear. From the 1590s onward, he engaged in more and more adventurous military escapades on behalf of his family, requiring ever greater respon­ ­si­­bility and financial outlay. Maybe he hoped they would start to notice him, at least by the expense. War broke out in Hungary between the Habsburgs and the Ottoman Turks in 1593 at a bad time for the Empire. The emperor Rudolf II, a better magus than a warrior, insisted on challenging Ottoman expansion just when confessional problems were gripping Bohemia, and handed the campaign to an incompetent brother called Matthias. Giovanni led the Tuscan contingent. Reporting to him were his nephew Don Antonio with two thousand infantry and Ferrante de’ Rossi, protagonist of the Campanella meeting, with four hundred horse, plus assorted other units.65 They managed to arrive on the field a full year ahead of Duke Vincenzo I Gonzaga of Mantua, the Medici rival, no doubt to Giovanni’s great satisfaction.66 They defended Giavarino, as it was called, now known as Gyór, a major stronghold at the confluence of three branches of the Danube, and moved on to take Strigonia (today’s Esztergom) and Visegrad, where the Danube above Buda turned southward toward Vienna. They stayed long enough to appreciate the Empire’s predicament and perhaps remember a few of the outlandish place names, but not to take Buda, the main goal, lost to the Turks along with the other sister-​cities Pest and Óbuda in 1541. In 1597 he led a Tuscan force to occupy Chateau d’If in Provence on behalf of Henry IV. The more impossible assignments seemed always to come his way—and in the most impossible places. The island was desolate, and the lonely fortress, badly in need of updating, was a perfect place for lost souls to be imprisoned forever. Here in the novel by Alexandre Dumas of two centuries later, the Count of Monte Cristo

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would have discovered not only the forgotten abbé Faria but also the fortifications built by Giovanni to protect the harbor and city of Marseilles on behalf of the crown of France. The job was intricate, not just from a military standpoint. The French Religious Wars were supposed to have ended in 1598 with Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes granting limited toleration for the Protestants of the Huguenot minority. But the violence had not stopped. If anything, the issues became more internationally entangled. Don Giovanni found himself in the middle of a struggle between rival claimants to the French throne (Bourbon and Guise) and contradictory allegiances of his family (to France and to Spain). Maria de’ Medici, Francesco’s daughter and therefore Giovanni’s niece, was already a marriage candidate for Henry IV, in case overtures for the future Philip III of Spain came to nothing.67 The mission consisted in preventing the Doria fleet and Savoy troops from seizing Marseilles for the Catholic League, that is, the Guise faction, allied with Spain and dead set on dethroning Henry. Yet the Medici dynasty was loath to spoil good relations with the Guise allies. Anything Giovanni did was likely to be taken amiss. No wonder his only specific instructions were to deliver a gift painting to the duc de Guise in the name of the Grand Duchess Cristina.68 Maybe as he watched himself go through these motions he saw not the great hero of his dreams but the stock character of the impotent captain that entertained theater audiences wherever there was commedia dell’arte.

g Once the marriage plan was finally settled between Maria and Henry in April 1600, Giovanni found himself thrust again into family business. The more adept he became as a matchmaker, the dimmer seemed the prospects for a marriage of his own. Strategy focused exclusively on the women—women to be exchanged for alliances with the great houses of Europe. At least he could take pride in the family’s continuing prestige, most eloquently confirmed by the Bourbon marriage. They were still first among the European rivals in this as in every other realm. Another marriage alliance with the Spanish Habsburgs would confirm a hard-​won position, and apparently it was only a matter of

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time. To the extent that the success of the daughters and nieces reflected upon the father and uncles, the grand duke himself could enjoy a boost. Already the crown of Poland had been offered to Francesco, and refused considering the huge cost and relatively small advantage. To what more tempting prizes might Grand Duke Ferdinando aspire? Giovanni, as the go-​between, had to maintain a spotless reputation. For the time being, he played along and kept his relatively austere private life to himself. For the Bourbon-​Medici wedding by proxy, held in Florence in October 1600, Giovanni helped put on another amazing show.69 Because of his prominent role, he had to appear in the center of the background of Jacopo Chimenti’s commemorative painting of the solemn ceremony held on the fifth (Figure 1.7). He stands between Ferdinando and Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, with Don Virginio Orsini and Don Antonio on the far right, while the bride, displaying only some of the thousand diamonds that bedecked her for the occasion, receives the ring from Ferdinando. His face is a placid mask: stern and frank despite the world-​weariness and mounting cares. Once again, art has vanquished nature. Later that day, he served as the new queen’s cup-​bearer during a banquet in the main assembly hall at Palazzo Vecchio. Guests were reportedly treated to twenty-​four cold and thirty warm dishes, washed down with rivers of the best wines. At some point in the proceedings, he may have met Pieter Paul Rubens, who later claimed to have been there. Evening entertainment was supplied by Giovanni Battista Guarini—not featuring the celebrated Faithful Shepherd, which eventually entered the literary canon, but a party piece called The Quarrel Between Juno and Minerva, with special effects by Buontalenti. The great invention of the time was the new performance genre of musical drama, and Giovanni joined in the wedding planners’ attempts to dazzle audiences. The program and the special effects had to be the best that art could offer to the most discriminating tastes. Rinuccini’s already-​famous Euridice, with music by Jacopo Peri, could obviously not top the bill: it was not nearly new enough. This was therefore quietly performed in Don Antonio’s private chambers at Pitti on October 6th. Three days later came the main crowd-​pleaser: a fresh work by

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Figure 1.7. ​Jacopo Chimenti detto Empoli, Wedding of Maria de’ Medici. (Uffizi)

Gabriello Chiabrera chronicling The Abduction of Cephalus, for over three thousand spectators all crowded into the theater above the Uffizi.70 In this piece, the latest stage machinery and illumination techniques helped convey the story of the seduction of Cephalus by Aurora or the Dawn, causing universal night, until Jupiter has Cupid locate her and bring back her light. Giulio Caccini, Chiabrera’s fellow member of the Florentine Camerata, provided the music, while Don Giovanni ­supplied the intermezzi, adding variety entertainment between the acts. Lost along with most of the music, played by over a hundred ­musicians, are

Figure 1.8. ​Peter Paul Rubens, The Disembarkation of Marie de’ Medici. (Louvre)

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the plans for his contributions, but not the memory of them, preserved in the tribute paid by Guarini himself: “miracles that have never been seen anywhere else.”71 For transporting Maria to Marseilles, Giovanni served not only as master of ceremonies but also as the queen’s personal protector. And if the official list numbered over two thousand accompanying well-​ wishers just for the journey to Leghorn, the number that set sail was much more. He fretted not only about how to accommodate a floating crowd of over seven thousand, but also about how to ensure the safety of the “royal galley” bearing the wedding party. And no wonder. Made for eye-​popping display rather than for seaworthiness, the vessel had nearly capsized on previous trips to bear other ornamented spouses to their new homes. Perhaps he felt partially responsible for its precariousness, having insisted on fitting it out with a formidable battery of cannon before weighing anchor (no sea was safe these days).72 After what could only have been a hair-​raising journey, the queen seems stock-​still and stone-​faced in the commemorative painting by Rubens, as she faces the dock at Marseilles. Clearly a little gentle encouragement by Giovanni is required to get her ashore, and here he is, looking almost jovial as he nudges her from behind in a handsome pink satin doublet (Figure 1.8).73

g The Turkish wars continued; there was honor to be gained, and he could obviously not stay home. Back in the field for the campaign of 1601, he flew the banner of Pope Clement VIII under Archduke Matthias, the future emperor, with Vincenzo Gonzaga and other princes. If the outcome was less than brilliant, others were to blame—as he stated repeatedly in his letters.74 In his view, foreigners were not well liked, and the archduke’s ministers and advisers handed out military commissions exclusively to their favorites. He conferred with Giovanni Marco Isolani, a member of the war council, concerning a possible strategy for taking Canissa (now Nagykanisza), which involved sending forces to converge from two locations, Nadasti (i.e., Nádasd) and Clancomare (today’s Kiskomárom).75 Archduke Matthias, believing the Canissa

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enterprise to be impossible, insisted upon an expedition to retake the city of Buda instead. Small consolation for Giovanni, his reservations proved correct, and the ill-​prepared expedition ended in a rout.76 The following year he headed westward hoping for better luck under Archduke Albrecht, the new governor of Flanders. Here, at least, was a reachable objective. The archduke had his sights on the port of Ostend, the last remaining Dutch stronghold on that stretch of coastline between Sluys and Nieuport.77 The place was strategically located near the French border, with the beaches of Dunkirk further to the southwest. If the Dutch garrison could be ejected, presumably there would be no more protection for scavengers and pirates. The people would be relieved, while Catholic forces would have an excellent base against Dutch shipping. The natural situation of the town, with the easily flooded plain behind and the open sea ahead, allowing two potent kinds of water defense, challenged the intelligence of even the most ingenious strategist. However, action was limited by the latest fiscal crisis in Spain, now compounded by plague and famine. Moreover, whatever supplies could be sent via the Spanish Road that linked Lombardy to the Low Countries were blocked by the French invasion of Savoy. Money and brains were sorely needed; and if Giovanni had been able to join his family’s resources to his own intelligence, perhaps he could have come away the victor. Instead, two years into the siege, in 1603, Ambrogio Spinola, scion of Genoese bankers, offered to stake his own fortune as a security in return for full command. It was not the kind of deal Giovanni would have been able to make, especially with such little assurance of getting his money back. Spinola’s gamble paid off brilliantly in honor and prestige, despite catastrophic mortality on both sides. A year later the city gave up, morale was restored among the surviving allied troops, and on the international scene, Spain’s tarnished image received a burnishing. Philip III regained confidence in the future of Flanders operations and propelled Spinola to an even more significant role of leadership there.78 All Giovanni could do was to hope that new infusions of cash from the Medici war chest would at least keep his own contingent fed and armed.

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Giovanni’s military career seemed at an impasse. There was recognition for effort, but not nearly enough; there was involvement in operations, but no decisive role. Expectations and reality were headed down different paths. Soon the difference would become embarrassing. He could obviously not ignore his predicament or pretend that his aspirations were not under threat. Nor could he ever lose sight of what portion of his thoughts to divulge, how, and when. The expressions to his brother Ferdinando regarding future plans must all be worthy of admiration and praise, carefully calibrated to appeal to the culture and expectations of the grand ducal recipient. His motives for staying in the field must seem as impeccable as his half-​brother could wish. What better reason to work and strive, he said, than to improve his fortunes by a worthy position serving “some great prince”?79 And anyone could see that the most laudable form of striving was that which brought at least “an ounce of honor”—for which, one’s very life was not too steep a price. Although Giovanni had no illusions about the time required to bring about this result, he was willing to wait. The only obstacle was his chronic lack of cash, especially considering the high cost of living in Flanders.80 Not that it was necessary to emulate the greatest spenders in his midst—a count Teodoro Trivulzio, who went through five hundred scudi per week; a prince of Palestrina, who poured out two thousand scudi per month only for household consumptions not including everything else; a prince of Caserta, who had an allowance of some three thousand scudi per month and still lived like “an animal.”81 All he desired was to endure honorably—that is, not miserably—while waiting for the next opportunity: My bad luck, and my poor estate, have always thwarted me; and the fact that I possess so little of my own, has been the reason why, without the aid of His Highness, I would not have been able to remain here except very poorly, so that rather than honor I would have gained only dishonor; because for fleeing dishonor, good and virtuous effort are not sufficient, when not accompanied by respectability gained by expense—not excessive or extraordinary, but proportionate to birth and parentage.82

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“Birth and parentage”—the concepts could never be too frequently repeated. In 1603, with similar reasoning, he moved the sympathies of the grand duke to disburse fifteen hundred scudi per month; by mid-​ 1604, he managed to edge this up to two thousand.83 Disappointments in the field were hardly offset by success in love, at least for now. Liaisons formed during the usual camp side entertainments were far too insignificant even to bear mentioning in his letters among the “various things” that might take up his time.84 The few tears spent on misplaced affections were memorable only as the subjects of scattered verse. He would never reveal the identity of the “cruel tyrant” he addressed in a poem shared with friends around this time. He set the sonnet “Now that the bitter pain unties my tongue” in the Petrarchan style, although the content seemed to evoke the striking chiaroscuro of the early Baroque rather than the austere melancholy of the king of poets. Whoever it was, assuming a real person, he was deluded, tying his heart with “a cruel string of love,” later recognized for “a blind error”:85 You who once enslaved me, take me now Place my heavy body in the depths Of other caves and solitary horrors You, O pitiless god of eternal sobs Clasp my soul in passions everlasting And never rise again to see the day

The vow of chastity lasted only until the next superficial infatuation; the pain, only long enough to get it written.

g The tension between reality and myth was becoming so great that thoughts about death were apparently a relief—especially the deaths of others. He conceived of his masterpiece of the macabre sometime between the frustrations of Chateau d’If and the disaster with Matthias in Hungary. Eventually dubbed the Chapel of the Princes, it was to be the most sumptuous and representative mausoleum of any living

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dynasty. The original project dated to when Cosimo I, dreaming of royal glory, commissioned Vasari to design a suitable resting place for the later Medici rulers. The main criterion was that it should be in no way inferior to that designed by Juan de Herrera for the basilica in the Escorial palace and monastery to immortalize the kings of Spain. When designs for the latter arrived at the Academia del Disegno in Florence, they created a sensation and, among family members, raised the familiar question of whether there was anything their money could not buy or any luxury they could not exceed.86 By Giovanni’s time, work on the enterprise had been so long delayed that Vasari’s concept had gone out of date. Giovanni knew how the somber shrine would have to look (Figure 1.9), and he shared his model with Ferdinando, who “never stopped staring at” it, proudly showing it off to all visitors, according to a young artist who was there.87 As so often in this period in his life, Giovanni would have to struggle to get his way. Satisfaction would come only after he had submitted his work to a panel of eleven judges including the court artists Alessandro Allori, Santi di Tito, Lodovico Cigoli, and Domenico Cresti (known as Il Passignano), who had before them a number of other projects by much more experienced artists including Buontalenti.88 In August 1602, he got his reward: unanimous approval, based in part (according to the reports) upon the general harmoniousness of the composition and in part upon the message it conveyed. From any angle within the larger structure, all the tombs were visible at once. What better way to demonstrate the “birth and parentage” of his older half-​brothers! Clearly he had understood the structure’s importance from the dynasty’s point of view. Besides, Giovanni’s conservative positioning of the statuary upon monumental pedestals, compared with Buontalenti’s incorporation of the statues into a scenic background, concentrated attention on the figures represented, rather than on the artist’s work. It was his last and most brazen piece of Medici flattery. Contemplating his tombs and the eventual entombment of those whose pretensions and traditions he so often found balanced against him, did Giovanni derive some secret pleasure? There also would be a chance for final reconciliation. When he devoted himself to ordering

Figure 1.9. ​Don Giovanni de’ Medici, design for Cappella dei Principi. (Archivio di Stato di Firenze)

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typical black marble from Dinant, in the Low Countries, while engaged in the more intense episodes of the siege of Ostend, he did so with selfish purposes in mind.89 Hopefully, he too would be buried somewhere in the mausoleum along with the other illustrious members of his clan, for posterity to admire: this he even stipulated in the only last will and testament by his hand, penned during a nearly mortal illness over ten years before, on the fields of Flanders.90 If life did not make them all equals, at least death would: such was the plan.

g Since courtiership in Florence was scarcely satisfying, he tried his luck abroad. On his way home from a 1605 mission to England aimed at gaining Stuart marriage pacts for his Medici relations from James I and Anne of Denmark, he called in on Maria de’ Medici, the queen of France.91 Now was the chance to do something for himself. He had a special tie to his niece, the daughter of his half-​brother Grand Duke Francesco. Surely she remembered his prominent role at her wedding to King Henry IV five years before. The rumors of Henry’s philandering, if true, suggested new possibilities, if they meant she would be shifting her attention to her own court and away from the husband’s. He would refrain from mentioning the sonnets he had once written in honor of the king, back before the new Medici knot had been tied.92 Once she got to know him better, he was certain she would prefer him to Concino Concini, the disreputable husband of her childhood friend Leonora Galigai, and now her current favorite.93 He could imagine himself adjusting to a new peacetime role. Yet everywhere he turned in the Paris court, Concini got in the way. Giovanni never understood what Maria saw in this son of a Tuscan notary, whose only qualities seemed to be slight charm and huge arrogance. He only knew her apparent fascination would eventually lead to ruin. Perhaps he even thought ridding her of him would be a favor to them both. Whether he actually set things in motion in Florence to have assassins sent up or was simply rumored to have done so, according to Cosimo Baroncelli, his secretary and biographer, “the king believed

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it, or seemed to.”94 At some point in the plot, if such there was, he must have lost heart, possibly because once again Medici interests intervened. There could be no joy in a successful coup if the result would bring no honor; and in this case, he began to see that remaining in France he would only antagonize his half-​brother Ferdinando. Accord­ ­ing to Ferdinando’s politics, there could be no fresh involvements with France as long as diplomatic overtures were under way with respect to Spain. Giovanni could visit and chat, but he had to keep his distance. He lost no time. Leaving behind him nothing but a few suspicions of foul play against Concini, he headed back to Italy. All of his efforts to secure a permanent profession had now been subordinated to family policy. Any aspiration to a generalship under the Spanish obviously had to be extinguished in order to maintain good relations with the French. What was obvious to him was also obvious to Baroncelli: Ferdinando “for his personal interest [ . . . ​] cut off the fortunes of his brother.”95 For the first time in his life, at the end of the Maria episode, he admitted defeat. “[I am] no longer hoping for great things,” he wrote to Ferdinando, in a particularly wrench­ ­ing letter. “All for me is vanity.” The door to France being closed, he added, “I consider myself so unfortunate, and perhaps so useless and imprudent,” that he no longer expected any improvement in his situation at all.96 However, he did not stay down for long. As he wrote these words of self-​pity to his half-​brother, he was already planning the next move. He knew the Venetians were preparing for a possible conflict along their borders as the states of Germany ranged off in confessional unions and Rudolf II appeared less and less able to maintain control over an empire breaking at the seams. He also knew that great condottieri were occasionally hired from abroad to lead the Venetian forces: reminders were the equestrian statue of Erasmus of Narnia, known as the “Honeyed Cat” in Padua, and of Bartolomeo Colleone, on view in Campo San Giovanni e Paolo. His Medici connections were no problem here. And when he heard of the available position, once held by Sforza Pallavicino, hero at the battles of Corfu and Lepanto, he asked the Venetian ambassador to put a word in for him. Just as he was preparing to take his leave of the court of Maria de’ Medici, he received a ­tentative

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answer from the Venetian Senate. He thereupon shifted his destination from Florence to Padua, where he rented a stately palace next to the Roman arena to serve as a base for the meeting in Venice with the doge and College on the 1st of May.97 Not all of those present would have recalled his first visit to the city in 1579, when he came up from Florence as a child-​a mbassador to report on Francesco I’s marriage to Bianca Cappello. But many had been present for the official commemoration of this visit in 1601 (with obligatory references to Bianca’s mysterious demise). Giovanni’s appointment seemed written in destiny. No wonder the terms and conditions defined at the beginning of 1609 were scarcely less generous than the ones offered to Pallavicino. Once again, events drew Giovanni away from the task at hand to official duties in Florence. The family could not simply let him alone, even if they refused to treat him as he thought he deserved. He found the temptation irresistible despite his new commitments. Blood still motivated him more than money or anything else. He was ready to make one last wager on their good faith even if it meant watching his current plans go up in smoke. If necessary, he could adjust his future to their needs, supposing they were willing to adjust their expectations. His nephew, who would become Grand Duke Cosimo II, was set to marry Maria Magdalena, or Maddalena as she was to be called, daughter of Ferdinand Karl, archduke of Austria.98 This new Habsburg marriage was important for the Medici, even though the bride was no daughter of the emperor, as Grand Duke Francesco I’s bride had been. The celebration would figure prominently on the European social calendar in a year when the wedding of Francesco IV Gonzaga to Margaret of Savoy in May 1608 had set a high standard. To help the Medici outdo their neighbors in Mantua, Giovanni offered to play his by-​now standard role as prince-​practitioner in the arts of court display. Not as a jouster but as a judge (more glory still), he participated in the tournament in piazza Santa Croce that kicked off the festivities in September 1608.99 Seated in the judges’ box next to Cosimo, the spouse, and Don Antonio, he watched the distinguished lineup of twenty-​four knights in all, mostly from Siena, Florence’s recently conquered rival. On trial, supposedly, was courtly intelligence as well as battle and equitation skills, in a carefully choreographed pageant. The ad-​hoc teams

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would pretend to debate a chivalric problem, such as, what is the best encouragement for knights to perform magnanimous and virtuous deeds. It was really a pretext for what came next. An argument would ensue, which the opposing sides, unable to come to a conclusion, would resolve by combat. The Grand Duchess Cristina herself, an avid spectator of men doing harm to one another, had designed all the costumes, including those of the numerous retinue of squires and servants. A more complete demonstration of Medici domination could scarcely be imagined, and Giovanni must for a moment have felt once again that the world belonged to them, and to him. But he knew he had already drained whatever political advantages he could out of this occasion and any other involving his family. If they wanted pure flattery, Galileo was their man, not him.100 The obsequious speeches to the women in charge, the wry witticisms to the accompanying males: for these, Galileo had honed a powerful talent in the intervening years since the last sojourns in Florence. His great discovery in 1608 (at least a year before he ever looked through a telescope) was nothing other than a new symbol for the Medici family, which he would now unveil on the occasion of this wedding. Still nothing but a sketch on paper, it consisted of a magnet pulling up some iron fragments by an attractive force, accompanied by the motto “vim facit amor”—“love makes power.” He would convey the idea to the patroness as a delightful gift in exchange for whatever kindnesses might be tendered in return, at the cost of only a single intense movement of his mind (and much haggling with the various courtiers over the previous three months). The meaning was obvious: “the pious and courteous affection of the prince, represented by the lodestone, does not oppress but rather lifts up his subjects, and makes them, represented by the fragments of iron, love and obey him.” Contemplating this symbol, “every­­one universally might find consolation,” because of its effect in causing them to think upon “the celestial piety that resides in your most humane breast” whereby you constantly “protect and relieve them.”101 This was toadying of the first order, but still not enough for Madama Cristina; so for the moment, no medal was struck. Galileo would get another chance. In the long run, perhaps Giovanni’s

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constitutional inability to indulge in such flattery, except in relation to one of whom he was truly fond, would ultimately seal his fate. Even the final and most magnificent spectacle of the entire celebration, a staging of “Jason and the Golden Fleece” in the Arno River on November 3, turned into an exercise in one-​upmanship between Don Giovanni and his old rival. Neither of the two could of course take credit for the basic concept away from Florentine Camerata member Francesco Cini. Cini’s playbook, loosely based on the ancient writers Apollonius of Rhodes and Valerius Flaccus, was a perfect framework upon which architects, tailors, shipwrights, and even bomb makers might exercise their imaginations. There would be a representation of the city of Colchis built in the middle of the Carraia Bridge, where King Aietis, defender of the Fleece, would be surrounded by a realistic assortment of parapets and bulwarks.102 Out of the harbor of Colchis, the king’s fleet would proceed to join battle against the Argonauts, arriving in sixteen vessels decorated with the most amazing extravagance, accompanied by fireworks. On a raft situated between the Carraia and the Santa Trìnita bridges, the temple of the Golden Fleece stood guarded by the fire-​breathing dragon. Jason, played by the young Cosimo, was to land here and seize the prize that would eventually make him king of Iolkos—but not before Giovanni and Galileo had engaged in a battle of their own. Giovanni was no stranger to staging major outdoor spectacles, although much time had elapsed since he had done the festivities for the Medici-​Bourbon marriage in 1600. Now he was only providing advice to Giulio Parigi, the current project manager. Galileo, still under consideration for a position at court, was on the scene and later remembered everything. This was the important prelude to the controversy about floatation that was to inspire his famous treatise on the topic. He and Giovanni argued as they watched workmen build the raft of the Golden Fleece, with Cosimo II in earshot.103 “I happened in your presence to contradict some engineers, otherwise very excellent in their professions,” Galileo later wrote in an unsent message to Cosimo, “who were devising a method of binding logs together to make a very wide surface.”104 Giovanni, one of the “engineers,” insisted that

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the raft should have an especially wide area in order to keep the temple, the fleece, and the dragon afloat so Jason could alight and claim his prize. Drowning the sovereign-​to-​be was unthinkable. Galileo replied with his usual aplomb that shape had nothing to do with floating or sinking—in his words, “no faith should be placed in such a construction, however broad, for support beyond that of its separate and disunited parts.”105 Pieces of wood only ever behave like pieces of wood. As things turned out, the raft stayed dry throughout the performance, without any further engineering interventions, apparently vindicating Giovanni’s common sense as a military architect. He won the battle, but in the struggle for Medici approval, he knew he was losing the war.

g Sometime after the Medici-​Habsburg wedding celebrations, perhaps while enjoying the small fruits of his artistic success, Giovanni began seeing Livia. There are no documents, although a letter from Giovanni of eight years later refers to the passage of eight years since they first began their relationship.106 Nor can we guess exactly when the new thought crashed into his consciousness that he was finally in love. Very likely, it came as a surprise. He liked to think of himself as inclined rather to the rational than the emotional (as his letters attest); and when he occasionally lost control, he regarded his outbursts as but the necessary force for reducing an imperfect world back to harmony. He had probably not experienced real feelings for another human being in a long time, at least not with such intensity. We can only try to guess the circumstances: the evenings spent in the company of the more roguish of his fellow patricians; the striking new face whose features he was unable to banish from his mind; the first snatches of conversation and the hankering for more. Perhaps he liked that she was Genoese and spoke in the singsong cadences of her country, rather than in the rough staccato of the lower orders in Florence. It would have reminded him of his last visit to Genoa on Medici business when he was only fourteen. What did he find the most alluring? Was it that she seemed so different from those among his set? Was it the curious mix of

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spontaneous and worldly, childish yet ladylike, sometimes bashful, sometimes coquettish? Later under interrogation in the court proceedings regarding Livia’s widowhood, Giovanni’s employees point to his increasing thoughts about her and diminishing thoughts about everything else. Whatever may have been the origins, the sensation apparently did not go the way of so many previous minor affections. Maybe because of her undeniable qualities, maybe because he was so desperate for distractions, maybe because he needed reassurance after the debacle in France, maybe for all these reasons, the attraction lingered on. Around Livia Granara, born Livia Vernazza, he began to contrive his exit from Florence. Although he only had the vaguest idea of who she was and where she came from (later he would do some research), he began to conceive of an imminent break and a new beginning, in terms that included her. After his encounter with her, we note a sudden rush to conclude the deal in Venice, for which previously no promises of money, titles, or advantages had sufficed. He needed a single rationale to unite all his mixed motives. Ever the chivalric hero, he must have thought, how fitting that rationale was embodied in Livia. And yet, whatever reasons he had for remaining in Florence as matters in Venice were coming to a head, these were soon compounded by still more family concerns. He could hardly be absent from the city for the funeral of his half-​brother Ferdinando I, who died suddenly after a brief illness in February 1609. In the following months, as his nephew Grand Duke Cosimo II began adjusting to the new role, he might be of some use. Surely enough, Cosimo called upon him to assist in negotiating a marriage between Giovanni’s niece Caterina and Henry Frederick, the prince of Wales.107 Those discussions with the English monarchs three years before apparently had set off a chain of events. But the signs were not good. Even if the religious difference and the prince’s undisguised apathy about the match could be overcome, there were rumors that the Medici star was beginning to set. Perhaps they were no longer regarded as appropriate partners in a royal wedding. Giovanni managed to keep the ball in the air long enough over the next months for the sickly prince to die, saving some more disappointment for the ­family.108 Meanwhile, he made one last tour of the state fortifications

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on behalf of Cosimo and dreamed up new excuses to tell the Venetians. To keep them interested, he visited Venice briefly and accepted his new commission. When not occupied with official duties or with Livia, Giovanni turned for the last time seriously to the occult. If only he could find what Francesco and Rudolf had spent their lifetimes seeking, he may have thought, perhaps he could reach some still indistinct goal of his own. If the secret arts of world mastery brought happiness and renown, he could wait no longer to find out. As always, he conferred with his nephew Don Antonio, who had built a formidable library on such subjects and could always be relied on for embellishing the conversa­­tion with scraps of erudition, referring now and then to those large and grow­­ing notebooks bursting with observations.109 He would use Don Antonio’s alchemical foundry, on the premises of the residence at the Casino di San Marco, as a model for his own at Parione (Figure 1.10). He learned the allusive language and tried some recipes, although turning lead into gold or making the philosopher’s stone still eluded him.110 Astrology was less frustrating. At least here was plenty of room for interpretation, and he did not have to take failed prophecies as a defeat. He shared charts and readings with his neighbor Orazio Morandi at the Vallombrosan monastery down the street, whom he had met perhaps in Rome in the 1590s when Giovanni was on one of his missions to the papacy and Morandi was a law student at the Sapienza. Although their ambitions went in different directions, they both worried about how to minimize risk and how to overcome fortune’s reversals, and other such problems related to the difficulties of life. Giovanni would never know it, but his recommendation for preferment opened dangerous prospects for his friend: promoted to a job in Rome, Morandi strove ever higher until a scandalous prediction about the death of pope Urban VIII ultimately proved his undoing.111

g A final clash with Galileo was probably inevitable; and if it did not happen as it did, Giovanni would likely have provoked it. Bound up in

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Figure 1.10. ​Buonsignori map of Florence, detail showing Parione. (Florence, Museo di Firenze com’era. © 2013. Photo Scala, Florence)

this one-​time protégé were the contradictions of his life and of his eventual exile from home. The court philosopher was on the rise due (some thought) to another piece of sophisticated Medici flattery. Branding the four moons of Jupiter, newly discovered in some of the first-​ever experiments in telescopic astronomy, as the “Medici planets,” was a public relations coup of enviable proportions.112 This time a medal had been struck. With no urging from Giovanni, Galileo returned to Florence in a court job with a magnificent offer. Giovanni may have wondered why he should have to leave and the other stay. There must be a chance for a parting shot. He was after all as quick with his tongue as he was with his other weapons. On his carriage ride through Florence, resulting in the near-​murder of a Buontalenti youth, he had made his point of honor in regard to the Florentine elite, including the grand duke. Now was the time to make his point in regard to the Florentine so-​called experts. A few weeks after the carriage ride and the apology to the grand

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duke, there came the perfect occasion: a philosophical dispute over floating bodies, where far more would be in play than the obvious questions of physics or mechanics. Giovanni was no traditionalist, and he probably regarded Lodovico delle Colombe and the local Aristotelians as just so many buffoons (the Galileo crowd, referring to Lodovico’s surname, called them “the pigeon coop”), but a few of their opinions he found useful, especially when different from Galileo’s. These days they were claiming that bodies heavier than water can float if shaped in a certain way—exactly the issue at stake in the Medici wedding of 1608 when Galileo dared to contradict him.113 He was only too happy to judge the second of a series of formal debates and demonstrations scheduled for September 1611 at Le Selve, the Salviati villa on the outskirts of Florence. When Galileo did not show up, perhaps he wondered whether the philosopher somehow had gotten word that the Aristotelians had a trap ready. If Galileo stuck to his standard explanation of flotation as an effect of the difference in specific weight between an object and water (lighter-​than-​water objects being floatable), they could choose to place in the specially prepared vat, for instance, a piece of heavy wood, such as ebony, which ordinarily sank in water, but if cut to a thin veneer, behaved differently. Floatation in this case would apparently be based on shape, as the Aristotelians wished to demonstrate. Galileo was clearly not helping his own cause, but the Aristotelians were getting impatient and the contest must go on. Giovanni did not need to let the personal grudge determine the outcome, or even the silly reasons advanced by delle Colombe. The thin piece of ebony veneer, placed flat in the water-​filled vessel, decided the matter. Floating gently on the water surface, it probably reminded him of the festive barge in the Arno River years before, with the young Cosimo on board. Once again, his instincts as a military engineer had been vindicated. He conveyed the bad news personally to Galileo at a dinner held later that month, perhaps at the Medici villa at Artimino, in the presence of Cardinal Maffeo Barberini (the future Urban VIII) and Cardinal Ferdinando Gonzaga, on their way down to Rome. Afterward, the embattled court philosopher resorted to the pen, attempting to save face by a brilliant hundred-​page treatise, The Discourse on Floating Bodies,

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that became a classic in the genre.114 There the dynamics of surface tension helped explain why the ebony floated when placed flat but not if dropped end-​down; but by that time, Giovanni had lost interest. Literature and the performing arts, Giovanni determined, must animate the life at Parione until he turned his back definitively on Florence. Any interruption would be an admission of defeat, and he could not bear to be outdone by anyone, for as long as he was in town. Sometime during the year 1611, he urged Ottavio Rinuccini to present the celebrated Daphne, a feature of the Este wedding in 1608, for a selected audience. Although this opera, the first of its kind, was originally put to music by Jacopo Peri some ten years before, the current setting, regarded as the best, was by Marco da Gagliano, who became famous for some lovely madrigals. The Florentine diarist Cesare Tinghi thought enough of the performance to mention it in an account of the most important events that year.115 With crates already being packed in one room for the move to Venice, in another room Giovanni had a full-​ sized stage built for the occasion. The carpenters later recalled: “Signore wanted something strong and safe; and spared no expense.” Perfection at all costs. Five braccia high and eighteen braccia long, the new theater was equipped with machinery for moving the curtain and scenery, faced by seating for a large number of guests. A realistically writh­ ­ing dragon and a contraption to simulate a howling wind ensured that the guests would remain open-​mouthed throughout the elegant entertainment.116 Seated in the princely seats during the representation were Don Antonio, Cardinal Ferdinando Gonzaga, and, of course, Livia. If the Venetian government had almost given up on their delinquent general, they had good reason. But when the Friuli war broke out in 1615, they renewed their offer, adding some special conditions of hospitality. There being nothing left to do in Florence, Giovanni transferred to Venice to take up residence with Livia in a house he had rented a few years before, located on the Grand Canal at San Geremia between the ambassadors of Spain and the Emperor. After the usual round of parties celebrating his arrival, the realities of his new position began to impose. By December 1616 he was already on the field in Friuli against the armies of the archduke of Inner Austria with whom the Venetians

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were at war. Over the next year, he and Livia met only sporadically, whenever he could break away from the action. To facilitate their encounters, they rented a temporary home in Udine, closer to the front. On occasion, Livia would travel up to the new Venetian fortress-​town of Palmanova, where Giovanni could reach her more conveniently. Otherwise they communicated by letter.

g Yet he could not so easily tear himself from family, friends, and Florence. Service was so ingrained that he continued to spy for the Medici secretariat the whole time he was working for Venice, at no small risk to his new position and even to his life. Deep in his consciousness somewhere, did he still hope for his family’s change of heart? Apparently he was willing to try a course toward self-​ ­destruction just in case. He reported what he heard regarding discussions in the Senate and the dealings of the various ambassadors and their entourages. No one showed much interest until he began report­ ­ing on the behavior of the next target of Medici marriage activity, namely, Ferdinando I Gonzaga, duke of Mantua and Montferrat, his nephew by his half-​sister Eleonora de’ Medici, the previous duchess of Mantua. On the basis of Giovanni’s information, the Medici began to formulate a proposal to Duke Ferdinando Gonzaga for adding yet another titled relative to the already cluttered family tree. In their view, the duke would soon realize that his marriage to Camilla Faa di Bruno, a mere noblewoman, was a foolish lapse of protocol and had to be reversed—a simple matter of annulment—in favor of a Medici bride. They could only imagine that the secret knot had been tied in February 1616 not due to convenience or even real affection but due to frustration. They looked at it this way: with the Savoy armies continuously gnawing at the corners of his territory of Montferrat, Duke Ferdinando must have decided against a matrimony with the Savoy princess who had been suggested to him at first; but he probably also didn’t want a Spanish princess who could place him under excessive subjection to

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Spain, even if Spain’s offer to reinforce the citadel of Casale Monferrato with Spanish troops was sorely tempting. The Medici closely monitored the growing hostility within the Mantuan court to Ferdinando’s hasty choice. There, a story of seduction had been concocted, casting Camilla as a she-​devil who ensnared Duke Ferdinando and therefore must be punished. The turning tide against Camilla seemed more and more to favor the Medici connection. The seduction story by a woman of inferior rank, to the endless mortification of the family, must have sounded familiar to Giovanni. But he kept to himself any thoughts he may have had about the comparisons between Camilla and Livia. Instead he simply passed on to his family in Florence whatever he heard about Gonzaga strategies. He knew several new marriage proposals were already in the air before Camilla was definitively set aside. He also knew Duke Ferdinando was not easily convinced. He reported the duke’s last attempt to raise her to a level acceptable to the society of princes, by endowing her with lands and properties in Montferrat, which in the current wars only fomented rumors that she could pass over to the enemy Savoy. There was no time to lose.117 On the basis of his information, Cosimo II and the Medici grand duchesses now openly joined the anti-​Camilla chorus. Subsequent events may well have reminded Giovanni about what his society did with unwanted women—a lesson his mother had learned the hard way. He would possibly have heard that Camilla was sent to the citadel of Casale and eventually shifted to a nunnery, while the original marriage was annulled and a new one concluded. He would never get to see the document she penned after six years of confinement, defending herself and her honor, the first Italian autobiography of a woman, suppressed until the nineteenth century.118 By the time his half-​brother, the grand duke, informed Duke Ferdinando Gonzaga more fully about the Medici virgins, Giovanni’s attention was diverted by the preparations for the trip to Friuli. Other mediators, not he, would convey the Medici offer of Caterina de’ Medici as the acceptable can­ didate, rather than the older sister, Eleonora, destined instead to the Savoy prince. Duke Ferdinando dutifully corresponded to Caterina

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includ­­ing suitable poetry, in Spanish, the current language of fashionable compliments. Giovanni was far too busy with his new position to attend the wedding in February 1617—but he would soon pay his respects.119

g Exactly two years later, in 1619, he got his chance to show Livia to the world. Although his retirement from Venetian service gave him time to do anything he wished, this was an opportunity he simply could not pass up. If a somewhat more modest playbill than the usual was expected for the carnival season in Venice, this would ordinarily not have cost him more than a yawn of ennui. However, an invitation from his great nephew Duke Ferdinando Gonzaga to spend part of the season in Mantua gave him a better idea.120 After all, he had played a major role in mediating the duke’s marriage to his niece, Caterina de’ Medici. He had just given his favorite acting troop, the Confidenti, led by Flaminio Scala, known as “Flavio,” permission to play in Mantua.121 Always on the lookout for the next job opportunity, he could use some of his time in Mantua for discussing possible long-​term service on behalf of the duke. Considering his years of expertise in hopeless causes, perhaps he was the right man to govern the troublesome territory of Montferrat.122 He would not have to lift a finger. For the two-​day trip down the coast and up the river Po by way of Ferrara, the duke of Mantua would arrange a special boat—a “Bucintoro,” said the document, in good-​ natured reference to the Venetian doge’s famous ceremonial barge.123 Giovanni would be accompanied by Livia, whom he had groomed into a lady fit to stand by kings, now two months pregnant with his child. So far he had shown her off only in Venice. The world would now take notice—but not in the way he wished. The couple may well have imagined themselves as the guests of honor at the Mantuan carnival. There would be entertainments of every description: tournaments, chivalric exercises, and performances of music, drama, and comedy, all concentrated into the period before Lenten fasting and austerity put a temporary damper on any public

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pleasure-​seeking. They knew Flavio was anxious for the Confidenti to make a good impression—not only on them, the company’s chief patrons, but on the duke and duchess of Mantua. They had heard that the season in Florence had been a big success, with the grand ducal pair joining in the applause.124 If they left no other legacy there, they could take pride in having helped create an appetite for commedia dell’arte.125 Here in Mantua they expected Flavio to present many of the same works that had been the company’s greatest hits in Florence: Tasso’s Aminta, Giovanni’s new tragedy, and Flavio’s The Fake Husband.126 Giovanni had personally seen Flavio’s work through the press in Venice, and now he would be on hand to give his personal endorsement. The gift to the duke and duchess of Mantua would also be his. The visit suddenly took a nasty turn. The Medici family, guided by old resentments and new long-​term prospects, were preparing a final showdown. Maria Maddalena, the new mistress of morals in the Medici court, had already begun to bring Cosimo II, her husband, around to her opinion.127 The very sight of Livia apparently made her nauseous. We imagine her wondering, how could Giovanni even think of bringing this woman along to the carnival celebrations, considering the careful planning that had gone into the Gonzaga wedding? How could he insist on having her treated like a lady, unless the worst was yet to come? She vowed to forbid him from attempting to place her permanently into their midst. The long arm of Medici power must be brought to bear, to ensure that he was made aware of their displeasure. There would be a gesture laden with symbolic significance, which no one could ignore. Whether he was a man to be intimidated by such things remained to be seen.

2 The Mattress Maker’s Daughter

She was at the window’s edge when they caught her and pulled her

back. Another second and she would have been gone. Perhaps the shutters wide open and the oilcloth rolled up had looked like an invitation. The testimony by a neighbor who claimed to have witnessed the scene and “stopped her before she went” does not reveal her state of mind.1 Did she think long and hard about suicide, or was it a moment’s decision? Did she imagine what would happen next, such as her head splitting like a melon with a soft thunk on the piazza in front of the grocer’s shop, followed by sympathetic murmurs among the shocked onlookers? Her actions, in those snatches of childhood that are accessible only in the judicial records associated with her marriage annulment, reveal deep dissatisfaction with all around her: her family, the church, and possibly even the helpful neighbor who prevented her from doing something drastic when she rushed in screaming from next door. Whether she developed her rebelliousness into a coherent viewpoint is more difficult to say—for instance, they all thought they made the rules, but her life was her own and she would prove it. We know she hated Battista Granara, the husband she was supposed to marry, and she was not convinced that she would grow to love him, as her family

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always insisted. As she put it, she “did not want him at all, and would never agree to take him.”2 What put her off is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it was many things. She called Granara a “bear,” presumably in reference to his beastly behavior as well as his hideous looks.3 Neighbors just called him an “old man.”4 One thing was clear: she could make no life with him and did not even want to try. The more she looked at him, the more she would have grasped the realities of stepping out of one mattress maker’s house into another’s, of living forever in the same plain surroundings sniffing the same foul scents. Other twelve-​year-​olds still played in the streets, although childhood marriage was not uncommon. Forced marriages, like forced religious vows, were a burden rarely articulated, only weakly opposed. 5 Livia apparently complained to anyone who would listen. By the stir she created in this busy tradesman’s neighborhood in the middle of Genoa, she may have sensed that similar feelings must be festering beneath the surface in other families. Her own family scene grew ugly. Maybe she knew in her heart that the only real weapon they had for securing compliance was physical force, whereas she had her endurance, her courage, and her hopes. She must have believed that somehow, by some stratagem, she would win in the end. If so, in a way, she was right.

g No document records what she thought about the whirlwind of events that brought her and Giovanni together, nor about what the two of them may have discussed in this regard, many years later, in the comfort of the palace in Parione or the villa in Montughi. Their letters, though extremely eloquent about some matters, are silent about this. The Medici court had its own interpretation: urged on by the miseries of her situation, tempted by dreams of improvement. It was at least a plausible version, considering her father’s trade. Mattresses were associated in the common mind with all the bodily functions performed upon them and the fluids generally secreted. Their makers were known to share one common feature: sheer ignorance.6 Family members desiring to avoid the tyranny of opinion had to get away.

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We can imagine a certain pride in being a tradesman’s daughter, at least early on. Throughout her childhood, she would have known her father Bernardo was a respectable citizen. She would see him dress up handsomely to march with the other guildsmen in the Corpus Domini procession on the Thursday before Easter.7 How fine he would have looked to her, perhaps from a perch on the shoulders of mother or brothers amid the throngs lining the tapestry-​adorned street in the gaudiest, most characteristic civic and religious celebration of the Genoese calendar. She may have thought that the whole world had turned out just to see him, although she knew she was supposed to believe the real attraction was the splendidly attired archbishop and the ornate silver box containing the body of Christ. Her father was always among the last to appear, after the princes of the church, the doge, the city councilors, and the nobility, all far more sumptuously arrayed than he was, and after him came the rabble. As the years passed and she knew more, the order of precedence became harder and harder to ignore. The ordinary days of course outnumbered the feast days, and most of the time respectability merely meant the absence of squalor. If her life was not good, it also was not especially bad. About whether or not it could be better, maybe she had not yet formed an opinion. Some had more, some had less; she would begin to notice this almost as soon as she could distinguish the world from herself. At that time the stucco was hardly dry on the high façades of Strada Nuova, the grandiose new boulevard created by the Spinola, the Lomellini, the Grimaldi, the Pallavicino, and a few other great families at the cost of leveling dozens of smaller dwellings and evicting the prostitutes in a brothel.8 She may have viewed a carnival procession there or heard the whoops and clashes of a jousting tournament there echoing all the way across town to where she was. The long walk from her house due north past piazza San Domenico to the street’s beginning at Fonte Moroso concretized the distance between herself and them and the levels of subordination that lay in between. As her gaze rose along those powerful structures, gaily painted with their occasional frolic of a Bacchus, a cornucopia (now mostly obliterated by time), frivolity never found at home, she may have wondered whether they too had children and

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whether the children had many dolls. On his business trips around the city, her father would have seen the high ceilings and the magnificent four-​poster beds with the ornate canopies and delicate curtains, among precious artworks from the best hands and tapestries from the best looms. Was he able to describe what he saw? That she would never be allowed inside would only increase the fascination. The few details we have about the family suggest they always had enough, despite the changing times, which was saying a lot. Her birth year, 1590, was heralded by famine; very likely, talk about this event continued as she grew up. That year, floods destroyed crops and killed livestock and a cycle of climate change depressed food supplies to an all-​time low, sending prices to the skies.9 Doge Giustiniani and the senate waited a full year before ordering a colossal haul in over one hundred ships from the Hanseatic ports and Holland, to the astonishment of some observers. Then strange-​looking rigs and crews from Bremen were to be seen for the first time. With no agricultural hinterland, Genoa relied on the very states that now had to worry more than ever about the needs of their own inhabitants. The city had to be provisioned by grain brought in from beyond the Alps taking the sea route around Spain.10 Perhaps the doge hesitated because of some foresight about the future consequences of such a measure, for instance, the danger to Genoese shipping posed by northern firms becoming too much accustomed to plying the Mediterranean waters. In subsequent years, for Genoa as for Venice, the loss of monopoly in the carrying trade would prove to be the beginning of the end. Imports rose, exports sank, and wages failed to keep up with inflation. The crisis passed, but when old people spoke of “the old days” as days of prosperity and the present as a season of want, as though the long term of Renaissance growth was bound to end in catastrophe, they were giving voice to very real fears. There were more paupers than ever in her part of town. The “intolerable blight” denounced a half-​century before by a visiting scholar named Giacomo Bonfadio, referring to “poor mendicants . . . ​on the streets, in the churches, at all the doors of the houses, running toward us colored with death or horrid with sores,” would have become worse than ever.11 The number at risk of starvation reached worrying

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­ roportions in Livia’s lifetime. She would have seen them begging p along the streets and mingling on the steps of the parish church of Sant’Andrea around the corner from her house. She would also have learned to bury her infantile sympathies under the usual pieties of urban people always. We know the later Livia as a person well able to put people in their place. Here in her childhood were fit objects for her scorn: inferiors in every sense, reminders about the hard-​won status of her family. Of course, the poor (she would have heard) existed also to exercise her Christian charity, but the real poor were hard to distinguish from the imposters. The real needy looked just like the lazy layabouts. Even the government Poor Office had trouble telling which was which, in order to ensure that only the deserving, those “who have nothing of their own and no way to get anything,” including “old people or young children or those disabled in their bodies or their brains from earning a living,” would receive the tiny available largesse, and the rest could be mistreated with impunity.12 Yet tough times revealed the limits of this view. Each raggle-​taggle urchin also evoked the chances of life and the dangers of slipping away from the edges of prosperity through the shoals of indigence and into the depths of despair. Testimonies in the annulment proceedings speak of “the will of her father” as being contrary to her will, but not necessarily malicious.13 Perhaps he only wanted the best for his family, given the limited resources within his reach and his limited understanding of how to use them: no more, no less. People always needed mattresses—at least, they needed to have the old rotting bug-​infested ones refilled. The concept was simple enough. He acquired cotton cloth and wool, sewed the bags, and stuffed them. The best mattresses required the long wool of castrated animals, carefully washed of all original oils to prevent emitting smells and attracting vermin, about thirty pounds of stuff per unit, beaten rather than carded.14 The cleaning and beating, and some of the sewing, he probably did in his own shop. The filling and shaping he would have done on location in the houses of his clients. As far as we can tell, what he saw there aroused in him no desire: a practical man, beyond frivolity, survival was his goal. He knew Battista Granara, Livia’s designated spouse, for long enough to be convinced about his

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worth. Had this man, ten years his junior, worked with him as an employee or as a partner? We only know that Bernardo brought Livia’s two brothers into the business as soon as he could; Giovanni Francesco and Giovanni Girolamo were not the sort to be wooed away by more attractive work, as was Jacopo Sansovino, son of a mattress maker in Venice and later a famous artist.15 Their vision was bounded by their neighborhood, and so was Bernardo’s. But there were serious problems beyond his control. We only know about the premature death and the comments of some neighbors called to testify in Livia’s annulment hearing, so the rest requires some speculation based on the history of his profession. No one has studied whether people in the area lived shorter lives than anywhere else; and at the time, the connection between illness and work seemed part of the order of nature rather than a problem of public health. But long hours in the dusty filament-​filled shop would have taken their toll. Apart from the substances thrown up in the course of wool beating, every old mattress when opened emitted a cloud of unidentifiable material, which hung in the air for hours. The constant wheezing, characteristic cough, and occasional vomiting were almost a point of pride, a defining characteristic of the trade, like the special outfits used in processions, rather than the symptoms of an occupational disease, only identified by the pioneer of social medicine, Bernardino Ramazzini, a hundred years later.16 Bernardo’s condition deteriorated over the years, and the ill health began to overtake him after 1600. When Livia reached puberty, he was already, a neighbor said, “infirm.”17 He no doubt wondered whether his sons or his wife Caterina could manage without him, and at what cost. Something or someone might have to be sacrificed to make things easier for the rest. Livia’s increasing nervousness over time may have been occasioned by the gradual realization that the sacrifice would be her. At least at first, very likely, the second floor apartment in campo di Rivalta and this congeries of narrow little streets at the top of an elevated area made her feel safe. Nearly forty years had passed since a number of the crumbling old buildings, haphazardly restored, disintegrated under their own weight and killed many inhabitants, only to be patched together again and reinhabited.18 Three more centuries would

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Figure 2.1. ​Lafrery map of Genoa, showing Sant’Andrea parish. (University Library Salzburg, G 59 III)

pass before the concentration of so many extended families on so many floors, blocking the sun and the view on every side, would seem miserable and unsanitary to urban renewal experts of the new Italian state, who ordered almost everything demolished for a new road named via XX Settembre. Livia may well have enjoyed the warmth and familiarity of a neighborhood that shared a history, a destiny, and a business, the wool business, in which almost everyone was some way or another engaged, at home or in the ground floor shops. She would have heard her name on the lips of others, in friendship and in anger. The medieval gate, the entrance to her neighborhood (and in earlier times, to the city of Genoa), loomed above: porta Soprana, with its two semicircular towers topped by old-​fashioned crenellations (Figure 2.1). The very name sounded imposing. Perhaps she thought that whoever or whatever was inside would protect her. Such was the message of the mysterious inscription under the archway: “if you come in peace, enter please; if in war, you will withdraw defeated.” For organizing experiences into thoughts, there was no help from formal learning. Nor for that matter, should there have been, according

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to age-​old prejudices repeated from pulpit and podium in different guises according to the prevailing fashions. Only at a higher level of society were the more advanced notions about education seriously discussed, including Lodovico Dolce’s directions, following Juan Luis Vives, for educating females.19 She therefore stayed at home while her brothers learned literacy from the Psalter and numeracy from the abacus, mediated by local instructors in return for a modest fee.20 Long before she could pen a single word, they mastered competent calligraphy and the handling of accounts, as we see by the later results, in documents by their hands. A quick wit and keen observer, she may well have wondered, for all their acquired skills, why they never seemed to become more intelligent. Left to her family’s own devices, Livia was to be protected from the allurements of an unregulated social life not by inner strength, superior understanding, and a solid grounding in the classics, as the humanists suggested, but by keeping her mostly at home and disciplining her when she misbehaved. The rod was not spared: this much we know from the testimonies during the proceedings for her annulment, which say she was beaten until she was black and blue.21 And no wonder. As members of the weaker sex, female children could fall into all kinds of temptation whether or not their wayward sexual appetites actually manifested behavior in need of correction.22 No matter that traditional notions about what girls might do, repeated by theologians, philosophers, and even physiologists, were just then being attacked by the first wave of early modern feminists. Moderata Fonte, a Venetian who died in childbirth around the time when Livia was born, suggested current models of female subjection responded to the sheer selfishness and convenience of men.23 No one was listening. Religious education would have covered the basic themes of damnation and salvation, which she may have wondered how to apply to herself.24 Did she attend mass, accompanied by her mother, as the contemporary depictions of church interiors suggest was the custom? There, if she concentrated on what was being said over the noisy chatter that the theologians constantly denounced, she may have heard one of the latest oratorical superstars, hoarse from shouting over the din of

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the crowd about the benefits of a good life and the calamities of a bad one.25 Alas, she would have missed by a few years the stirring words of the Benedictine preacher Ilarione of Genoa, in churches around town, against “the love of the flesh, vulgarly known by the most unfortunate names of lust or libidinousness,” caused not by “simple nature” but by “corruption,” as well as against the almost equally detestable love “of oneself, entirely distorted, and full of turpitude”; she would have had plenty of chances to hear other younger ecclesiastics bearing the same message.26 At home there would be a few prayers and perhaps bits from the Bible, interpreted by the newly trained brothers, from the Latin vulgate, the only version allowed. Too bad, she may have thought, the Bible was somewhat short on actual examples of real people in situations one might meet. Marriages like the one she may have thought she deserved did not abound there.27 The prohibitions perhaps had more force than the encouragements. Submit to the husband, do not engage in deception, avoid adultery. For looking into future prospects, as one struggled on from day to day before the final judgment, perhaps she found more questions than answers. Meanwhile, the tension between the search for happiness and the desire for salvation could be unbearable indeed. The testimonies in the various legal proceedings regarding Livia’s flight from Genoa and later regarding her annulment, which are our only source for her life at this early age, speak more of her actions than of her states of mind. But her actions speak loudly. We must conclude that she wanted earthly rewards more than spiritual ones. Did she ever reflect about this? If she did not feel particularly inspired herself, she may have heard about some other Genoese women who answered the call to holiness. The great mystic Catherine of Genoa, known for her self-​sacrifice in the plagues of 1497 and 1501, was only canonized in the eighteenth century.28 But shortly before Livia’s birth, a certain nun of aristocratic origins and a suggestive name, Battistina Vernazza, apparently no relation, died at the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, leaving behind a reputation for extraordinary devotion.29 Livia’s own neighborhood was dominated by the Benedictine convent and the attached church, of which only a section of cloister has survived the demolitions, moved stone by stone to a new location by thoughtful antiquaries.30 Perhaps

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she knew some of the inmates when they were her playmates, before they went inside, physiologically or psychologically unfit for marriage or too poor to raise a suitable dowry—but well enough off to pay the costs exacted from novices. She would have wondered whether she too might actually discover an extra-​worldly vocation and achieve renown as a holy woman.31 But if anyone had suggested the “annihilation of the self,” a basic principle in Battistina’s Spiritual Works, she would have found this was not in her nature, even if accompanied by all the benefits of “union with God.” Others might seek a level of experience “whereby the soul, possessed by such a spirit, at the same time abases itself and rises to glorify God.”32 Not her. When and why Livia conceived the dangerous plan of running away to lands unknown are not revealed in any document, but a few guesses are possible concerning how things may have developed. If she found the present unexciting and the future even worse, there was plenty to fire her imagination, very close to home. Precisely because of its position as a financial hub for Spain and the world, Genoa was a city of news. The Spanish Road from Barcelona passed through here in the direction of Milan, over the Alps to Besançon and the Spanish Netherlands, where war was still raging. A young Giovanni de’ Medici came here, ten years before Livia was born, to meet the Habsburg empress on her way to Spain and convey the Tuscan grand duke’s good wishes to the doge.33 From a family that lived in Livia’s own neighborhood a hundred years before, a previous self-​exiled Genoese, one Cristoforo Colombo, navigated to foreign seas. 34 Whether because of the lingering folk memory or because of the fantasies of the Genoese writers, Columbus was a solid feature of civic pride in the early seventeenth century, depicted by Lazzaro Tavarone on the state bank palazzo façade as one of the fathers of the city, and in similar guise in a fresco cycle at the palazzo Belimbau. 35 There was knowledge even without the benefit of letters, fit to delight the fantasies of a young person and take her beyond her present surroundings, into other places, perhaps ones she might inhabit. Reminders abounded about the politics of marriage in the corridors of power looming somewhere beyond her doorstep. When Livia was eight, Margaret of Austria, accompanied by Archduke Albrecht of

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Austria, came through Genoa en route to meet their spouses, respectively, Philip III of Spain and Philip’s sister Isabella. The double marriage by proxy in Rome had reportedly been a wonder of the age. Here on the last stop of their Italian voyage, the distinguished pair was treated to all the features of a royal entrance that Genoa could muster to confirm its unofficial status as Spain’s most loyal ally. The performance was a history lesson in itself. The huge specially built triumphal arch stood for months on the opposite side of the port from Porta Soprana, in Genoa’s largest open space, just east of the light tower.36 Even if Livia did not manage to cross town to see it and pull on a friendly sleeve to have the descriptive texts read to her, explaining the pictures of great deeds done by the Habsburg emperors, she would have heard that Charles V “erected splendid trophies,” as was obvious, and that Emperor Ferdinand “defended the city of Vienna,” and, less well known, that Emperor Rudolf “took Esztergom by siege.” She would not know that Giovanni had been at that battle or, indeed, that Archduke Albrecht was to be Giovanni’s commander in Flanders. Fortunes were constantly made and broken in Genoa. She may have heard the echoes. There were ways to eminence even playing by the rules, but not for everyone: costs ran high and prejudices ran deep. A few actual rags-​to-​riches stories were enough to make ambitious aspirants discontent with their lot. Andrea Spinola, a prominent senator, knew some of these cases first hand, when their petitions were heard in the senate chambers in the month of January. That was when the doors to nobility were cracked open just a slit, for a few who could afford the fee. And his portentous words, uttered during one of those sessions, resounded through Genoese society. He told of a fisherman’s younger son—real or invented—who made a fortune as a bookkeeper. 37 No sooner did the youth begin to outshine his older brothers in writing and counting, than he changed his name and began calling himself by an honorable title and walking about in robes. One job doing the books for a wealthy family led to others, and soon he was raking in sizeable commissions. Happy are those able to manage wealth better than the wealthy, Spinola commented. Happier still, he added, are those who, having enriched themselves by their shrewdness and industry, are wise

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enough not to throw it all away. Let them avoid those addictions that were the ruin of the nobility: gaming, feasting, every sort of extravagance, and most of all, idleness. Indeed, let them stay out of the nobility altogether. That way (Spinola explained) they would also avoid the nervous jockeying for position between the old nobility and the new, which continued to plague the political life of the republic and which the constitutional reforms of 1576 were designed to mitigate by allowing more new ennoblements. They should instead (he concluded) remain content with their status of artisans, and excel in the pertinent values of modesty and hard work. Livia, as she grew up, apparently found little solace in such wisdom. When reality was too disappointing or irrelevant, children retreated into the imaginary, perhaps Livia too. 38 She would have needed no script for the parts she may have played, but for her ideas there was a frame, suggested by the wealth of stories told and retold for generations. Some of these stories were represented on the popular stage erected in the space before the façade of Sant’Andrea near her house.39 The message would have been mixed. On the one hand were the reminders about suffering and obedience. Freewill, sporting a suggestively ambivalent costume, would alternate between the two companions Virtue and Vice before finally settling on the suitable one for the journey with the Angel of Death. Versions of the action did not have to follow the reputedly heretical script written down a half-​century before and printed by Father Negri of Bassano for performance throughout Italy.40 Maybe there was the ever-​popular “Universal Judgment” with an artificially emaciated Avarice and an unnaturally obese Gluttony closely followed by a grotesquely fawning Lustful as they plead forgiveness for their weaknesses on the last day.41 Watching such scenes, did she see herself or only others, many years from now? Perhaps of more immediate concern were reminders about the many masks of life and the strategies for survival. Sometimes the itinerant players themselves were more pathetic than the scenes they represented, posturing in threadbare costumes to the tuneless squeal of worn-​out instruments; but to young eyes, the Fawning Lovers with their sweet platitudes may have seemed as convincing as Harlequin with his twisted

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c­ ircumlocutions or Captain Braggart with his arrogant bombast, delivered in a fake Spanish accent.42 Perhaps she wondered whether her lover would be a captain or a general—better the last. Whether from the depths of folk wisdom or the modern literary tradition or some combination of both, the stories she would have heard in the mouths of family and neighbors provided another reservoir of life directions. Some she apparently took, some she left. Maybe she mused that she might one day play the patient Griselda. The story circulated long before Boccaccio and many other tellers placed their names on it.43 The basic outline was always the same: a long-​suffering bride is put to the test of her faithfulness, constancy, and obedience, even at the cost of her children. Braving public humiliation and estrangement, Griselda remains true to her husband and gets the reward of her rightful place as wife and mother. In Boccaccio’s version, Griselda is a low-​born woman who marries a marquis. Livia’s version, whatever it was, no doubt had all the essential aspects, including the key scene. The scene, as recorded in the many Renaissance visual representations, was the undressing of the bride, the complete removal of her peasant clothing and her redressing in aristocratic finery.44 The new clothing made a new woman, Boccaccio commented: “the young wife had the impression that her behavior and her soul were transformed by the change of clothes.”45 Not yet relevant to Livia, but perhaps filed away in her brain for future use, was that one of the brutal fidelity tests was that the husband had reportedly obtained a papal annulment to marry a better woman. She would herself one day marry a prince and acquire a considerable wardrobe at his expense. What is more, papal annulments—their making and breaking—would figure prominently in her future. Stories about a reversal of fortune she may have found particularly apt; they were typical of folklore in commercial cities where fortune ruled.46 Magical forces dominated a world order beyond the control of any human being. Instructions might be given, and woe to him or her who failed to heed or understand. The human had to wait and watch.47 The “Pig King,” considered by ethnographers to be typical of Genoa, spoke to many issues in her life. A variant on the “Beauty and the Beast” tale type, it had been most recently written down by Giovanni Francesco

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Straparola, who published his hugely popular story collection in Venice just decades before she was born. In Straparola’s telling, the love-​ starved monster demonstrates tenderness to two of three poor sisters, only to receive scorn in return, despite the promise of a reward. Finally the youngest sister enters into the marriage and endures the disgusting scene with loving gaiety.48 At the appointed time, the enchantment is broken, the pig reveals his true nature as a handsome prince, and the couple and their child inherit the kingdom. Significantly, all negotiations are carried out exclusively between the prince’s mother and the mother of the three daughters—not directly by the couple. Once again, a good girl is one who obeys: in the family where she is born, and later in her husband’s. Just as significantly, the suitor appears at first sight dreadfully uncongenial. Livia would be forced to take a husband whom she loathed; maybe she hoped he too would change. If Livia yearned for a magical outcome to her life, she would have had good reason. Like other children in Genoa, where the local folklore was permeated with magic, very likely she too inhabited a world of enchantments and shared this world in part with the same adults for whom enchantments made sense.49 Typical at every social level was the conviction that spiritual forces flowed through all things and needed channeling or deflecting by “wise women” or popular healers capable of administering ritualized cures for everything from indeterminate longing to back pain. In Genoa, as in the traditional societies examined by modern anthropologists, the strangeness of the incantation or the mysteriousness of the spell seemed to transport the activity to the realm where analogies and similarities between things offered possibilities for intervening to change the present or the future.50 The notion of “sympathy,” deeply entrenched in ideas about how medicine worked, referred to the relation between a substance and the part of the body it affected, such as roots shaped like human beings, in the case of the mandrake, which operated to induce fertility. Sympathetic magic operated on the same principle, where models or symbols of the part affected, or the person to be seduced, might be equally potent. Unguents of all sorts, combined with ceremonies sometimes loosely derived from religious liturgy or prayer, were the stock in trade of all manner of consultants, honest and not.51 Among the operations most in demand,

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known to us in documents specifically relating to Genoa, were love magic and prosperity magic. Later in life, exactly what Livia thought Giovanni was up to in his alchemical foundry or in conference with his cabalist, we cannot guess. No doubt she agreed with his principle that fortune favors the bold—especially when aided by some extraordinary power available to humans who seek it. To her as to others, magic would have seemed all the more real as the efforts to stamp it out turned more earnest. Why, she might have thought, were priests, bishops, and inquisitors all so interested in shifting her attention over to more fully authorized divine forces? They ordered magic books destroyed and extended the characterization of “diabolical” over a whole range of popular behavior. They gave the persons involved, especially if female, the designation “witch” and accused them of dabbling in “witchcraft.”52 Livia’s neighbors would still be talking about the famous trials in the nearby Ligurian village of Triora, which occurred just two or three years before she was born. In the course of the investigations, over two hundred people were mentioned, some of them admitting to preternatural talents like flying and conjuring with the spirits. Six of the most vehemently suspected were actually brought to Genoa for the last stage of the trials. 53 Skeptics claimed the women merely “confessed” to what they heard too zealously preached from the pulpit about witch activities, in order to avoid more torments (an interpretation that coincides with the current line of research). After an old woman died under the torturer’s irons and another flung herself from a window, even the community’s elders began to believe there had been some exaggeration. But the main point was well taken: witchcraft was real, and so were the forces that the officials sought so desperately to control. The message perhaps was not lost on Livia: look out for some shortcut to a better life in this world, before being caught up in the next. Bernardo and his family apparently began to feel the economic pinch most acutely when Livia was around twelve. The decisions were going to be anything but easy. He could no longer afford a girl child, and he refused to put her to work. Having the women clean and beat wool for his business, as in the most miserable shops, was too deep a degradation. Up to now he had allowed them the luxury of busying

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themselves in the female arts of spinning and sewing, when not preparing meals and managing the household. She ordered a loom many years later for her palazzo, perhaps as a reminder of this period in her life. 54 Bernardo’s females added little to the family’s disposable income by such activities, certainly not enough to offset the expense of food and clothing. Working or not, a girl brought honor to the family mostly by fulfilling her destiny in marriage at the cost of a small dowry. In Livia’s case, the ailing Bernardo was ready to disburse some 414 lire, more than the yearly wage of a skilled workman, just to see her permanently situated: a worthy sum indeed.55 Bernardo seems to have thought the whole thing through from beginning to end. He even had a perfect suitor in mind: “a quiet man,” his wife apparently reported to neighbors (according to the annulment documents), “who had some possessions.”56 Battista Granara, nearly his own age, well along in the trade, appeared in reasonably good health. Here was someone he could trust not only to take Livia to the altar but to serve as a kind of paterfamilias for the whole family when he was gone, if Caterina proved too weak. He could personally vouch for Battista’s reliability. There was no time to lose. As he felt his breath getting shorter, he longed for the assurance of having done his duty in respect to every family member, and he hoped to conclude matters before leaving the scene. A neighbor later tried to explain, “he did not want to leave the said Livia in the hands of her brothers.”57 Livia was not ready. Neighbors, somewhat surprised at the event, thought her too young by far.58 But current usage was against her. Leon Battista Alberti, a Renaissance thinker born in Genoa in the fifteenth century, was only stating what was obvious to every family when he suggested that prospective wives should not have passed childhood because at a young age they were still bashful, had not yet acquired bad habits, and conformed to the desires of the husbands.59 He might have added, the younger they were, the more probably they were virgins. Males of course need not be virgins; for them the main concern was that they should be socially and economically established. Livia’s world was not too different from Florence, where the average age of marriage was about fifteen for females and thirty for males, or Venice, where a seventeen-​year-​old girl was already considered past her prime.60 By

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these standards, Livia’s own behavior already placed her on the edge. “She did not show any more than her age,” said a neighbor, “but she acted like more, she was a little flirtatious, and played with my children” in unspecified ways.61 Age of course was not the only problem. After all, Don Giovanni, her beau of some four years later, was no younger than Battista. Battista simply did not match her concept of a suitable spouse. Apart from the looks, perhaps the wheezing and coughing, though less chest-​rattling than the father’s, was still noticeable enough for her to think the worst. Spending her best years next to this stranger and then becoming his nurse was out of the question. The matter went well beyond the usual obstinacy of a child. She wished to have nothing to do with him and complained to whoever would listen. “They would never get her to take him,” she told a neighbor, and in any case, she could not love him.62 Somehow she knew she deserved better. Her father could see where this was heading and he did not like it. In his opinion (shared by his sons and wife), girls could safely be ignored in such matters. However, the perennially meddlesome Catholic Church had in relatively recent times begun to make family policy far more complicated than ever before. According to new legislation from the Council of Trent, children could no longer simply be disposed of as parents thought fit. Indeed, the famous “Tametsi,” as the first chapter of session 24 of the Council was known, in consideration of the first Latin phrase in the document, seemed to deny parental discretion entirely in marriage. Unions, even clandestine ones, if performed by ecclesiastical authorities, were valid without any parental consent at all. Ignorance of the law was no excuse, especially since it was read aloud at Mass every Christmas and Easter from 1562 until it was finally superseded. Protest though he might, that his freewill as a father was more important than Livia’s freewill as a child, the theologians were against him. The match he proposed, if entered into unwillingly, was just as invalid as those entered into by victims of abduction or by vassals made to marry the lord’s relations. He even had to have the marriage celebrated in his own parish, where the priest would be well enough acquainted with the situation to ensure the proper procedure was followed. He also had to give the spouses plenty of time to

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think about the consequences while the newly required banns went forth on three preceding Sundays. He must have dreaded the moment when on the appointed day in the course of the ceremony the priest would, as stipulated in the rules of the Council of Trent, “interrogate the man and the woman and hear their mutual consent,” before pronouncing the sacramental words joining the two.63 How he must have wished he could simply ignore reports about waves of requests by brides seeking release, under the new rules, from marriages they never wanted. Livia therefore must be made to comply before setting foot in church. When verbal arguments gave out or showed no visible effect, Bernardo resorted to violence. He needed no prompting from the many manuals on child rearing that recommended the strongest form of “correction” in cases of disobedience, by blows across the tender parts with a conventional instrument known appropriately as a “corrector.” He got help from the brothers, only too happy, so it seems, to reduce their saucy sister to a rag doll under their wallops. Caterina, the mother, pitched in, with expertise born of having been subjected to a salutary battering or two herself, when young, by her own parents and then by Bernardo, in a world where wives who complained of marital abuse had to prove the battering did not occur during the normal course of spousal discipline. At Livia’s last word of protest, they beat her until she was black and blue (so the documents specify) and “copious blood came from the nose.”64 The half-​hearted suicide attempts they regarded as the usual histrionics of a cheeky scamp, to be exorcized by more beatings. Once the screaming seemed to stop and the obedience seemed to start, Bernardo organized the proceedings to ensure the marriage would go through without any embarrassments. A nasty scene in church must be avoided at all costs, and on this he got full agreement from the parish priest. A last-​minute refusal at the altar was in nobody’s interest. He and the priest conspired in a method that worked in other cases where a family’s plans were addled by that infernal “Tametsi.” There would be a surrogate performance, whereby the brothers stood in temporarily for Livia while the family kept her in check by angry glances threatening further punishment.65 Accordingly, on the day,

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the priest asked the fateful question, and Giovanni Girolamo or Giovanni Francesco responded on her behalf. For the time being, the strategy worked, Bernardo had his way, and the girl left the church a married woman. Livia played along for a while, waiting for her chance. For a time she lived with Battista Granara in one of the three rooms of her family’s house while Battista moved his possessions from bachelor digs to a dwelling suitable for a couple, just around the corner from Bernardo’s, in vico della Celsa. For this brief period she could pretend that nothing much was changed except that now they were two in a bed. She eventually accompanied him to this house and even managed to put on a relatively happy face in the first days. But she wished to avoid spending too much time with him in order to keep her mind clear for the next step. Whenever she could, she ran back home to stay with her father and brothers until the welcome there wore thin and she was forced back with her husband by the usual threats and beatings. This could not go on indefinitely (as the family made abundantly clear), but her movement back and forth created spaces of relative freedom where she made contact with persons who might help. To make her escape she took advantage of any credible offers of aid and protection that came her way. Her first champion was a petty criminal named Francesco del Buono, identified in the documents as “a Milanese” whose last known dwelling was apparently in Monterosso, one of the Cinque Terre of the Ligurian littoral.66 Whatever may have been his imaginings of her as a possible partner in crime, a role for which she was wholly unsuited, she viewed him as her passage to freedom and nothing more. Perhaps she admired his daring. One day when Battista was out of the house, she and del Buono broke into his strong box, extracted two hundred lire, gathered together her belongings and some of his, and walked out the door. Battista at this point must have realized that this woman was not for him, or at least that he could not have her. The time with her had not been good; if he had imagined serenity, he got strife instead. He was certainly not the last to be intimidated by her behavior. From her battered childhood, Livia did not emerge contrite. Perhaps she thought the punishments were disproportionate to her faults. In any case,

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reproof made her by turns sullen, by turns defiant; and when she could, she rebelled. To get her way, lacking in physical strength, she resorted to verbal abuse and cajoling. She did not suffer fools easily, and when necessary, she applied public humiliation. The strange effectiveness of such tactics may at first have surprised even her. Later in life, subordinates quailed at her remonstrances—whether male or female. A comic actor associated with Giovanni once said her “anger” was “terrible” and confessed his imbecility in her presence.67 Battista’s solution was to confine her to the hospice of the Penitenti, or “Penitent Women,” presumably for life. He tricked her into a trap with the connivance of a noblewoman called Marzia Cybo along with a certain “Niccolosina,” and other patrons of the institution, and once again, the door slammed shut behind her.68 She thus found herself in a sort of correctional institution, sharing the company of prostitutes and ex-​prostitutes as well as other young brides who had run away from home. The strange combination derived from the public perception that both groups were steeped in sin.69 In fact, as a single woman of slender means she could hardly avoid suspicions of harlotry. Confinement was supposed to serve the dual purpose of rehabilitating her and saving family and neighbors from any further unpleasantness on her account. Such was the function designated by the “devout ladies” who established the institute in the city area called Pré in the first half of the sixteenth century.70 That the most generous benefactor, patron of this and many other ecclesiastical foundations in town, was none other than Ettore Vernazza, the early-​sixteenth-​­century father of Suor Battistina, meant nothing whatsoever to Livia. For a few weeks, she endured the efforts by Barbara Marienetta, the institute’s matron, to make her adjust to her new situation. But “she always said she wanted out,” Marietta Fravega, the porter, was heard to say, during the ensuing legal proceedings.71 In April 1607 she got her chance to bolt. Her apparent hard-​ ­headedness gained her a ready accomplice in a certain Margherita Assereta, confined for the same or similar reasons and also looking for the way out. Livia’s constant cries of “Bono, Bono,” seemingly signifying a strong attachment to her former protector, gained her the sympathy of Marietta the porter. A few clandestine visits by del Buono and

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the plan was set. On the evening of the escape, so Marietta recalled, “when we went to bed, Livia wanted to put the light out, and I said we had to keep it lit by order of the matron to prevent us from doing anything dishonest. Livia gave it a kick to put it out, but it stayed lit”—just until all were asleep, at which time Livia managed to extinguish the light and grabbed the keys from the matron’s antechamber.72 Whether she found del Buono on the outside and remained with him for some time we do not know. Eventually they parted and he got involved in other capers that would lead him to the scaffold. Marietta’s role in the escape, possibly in return for a handsome reward, continued to be a matter in dispute. By the time the gold and jewels were found sewn into Marietta’s clothing, Livia and Margherita were gone, having carried off with them what they thought they needed, and perhaps something more. All the Genoese criminal court could do was attempt to extract a confession from Marietta, which she steadfastly refused to give, despite being hauled upon the pulley for the limit allowed by the physicians to a female defendant already suffering from health problems.73 The investigation was closed; Marietta was released; and Livia was banned from Genoa for life.

g Livia was free at last. But for the long voyage to a safe haven within the heart and home of some future rescuer, she had to rely on her wits and her assets. These latter included a modest amount of booty, whatever she could easily transport of her own possessions, and her own person. Disposing of the other goods was easy enough. Deploying her good looks to her best advantage required refined abilities she was only now acquiring.74 She knew something of her own charms; and she calculated what her sex allowed and what it did not—indeed, what her body allowed and what it did not. A friend later writing to Giovanni would characterize her as an example to the world, of “how beautiful women are made.”75 There was at least one likeness, mentioned in the inventories when the couple’s goods went into probate at Giovanni’s death: “a portrait of Signora Livia in gold.” It may have been some kind of embossed image. The item shows up in later inventories simply as

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“portrait of a woman,” and then disappears forever.76 Other than that, we only know that her aspect attracted attention. After leaving Genoa in April 1607, she apparently chose an itinerary leading through Massa and Lucca. Neither city appealed to her and neither was particularly hospitable to strangers—especially female ones. How long del Buono remained in the picture we do not know. By the time she got to Florence, the pouty thirteen-​year-​old had become a woman of sixteen or so, and funds were running out. Her first temporary dwelling in Florence was along Borgo Pinti between San Pier Maggiore and Via di Mezzo, at a corner known as Canto del Pino referring to the evergreen vegetation that flourished there.77 She probably would not have known her famous neighbor on sight, the sculptor Jean de Boulogne, known as Giambologna, a Medici courtier who died just months after she arrived. However, his creations would soon occupy a prominent place in her visual perimeter. When she moved west of her first place, where Via Rondinelli intersected with Via de’ Banchi at the opposite end of the cathedral, in the so-​called canto dei Carnesecchi, she would encounter the artist’s colossal sculpture group of Hercules and the Centaur, commissioned by Ferdinando I and eventually removed to the Loggia at the edge of piazza della Signoria where it now stands.78 To her, the huge statue could have been a reminder about her vulnerability, rather than about Ferdinando’s program of law and order. We can try to guess what would have struck her the most. To any observer, the noonday sun upon the gleaming white marble made for a blinding spectacle; no wonder Cosimo II himself enjoyed being driven around it from time to time in his carriage.79 In the late afternoon, its weird shadow fell directly across buildings around the piazza—her window too? In any case, she may have shared contemporary observers’ perplexity about Hercules’ raised club, curiously misplaced for crash­ ­ing down just on the head of the Centaur. Would she have thought it was all brawn and no aim, just like so many men she had known? As the hours passed and the shadow moved, the targets for the imaginary blows would have seemed to shift all around the piazza. People were still talking about how Giambologna, some eight years before, had accomplished the impossible, bringing the whole work out of a

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single solid block, and replacing Cacus in the original project with a squirming, writhing half-​horse, half-​man.80 Livia may have had mixed feelings: a single girl in a busy city, surrounded by suitors not all with the best intentions; there were beasts out there and she needed protection. Making her way through Florentine society would have been difficult, and there are no records of how she survived. Unattached women newly arrived from elsewhere were presumed to be prostitutes unless proven otherwise, despite the 1471 law requiring whores to wear special clothing.81 The same rush to judgment has annoyed young tourists mistaken for immigrant sex workers for centuries.82 However, Flor­ entines loved novelty, and the young beauty aroused curiosity. She was still flirtatious, although her later fidelity to Giovanni and her intolerance of immorality in her own house belied the reports of easy access to her bed. She made an impression on the well-​born Florentine males she happened to meet, who, unlike the females of their families, were free to socialize at any time and place. Livia’s expanding social world included youths still by and large unmarried by age 25, or else joined in weddings of convenience to much younger brides; they were easy prey to the same temptations into which they induced others. Some belonged to families whose sons fought with Giovanni in the Wars of Flanders. That she and he would eventually cross paths was perhaps only a matter of time.

g To Livia he must have seemed too good to be true. Sometime in late 1608, the hero of the wedding celebrations for Maria Maddalena, and of much else, was talking to her, and she was making sense. Did she worry, as any girl might, that she could spoil things by revealing her thoughts or moving too fast? She must have felt a certain diffidence, based on recent experience: not toward him, but toward the entire tide that seemed to be turning in her favor. Pushed around for as long as she could remember, by her family, by her husband, by del Buono, and finally by the Genoese church, she would have been wary of promises. Now that the Florentine young bucks all seemed ready to rush to the

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aid of a young female exhausted at the end of a long journey, she must have wondered whether she could take them at their word—including Giovanni. The rules of courtship were implicit in every love story she would have heard: do not give too much too soon, allow the other to make the first moves, dodge and defend, parry and thrust. There was the danger that her affection might warm beyond her control, just as he began to reveal unmistakable signs of sincerity. At a certain point she would have decided: this is no longer a game. The personality she was beginning to admire perhaps lies somewhere beneath the features of the anonymous portrait of Giovanni from around this time in the Uffizi Gallery listed as inventory no. 128: wise as well as clever, with an intelligence that gave his gaze a cast she would have rarely seen in men, at least not the sort she had known. She surrendered to her feelings, and something new, their mutual affection, was born. Giovanni took no chances. He saw at once Livia’s potential as a mate, but he was well aware of the consequences of what he did. Admitting another person into his protection was serious business; and in the present case, there were obvious concerns about parenthood and property. He knew the basics of the story but not the details. The identity of the former spouse, the occupations of the parents and siblings: all these had to be sorted out. Interrogating her would do no good—she would only feel once again a fugitive and retreat into her shell of mistrust. When the first flush of the new rapport wore off and the possibility of a long-​term liaison began to occur, he ordered the appropriate research to be carried out by those who would know where to look and whom to contact. To the archdeacon of the cathedral of Genoa, he proposed “a delicate question.” Who was this man, Giambattista Granara? Indeed, “what is his quality?” Who was Bernardo Vernaccia [sic] and Caterina his spouse? Who again were Giovangirolamo and Giovanfrancesco? Finally, “who is Livia, the daughter of the same messer Bernardo?”83

g For a time, Livia lived the charmed life she always wanted, as her fortunes became inextricably entwined with Giovanni’s. The extent of her

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involvement is still a mystery, shrouded in the ambiguities of documentation that passed between Giovanni and his administrators. There, we find no mention of her opinion regarding the improvements being made to the villa “Le Macine,” which Giovanni purchased for her at Montughi on the outskirts of Florence. And whatever she contributed to the restorations on the palazzo he acquired for her on a lifelong lease in via del Parione, directly across from his own, was never written down. We know more about how she shared in Giovanni’s support for the commedia dell’arte company known as the “Confidenti” beginning in 1613.84 They both enjoyed the performances, first at Giovanni’s palace and later at the houses in Venice. They followed the comics’ progress from afar, on itineraries throughout Italy. In Venice, she passed hours of leisure with head comic Flavio, who along with the other members of the troupe referred to her as their “patroness.” Soon she learned to write and use written messages as an extension of her will. In the first known example from her hand, dated April 25, 1614, she longs for Giovanni’s return from Venice, where he is negotiating a new position.85 She acknowledges a letter of his dated three days before, apparently brought to Florence by special courier. She desires his welfare above all other things, and she is happy to know this is assured. She, on the other hand, is well physically, but not in her soul, because her soul is missing all that is good for it: namely, him. She takes account of his instructions (not specified here) concern­­ing the things to order at the market in Florence; but, she adds, she would gladly pay anyone to have His Excellency back home. She asks for a small favor (this too, unspecified) in respect to a certain Cosimo Lambrini, “truly a pitiable case,” thanking him for his generosity. Once again she offers her humble servitude to Giovanni along with a wish for God to bring him ever greater happiness. After the move to Venice following Giovanni’s reappointment as the Venetian Republic’s general in Friuli, she was occupied with the typical domestic minutiae of any couple of aristocrats. She distributed money (25 April 1614).86 She rented out property (20 June 1615). She logged the arrival and departure of guests (same date). She exchanged gifts: partridges, pheasants, quails, and sturgeon (2 December 1616). She ordered conveyances, with the equipment necessary for travel across distances

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near and far (19 February 1616). She moved her residence from Venice to Udine (5 November 1617) and back again. She quieted or dismissed servants and members of the entourage who were acting up (2 Decem­ ­ber 1616). She tried to build a family (21 February 1617); she tried again (4 April 1617). Communication was complicated by the irregularity of the mails, so that letters waylaid were a matter of constant discussion. At a certain point the exchange seemed to be taking place nearly every day, with letters crisscrossing this way and that, out of any order. For nearly seven years, the couple lived undisturbed; Giovanni’s family pretended ignorance, and Giovanni in correspondence referred to Livia as “a friend.” But the charmed life was not to last. The family first took serious notice of the situation when he fell ill in early 1618, while on campaign. The chronic “tumor” on his throat had grown to a swelling so disfiguring that he compared it to a “goiter.”87 The camp doctors, driven by the logic of soldiering on at all costs, insisted that there was nothing to worry about, as long as the pain was gone. Though he attempted to follow their instructions about taking care of himself and avoiding severe cold, the swelling continued. In September he underwent an extremely tricky operation in Venice to have the tumor removed, and there were life-​threatening complications. News of the events reached Florence via Cosimo II’s secretary, Curzio Picchena, who mentioned the matter briefly to Caterina, Giovanni’s niece, now married to the Duke of Mantua, in a message mainly concerned with a ball game (“calcio”) in piazza Santa Croce.88 The family took the necessary precautions. Cosimo ordered Cap­ tain Piero Capponi to proceed to Venice, presumably to ensure that Giovanni’s considerable property would be placed in good hands, should the worst occur. Particular care was to be devoted to handling Livia, whose strong will and defiance of decorum were apparently well known.89 Clearly she must not be allowed to remain the mistress of the situation. Giovanni’s intentions in her regard and, especially, his possible gifts and donations were still only matters of speculation. The account books, bills of sale, and other papers would have to be scrutinized with great care. As a first step, Livia would be taken out of the house. Next she would be placed somewhere, “honorably”—a code word for confinement to a nunnery. If any division of the spoils was to occur

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at this time, this was to be undertaken by the Medici officials, not by her. What would happen to her in the long run was none of their business. Perhaps to the chagrin of Medici family members who were already making calculations in the air regarding the properties ripe for redistribution among themselves and their offspring, after the false alarm, Giovanni recovered, apparently stronger than before.90 As the months went by, Cosimo and the grand duchesses began to realize that the couple might do the unthinkable, with consequences too painful to imagine. Livia showed no signs of disappearing voluntarily. The length of her relationship with Giovanni, in generally monogamous circumstances, suggested more than a casual interest between the two. There was no need to consult the legal literature of the time to understand the inherent problems in unions between unequals. At least, Ferdinando Gonzaga had chosen a local noblewoman, Camilla Faa di Bruno, for his morganatic elopement, before marrying Caterina de’ Medici (and there were plenty of reasons to doubt that he ever intended to keep her long after the seduction).91 Livia was no Camilla. Out of range, and out of the claustrophobic environment of Florentine high society, Giovanni had become a hero, and he managed to exalt Livia to heights only possible in Venice, a city full of libertines. From the family’s perspective, nothing had changed: Giovanni was a relic from the previous age of Medici illegitimacy and Livia was a mattress maker’s daughter. Simply to say so was not enough. Each grade of subordination must be clearly marked and cemented and reinforced daily, hourly, for the whole hierarchy of grand ducal Tuscany to stay firmly in place. Perfecting this structure, including the relations within it, was an art like no other. A marriage alliance with a girl of her origins would make a mockery of so many careful efforts to craft a distinguished genealogy. Said Cosimo, “If I thought he had married her or was about to, I would wish that he should never call himself by this family name again.”92 Powerlessness in such a matter could only encourage more serious forms of mischief. They must be stopped. As soon as word reached Florence of the couple’s plans to attend carnival together in Mantua, the family deployed the first elements in their strategy against Livia. “I hold the said woman,” wrote Cosimo to

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Caterina, referring to Livia, “for nothing but a whore.”93 They would demonstrate by gesture what words could not convey. So Giovanni intended to wave this hussy in their faces? They would show who they were and what they could do. Unfortunately Caterina and Ferdinando, Giovanni’s niece and nephew, had already organized the boat trip for him and Livia and had received them at the castle in company with Cardinal Vincenzo Gonzaga, so there were some limits on the just expression of disdain. However, the question of protocol and ceremonial precedence offered opportunities to concretize negative thinking of the highest order. Indeed, noted Cosimo, the question would have to be answered, “under what title he is bringing the said woman” and “in what manner she might be treated by the Signor Duke and by Your Highness.”94 What would they call her? Certainly not “my ladyship.” There was the essence of the fundamental paradox. The Medici factotum, Annibale Chieppio, and other family agents were set in motion to oversee Don Giovanni’s accommodation in the ducal palace. Accordingly, Livia was housed in Palazzo Cavriani, a short carriage ride to the west, much more modest than it is now since the eighteenth-​ century updates. The forced separation, so finely choreographed, would leave no doubts also about the future consequences.95

g Giovanni however was not chastened, and the gesture of Medici disapproval only steeled his resolve to carry his Livia project to a conclusion. Even as carnival was drawing to a close and they headed back to Venice, they were preparing the next coup de scène. All they needed to clear the way for their future together was to have her previous marriage annulled. Livia could then turn a fresh page on that dark episode in her past and as a free woman embrace the new life now offered to her. They had good reason to expect a favorable outcome. After all, in substance, Livia’s case was no different from those of so many other unhappy brides, mostly with something substantial to win or lose if matters went badly, just now filling up the dockets of the ecclesiastical courts. Like them, she would make good use of the very regulations promulgated by the Council of Trent to protect ­matrimony.

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While asserting the absolute sanctity and indissolubility of the marriage bond, the “Tametsi” decreed that marriage was invalid unless certain conditions were met.96 The unspoken rule in every courtroom, that the desires of the respective families also had to be taken into account, gave them some room for maneuver. If they attempted to stack the deck somewhat in their own favor, they were not alone. Their methods in fact would be far gentler than those used only six years before, in the same ecclesiastical court of Genoa where they wished to try the case, by the Pinelli family, attempting to save a daughter from marriage to Girolamo Grimaldi, prince of Gerace.97 Unlike the Pinelli, and unlike the Medici family later on in this story, they would not abduct or in any way intimidate the witnesses. A trial date was set for June. This time, Livia’s brothers were only too happy to collaborate. The father was no longer there to stop them, and her new liaison seemed to offer endless possibilities despite all that had happened in the past. The mere sound of the Medici name was enough to remove any misgivings about her defiance of paternal authority and embarrassing flight from Battista Granara and from them. They also enjoyed taking their own small cut from the money sent to make things happen. “I appreciate Your Excellency’s courtesy toward me and your efforts in the matter of my sister,” wrote Giovanni Gerolamo.98 They would see that the required number of witnesses was rounded up, so that the lawyer Bartolomeo Tassarello could instruct them about what to say. That the proposed construction of events cast them in a somewhat unfavorable light was no concern. Let the judge be told that Livia stayed with Battista “only because the father and brothers continuously threatened her, and because of her fear of them,” while she “always and continuously made clear that she did so because she was afraid of their said threats.”99 The brothers could stuff their ears at the appropriate moments, assured that they would be rewarded for their efforts over the long run. During the trial, witnesses from Livia’s neighborhood made a convincing case for her youth, her innocence, and her reluctance to go into this match. The different angles pursued by each witness, on the specific points they were asked to elucidate, directed a spotlight into

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neighborhood life in Livia’s time, whatever may have been the mix of fact and fiction. The details could hardly have been invented lock, stock, and barrel, although surely the desire to please the plaintiff’s party colored the account. Michelangelo Turcotta, a night watchman who lived above the Vernazza family in the same building, testified that she “was not even thirteen.” She was, he said, “a little child, who wandered unaccompanied up into our rooms.” He added, “When we heard the said Livia was betrothed, it seemed strange to everyone.”100 Marietta, wife of Giovanni Castanisci, another neighbor in the same building, agreed. Livia was “very young,” and when urged to “do what her father and brother wanted,” she refused to budge, insisting that “she did not want [Granara] as her husband in any way.” Moreover, after being taken to Granara’s house, “in a few months she fled three or four times, and went to her father’s house.” One day, Marietta contin­ ­ued, she had “an injury on her head and said her brother hit her with a blunt instrument because she did not want to return to Bernardo’s.”101 The lawyer’s summary concluded, she “stayed and lived” with her husband, “due to fear and for no other reason.” The judges were impressed enough to deliver the favorable sentence, and on the 12th of June, 1619, they “determined and declared that the matrimony contracted between the said Battista Granara, on the one hand, and Livia Vernazza, on the other, was null and void,” and “by this definitive decision of ours,” they went on, “we annul, and invalidate it” not just as stated in court, “but in the strongest possible way.”102 Livia was free at last. Medici interest in Livia rose to fever pitch as soon as news of her annulment proceedings began trickling along the line of family informers from Venice to the Florentine court. Maria Maddalena wrote directly to the bishop of Genoa, with none of the usual complimentary flourishes, insisting that the matter must go no further. He should know that this “foolishness” of don Giovanni “affects this house very much” and would cause “great displeasure” if allowed to take place.103 As “a true friend of mine and of this house,” therefore, he ought somehow to “procure for me a diversion” from Don Giovanni’s objective and quash the suit. The bishop’s opinion of this extra-​judicial interference by the grand duchess has not been recorded, but he showed neither regret nor surprise. He simply replied that it was too late, and

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the annulment had already gone through. Anyway, he added, evidence showed she had been “taken by force and never wished to live or remain with” Battista Granara.104 He acknowledged the grand duchess’s concern and professed his allegiance, confessing, however, that “I do not know how I can serve” in the matter. Maria Maddalena determined that this would not end here. A new marriage to Giovanni was now a real possibility. Cosimo and the grand duchesses conveyed their fears indirectly, by insinuating them to Don Garzia di Montalvo, now en route to Venice and one of Giovanni’s closest companions on many escapades, honest and dishonest. Giovanni reacted immediately. The news was correct, he wrote to Cosimo. Annulment proceedings had indeed been concluded. But fears that he might commit some gross indiscretion were unfounded. “I am not, nor will ever be, on any other terms with the said Livia Vernazza,” he insisted, “except those that subsisted prior to the annulment of her marriage.”105 Nor would he ever do anything beneath his birth or contrary to the reputation he had built by so much sweat and blood. The wording was careful, as always. He never spoke of a new marriage. In his mind, the formal tie was irrelevant: he would always be with Livia on the same loving terms, until death parted them, and the generous thoughts he had for her were a proof of his honor, not a stain upon it. Giovanni now tested the waters. Would the family respect his good intentions through and through? Having failed to gain their support by bravado, he would try a risky move. He would reach for their compassion by drawing their attention to a pitiful object. Livia was expecting his child! Everything must be done to ensure that this one, unlike the previous two, would survive to adulthood. Duty bound him, as it had bound Cosimo I and the others of his kin who had fathered children out of wedlock, to provide for Livia and the offspring. She sought liberty, peace of mind, and the restoration of her good name. The annulment freed her from a great burden and canceled the ban that had been placed upon her in her own country. The same would ensure a better life for the “poor creature.” How much more effectively could someone serve the grand duchy if born in less “obscure” circumstances and from a “free woman.” Accordingly, Giovanni entreated the

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“magnanimity of Your Most Serene Highness” to show mercy, and to wait patiently for the day when the child should take up a role in the grand ducal service.106 If the young Cosimo himself was momentarily charmed by the word master’s carefully crafted expressions, Maria Maddalena, his consort, most certainly was not. She was well aware of her in-​law’s oddities, and what she had not experienced firsthand she had heard from Madama Cristina, Cosimo’s mother.107 There was nothing she could do about Giovanni himself, but she could certainly show her opinion by her actions in regard to his dear one. And if she could have her way, Livia Vernazza’s freedom would be short-​lived. The whole situation probably made her think about the den of licentiousness (as she saw it) into which she had been thrust by coming to Florence in the first place from Gratz, in Austria, land of simplicity, purity, and faith. She had not yet conceived of the vast dynastic themes regarding Habsburg and Medici to be plastered all over the walls and ceilings of the soon-​to-​be-​ acquired and aptly renamed Villa Poggio Imperiale, which would be her personal citadel on the outskirts of Florence.108 But she had devoted much energy to marriage politics, both for the Medici offspring and for her own brothers. And over the years she had seconded all the attempts by her mother-​in-​law Cristina of Lorraine to bring discipline to these impossible Florentines, by surrounding them with the institutions of piety: new religious orders, new convents, processions, pilgrimages to holy places, observing with particular admiration the capstone of Cristina’s social policy, consisting of a yearly giveaway of small handouts to help a carefully selected crop of poor girls marry the poor boys of their choice.109 No doubt with strong encouragement from Maria Maddalena, Cosimo finally articulated the principle that would justify whatever the family might do in Livia’s regard: “Let the door not be opened so easily to the annulment and invalidation of marriages,” he said in one of several references to Livia throughout his correspondence in these months, “when a husband and a wife in order to have a dissolute life or in order to remarry to better advantage with someone more powerful, try to have the preceding unions annulled.”110 The point made during the Mantua carnival was only the beginning. For the next level of

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strategy, Battista Granara was to be transported to Florence, ostensibly to save him from possible mishandling by Giovanni’s men, but actually to force him into the next judicial proceedings. Then the usual methods, soft and hard, would be used to convince him to take Livia back—at least, on paper. Plunged again into her original marriage and reduced from a mattress maker’s daughter to a mattress maker’s wife, she would, according to the family’s new thinking, deflate rather like a punctured Florentine football, and order would be restored. Meanwhile, Piero Guicciardini, the Florentine ambassador in Rome, interceded with Paul V, the Borghese pope, according to precise instructions that the annulment proceedings must be cancelled at all costs. Quite apart from the merits of the case, so the instructions specified, he should let the pope know that any efforts in the direction suggested by the grand duke would be highly appreciated as demonstrations of “the love he bears for our house.”111 The Medici family (the ambassador should point out) deserved some consolation for the failure of a wedding to materialize between their eligible young people and the pope’s relations. Marcantonio Borghese, the papal nephew, had married instead into the Orsini family, despite all the Medici financing fourteen years ago, which helped the uncle secure the papal tiara.112 Here was a chance to redress the balance of favors. Having thus properly prepared the terrain, Guicciardini was to spring the ultimate request: for the nuncio in Venice to order Livia to be sequestered in some honorable place, that is, a convent, while the annulment was retried and the presumed marriage plans were destroyed. If the key to the lock on her place of confinement somehow got mislaid, so much the better. In the family’s instructions to the ambassador, a narrative about Livia began to take shape, which would serve as the guideline to future conduct in her regard. Livia was not only a home wrecker; she was a “diabolical woman” who had “somehow managed to bamboozle [inviluppare] Don Giovanni” and now sought to insinuate herself legally into the family. Paul V, notoriously alarmist regarding the supposed increase of sorcery in the world, may well have been at least temporarily impressed. In fact, it was the first association of Livia with a theme that would preoccupy novelists like Giovanni Rosini, using her

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as a character, in the nineteenth century, in a work about women’s ways and wiles loosely based on Alessandro Manzoni’s great novel, The Betrothed.113 Even for papal officials anxious to ingratiate the family and gain some tangible rewards for their trouble, the last request seemed just too much. As Curzio Picchena reported to the grand ducal secretary, they were ready to concede everything, “except for the suggestion that the woman, during the process, should be deposited in some honorable and secure place,” reserving, they said, to a later time, any discussion about such a step.114 Thus the family lost this round, and Livia was not immediately abducted. The plot was only laid that would eventually undo her. But before the family battle heated to incandescence, Giovanni and Livia lived as a couple in love.

3 The Heart of Combat

The descriptions in Giovanni’s correspondence with Livia have an air

of authenticity. Making allowance for some exaggeration, what he tells about his life as a warrior and their life together as lovers somehow rings true. Love and war, in his account, are inseparably intertwined. As he slogged through another field of Friulian mud, forded another stream, held vigil in a cold tent till the morning of another battle, as the pains from years of soldiering seeped in and out of his consciousness like the water soaking every stitch of clothing, as the thrill wore off and the campaign wore on, as the supplies flowed out and the shortages caused more trouble, as news trickled in reporting another week of inconclusive negotiations with the Imperials, as summer of 1617 waned into autumn, one thought filled his mind, raised his spirits, and gave him reason to keep going, reason to do the same again tomorrow and the day after, until the war was over and everyone could go home. She was his horizon, his compass, his dream. And yet, Giovanni, the Captain General, unlike Paris, driven by lust for Helen of Troy, viewed honor on the field as just so much more honor he could give to her, his soul and his mate. “By my poor efforts,” he wrote to Livia, “I am preparing, if I can, a crown of glory for Your Illustrious

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Ladyship.” Indeed, only “for your convenience, reputation, greatness and peace, I willingly face continuous industry and exertion.”1 When he wrote these words, the question “why war?” seemed easy to answer. War, at that moment, was life. From time to time, no doubt various other motivations moved in and out of the antechamber of his thoughts, just as they transited through the thinking of his contemporaries. Apart from the personal reasons for committing organized violence against an enemy were the more ostensible reasons: the so-​called justifications, the rational explanations for killing, some more probable than others, such as self-​ defense, sheer greed, the need for substance on which to live or more substance to carry on more war, living space, divine mandate, defense of the true faith, revenge, and even the drive to prevent potential adversaries from undertaking wars—none of these alone sufficed. His own times had added a new twist to the old formulae: namely, the dynastic war by a family and its forces against a rival, presumably to show off military virtue, regarded as a value in itself, the bringer of honor and glory.2 In this respect he was rapidly becoming aware that the Medici, the Gonzaga, and the Savoy were far outdone by the Bourbon and the Habsburg, whose titanic belligerency was just about to scorch the earth of Europe once again in the Thirty Years War. Every war on which he embarked had its own separate rationale, which he shared for a time before moving off to the next war. If we search further, we may find that far deeper in his mind there ran currents in one way or another connecting war with human nature or consciousness itself. The stimulants that carried him away would have been the same as in warfare always: the rushes of excitement sweetened by danger and risk combined in some way with the fellow-​ feeling among waves of soldiers surging together against a common enemy.3 We know that, though attached to his own battalion, he had his own fantasies, which he and other officers did not necessarily share with other ranks. He had the ruler’s appetite for intangible rewards, whereas the common soldiers, by all accounts, worried mainly about their own survival or about getting the next meal. His personal honor as the scion of a noble family, he constantly repeated not to Livia but to his relatives, was in part at stake. The blood of his grandfather, the

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condottiero later known as Giovanni delle Bande Nere, Machiavelli’s favorite soldier, pulsed through his veins. While saving Livia, he must vindicate himself. Then, hopefully, all would be well.

g He knew as well as any commander on the field that the stated explanations for armed conflict were never entirely irrelevant. War may have given meaning to life; but people also gave meaning to war. To a new generation of Venetian senators, the question “why?” had a ready answer in 1617, which he would have heard many times, connected with the survival of their society. They had a sprawling empire to protect, stretching from Lombardy to the Greek Archipelago, and to ensure defense of the landward portion, they regarded pure constitutional stability—the famous “myth of Venice”—as cold comfort in the face of any real threat.4 They could count on a formidable standing army, developed over the previous two centuries as one of Europe’s first, mak­ ­ing a ground force always available for border defense. The pioneering combination of professional soldiers with local militias engaged the subjected mainland inhabitants in defense of the territory so methodically acquired over time. At all costs, they were committed to avoiding another defeat like the one at Agnadello back in 1509, by the French and the rest of the League of Cambrai during the Italian wars. They thought they could count on people’s loyalty, the virtue so praised by Machiavelli, without losing the other advantage of specialized train­ ­ing, necessary for victory. By relying on non-​Venetian commanders, they could avoid cronyism among the patriciate; and to ensure quality performance, they shadowed the appointees with a network of high-​ level officials called Provveditori and Inquisitori. Meanwhile, they spent so much money and effort to increase firepower and update fortifications against modern weaponry that they seemed to be contributing along with the rest of Europe to a kind of military revolution.5 Giovanni, one of the outsiders brought in to lend a hand, would visit some of the sites. For Giovanni, as for his contemporaries, the term “young” designated a group of senators supporting the most energetic policies, a

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kind of party before party politics. The term referred to age as well as outlook. Unlike their forebears, they were not too obsessed with maintaining the unity of Europe as the necessary condition for dealing with the Turks.6 They would fight any neighbor, near or far, if necessary for protecting the Republic’s freedom; and they blamed the long years of prosperity for sapping strength and smothering bellicosity. War was supposed to protect the gilded lifestyle; and the lifestyle must not get in the way. They viewed the English and Dutch privateers plying the waters of the Adriatic, interfering with Venetian traffic and damag­ ­ing commerce, as just so many signs of decline; whereas the maritime marriage ceremony held every year on Ascension Day, and involving the doge of Venice, must once again be made to celebrate the Republic’s lordship over the sea rather than commemorate an age that had passed. The Spanish monarchy was a constant preoccupation. When its influence was not obvious, they strained to discern its hidden agenda for extending sway throughout Europe and the world. If the jurisdictional controversy between the papacy and the Republic back in 1605 had somehow degenerated into violence rather than remaining an armed standoff, as it was in fact, they were sure that the Spanish would have sided with the pope. After all, the Spanish ambassador had done everything to foment Paul V against them, so that a simple papal protest against the arrest of two clerics claiming immunity from prosecution for civil crimes eventually escalated into excommunication of the whole city. Later on, during the Mantua succession crisis, the “young” senators appeared momentarily to favor Spanish interests in propping up the tottering Gonzaga dynasty. It was a feint, in the style of that military and diplomatic maneuvering for which Venice had once been famous. At the death of the heirless Francesco Gonzaga in 1612 (predecessor to Ferdinando, Giovanni’s eventual grand nephew through his niece Caterina de’ Medici), part of the family territories could have reverted to a daughter of Charles Emmanuel of Savoy. Although an even more arrogant duke of Savoy was an odious prospect, they balanced off support for the Gonzaga with clandestine aid to Savoy’s struggle against Spain.7 Open hostility to Spain soon resumed in the Uskok War, in which Giovanni was to play such a prominent part.

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The irony could not have escaped him. Now in 1617, having taken the Venetian side, he was supposed to stand in the way of the same Habsburg dynasty he had spent a lifetime to advance. If ever he reflected upon his tumultuous military career to date, he could scarcely avoid noticing the major theme. Over the years, if Spain and the Habsburgs were still able to dominate European affairs and encroach more and more on Venice’s sphere of activity, he was at least partly to blame.8 In Flanders under Alessandro Farnese he had played his small but well-​ timed role in Philip II’s strategy of driving the northeastern boundaries of Spanish power to the limits, in the English Channel and in the Low Countries. Later under Archduke Albrecht he had held the line against further disintegration of the Spanish Netherlands, in the face of continued threats from the rebel Dutch Republic. He was there at the siege of Ostend, later reputed one of the longest of all time, and certainly among the bloodiest, in which, it is said, “the Spanish assailed the unassailable, and the Dutch defended the indefensible.”9 Reportedly, over a hundred thousand died on both sides. Next, with a sizeable Tuscan force, he helped Emperor Rudolf II prevent further Ottoman expansion on the eastern frontiers of the Habsburg lands and their allies’ during the Long War (1591–1606). With Michael of Wallachia having defected to the imperial side, and the Bocskay kingdom in Transylvania well on the way to becoming an independent force, there was reason to hope that one day even Buda, the old capital, might be recovered from the Ottomans.10 No wonder, in view of his early accomplishments, Giovanni was made a grandee of Spain, when he met Philip III in Madrid on the occasion of the marriage to Margaret of Austria. The appointment might have led to still greater things in the Habsburg orbit had not Medici interests gotten in the way. He was a hero, betrayed by his own relatives—and he knew it. His family had no excuses for ignorance about his deeds, or indeed, about anything else that was going on where he happened to be. Over the years, in letter after letter, he had described the situation in the field, dropping more or less explicit hints about the costs of campaigning and the need for funds. He tried his best to convey the sights, the sounds, and the smells of life at camp, while countering rumors of his own wild antics. On the field of Flanders back in 1602, maintaining

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a lifestyle equal to his status was a constant struggle: the rented house in Antwerp had to be furnished, frugally but comfortably; there would be chairs (few) and beds (enough). There also had to be mattresses, for himself and his small personal retinue of servants, some of them recruited locally, who would have to be dressed in livery “so as not to look like beggars.”11 Entertaining was inevitable, among the foreign community in Antwerp, so there would be kitchen utensils, not for use by his soldiers, but by himself and his guests. As a warrior-​prince, he could hardly be expected to live like his men. Master word painter, conjurer of the vivid image—Giovanni placed the court there with him in the thick of things, time after time. He was aware of the challenges of turning actions into text. Rendering such a great tumult and shouting, “blasts of trumpets, thunder of horns, neighing of horses and clamor of men,” Erasmus the philosopher already knew, was no small matter. Distractions abounded—not least because of the necessity for each observer to seek sudden shelter from dangers emerging unexpectedly. No wonder the character Thrysmachus, supposedly just returned from the Italian wars in the fifth dialogue of Erasmus’s Colloquies, replied to Hanno’s query about how it was by exclaiming “I couldn’t see what was going on; I scarcely knew where I was myself.”12 Nothing had happened since the early 16th century to make Giovanni’s job easier—if anything, the prevailing uncertainty and perplexity in the daily life of a soldier had only increased. In the effort to get it right, he canceled one idea and wrote in another even in the fine copies of the letters. When reports conflicted, he sifted through them for the most plausible one. “Matters here, as far as I can see, are conveyed with . . . ​passion and partiality,” he noted during the siege of Ostend in 1604. He committed himself to communicating only what he could verify: “I assure you that what I write I have seen myself or have received on report from disinterested persons whom I trust.”13 Battles were a special case: as things transpired, no one observer could take possession of the entire multifaceted reality. In his earnest efforts to get it right, maybe he wondered why the greatest narratives, which he knew from his studies of Homer and Guicciardini, seemed so convincing, if the phenomenon was so elusive. Had readers been deceived?

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He tried to make the wealth of detail compensate for any overall lack of coherence. “Your Highness,” he told the grand duke, with tongue in cheek, “should not be upset if I bore you.”14 In one partic­ ularly memorable series of vignettes referring to an afternoon in 1604, he wrote how field marshal Lelio Brancaccio made an ill-​considered advance on the town of Ostend after a mine damaged some of the bulwarks, but his men were cut to pieces. At the same time, Cav. Lodovico Massimi of the company of Cav. Melzi, got his face burned off beyond recognition, and field marshal Pompeo Giustiniani lost an arm, soon replaced by a prosthesis, the whole event earning for the Genoese condottiero the sobriquet “iron fist.” He continued: “they fought for about an hour, with the enemy above and our men below, then when the enemy pikes retreated there came the usual rain of fireworks, bombs, grenades,” and in an afterthought, he squeezed another word between the lines, “and stones.” Our men and any others in the vicinity, he went on, “came through very badly, counting about 53 either dead or wounded or burned or severely battered by the stones.” He went further afield for more news from the same day, gathering information from “one who surrendered to us.” According to this witness, “besides the two inner defense works [ritirate] that the enemy was building inside each bulwark, which have already been observed, now they are making certain demilunes before the trench of the greater of these defense works, which will be like the counterscarp that they had in front of the bulwarks that they are now combating from, because they are filling them with water all around.”15 At the end of each dispatch, he left the court wondering where it was all going to lead. War was also a spectacle, and to keep his audience interested, he lavished on the machines and scenography of war the same attention he would have devoted to any court entertainment. He could rely on the same engineers who amazed theatergoers or festival attendees to keep the battlefield visually exciting and the court on edge. In 1604 the contraption du jour was a moving turret housing several cannons for breaching a wall, devised by Pompeo Targone, a Roman engineer honorably mentioned much later by Karl Marx in connection with movable grain mills built for the Roman countryside.16 After the first

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unsuccessful attempt to render the idea by a drawing, Giovanni finally unsheathed his powers of verbal description.17 “It is built on boats that at high tide will be pushed toward the channel,” he explained, “It has the form of a barrel, and the diameter where the soldiers will stay is 37 feet, and between the said space and its bulwark will be 35 feet, all full of padding that will resist cannon fire; the other part facing the sea is not so full, but is made of wood, and on it will be placed six cannons that will fire toward any approaching boats.” Much of what he had to say was speculative, as a few days would pass “before the whole thing is put together.”18 The more he described, the more outlandish the monster seemed to be. A dyke would be built along the canal, 112 Florentine feet long, distant from the old dyke an unspecified number of feet (left blank in the original). Upon this would stand the famous machine, with six cannons ingeniously fixed on top so as to turn with each recoil after firing, rather than simply being pushed back.19 Yet he must not allow the machine of another to overshadow him. He could make no secret about his contempt for Targone, whom he regarded, at least in the science of military architecture, as just another meddling Galileo Galilei. “The first shots” of the curious machine, he added in the same letter, “would ruin and shatter the socket” which held the artillery within the housing, and the smoke would harm the cramped soldiers.20 To reinforce his opinions he gathered intelligence across enemy lines. Gaston Spinola, Archduke Albrecht’s master of the horse, had gained entry there by means of a special safe-​conduct to visit Alessandro Malaspina, the Archduke’s counselor, who lost both feet from a cannonball over the city walls after his capture during a skirmish and was now in the care of the Dutch physicians.21 According to Giovanni, Malaspina was given the best hospitality that the brother of Maurice of Nassau, the Dutch commander, had to offer, including a dinner where the two of them talked about the current situation on the field. During the course of the meal, the conversation came around to the prospects for an early end to the siege, with Maurice insisting Ostend “could hold out for another eight years,” but if the Archduke wished to purchase the city from the States General, he could have it for a million and a half in gold. Finally, in the midst of “other similar jokes,” they had discussed Targone’s famous machine: Maurice

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“expressed amazement that His Highness wished to take the city using such a parrot cage.” Giovanni took some satisfaction in his contempt for the man and the idea being shared by someone else.22 Information, for Giovanni, was a major weapon in the war at hand as well as in his own personal campaign for recognition. Of course, there had to be memorable actions to report; and to save his strength for those, while keeping up the flow of news, he organized friends and acquaintances, including his squire Cosimo Baroncelli, into producing a weekly Antwerp newsletter.23 It was no different in form from the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of such newsletters that were being written, copied, and disseminated from every major center, along the main mail routes, containing whatever contemporaries cared to define as news. Four to eight sheets long, with a date and place at the top, they were a recognized genre peddled by postmasters and colporteurs. To field marshal Melzi he gave the job of writing up the daily field operations, so details such as the following came from a firsthand source: “They write from Ostend that the gentleman Melzi with his tercio of Italians has very fortunately taken the ravelin of the gate, and with the loss of few of his men.”24 Week by week, throughout 1604, he kept the court wondering what might happen next. While doing his best to communicate the realities of the battlefield, he kept most of his personal thoughts to himself. Not that he was reluctant to speak his mind about the tactics of the leaders or the behavior of the men, nor, especially, the way money was being spent. In this last regard, the campaign received 250,000 scudi per month from the king and another 150,000 from Flanders. There should, Giovanni opined, be plenty to carry on the war. But the Spanish ambassador and other high officials, he noted, were diverting vast portions of these funds to their own pockets, using the excuse of war expenses to cover entertainment and display. The allies appeared to be less interested in actually taking the city than in raking in the revenues that accompanied the ongoing siege. Don Juan de Rivas “who is the supreme commander, reaps a great profit,” he wrote, “amounting to many many scudi per day.”25 The Walloons in particular received regular pay based on the amount of time they devoted to building the siege machines, so they took as long as they could, and one of the colonels responsible for

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them sliced off a tenth part of their earnings for himself. Observed Giovanni, “here it seems they are making war on the king’s treasure rather than on the enemy.”26 Prospects for a successful siege, he concluded, looked grim.27 Silences are sometimes as significant as outbursts, but they speak less eloquently. He made no pronouncements on the wider strategic goals of the war, such as whether he hankered for a world ruled by Spain or believed that the only alternative to universal chaos was a universal Spanish Peace, a Pax Hispanica.” Nor did he seem too worried about the atrocities, the danger to civilians, or the insult to civilization posed by Christian princes unable to avoid slaughter, or any of the other major pacifist themes that over the years had bothered the best philosophers, including Erasmus. If he ever gave any thought to the matter, he probably agreed with the philosopher Francisco de Vitoria, founder of the School of Salamanca, who argued that state violence against enemies, inside and out, was not only justified, but was inevitable given the fallen condition of humanity, inasmuch as the strong must defend the weak.28 Maybe to Giovanni, the principle was too obvious to bear repeating. The idea of a unifying power, a sort of world constable, does not seem to have excited him despite his contemporaries’ last attempts to infuse the old concept with new life. He could probably see as well as anyone that the days were long gone when Machiavelli’s suggestion about a possible Medici hegemony was even thinkable.29 In his own time, candidates for the leading position in the world included only emperors, popes, and kings, with the Spanish monarch distinctly in the lead, despite the failed Armada and the falling value of New World silver. All around him were the voices of Spain’s apologists: Giovanni Botero, the Piedmontese Jesuit, who dreamed of a new empire for Christ, and in Florence, Scipione Ammirato, who touted Spain’s achievements in Italy’s north and south. In the same city of Antwerp where Giovanni was based in 1604, Justus Lipsius would soon be lauding Spain’s actions in the Low Countries.30 Only in one unguarded moment did Giovanni suggest the rise of Spain meant the decline of everywhere else. After he voiced that thought at the time of the Armada, he would never do so again.31

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His loyalty to the cause he served was unquestionable—whichever that happened to be. Devotion was survival. To conserve energy for leading troops into battle and showing courage under fire, he could have no doubts about which side he was on. Still, like the other great condottieri, he gave his arms to his employers, but not his soul. Even when he put on his battle face, he was no impersonal fighting machine. When his job was finished, so was his allegiance. 32 There is no record of any qualms about switching from Florence to Venice, and the turn against the Habsburgs probably meant no more to him than it did to Pompeo Giustiniani, the Genoese condottiero whom he would replace and who had done the same thing.

g When Don Francesco, his nephew, the brother of Grand Duke Cosimo, went to the Mantua Succession War in 1613, he may have wished to be there instead. Of course, he could hardly blame the grand duke for passing him over, since Giovanni was already on the Venetian payroll when hostilities began But he had as much of a stake in this war as did any other Medici people—perhaps, for different reasons. The late duke, Francesco IV Gonzaga, was his great nephew, and so was the successor, Ferdinando I. Both were the sons of the same Medici mother, Eleonora de’ Medici, the daughter of his half-​brother Francesco. In fact, the pattern of succession in the two dynasties seemed wondrously similar. Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici had taken over after the mysterious death of Francesco de’ Medici, renouncing his cardinalship, finding a spouse, and devoting himself to the business of rule. This solution, all except for the typical Florentine suspicions of assassination, could have been a model for Cardinal Ferdinando Gonzaga, when a similar future loomed on the death of the brother, Francesco Gonzaga. Despite the rivalry, the dynasties and their destinies seemed thoroughly entangled. Giovanni, too, like the rest of his family, may have taken personal offense at any aggression against the duchy of Montferrat, a Gonzaga pos­­session. Still more irksome would have been the blustering pretensions of a fellow soldier, namely, the Duke of Savoy, known as “the

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hothead.” He scorned false claims to glory and false pretenses. He would have been as indignant as anyone in Italy when Charles Emmanuel insisted that Montferrat was exempt from the usual laws of male primogeniture and could therefore be broken off and in­­ herited by a Savoy princess. He could have had nothing personally against Princess Maria, a daughter by Charles Emmanuel’s own daughter Margherita and the late Duke Francesco Gonzaga. How­ ever, his great nephew Cardinal Ferdinando Gonzaga appeared to have more right to the whole inheritance than this three-​year-​old girl did to the fragment known as Montferrat. He saw the reversion of Montferrat to the Savoy orbit, along with its magnificent stronghold, the modern fortress town of Casale, as a dangerous prospect. Such “running to the destruction of the Italian princes” to achieve advantages for one alone, he would later condemn in writing. 33 He could hardly believe that this man could have become the husband of the Queen Regent of France by marriage to his niece Maria de’ Medici, the widow of the late king, Henry IV. Maria had been blind to his ambitions, but at least she had the good sense not to pay too much attention to this offer. Finally, Giovanni probably thought, upsetting the Spanish, who also supported the succession of Ferdinando Gonzaga, would help nobody. Intervention was inevitable, but not by him. While Giovanni sent the Venetians his latest excuses for failing to show up in his new job, Don Francesco assembled a force of two thousand infantry and three hundred horse at Prato in May 1613 for the Mantua enterprise, with another eight thousand soldiers on the way.34 Maybe Giovanni felt a certain dark satisfaction when Don Francesco trudged home in July without having set foot in Mantuan territory. His nephew’s apprenticeship as a soldier was no more glorious than his own, years before on the fields of Flanders. The only action in the campaign had been a few shots exchanged over the ramparts of Montetortore Castle to bully the Duke of Modena, Cesare d’Este, into allowing the Tuscan troops’ passage through Modenese lands. In the event, a major conflict was averted for the time being, but the real credit went to Juan de Mendoza y Velasco, the Spanish governor of Milan, who broke Charles Emmanuel’s siege of Nizza della Paglia, and put a temporary halt to the duke’s progress,

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removing the immediate danger. Giovanni’s only assignment was to try to mend fences between the grand duke and Pope Paul V, who noisily protested the trampling of some papal soil along the Mantuan border in the course of Francesco’s attempts to make way across the countryside. The trip to Rome cost him no more than a brief interruption in the rich cultural life of Florence that he was currently enjoying in the company of Livia. He knew it would be only a matter of time before he and his concubine were blasted out of their sweet repose. Once the Venetians began to realize that the pacification between Charles Emmanuel and the Spaniards was really just the beginning of a longer conflict on the western side of the peninsula, they would surely take the opportunity to move an attack on the eastern side. They could count on Habsburg resources there being stretched too thin to offer much resistance. 35 Now was the chance to punish Archduke Ferdinand of Inner Austria for failing all these years to do anything about the Uskok pirates in the area. A significant menace to Venetian shipping could be removed.36 Nothing else had worked—such as blocking the ports of the Austrian lands to all ship traffic back in 1600, or, most recently, demanding retaliation for the brutal murder of the Venetian ship captain Cristoforo Venier. Whether or not the Venetians actually believed Venier’s body had been ritually mangled, his blood serving as a sauce over the pirates’ breakfast, they found the story good enough to fit into their protests to the archduke. Instead of an apology, they got another challenge: out with the pirates in return for total freedom of movement in the Adriatic Sea. But that was nonnegotiable. The Venetians appointed Giovanni’s old acquaintance Pompeo Giustiniani, the “iron fist” of Ostend, as supreme commander of the land forces in Friuli, with no doubt about war against the archduke— only about the proper moment to strike. This able commander was supposed to be defending their maritime empire, so pulling him closer to home meant the anti-​Austrian action would have to begin soon. They could not afford to leave the maritime flank exposed only to have Giustiniani and his Genoese cohorts including four captains of his own, along with the Venetian army, sitting idle for long at the northern

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frontier, waiting for a signal. And if they needed any more potent excuses for hostilities, they only had to look at the latest skirmish against the Uskoks on the landward side of Senj, where Venetian troops encountered not only the pirates themselves, but the Austrian troops. To the Venetians’ surprise, the Uskoks had actually been enrolled by the Austrians in special companies, officially for defense against the Turks, but obviously with other intentions. Archduke Ferdinand had much to gain by facing down the Venetians, at whatever cost. With the redivision of all of the Habsburg lands in 1556, on the approaching death of Charles V, Ferdinand’s branch of the family, the Habsburgs of Graz, had come into the possession of all the assorted territories of Styria and Carinthia (both now in Southern Austria), along with Carniola (part of modern Slovenia), Gradisca, Gorizia, and Trieste. Now he insisted on crafting his own foreign policy. A younger son of the emperor, he did not regard the archduchy as merely a parking place for further ambitions; indeed he was the first of the archdukes who actually stood in line for imperial election himself, by a series of machinations perfectly carried out to achieve this result. While currying favor with the Spanish side of the family, he urged the election of his cousin Matthias, the last of the sons of Emperor Maximilian II. Matthias would die heirless, and the crown would pass to the line of Maximilian’s younger brother Charles, the previous archduke—that is, to Ferdinand. As archduke, he gained a reputation for intransigence, also in his attitude to the Protestants in his realms—a point pleasing to the Spanish, as confessional boundaries became more and more sharply drawn. In him, all the various imperial lines would converge, with all their disparate territories and contradictions, including the rifts and divisions that would break out in the Thirty Years War.37 The new fortress city of Palmanova (also known as Palma), where Livia would stay occasion­a lly during Giovanni’s campaign, symbolized the strained relations between Venice and the archduke. Obviously, the official designation of the place as a bulwark against the Turks was only partly true. Beyond it lay the two strongholds, Gradisca and Gorizia, that guarded the mountain passes into Italy from the north.

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The Habsburgs had seized them from Venice in the wild territory-​ ­grabbing spree by Venice’s neighbors that had followed the catastrophic defeat at Agnadello in 1509. Venice managed to regain almost everything in the subsequent years. In this region, only Gradisca and Gorizia held out, and all that was necessary was a good pretext to take them back. Now there was Palmanova to serve as a base of operations. Archduke Ferdinand was not so easily fooled. As the walls began going up and the Venetian flag unfurled over the central piazza there for the first time in 1602, he ensured that Gradisca and Gorizia, the two ex-​ Venetian strongholds, were well supplied with troops, food, and ammunition. The day of siege would come soon enough. Giovanni sympathized with the motives for this war. Brigands of all sorts ought to be extirpated, he said on more than one occasion; and he could see the Venetians’ point about the Uskoks. He would not necessarily agree when the Venetians used the term “piracy” to designate the attacks on Venetian shipping carried out by knights of the Order of St. Stephen, founded by Cosimo I, who excused themselves by saying the Venetians, still the masters of the Levantine trade, were far too cozy with the Turks. The Knights of St. John in Malta, backed by Spain, used the same excuse, and so did certain Neapolitan captains operating under the benevolent gaze of the Spanish viceroy. There were no ambiguities about the Uskoks. No one believed their claim that the Venetians simply prevented them from harming the Turks for Christ. To all effects, they behaved just like the Barbary pirates who preyed on European shipping under the aegis of Islam, or the English and Dutch vessels under the aegis of commerce.38 For Giovanni, piracy was a legitimate target for organized violence, one for which he had already supplied some fortifications at Livorno, and whoever refused to control it was an accomplice. That the archduke, in this case the Uskoks’ protector, had once been his commander-​in-​chief (in the war in Hungary back in 1602) made no difference to him. That the same archduke happened also to be the brother of Maria Maddalena, Cosimo II’s grand duchess, perhaps at this point in his relations with the Medici women, even added a certain ironic satisfaction.

g

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In fall 1615, the Venetians began moving the zone of conflict away from Croatia, across the Istrian peninsula, to the border with Trieste and the other archducal territories thrust between two portions of Venetian coastline. They first attacked the area around the castle of San Servolo, or as the archduke might have called it, Schloss Sankt Serff (now known to the Slovenian citizens as Grad Socerb), in the Triestine suburbs. The choice of target combined the larger strategic interests with smaller local ones. The area around this highly symbolic castle, residence of the captain of Trieste, was the site of a century of conflicts over the salt trade that gave a livelihood to villages on both sides of the border.39 Seizing the castle meant controlling the trade, while dealing a blow to archducal pride. But after raiding the enemy salt works, when the Venetians turned to the villages under the castle ramparts, they found themselves quickly outnumbered as the enemy ranks filled out with Uskoks and local villagers.40 They were routed at the first repulse, and the enemy went on a twelve-​day rampage across the Venetian border. Wolfgang Frankopan, count of Trsat, played a conspicuous role, motivated at least in part (so says one version) by vendetta against the Venetians, who chased the family out of the island of Veglia (Krk, in Croatian) long before.41 The archduke’s staff must have thought, if Benedetto da Lezze’s “timid and amateurish” generalship (in the words of one of them) was all they had to fear, the Venetians would not last long.42 The San Servolo episode was nothing compared with what followed. At the upper end of the Gulf of Trieste—in fact, at the northernmost point of the Mediterranean Sea—stood the town of Monfalcone, within a portion of territory Venice had conquered from the bishop of Aquileia in the fifteenth century. The medieval tower had been reconstructed after being destroyed in a previous engagement with imperial troops back in 1514. Now the area lay within reach of Wolfgang Frankopan and his men. On the way to join the main nucleus of Austrian forces in their attack, they sacked and burned the town, leveled any dwellings in the surrounding territory, made off with whatever provisions they could carry and animals they could round up, and subjected the populace also to “other violence” too terrible even for the contemporary historian to specify.43 Only the tower could offer any serious resistance,

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quickly overcome; and by the time Francesco Erizzo, the captain of Palmanova, learned of the event, Frankopan and his army had already left Monfalcone and proceeded in their northward progress. All Erizzo could do was to join promises of vengeance to the latest shipment of emergency supplies. Meanwhile the main struggle moved still further inland and up to the northwest, on the border between Friuli and what is now Slovenia. Here Giovanni would find himself in a strange land, and so would Livia, who went up to join him from time to time. At the edge of the Karst Plateau, known for its limestone cliffs and deep natural tunnels, the bitter winds and abundant precipitation were reminders that they were no longer strictly speaking in a Mediterranean region. Architecture presented a mix of the four cultures that, not always peacefully, coexisted here—Venetian, Friulian, Slovenian, and Austrian: steeply pitched roofs, church steeples topped by onion-​shaped cupolas, and a combination of stone and wooden structures. Further west toward Udine, things became more familiar, although Venetian taxation and baronial oppression had debased the peasantry to a level surprising to any Genoese or Tuscan, and many villages lay abandoned.44 Ancient castles still dotted the hilltops, where the members of the feudal nobility anxiously protected themselves from each other’s bitter vendettas; any head that rose from the heap was quickly mowed down. In Udine itself, a local patriciate of bankers and feudal lords moved within a stately nucleus of elegant palazzi, though the social calendar, mostly connected with the Venetian administration, offered few entertainments worthy of note. The Venetians rolled into action in December 1615, hoping to make some progress before the good season began again. Erizzo’s strategy involved blocking any relief to the city by seizure of a number of fortified villages around Gradisca on the east and west sides of the Isonzo River, while protecting access to his garrison in Palma by the capture of principal sites along the Marano Lagoon to the south. Pompeo Giustiniani accordingly occupied Cormons and settled in to restore and expand the ancient fortifications there; other generals completed the circle at Sagra, Romans, Medea, and Mariano.45 If Admiral Lorenzo Venier, a distant relative of the massacred captain, could keep the

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Austrians under duress on the far side of the Istrian peninsula by a seaborne attack on Moschenizza (Mošc  ´enice) in Croatia, while other units moved in under Trieste to do more damage to the salt works at Zaule, perhaps the defending forces would be thinned out enough to make for swift progress in the northern operation. There, the tide seemed to be turning, and massive assaults on the Venetian forces were successfully repulsed on the field before Gorizia. Adam von Trautmannsdorf, a veteran of the effort to put down Stephen Bocskay’s Protestant rebellion in Hungary, arrived in the Austrian camp two days after Christmas to turn back the tide for the archducal cause.46 Defending Gradisca and Gorizia would be his task, and soon he would have his hands full. Gradisca, upon which Giovanni would soon be gazing across a corpse-​filled battlefield, presented a formidable appearance. After Marino Sanudo, the Venetian diarist, had disparaged the fortifications as “not very strong” in the late fifteenth century, the Venetians had called in none other than Leonardo da Vinci to make the necessary improvements.47 What was sufficient armament in 1500 became more and more outdated over the course of the imperial domination in the following decades. The imperial engineers had restored, rebuilt, and adapted the walls and bulwarks in conformity with current methods for repulsing any well-​armed assault and kept the grid-​like pattern on the inside.48 The new star-​shaped outer walls exposed no straight surfaces to cannon-​fire while offering plenty of positions from which to rain down death and destruction on any assailant. Palma was nonetheless far more up to date. Pompeo Giustiniani earned the role of chief tactician on the Venetian side by an extravagant claim to the Senate: that he could take Gradisca in three months.49 If he began at the end of February 1616, he could be done before summer. From his headquarters at Fara (Farra), such was the plan, he would circle down past the westward side and attack from the south. Accordingly, long trenches were dug for safe movement of troops, and terrepleins were constructed to deflect cannon fire. Things turned out to be far more complicated than anyone expected. For one thing, Trautmannsdorf managed to make a safe fortified headquarters at Lucinico (Lucinis), on the road between Gorizia and Gradisca,

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and he kept the area on the opposite riverbank from Gradisca, between Sagrado and Sdraussina (now called Poggio III Armata to commemorate a much later engagement), free of interference for supplying the city by way of a small entrance on the river side. 50 Despite fierce fighting, the Venetians showed few signs of progress by the end of March.

g Back in Venice, from their residence in Palazzo Trevisan on the Grand Canal, Giovanni and Livia enjoyed a panoramic view not only of the city of the doges but of the European situation into which they were about to be thrust.51 With the Spanish ambassador in the vicinity and the imperial agent next door, news, rumor, and gossip were in easy reach. Whatever he could discover, he passed along to Cosimo II. He had no illusions about the situation in Friuli. Despite the favorable conjuncture presented by the current Habsburg distraction with the duchy of Savoy in the west, the Venetians (Giovanni noted) were beginning to run out of money. Taxes and duties had to be increased; there were protests, though muted. “One is forced to conclude,” he said, “that the government is broke.”52 Yet efforts by Emperor Matthias and Pope Paul V to mediate the differences encountered only obstinacy and intran­ ­sigence. Representatives of the king of Spain did whatever they could to wear down the archduke into giving some “apparent satisfaction”—to no avail.53 If the Venetians could still afford to go through with the planned troop levies in Northern Europe, presumably Switzerland, the tide might turn. 54 Uncertainties about his employment poisoned the glories of Vene­ tian springtime in 1616 for Giovanni and Livia. Their inevitable separation kept being put off, agonizing month after agonizing month. In early May, he met with Antonio Priuli, the “provveditore” responsible for defending all of Venice’s mainland territories. The conversation went well, but his salary and responsibilities still had to be decided.55 This last item was by no means trivial, since there were already many generals on the field, and according to some reports, conflicts were brewing between Venetian administrators and condottieri, and between the various condottieri themselves.56 Worse yet was the long-​standing

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f­ riction (so he had heard) between field commanders and the local feudal barons fighting on the Venetian side, whom the Senate traditionally allowed to keep the area in check, by fair means or foul, in return for amnesty.57 He could probably foresee trouble with Pompeo Giustiniani, whose boasting he would have found as odious as the high-​handed methods.58 He could hold his own in any dispute, but he preferred not to waste his time in useless squabbling. Hopefully there would soon be a problem no one else could solve, and he would receive the authority necessary to solve it.

g As the prospect of his eventual separation from Livia became more real, Giovanni had a new idea: not to separate at all—or, as little as possible. He would bring Livia along to war, and when this was not practical, he would put her virtually there with him. It was a daring plan. All the campaign manuals discouraged any joining of civil and military life. The best soldiers, everyone agreed, were free and unattached individuals whose entire attention was focused on the matter at hand. Women and children in principle had no business in war except as objects of violence and rapine.59 Yet, as he constantly repeated in his letters, he could not do without her—and he probably thought, why should he try? His joining of the home front and the battle front evoked such surprise in later commentators as to suggest that he had really struck out on a novel path. To be sure, the decision to move Livia to the front may well have been taken jointly. She would have had her reasons to want some vicinity to Giovanni, including motives of surveillance as well as of affection. No trace of such discussions survives. But before they had a chance to move anywhere, in June 1616 a new battle for survival commenced on the home front. Livia was already several months pregnant with their first child when Giovanni began his negotiations with Priuli. Now as her term was approaching, they received advice from Giovanni’s mother Eleonora in the convent in Florence: let Livia keep up strength and hope, she advised, and not fail to have prayers said for a good delivery.60 Then they heard from Benedetto Blanis, Giovanni’s agent and librarian and an authority

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within the Florentine Jewish community, who sent a book of cabalistic potions, to ensure the channeling of divine forces from every angle, not just the Catholic one. “And unto us a child is born,” exclaimed Blanis, as though the prophet Isaiah had spoken on the matter.61 Only a “strong and admirable” offspring could be imagined from such a distinguished couple, he added, with the conventional gender-​weighted prediction that the new heir should be “the greatest man in the world.” They could not ignore the risks. Unsaid, but evident to all around them, was that infants were always the first victims of the harsh realities of early modern life. Nor, as far as we know, did the high rate of infant mortality at the time do much to soften the blow to families. How Giovanni and Livia were affected by the premature birth and death of this first child can only be imagined, since they left no written testimony. They would have often walked by one of the more impressive monuments to family pain in Venice, the famous twenty-​fourth column, counting from the end of the portico beside the ducal pal­ ­ace in piazza San Marco, with its sculpted scenes from a fifteenth-​ ­century marriage, the eighth figure depicting the death of the child.62 If they ever observed carefully the quaint images, perhaps they wondered whether Livia would one day be that mother, expressing a gesture of despair while the father prays. What we do know is that, as often happened in families affected as they were, they tried again to conceive.

g Daily news diverted attention away from family matters. In the west, Giovanni observed the conflict escalating between Spain and Savoy. “I am deeply aggrieved,” Giovanni wrote to Cosimo II, “because this running to the destruction of the Italian princes . . . ​can never be pleasing to good Italians,” although he knew the Venetians would use this chance to strike harder in Friuli.63 What he heard from Friuli, meanwhile, only convinced him that he would soon have his hands full. As spring gave way to summer, each small Venetian advance that he could

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applaud was blocked or countered by small advances on the other side that he must deplore. The logistical problems worried him. Since the Grey Leagues refused to set aside their Spanish allegiance long enough to allow free passage of Swiss auxiliaries through their lands, reinforcements had to be requested instead from the Dutch Republic, in a bold rapprochement between a Protestant and a Catholic power, but these would not arrive for many months. Already, the formidable Don Balthasar de Marradas, of later fame in the Thirty Years War, showed up in the archducal camp with a new troop of cavalry recruited by Spain. Meanwhile, perhaps Giovanni hoped to be able to exercise his engineering skills as the war of positions evolved into a war of fortress-​ building.64 The Venetians placed a stronghold on the elevation at Fogliano, tightening the circle around Gradisca. He would have to inspect it. The archducal forces reciprocated by building a new star-​ shaped fort above Gradisca, one which would play a role in Napoleon’s campaign here two hundred years later. Then they added further improvements to the defense works at Sdraussina that protected the supply route to the besieged citadel. As soon as the forts were built or rebuilt by one antagonist, they were assailed by the other. Toward the end of summer of 1616, Giovanni may have already begun to view himself as the rescuer from disaster—a role for which he seemed particularly well suited. Pompeo Giustiniani was the sort of leader who must either win or die, and winning seemed far off. Before the rigid season began again, there was a final push to drive the Austrians from the position at Lucinico, which had dogged Venetian progress since Trautmannsdorf had made it his substation for molesting the Gradisca operation. When this success was followed by others at Podgora, on an elevation slightly upriver from Lucinico, and at Vipulzano, further inland, as well as other places on the way to Gorizia, a new plan began to mature: to move all siege operations across the Isonzo River and up to this latter city.65 The obstacles were huge. Assaulting Trautsmannsdorf’s main center of operations without the benefit of Gradisca was going to be risky at best. By late September the two forces were still mainly ranged on opposite sides of the river exchanging cannon fire, and there was no circle of friendly forts around

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Gorizia as there was around the earlier target. Giustiniani could not bear to just stay dug in without attacking. On October 10, 1616, the decision was made for him by an harquebus shot to the ribs.66 He died the next day, and operations began winding down. In early November 1616, Giovanni was at his villa outside Padua when he finally got word that the command was at last his.67 His Medici relations were alarmed about the change of loyalty, but nothing could stop him now.68 The conditions were all he could have hoped. He would have practically unlimited authority, reporting only to the Venetian governor. With the hierarchy clearly delineated, squabbling among the officers must cease forthwith. There was no need to rush to the now-​stagnant battle scene, since the winter snows had made further troop movements practically impossible, except for sporadic skirmishes mainly intended by each side to keep the other mindful that the war was still on. Just getting to the site would be a chore, in slow vehicles over roads that were bad in the best of times and when icy, nearly impassible. Livia would join him. They made their way north in the first days of December 1616 but along different routes: he to the front, she directly to Palma. Everything was done to make her feel welcome. On the evening of her arrival at the city gate she was greeted personally by Francesco Erizzo, the captain of the place. “Truly a most well-​ mannered gentleman,” she reported to Giovanni.69 Soon she got her first taste of the action at the front; and Baroncelli, normally no admirer, effused about how “courageously” she toured the forts and outworks there. The soldiers reportedly added to the acclaim, firing salvos of artillery “in recognition of her valor” and offering whatever rough hospitality they could.70 She would have seen Palma was no place to call home. Everywhere she turned she would have been reminded of the city’s primary role. That it had been worthy of inclusion in a manual on military architecture probably meant little to her.71 As she perambulated the perfect nine-​pointed star shape design she probably thought less about the architectural genius of Buonaiuto Lorini and Giulio Savorgnan than about her own boredom and discomfort. How­ ever much she appreciated Venice’s renewed aspirations as a mainland power, what she saw here was basically fresh stone and mortar with

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soldiers pacing back and forth and cannon shot rumbling in the distance. Hard as the Venetians tried, since the city’s founding, to foster the image of a thriving border town, no one came here unless upon army business, and distractions were few. When the novelty wore off, the anxiety set in. She tried to pass the time conversing with the two sons Erizzo placed at her disposal, young gentlemen who shared their father’s gentlemanly qualities and “knew how to express themselves so well that I found myself very intrigued.”72 Food was another diversion. She was no big eater, but she was a fine one; and from the paymaster, Signor Contarini, she acquired good botargo, the fish roe delicacy, to flavor her bread, and artichokes for whatever fashionable dish the new vogue for legumes might suggest to her. Did she prefer the hearts of the plant, a passion Catherine de’ Medici had brought to the French court a generation before? The documents are mute.73 From Provveditore Antonio Priuli she received fresh pears, of which she ate a few and sent along the rest to Giovanni at the front. She would have done the same with the partridges and quails, of which she was not fond, but Giovanni’s agent Francesco di Baldo ensured her that game could be found within easy reach of a musket shot anywhere on the field.74 Concerns about moving things here and there amid the fighting no doubt, in her mind, somehow brought her closer to Giovanni. News brought her still closer to the action but also fanned her fears. She heard Giovanni had produced an immediate effect on troop morale by his reputation as a great commander, but obviously this was not enough to bring about easy victories.75 She was relieved that he was not involved in the fierce battle below Lucinico the week he arrived, where Pompeo Giustiniani’s son was taken prisoner by Trautmannsdorf and released for a steep ransom. Clearly the Austrians were waiting to see if he was up to the job. They would test his mettle in the confrontation with Henri du Val de Dampierre, who had fought alongside Trautmannsdorf against the Bocskay rebels in Hungary and was now leading a company of heavy cavalry on raids across the Isonzo in the region of the Venetian supply line between Lucinico and Mariano.76 Giovanni’s plan was to send small groups of men down along the river from Lucinico unnoticed and suddenly regroup for a surprise attack

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on Dampierre’s flank, blocking the way back over the river.77 Dampierre accordingly made the expected raid under cover of darkness, but no sooner did Giovanni reach the meeting point with his attacking force but an alarm shot went out mistakenly from the garrison at Mariano. Dampierre guessed what was afoot and the surprise attack turned into a skirmish, with the Venetians just managing to chase the enemy back across the river, without cutting them to pieces as they had hoped. Perhaps the Austrians were impressed, perhaps not. For Livia, the barely-​successful action was enough to renew her admiration: “let it please God that matters continue for your greater glory and happiness,” she wrote to Giovanni, “because I also share in this.”78

g Giovanni developed a veritable philosophy of leadership from the imperative to survive alongside Livia; and his historian Faustino Moisesso later set his ideas down in words. His job as a captain general, he would say, had changed much since the time of Machiavelli’s Art of War. He no longer had to be present in every fray. The growing compexities of warfare demanded that he save his personal involvement for the day when a particular struggle seemed to have reached the point of desperation. Only then should he divert his attention from the more elevated tasks of leadership. For this very reason, he suggested, there were distinctions of rank. “It is not possible to fight with the hand and at the same time gaze with the eye over the entire situation of a battle.”79 Were he to place himself in constant danger, he would not be able to make those decisions about supplies, reinforcement, troop placement, and so forth, according to the necessities that emerged in the course of a battle. “The operations of a Captain General are of much more importance than merely shooting a pistol or whacking with a sword.” Instead, he ought to observe everything from a distance, somewhat as the Friulian war theorist Mario Savorgnano had already hinted back in 1599, by writ­ i­ ng, in a work Giovanni and Moisesso both probably knew, “Cap­tain generals must be cautious in risking them­­selves.”80 Anyone could see, as a casualty, he was no use at all.

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To avoid blame for mistakes not of his making, he set out a new plan for the whole war. If certain problems were not solved soon, he wrote to the Senate, not only would progress be impossible, but even acquired territory might be lost. “We cannot keep going very much longer on mere appearances,” was his ominous refrain. There would be hope, he implied, if the Republic could resolve to send more money and more men. Let clothing be supplied, more suitable for the heavy weather, and attrition due to illness might diminish, he went on. Quantity alone, however, without quality, would not do. Remedies should be applied with due attention to their effects. Not just men, but specialized trades were required: tailors as well as sappers. No improvements could be made without a clearer sense of the chain of command; let a decree go out specifying himself, Giovanni, as the chief commander on the field. Discipline must be better enforced and waste eliminated. Let public action be taken against the many corrupt officials who used the war as an extension of their own businesses. Deserters should be rounded up and shot as a warning to others. To relieve some of the burden of obligatory militia service upon the local villages and, by extension, upon local food production, equally necessary for the campaign, let the eligible males be divided in threes and ordered to serve in three-​month tours of duty. Then they would arrive fresh and finish in good time to go back to work on their farms. Here again, quality was the key. Since one good soldier was worth an infinite number of bad ones, let more good ones be trained. And to make sure his message got through, he wrote not only to the Senate but also to Nicolò Contarini, future doge, recently elected supreme political authority in Friuli.81 A major military reform was under way, but in the Netherlands—not yet in Friuli. Giovanni hoped to bring in the latest developments. A host of new authorities, mostly Northern European, was revising Machiavelli’s now-​outdated insistence on the use of the long bow. Suddenly for studying troop formations the ancient Roman sources came back in fashion, reinterpreted in the light of modern ballistics. Giovanni was at Ostend in 1602 when he first heard about Maurice of Nassau’s success with the new methods two years previously at the battle of Nieuport, not far away. Four thousand men had reportedly

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been slaughtered by volleys of Dutch musket fire from units arranged in ranks so that the first line could fall back while the second line loaded for the next volley. No matter that much of the killing had actually been done by the Dutch cavalry, which advanced with the help of the smoke and confusion caused by the musket fire that was making all the news. Most important was the novelty, and Prince Maurice was said to get ideas partly from the Dutch classicist Justus Lipsius and partly from from a cousin named William Louis of Nassau, such that whatever the former referred regarding the way the Romans arrayed ranks of slingshots and javelin throwers was applied by the latter to ranks of musketeers. For getting the details right, Giovanni could consult the illustrated manual published by William Louis’s younger brother Jan VII along with Jacob de Gheyn, now available in French (and in English as The Exercise of Arms).82 It was just the sort of reading he might have brought in his kit to accompany the nightly lamplit vigils Moisesso claims he devoted to thought and study. To ensure that the new techniques sank in, he had the new soldiery train alongside the old. Soon there would be Dutch soldiers trained under Johan Ernst of Nassau-​Siegen, and Giovanni would have a real opportunity to wage war here (so he boasted) just as Maurice had waged it there.83

g Training of course was not enough. The springtime battle season was upon him and Giovanni needed something concrete to justify his role and salary. The self-​described master tactician would have to come up with a plan capable of giving the Venetians enough of an advantage to direct the future course of developments. The eventual operation was as ambitious in scope as it was challenging to carry out. In the last days of March he directed the movement of troops and equipment to suggest a massive all-​out assault on Gradisca was in the offing.84 However, he would not commit Pompeo Giustiniani’s mistake of underestimating the citadel’s capacity to defend itself. Suddenly on the last night of March, he split the army into several groups and ordered them under cover of darkness to sites along both sides of the

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Figure 3.1. ​Localities along the River Isonzo involved in the Venetian attack on April 1, 1617; supposed locations in brackets. (Munich Staetsbibliothek)

river, from Canale (now Kanal, in Slovenia), a village upriver from Gorizia, down to the star fort built by the Austrians on the eastern riverbank across from Gradisca. With the Venetians in control of the whole river basin, Gradisca and Gorizia would soon be theirs. The attack took place in the early hours of April 1, 1617, on five targets at once (see Figure 3.1).85 Captain Marc Antonio Marzano and Lorenzo Todini, governor of Caporetto, were to take the fortified village of Canale, with its ancient but still serviceable stone bridge, allowing easy transit and full command of the upper Isonzo River. Count Nicola Gualdo would take the castle of San Floriano (Števerjan) on the hillside overlooking the western plain along the river at Gorizia (which then would have been located on the opposite riverbank). Francesco Giustiniani, the son of the deceased condottiero, would seize a fortress called Forte del Bosco, which guarded the bridgehead before Gorizia. Camillo Trevisan would wade with his Croatian and Albanian cavalry regiments upriver from their quarter at Lucinico to assault the small fortifications around Podgora and then cross the river to attack Rubbia. At the same time, Marquis Cosimo del Monte would seize the

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star-​shaped fortress opposite Gradisca. Meanwhile, whatever forces were left would converge on the citadel of Gradisca itself. Livia began to get less news as Giovanni devoted more attention to the intricate operations on the field. Back in Venice for the birth of their second child, she did her best to make sense of what she heard. At first, she ignored the inevitable gaps in her knowledge, while showering Giovanni with words of encouragement. “I am in great anxiety to hear continuously Your Excellency’s letters, hoping some good result follows from your thoughts,” she wrote on the first of April. If things turned out well, she added, “I will be very ambitious, knowing that surely all the senators of this city will give you infinite glory.”86 Yet as events unfolded, news and rumor became indistinguishable. Time and distance generated a thousand contrasting stories, and she had no means to tell truth from falsehood. As she wondered how many were dead and wounded and whether Giovanni was safe, terror worked sinister effects on her already troubled pregnancy. The pains began again, and she went into labor long before her term. She lost this child too, a victim of her anxiety about the wars. “I heard of many strange things that were going on at camp,” she explained, and “the only confirmation consisted in more strange things.”87 Strange things were indeed happening—few of them to Giovanni’s satisfaction. Had the whole operation gone as planned, Moisesso later said, the war could have ended here.88 The attack on Canale was supposed to set the whole complex mechanism into motion and give necessary cover for all actions further downriver. There seemed nothing to it. Captains Marzano and Todini would rendezvous at Ronzina, slightly inland from the riverbank opposite Canale, on the Venetian side. From there they and their men would wade across the river and surprise the guard tower that protected the bridge entrance on the town side. All reports indicated a tiny garrison and no modern defenses. Marzano arrived on schedule and regrouped his cavalry forces at Ronzina. Daylight came, and still no sign of Todini. Finally, with the advantage quickly slipping away, Marzano made a half-​hearted assault, stoutly repulsed by the garrison and villagers. By the time Todini finally appeared, complaining of bad guides and missed turns, a joint effort seemed pointless and both armies withdrew. While this was

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going on at Canale, the night’s activity elsewhere was dogged by logistical problems and the difficult terrain.89 Camillo Trevisan’s force from Lucinico collected at Podgora to prepare to wade across the river at Mainizza for the assault on Rubbia. But the defense works placed by the Austrians to protect the shoreline from invasion proved too robust for the vanguard to tear down before the cavalry arrived. Don Giovanni himself commanded the artillery from the Venetian side, as a diversion away from the river, but it was no use. The defense works could not be passed in time and the cavalry retreated. Giovanni’s one success that day was at the castle of San Floriano. The medieval structure defended a small village inhabited mostly by people connected with the local feudal lords who had acquired the place in the early sixteenth century.90 It was integrated into the imperial fort system and defended by soldiers. Nicola Gualdo and his armies managed to arrive under the ramparts completely unnoticed while sappers set the explosives. The massive ancient door blew wide open and the troops streamed in. Thereupon the occupants barricaded themselves for a time in the church tower, and outside, sacking began. Booty reportedly included some three hundred casks of good Collio wine found in the cellars, which the attackers distributed among themselves according to the difficulty of the various tasks they had performed in the fighting that day.91 A more bittersweet conclusion could scarcely be imagined. Livia hoped the victory was real, but she had to be sure. As soon as Lazzaro Fabbruzzi, the postman, brought news about San Floriano, she asked to get verification from Antonio Priuli, the provveditore of the Venetian mainland. Tell him I sent you, she ordered Fabbruzzi, with the familiarity due to her newly won position. What a relief, she exclaimed to Giovanni, that everything was far different “from what was said in the piazza.” Priuli sent Fabbruzzi back to her (she added) with “many words glorifying and honoring Your Excel­lency.” Apparently, the worst had not happened, or was still to come. Mean­ while, the Republic was “very satisfied” with Giovanni’s accomplishments so far.92 To this reassurance Priuli, always the gentleman, conjoined his personal condolences for her miscarriage, offering any help she might need.

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Just as he began plans to build on this small victory, Giovanni received orders from the highest political authority in the Venetian Terraferma, Antonio Lando, to do nothing until the Dutch reinforcements arrived. At least this time, the agonizing pace of developments was clearly not his fault. The weather deteriorated, and while reporting to Livia about “water, water and more water,” he hoped for the best.93 The Dutch reinforcements finally arrived at the end of May 1617, three thousand strong, after a three-​month sea voyage around all of Europe complicated by the Spanish blockades, stopping first on the Lido in Venice to reship onto Venetian vessels for the last miles up the coast.94 At first, they were a disappointment. The sea voyage and accompanying privations and illnesses had worn down their enthusiasm. Seeking what diversion they could find, besides the usual camp side pursuits of whoring, drinking, and gambling, they engaged in confessional insults against Catholic soldiers on the same side, as even Pope Paul V predicted upon hearing of their presence on the field. Worse yet, Giovanni began seeing the first signs of trouble with the Dutch commander, Johan Ernst of Nassau-​Siegen. He could not comprehend why the Venetian authorities put this other general directly under themselves and not under him, creating confusion in the field. If they did so on the grounds that the Dutchman was a better fighter, they were wrong; and if because of contract demands, they were irresponsible.95 He suspected the reason had something to do with Johan Ernst being the son of Jan VII, one of the exponents of the Dutch military reforms, whose military manual, the Kriegsbuch, had just begun to circulate the previous year. Jan VII, by bringing to bear the experience of the Romans, as narrated by Polybius, upon the problems of the moderns, joining erudition to experience, had done what Giovanni had so far only promised to do.96 But the son was not the father. Giovanni himself wished to bring the Dutch reforms to the Italian armies, and now Johan Ernst was in his way. If the situation ever reminded him of the trouble with Galileo Galilei, who had dogged his steps at the Florentine court, he would have seen that there was really no comparison between these two rivals. He was ready to defend his superior role whenever necessary, hoping secretly that the other would slip up.

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While Giovanni nursed his grudges and contemplated his vendetta, the political conjuncture began to slip away. The arch-​Catholic Archduke Ferdinand was maneuvering around the more conciliatory Emperor Matthias into the kingship of Bohemia, despite rumblings of dismay among the princes in the Protestant League, quieted only by the recognition that this man was almost certainly the emperor-​to-​be. A reshuffling of loyalties within the empire and its allies, including Spain, was bound to occur. Meanwhile, the Spanish governor of Milan had besieged Vercelli, in the territory of Charles Emmanuel of Savoy. Charles Emmanuel managed to stuff the city with a full garrison before the siege was closed, but they obviously could not hold out forever.97 Sooner or later the victorious Spaniards would leave the western war behind and turn definitively eastward to the Empire’s struggle in Friuli. Some of the ardor of the war party in Venice was beginning to cool. All that had kept them on board in the worst months had been Nicolò Contarini’s unwavering conviction that the war was necessary and could be won. His leadership and vision would earn him a doge’s cap—but not now. With Contarini away from Venice and on the field in Friuli, his enemies had a bigger voice in the Senate. Already in April the Venetian ambassador in Madrid received an order to test the waters for a possible peace mediated by Spain.98

g It was now or never, but the immediate objective was still a matter of dispute. Giovanni wanted to push straight for Gradisca. The Venetian administrators Contarini, Erizzo, and Lando, on the other hand, preferred to take Gorizia first, ensuring a safe haven in enemy territory, and then proceed to Gradisca. Giovanni could hardly believe it. Having struggled so long with the enemy he now had to struggle with his superiors. This time, he must have thought, they had gone too far. The matter went beyond their having put another general on the field without his consent. They now pretended to do the commanding themselves. He knew they had the authority to do as they wished, but he could not let the slight go unrecorded or the error misattributed. To distance himself from a plan he believed to be a dangerous distraction

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from the Gradisca enterprise, and to ensure his innocence if things went wrong, he made an extraordinary request: let the order be conveyed to him in writing for later demonstration in case of any inquiry. And this was done. Who was to lead the ill-​conceived operation, he left no room for doubt. “Where not one, but many command,” he was quoted as insisting with the Venetian authorities, “sometimes in the moment of greatest need there is no command at all.”99 Let the Dutch and their leaders submit to his rule, or he would not be answerable for the disastrous consequences. Even in this aspect, he was only partly gratified. The new attack plan for June 1617 was even more sophisticated than the one Giovanni devised for April Fool’s Day (see Figure 3.2). Basically, the bulk of the Venetian forces would move across the Isonzo to the area around the safe haven of Monfalcone on the Gulf of Trieste and turn due northeast upon Gorizia.100 With Gorizia out of the way and the supply line broken, once again the way into Gradisca would be wide open. Accordingly on the night of May 31, the various separate springs of the plan were put into motion.101 Francesco di Strassoldo sped from Fara to Lucinico and there regrouped cavalry for the crossing to Sdraussina under cover of artillery. Over the next days, Camillo Trevisan would move with another cavalry brigade down the Isonzo to the next available crossing and smash whatever fort happened to stand in the way. The garrisons at Fort Lando and Fort Albanese would make a feint on Gradisca to distract attention. The greater portion of the Venetian infantry would proceed with Orazio Baglioni from Monfalcone up by way of Ronchi and Doberdo (Do­­ berdob) to San Michele just below Rubbia. Johan Ernst of Nassau, coming from the south, was to lead the Dutch regiments out of Monfalcone, across the Karst, up toward San Martino, and take the high ground between Rubbia and Sdraussina. To protect the advance, also heading from the south, Giovanni Martinengo was to lead his column via San Pietro and Cassegliano up and around toward the heights of San Martino, where they were to build a detached redoubt of wood and stone facing the Austrian star-​shaped fort across from Gradisca. At first the Venetian drive to seize the eastern riverbank and

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Figure 3.2. ​Localities between the Gulf of Trieste and the River Isonzo involved in the Venetian attack in June 1617; supposed locations in brackets. (Munich Staetsbibliothek)

the Karst seemed inexorable, and as they occupied the available forts and strongholds, they swept away any units that stood in their path. When he set aside his animosities, Giovanni was no doubt a bold and effective tactician, even when the strategy was one with which he strongly disagreed. The underlying intention of the whole assignment he gave to Francesco di Strassoldo was to lead enemy cavalry and infantry units in a vast diversion away from his principal object; even the tumultuous and noisy scrambling to transport supplies and ammunition from one place to another was one more brilliant feint to deceive the enemy into believing that the troop movements themselves had been no feint. Operations of the sort required mental gymnastics of the highest order; for Giovanni they were routine. Reports credited him with being a man of imagination as well as of detail, who spent day and night considering “all the needs and possibilities” of a campaign.102 Between plan and execution, of course, stretched a deep divide (Figure 3.2). The potential for strife between Giovanni and his allies

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was only part of a much larger problem. With over 16,000 men in the field, including the Dutch reinforcements, the cumbersome Venetian command structure was tied up in knots. In a particularly disagreeable episode, apparently the archducal garrisons from the so-​called Fort Imperial requested and received safe passage to Gorizia after surrendering to Johan Ernst; apprised of this, Giovanni countermanded the Dutch commander’s order and sent the defeated army to Gradisca.103 Perhaps as a reprisal, when Giovanni requested Johan Ernst to send a force to occupy San Michele, recently taken by Orazio Baglioni, and use this as a base for further conquests in the area, Johan Ernst excused himself and his troops on the grounds of exhaustion.104 Giovanni interpreted the uncooperativeness as a deliberate slight and went straight to Antonio Lando to complain, but there was nothing either of them could do. Weather compounded the effects of indecision and petty squabbling. Such rain had never been recorded in recent memory even in this wet part of the world. Showers continued unabated for forty days, sources said. Not only did the action occur in the midst of it—so also did the inaction, because in many of the small forts built to accommodate the advance, there was no covering at all.105 Waking, eating, and sleeping took place practically under water. Provisions were ruined, and men got ill. Drinking gave illusory respite from the cold. Tempers, already irritated by differences in language, culture, and religion, frayed to the breaking point. Brawling increased, and desertion spread. The advance slowed to a crawl. For whatever reason, by June 6, the Venetian advance appeared to have stopped. Instead of muskets and pike men, the enemy saw shovels and picks. The Venetians were digging in for another season of the agonizing war of position. The fleeing villagers began to return, and the archducal forces regrouping for a counterattack were discouraged only by the untimely death on June 7 of Adam von Trautmannsdorf, Giovanni’s counterpart on the other side. Even Fausto Moisesso, a historian highly favorable to the Venetians, had to admit that “the Venetian army in a few hours had accomplished something considerable, and then allowed the fruits of this to slip from their hands.”106 Weather was only one reason for Giovanni’s extreme caution. Rather than urging speed despite the conditions, he worked the slowdown

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into a philosophy of war more in tune with his responsibilities at home. Although a vehement critic of Johan Ernst’s inaction, he noted, “nothing less befits a good captain than haste and temerity,” or “slow and steady wins the race” (chi va piano va sano), or especially, “considering the Venetians’ difficulties in enlisting enough soldiers they could hardly afford to leave the present ones hostages to fortune,” and the like.107 Not that he was suddenly risk-​averse: no warrior could be. The gambler never left. But the irascible avenger of his youth was becoming the thoughtful hero of his maturity. Now he had more to live for than ever before, and (he no doubt repeated to himself) he could be of no use to anyone as a dead man. The more he considered the matter, the more he agreed with Livia: his army—including himself—must get out alive.

g By June 23, 1617, Giovanni had little good news left. When he wrote to Livia on that day he omitted the events of three days before, when apparently he had refused to send reinforcements to relieve Johan Ernst, pinned down by the archducal armies outside Rubbia, for the usual reason, because the Dutchman had not requested his permission to engage the enemy there.108 Instead, to Livia he preferred to narrate a battle that took place on the day he wrote, which in his view typified the whole mess in Friuli.109 The objective had been to create a crossing point over the Vipava River (“Vipao” on the map in Figure 3.2), a tributary entering the Isonzo from the northeast, which ran between the Karst mountainous region and the plain on the way to Gorizia. Adam von Trautmannsdorf had cut all the bridges except the one at Merna (see map), and his successor Marradas had ensured that this village was well fortified, along with both ends of its bridge. Giovanni knew that a surprise attack could be particularly effective, as the enemy forces in the area typically found quarters in dispersed dwellings and could have difficulty reassembling on the spur of the moment. Accord­ ingly, on the evening of the twenty-​second, Orazio Baglioni’s men and some others swarmed across the Karst and down toward the southern bank of the Vipava, and they rushed toward the site in the early hours of the following day. The exuberant troops soon spoiled the surprise by

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cries of “viva San Marco” and “kill, kill” (ammazza ammazza). There was a skirmish, and the enemy on the southern bank rushed to the village, cutting the bridge behind them. In any other weather the Venetian forces would have waded across in pursuit, but once again the unremitting rains made the river an inexorable torrent. After much swearing and some shooting, with casualties on both sides, nothing more could be done that day.110 Livia made no immediate reply, probably because she was already packing her bags to head north again from Venice. She was glad to leave. Losing the baby had canceled her enjoyment; the distance from Giovanni was just too great. This time she would stay in Udine, close enough to commune mentally with her lover, yet surrounded by the urban life she craved. The city was so different from Palma, only 20 miles due south-​southeast. She could enjoy more of the conveniences of home here than she possibly could there, while availing herself of the same circulation of battle news. It had the feel of a regional capital, a Venetian outpost where the Patriarch of Aquileia, the “Friulian Pope,” officially resided. Her daily perambulations would take her past the municipal building in the style of the ducal palace in Venice, with the same colonnades and Venetian Gothic elements, built in the early fifteenth century to remind citizens of the city’s allegiance to the Republic—which they occasionally forgot, as in the famous bloody carnival of 1511.111 In the public square, bounded on the other sides by the castle and the cathedral, there would be, in miniature, the colorful civic life that she sorely missed in Palma. Within Udine society, Francesco Antonini, the Venetian governor of the place, whom Giovanni informed about her arrival, would make her introductions. She did not yet imagine having to make do with this place for the next six months. The vicinity to Giovanni did not remove the anxiety. Every day there was reason for concern about “the danger in which Your Excellency places himself,” and she knew that the following day could be his last. She tried to avoid contemplating what would become of her if he died. It didn’t work. She tried living without news. “I will try to hear as little news as possible,” she joked, “in order not to have any more worries.”112 That didn’t work either. As summer 1617 wore on, she tried to interpret

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the changing world situation that seemed to impinge on their happiness. The fall of Vercelli to the Spanish forces in early August signaled the defeat of the Duke of Savoy and the end of the Mantua Succession War. She wrote about it to Giovanni, pointing out how the event was demoralizing for the Venetian side. “They are tired, and they are right,” she said. With the western commitment out of the way, the further concentration of imperial forces in Friuli was only a matter of time. No wonder the Venetians seemed frustrated. They were already stretched to the limit; the probabilities of a favorable outcome here were diminishing daily. They seemed to behave as though the end was near— especially the administrators, who (she said) “do not give the necessary assistance,” because “they have little desire to make war.” In an interesting slip of the pen, she noted “you know more, while awake, than the others do, while asleep,” probably meaning the contrary. Even if she suspected that Giovanni was the author of his own misfortunes, she would not dare admit this to him, or indeed, to herself. Livia’s apprehensions about renewed Habsburg interest in the conflict were borne out by the arrival on the field of the young Albrecht von Wallenstein. Not yet the famous general of the Thirty Years War that he would later become, nor the overambitious renegade celebrated in the epic-​length drama by Schiller, he was nonetheless a formidable presence. Suppression of the Bocskay rebellion in Hungary had whetted his appetite for more real action.113 Like Giovanni, he joined intellectual to military interests, in this case, informed by study at the University of Padua. Again, like Giovanni, he believed natural knowledge brought practical advantages. To judge the suitability of the stellar conjunction he consulted no less an astrologer than Johannes Kepler.114 Now he brought 180 armored cavalry and eighty foot soldiers on the field at his own expense. Maybe Giovanni would meet his match. With Wallenstein and Marradas guarding the supply route to Gradisca, the Venetian forces could never complete the siege.115 Any attempts against the city would be frustrated by the continuous passage of men and goods coming across the Karst. The Venetians determined to attack the supply train itself. Baglioni and his force swept down from Doberdò, deep in the Venetian-​dominated part of the Karst, to engage the enemy while waiting for the Dutch contingent from

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Fara to make a combined raid on the supply train. Marradas came to meet them. In the fierce fighting, Baglioni caught a sword blow to the head, raising to two the number of monuments from this war to be built in the Venetian mausoleum of Ss. Giovanni e Paolo. The setback inspired Giovanni to reclaim his leadership by insisting once again on his idea for an all-​out assault on Gradisca. This time the design had to be elegant enough to impress the other strategists and at the same time so intricate that only he could possibly pull it off. The occupation of the fortified villages of Sdraussina and Fogliano would only be the beginning, he explained. Next would come the star-​shaped fort directly across the river from the Venetian camp, and finally an entire encirclement. Never mind that previous experience demonstrated the virtues of simplicity. The difficult terrain and climate, the cumbersome command structure, and the painful lack of essential resources all rendered any highly articulated operations involving several simultaneous movements practically impossible. All this he set aside for the moment in view of his daring objective. To shift the blame upon others in case something went wrong, he communicated his ideas in detailed letters to the Venetian authorities while arranging things on the field.116 Concerning the timetable for completing the elements of his attack plan on Gradisca, Giovanni made no precise specifications. There were far too many variables to take into consideration. Better to proceed step by step and see how things went. The pace corresponded to his new attitude of a relentless push rather than a lightning strike. In the second week he reported to Livia that the enemy was already “very badly off in Gradisca.”117 On September 6, 1617, the Venetians put some suppliers and their military escorts to rout, killing a few and leaving the rest “fleeing practically naked through the woods.” Another major strike would follow, he promised, from a new fort, “as high as a tower” on the Gradisca side of the river; three heavy cannons would be hoisted into it “to make nice music.” At the proper moment, the rain of fire from this fort would combine with the artillery shower from the opposite side of the river, when the Venetians succeeded in occupying the forts along that side, which would be “very soon.”118

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For any vacillation, he threw the blame back on the Venetian officials. There was nothing he could say about the sincere and always reliable Nicolò Contarini, who continued to press for victory. But the Venetian provveditore, Antonio Lando, had lost all interest in the battle: “he can’t wait to be in gondola,” Giovanni complained to Livia; “he speaks nothing, listens to nothing, consults about nothing, thinks about nothing but Venice.” In the midst of such apathy, “things are being done and undone according to their private interests.” His final assessment: “it is a most terrible shame.”119 Only the replacement of Lando and Francesco Erizzo, accompanied by the return of Pietro Barbarigo, a fine general who had been temporarily removed due to power struggles within the war administration and was now ready for action, could possibly make a change for the better.120 If he could only make the current Venetian authorities listen to reason, the campaign could be saved. “I hope that when it pleases God I will be able to complete what I have ordered for your greatness, peace, prosperity and reputation.” And again: “my desire to come and be with you in perfect tranquility drives me to endure any effort or discomfort as long as it leads to the desired end.”121 By late September 1617, Gradisca was still holding out, when Livia announced that “the peace has been concluded.” She hesitated to rejoice. The diplomatic endgame had already begun back in April, when the Venetians were hoping to bluff their way to victory. At that time the war was already a stalemate, and the two sides seemed capable of mutually exhausting themselves without gaining anything decisive. The Venetians had some bargaining power left, plus the best possible advice from their astute counselor, Paolo Sarpi, so they stalled while trying out various solutions. The first diplomatic feelers went out via their representative Piero Gritti, looking for a profitable peace mediated by Spain; and preliminary negotiations began in Paris in July. Nothing came of it, and the blame fell alternately on the incompetent Venetian delegate Ottavio Bon or on the squabbling “young” and “old” in the Senate. Soon the favorable moment passed and the conclusion of matters between the Venetians and the archduke became mixed up in the larger questions at issue between France, Spain, the Empire, and

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the Italian princes. The final treaty signed in Madrid on the 26th of September included provisions not only for the war in Friuli but for ending the Mantua Succession War.122 Half skeptical and half relieved, Livia told Giovanni a few days later, “As for me, I can’t believe it.”123 Two months of frustration followed: the time allotted to the signatories for ratifying the Treaty of Madrid. In principle, operations on the field could continue while the Venetian leadership, especially Nicolò Contarini, attempted to squeeze whatever advantages they could out of the last phase of the conflict. “In Venice everyone is crying, Peace!” Giovanni observed from the field, “but here everyone says the oppo­ site.”124 If they were hoping for a reversal significant enough to force the bargainers back to the table, it was a pipe dream. By late October, Giovanni no longer reported progress in major operations, only occasional skirmishes. And killing five or six soldiers out of a raiding party in retreat back into the Karst from the star-​shaped fort, which he recorded on the 28th of October, was obviously not going to make much difference. Finally in early November, he got the order to maintain the acquired positions and avoid offensive actions, while allowing a predetermined quantity of approved provisions to enter Gradisca. The truce, he told Livia, was merely a subterfuge to keep the occupants of the citadel on the side of the living while the Venetians wore themselves out.125 Still he refused to believe everything was over.

g What finally stopped him came unexpectedly. So far he had avoided the musket shot, the cannon ball, the mine, and any number of other battlefield hazards. He had survived the weather and the hardship, hardened in his body as well as in his mind. He took his physical frame for granted: a reliable instrument of work and play. Suddenly, for the first time since on the field of Flanders some thirty years before, his otherwise perfect health began showing signs of damage. There were small annoyances: a persistent “influenza,” a low-​grade fever.126 As symptoms grew more worrying, Livia understood and trembled. “By the body of Jesus Christ!” she exclaimed.127 She had a theory. “Remember that you weren’t born today or yesterday,” she told her fifty-​year-​old

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lover. “Don’t forget that you have been struggling for eleven months with no respite,” notwithstanding the advancing age, she said: “The sufferings have been great, especially those of the spirit.” She feared the worst: “something could happen that I do not wish, for all that I hold dear in life.” A brief holiday in Udine during the truce-​time slowdown at the front worked like a balm, but the effect was transitory.128 The tumor began in December, when Livia had already packed things up in Udine and journeyed back to Venice—an “inflammation” on the neck and throat that he told her “really hurt.”129 There was no more point in ignoring it or hoping it would go away by itself. It infected his thoughts and robbed him of sleep. His hand was not yet trembling, but he did write “Easter” instead of “Christmas” when telling Livia the probable date of his return. The camp doctors had no better remedies than what he usually prescribed for himself: muddle through, perhaps in a better-​heated tent. He needed a furlough and a surgeon. All that held him back was duty and vague thoughts about his legacy in Friuli. “Every day these gentlemen invent something new that makes my continued presence here seem necessary.”130 Christmas came and went, December ended, then came the month of January. On New Year’s Day, he reported a new development that weakened his resolve to depart immediately. The tumor, grown to an unsightly goiter-​like lump, still bothered him when he ate, but it had ceased to hurt constantly.131 He would try to hold out for the rest of the month.132 By the end of January Giovanni finally convinced himself to put the Friuli adventure definitively in the past. Most of the Venetian regiments had left already. There was not much more glory remaining to be earned; and he, not his presumed successor, don Luigi d’Este, the duke of Modena’s younger son, would be credited with the accomplishments of the campaign. If he played it right, a retirement embellished by the pleasures of his studies and the joys of his companion awaited him in Venice. All he needed was to arrange an elegant and honorable exit befitting his reputation. To the Venetian authorities he promised to be back on the field at an unspecified time after his convalescence. Considering his faithful service over the past year, “I beg you,” he wrote them, “not to refuse this request for some leave to get treatment for myself” so that, once restored to health, he could again “demonstrate

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the ardent desire that continues in me, to act for the benefit and greatness of this Most Serene State.”133 He had a message to convey to the Senate, he told Livia, namely, “if they don’t provide for many things, everything will be spoiled.” In fact, “I want to tell them this in person or else be silent; and being silent would be far too dangerous for them.”134 This in itself was worth a furlough. He dissimulated the illness. His real torment, he assured her, was in “the spirit,” from being so long away from her.135 Soon the torment would be over. They were reunited in late January.

g The respite from fighting left him plenty of time for other interests and energy to dedicate to them. Already in February he invited his librarian and cabalist Benedetto Blanis up from Florence to work on his projects connected with the occult.136 After he had the surgeon remove the tumor in September 1618, there was one last piece of war-​related business.137 Reputation, he knew well, was made only partly on the field. Then followed opinion—carefully cultivated, where possible, and judiciously propagated. There was no time to lose. Already in the last days of 1617 a writing, shoddily printed and badly proofread, had begun to circulate in Venice, purporting to recount The Wars of Italy Between the Most Serene Republic of Venice and the Archducal Armies of the House of Austria. In ordinary circumstances, he would have been ready with the sword to defend himself and his honor. In this case there was no culprit, no matter how hard he tried to find one. “Pomponio Emigliani,” supposedly a “Milanese” according to the pamphlet’s title page, was obviously a pseudonym, and no one in Venice knew the real name. Even the printer, “Peter Gat,” was unknown, and “Poisdorf” did not exist on any map. Precisely because the writing came to the notice of the Venetian administrators, it had to be refuted—all the more so, as Paolo Sarpi, passing judgment on it for the Venetian book censors, condemned it on the grounds of injuriousness to the interests of the Republic, without in any way impugning its accuracy.138 Setting aside the sham attempts at groveling (“Giovanni having always demonstrated knowledge, virtue,

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prudence and authority in his every action . . .”), the attacks were very real.139 Observers of his temporizing in the campaign for Gorizia (it said) made some consider him “unfaithful.” The Venetian Senate (it went on) had gone so far as to consider dismissing him but reconsidered only because peace was near. “Venetian matters in Friuli went very badly because the war was badly administered by the captains,” it explained. Insiders would know the reference in the next phrase: “particularly blamed was the doubtful fidelity of [left blank in the original], about whom the Senate made no remonstration, preferring instead to make an apparent remedy by replacing Lando with Pietro Barbarigo.”140 In context, the indictment was as incisive as it was damaging. By subtle innuendoes and even some direct charges, it threatened to destroy what he had spent an entire campaign, if not an entire lifetime, to build up, at no small cost to his own health and Livia’s tranquility. The record, he thought, must be set straight—and soon. A point-​by-​point refutation would be too obvious, and anyway might draw undue attention to Emigliani’s diatribe. Giovanni resolved instead to tell the story in his own way, and so memorably that the other would quickly be forgotten. The format he chose was novel and eye-​catching: a series of eight carefully prepared engravings accompanied by a narrative explanation. He already had plenty of material, written nightly at camp in the grim penumbra of an oil lamp or sketched on location by himself or by his engineers.141 For the artwork he engaged Jacques Callot, a talented engraver from Lorraine on the Medici court rolls, not yet renowned for the great series on “The Miseries of War,” but already celebrated for depictions of the Mardi Gras celebrations of 1616, and possibly the author of an earlier sketch of Gradisca.142 Giovanni offered the generous sum of two hundred scudi for the eight-​ part work. When finished he would have a small number of copies printed up for distribution to friends, confidants, and especially, the court of Florence and the Collegio in Venice, the principal theaters of his military honor.143 His reputation would be secured—or would it? Here finally was the chance to narrate the triumphs of the Venetians, the depredations of the Austrians, and the perfidy of the Dutch, all of which had been bothering him since the beginning of the campaign. He accordingly started his account not with the Venetian raid on San

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Servolo that sparked the war, but with the terrible action of Count Frankopan at Monfalcone. To make his point more forcefully, he did not bother to distinguish between any particular “Austrian” and another. Thus, “the Austrian skirmishes penetrated to the territory of Monfalcone, passing by way of the valley of the Karst from Vermigliano, and sacked many villages, setting fire to seven of them.”144 And again, “the Austrians stole many animals in the village of S. Antonio near Marina.”145 Likewise, he drew no distinction between one “Venetian” and another, thus deflecting from himself the mention of any faults he might have had as a general and attributing them to the whole team. In the very month when he arrived on the field, he said, “The Venetians, having secured as well as possible the headquarters in Meriano by cutting off all the roads and approaches with double barriers to thwart the advance of cavalry and gain more security, fortified later the area between the Priuli and Lucinis forts to prevent the Austrians from crossing the river.”146 More could have been done in the attack on San Martino, had the men cooperated. “But the solders retreated, terrified and in a panic, in spite of all efforts by the officers to keep them in order.” Worst of all were the uncooperative Dutch. During the July 1617 offensive, “The Dutch under Nassau no longer wished to stay in the Karst, rebelled against their officers, and crossed the Isonzo at Fara, abandoning four positions, namely the forts delle Donne and Imperiale, which had been taken, the little building on the Isonzo, and the houses in the woods with the battery; and they refused to fortify their present position, even when offered payment, contrary to their promises and our orders.”147 Despite all these difficulties, victory on the field would have been possible, prevented by the ceasefire. Between script and print there stood only one obstacle: Grand Duchess Maria Maddalena. As soon as she got wind of the manuscript’s existence, she ordered Cosimo Baroncelli, Giovanni’s secretary, to tell Giovanni “not to have it printed.” Although she never directly stated her objections, she may well have taken some offense at the passages about the depredations of the Austrians. If she perceived a personal slight, she was probably right. Likewise, the account of how the Venetians routed her brother Ferdinand’s armies may have been framed with rather an excess of lurid glee. She already disapproved of her

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brother-​in-​law’s boisterous behavior and amorous attachments. Here was another occasion to show her feelings. In the meeting with Baroncelli, however, she made no attempt to defend the Austrians or her brother. Instead, she made vague references to the “many things that can be learned” from the work by common people who should remain ignorant, a typical remark any censor might have used to block a political treatise regarding “reason of state.” Matters of the sort that Giovanni narrated should be kept “within the family”—not divulged indiscriminately. If anyone wished to know what war was like, she went on, let them “risk their own lives and give their sweat and blood” on the field. And as for having the work printed anywhere else (in other words, in Venice), this was out of the question. The grand duke, she added, agreed. So if Giovanni did not wish to incur the displeasure of his lord, he had to give up the idea forthwith, and the scarcity of surviving copies (one only of the narrative and none of the engravings) suggests that he complied.148 However, there was nothing Maria Maddalena could do to prevent Giovanni from going ahead with yet another project of mixed-​media self-​congratulation. This time the engraving was by Pietro Tozzi, a print maker in Padua (Figure 3.3). There was no mixed message here. In the image, he wields the baton of command while bringing his horse up on its hind legs in a perfect levade. In the middle ground is a cavalry regiment charging toward a distant “Gradisca,” accompanied by compact ranks of musket-​bearing infantry. For the poem beneath the image he may well have commissioned Gabriello Chiabrera, an old acquaintance from the Florentine days, whose verses had celebrated Giovanni’s adventures beginning with the first wars in Flanders and who had most recently written a poem “To Signor Cosimo Baroncelli, When Don Giovanni de’ Medici Was Hired by the Venetians.”149 To Chiabrera, he would have related the whole troubled story of the war. The result was: But you, O Tuscan chief, who with your gaze Confused all those who stood before your ire, Domesticator of fierce armies, bold, Born to lead and to a greater role

Figure 3.3. ​Pietro Tozzi, Don Giovanni de’ Medici. (Correr Museum)

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Not slow or timid in the enterprise, Whatever be the weight upon your valor, With new ideas, industry and art, You always win, O you, great son of Mars.150

As Giovanni would have requested, there was a reference, in the fourth line, to the opportunities offered and taken away, and, in the fifth, to the more recent accusations of dereliction. At 25 centimeters by 18 centimeters, it was modest enough to have been hawked on the street along with the usual effigies of the Grand Turk and the Virgin Mary. One copy is known, acquired by some Venetian admirer or spy whose papers ended up in the Correr Museum. So much for saving his reputation. For ensuring his legacy, Giovanni needed something more. Only an enduring work of history, maybe of the kind that the Venetians commissioned official historians to write from time to time, could instruct posterity in remembering what he did, from his point of view. And just as he began to realize that his own authorship would compromise perceptions about the objectivity of the work, even supposing that he had the time and inclination to write it, he found the perfect partner: Faustino Moisesso. He had known of this Friulian nobleman during the wars but had not been a close friend. Back then, he had been grateful for the personal offer of three knights to serve the Venetian cause when he needed them most, plus all related expenses, to be deployed as Giovanni determined. What happened later, he did not care to know. Suddenly in late August 1619, Moisesso approached him with a surprising request for help in writing a new history of the war. Here was an ardent and long undeclared admirer, ready to interview the heroic protagonist of the events to be related. Giovanni was no doubt as much impressed by the adulation as by the law degree from Padua; the man would be able to argue his case at least as well as he could himself, and maybe better. All he had to do was to supply documents and original material, including whatever he could remember of events in which he was involved, and Moisesso would do the rest. He liked the idea. He sent Moisesso his notes, confident of receiving in return the prom­ ­ised “good level of glory.”151 For the final touches on the ­manuscript, in

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May 1620, he invited his collaborator to sojourn with him and Livia in the palazzo on Murano. That way they could confer daily regarding interpretations and recollections and change necessary phrasing to suit his tastes. The final draft must not only convey his version of events, but also remind readers about who he was: a learned prince, who “spent almost all night” on the field “in thinking and writing,” and when off the field, dedicated himself to the arts and sciences. True, the manuscripts of his productions still lay unfinished in his study, while his experiments still awaited his attention in the laboratory, but that was unimportant. “Not many of those who are supposed to be scholars or have the reputation of being scientists [scienziati] . . . ​would have been able, in the leisure and quiet of the night and day to write so many things, and so well, as Giovanni did.”152 Let posterity remember him as a man who combined life and learning. Moisesso obliged.

g For Giovanni and Livia, the wars were over. For the Venetians, there was more work to be done. They would have to return the portions of territory gained in Istria during the war, according to the agreements made in Paris and Madrid, and Archduke Ferdinand, Maria Maddalena’s brother, now king of Bohemia and soon also king of Hungary and Croatia, agreed to have the Uskoks expelled from the coastal cities within the Habsburg territories, including Zengg, where a garrison would be set up with commissioners from both sides. The next task was to ensure that the obligations were met. In spring there were conferences at Fiume and at Veglia to deal with the practical matters.153 For instance, “since His Majesty” (using the new form of address) “is supposed to pay the cost of flour and wheat and other things for the people of Zengg in one hundred days, clearly this money should better go to paying the soldiers.” Moreover, “a captain of good fame will be sent there to administer justice and punish disobedience.” This personage, obviously not Giovanni, but some successor to him in the next round of glory, would sequester all the boats except, for the time being, four to be used for transporting legitimate merchandise. The Uskoks were supposed to take some responsibility for policing themselves on

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behalf of the king, by appointing representatives of their own who would be personally liable for handing over delinquents. By July the treaty provisions had been carried out more or less to the satisfaction of both sides, also thanks to the secret gift of a golden goblet worth a thousand scudi to the king’s chief negotiator, Karl von Harrach.154 With matters somewhat settled in Friuli, the Spanish threat was still very real, and whatever fears or premonitions Giovanni had were more than fully borne out. Already in the first months of 1617, disturbing news had come from the Venetian ambassador in Naples, Gaspare Spinelli. Apparently the duke of Osuna , Spanish viceroy there, had actually been working up plans for a seaborne invasion of Venice, ordering spies to scout the defense works along the Adriatic coastline and inspecting military craft capable of navigating the canals. And if Ossuna was in earnest about picking Venice for himself as a personal fiefdom, mused the ambassador, this could only be considered the product of a troubled mind. Troubled or not, Ossuna had to be reckoned with, especially since his ships were now navigating the Adriatic with no regard for Venetian jurisdiction. In April that year the Spanish fleet sailing out of Puglia attacked the Venetian island of Lesina (Hvar) off the Dalmatian coast and was repulsed; further engagements followed in July.155 At least according to one source, a fleet of Uskok vessels sailing out of Trieste and bound for a rendezvous with the Spanish narrowly missed landing at the tiny fishing community of Pellestrina just south of the Lido, within view of St. Mark’s bell tower, and had been turned away only by a mid-​July sea squall. Thus, the mutual defense pact Venice signed with Savoy in March 1618 against Spain had a history of its own. Still in April, Spinelli was worried that behind the impossible plans and the improbable claims there lurked a serious danger.156 Giovanni and Livia no doubt watched in awe as the events of May 1618 in Venice unfolded right before their eyes. Their neighbor, Alfonso de la Cueva, Marquis of Bedmar, the Spanish ambassador, turned out to be the only other operative in Italy more imprudent than Ossuna.157 Over the years he had made himself notorious to the Venetian secret service by his dealings with extremists in the pro-​Spanish faction among the nobility. And if the presumed gunpowder plot imputed to

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persons in his retinue already in 1612 proved to be a fabrication by his enemies, his suspicious acquaintances between 1617 and 1618 among the disaffected in Venice did not. Everyone thought he was somehow involved when an association of outcasts and adventurers led by a French pirate named Jacques Robert cooked up a vague scheme to take over the city with powerful foreign aid. He was not directly charged with planning to “blow open the Treasury at night with explosives, promising their soldiers all the money they could get there, burn the Arsenal, take over the Rialto Bridge with a strong force, cut various bridges,” and a long list of other mischief mentioned in the trial, including “setting fire in various places of the city in private houses to cause universal confusion, revolution and terror.” Thus, when the Council of Ten, getting wind of the matter in May, had the plotters executed, Bedmar was spared.158 But his self-​avowed carelessness, loose talk, and offers of Spanish service to Dutch mutineers from the Venetian war in Friuli were enough to get him removed from his post, by request from the Council, in the midst of one last exchange of bravados between Venice and Spain. For Giovanni and Livia, the whole business must have seemed better than a theater play—in fact, years later, in far-​off London, Thomas Otway would make it one. Eleven days after the executions in Venice, before Livia and Giovanni had quite made up their minds about whether recent events concerned them or not, on May 23, came the defenestration of Prague. Weeks later when they read about it they would understand how a Protestant protest against Ferdinand’s elevation to the throne of Bohemia had taken on enormous symbolic significance; and at the Prague meeting, the ejected Catholic commissioners escaped death only because they were saved by angels (said some) or (said others) by falling into a conveniently located dung heap. The European powers were caught up in the maelstrom that was to become the Thirty Years War. But by this time the two lovers had retired from politics, from warfare, and from much else. They wished to spend the rest of their days in peace and contemplation—including contemplation of each other. The simple wish was granted—for a time.

4 Writing the Passions

The War of Friuli was still going full blast when Livia discovered the

betrayal. Her understanding of what was going on may have occurred in stages. At first there would have been disbelief. Then she would have wondered whether Giovanni’s many declarations of fidelity were just repetitions of what he was saying to someone else. She often said that she took his words to heart; perhaps she even mouthed them as any new reader might: “my eternal love,” “your obedient slave.” Saying them over and over to herself perhaps made them more real to her; now they would only remind her that a removal of affection could have consequences too painful to imagine. The signs of the other woman’s existence were plain through the gaps in the overburdened military mail system. What tipped her off was a mysterious message to her own physician ordering a “double purge” to be sent to Giovanni at the front.1 Severe constipation was not rampant there, as far as she knew. However, such strong medicine was often prescribed to induce an abortion. She found out by chance: obviously Giovanni was getting careless, or was in a hurry to do whatever he had to do. In any case, things with the other woman had apparently been going on for a while, and there were serious repercussions.

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Moments of reflection are the hardest to recapture. We only know the times and the spaces, not how they were filled. We can imagine Livia wondering why she had noticed nothing in the past months, despite all her efforts to keep in touch. We imagine her seeking some clue in the pile of letters, his correspondence, which she kept and no doubt read and reread, sitting alone at home while he was away at war. Every plea he made for forgiveness after some tiny fault would now seem to reveal a guilty thought regarding something he was not telling her. The excessive praise, the promises, would all take on a new aspect. She enjoyed the theater and lived in a world of performances, of plays within plays, of clever simulations suggesting all the world was a stage, but so far, she enjoyed the tropes of the theater only as a spectator. Did she now view herself for a moment playing the victim in some comedy called “The Lying Lover”?2 Indignation would have given way to fear. It was bad enough having to worry about Giovanni’s survival. Now she had to worry once more about her own. The hard old life she had left before meeting him had vanished. If she walked out the door, she had nowhere to go, and the prospect of having to rely on the types who once had helped her surely chilled her soul. How aware she was of her predicament her letters do not tell. We may make a few conjectures. She must have supposed that all her present acquaintances would side with him, and the servants would turn their backs. She must also have begun to wonder about whether the two main compass points of her current existence were nothing but illusions: the illusion of importance and the illusion of being loved. Maybe she began to doubt whether she was really as special as Giovanni made her feel. Thinking forward a bit, she would have feared that the gilded life she had been living for eight years, beyond her wildest childhood dreams, was nothing but a flattering parenthesis. She knew Giovanni well, or so she thought; surely he could not bestow upon her all the cares he claimed while dividing his thoughts with someone else. She gathered her courage, and on September 17, 1617, she confronted him with the evidence of his transgression. At first he made some lame excuse, which only deepened her mistrust, expressed in another letter. Finally in the first week of October, he admitted his fault: it was too

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little, too late. Now she wanted more. “Find some remedy, Your Excellency, because I cannot and will not stand it any longer!”3 Act now, she warned,“if you love me and still want me by your side.” Perhaps she knew she would get him back, simply because the alternative was so unthinkable. But it would not be easy for him or for her. There was one chance for a reprieve, she told him. He must prove his love by an act of boldness. He must risk something dear to him, even at the cost of his reputation, showing by his sacrifice that he placed her above all else. Giovanni understood and made a plan. He could not so easily abandon their love or the entire culture of Renaissance lovemaking that he was sure he perfectly embodied. Someone else would have to pay.

g She would have read the letters differently at different times. Perhaps the second time around she began to see the pattern. His very first communication had contained an apology: Florence, 19 February 1616 I can hardly wait to see you and serve you, throwing myself on my knees before you so you may pardon me and punish me; because I have been the reason why Your Ladyship has had so many great inconveniences, bothers and displeasures in the past months; My Lady I await you with extreme desire, and soon I will profess to you my obsequious and humble servitude, and therefore I hope you will make me as usual worthy of your good grace while I, reverently lov­ ­ing you and humbly adoring you, kiss your hands, with the hope, your goodwill permitting, to make this compliment even better in person.4

She had been heading up to Venice for the move from Florence, and Giovanni was supposed to arrive slightly later on. He was excusing himself, so it seemed, for having allowed his career to take precedence over their happiness, forcing them to expatriate. Then came the declarations of love and a bouquet of compliments. Maybe she had enjoyed the slightly formal way of writing: so gentlemanly, so educated.

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She expressed some embarrassment at having to respond in her own simple script, diligently mastered with the help of Giovanni’s servant Signor Urbani and coaching by Cosimo Baroncelli, Giovanni’s secretary: utilitarian, expressive, but completely without frills. 5 The tone was light-​hearted, because she was as happy as her incurable fatalism allowed her to be; her distrust was momentarily silenced by a thin layer of security; and the security derived from feeling loved. Her belief seemed to make the fable true, well into the Advent season of the same year. By that time Giovanni was in the field and she was staying as close to him as she dared. Palma, 2 December 1616 I got two letters from you, in which I heard with great pleasure and contentment that you were well; and I am infinitely happy about this. As far as my desire to see Your Excellency again I don’t have to say anything; I’ll let you judge whether I desire that or not.6

As the weeks passed she added her wishes for a good outcome to her wishes for his well-​being. The following January she was congratulating him on some small victory or other, joining her own ambitions to his: Palma, 2 January 1617 Your Excellency’s letters were very dear to me, especially the one of this morning, in which I heard about your good success; God willing, it may be to your greater glory and contentment, because I also participate in that; I will await Your Excellency’s return with the greatest desire one can possibly imagine.7

At that time, her only real preoccupation had been the fortress town of Palmanova itself: remote, strange, lonely. She longed for a city where normal people circulated, not just soldiers and camp followers, and where the activities comprised more than just waking, sleeping, and waiting: Palma, 4 January 1617 Your Excellency should not be surprised if I write to you that I am imagining things, because being in these melancholy places with not

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too good air, no wonder I am imagining things and I’m constantly upset; but Your Excellency wants to shut my mouth with these exclamations, so I never say anything, and telling me you’re going to do this or do that; I only desire your greatness and your glory, as Your Excellency knows well.8

The words are simple and direct, perhaps just like herself. When she formed the characters with her own hand without dictating to a secretary, we seem to discern her soul: vigorous, stark, questioning. She no doubt wondered at first how he could write at such length, sometimes five or six pages, filled with information and instructions. He always had so much to say; just answering him was a struggle. She sometimes said he was simply using her as an extension of his household personnel, to keep affairs in order while he was away. And when it came to her own needs, he left everything up to her, as though she were no more than an afterthought: Palma, 14 January 1617 I am happy that Your Excellency is in good spirits and is getting some enjoyment. Your Excellency writes me a long long letter, I do not know whether you are writing in anger, and I won’t try to respond to all the details because I don’t have so much knowledge to put on paper so many things; I will wait to respond to them in person, if God pleases to give me enough time to respond, I will say only this to Your Excellency that writing so long and that I do what I want and that all things are left up to me I understand that too well, and saying it’s up to you and do what you want, I don’t care, Your Excellency is right, because when someone has such great things to think about, he throws the others into a corner; that’s duty.9

She may have experienced the letters as a substitute presence, bringing him beside her: consoling, decisive, elegant. She only wondered whether he meant everything he said. She couldn’t understand, at the time, why Giovanni pounced on her suggestion that he might be enjoying himself, and why he answered so vehemently for what seemed like no reason. She just said he was “getting some enjoyment.” She was not being ironic when she said it, and

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she knew practically nothing about what was going on at camp. Either he deliberately misinterpreted what he had read or else this letter ­business was more devilishly complicated than she had imagined. She worried that she might lose him just because of some silly misunderstanding. Palma, 16 January 1617 Yesterday I got one from Your Excellency that was very dear to me because I learned of your being well and I had already heard about Your Excellency’s continuing good will to me, wholly without any merit of mine; Your Excellency writes that you can neither take me nor leave me, meaning that I am troubling to you; but if I wrote anything that gave offense pardon me and I won’t commit the same errors again; when I wrote that Your Excellency is getting some enjoyment, I did not write it with any bad intention; but there is nothing worse than being thought ill of, as Your Excellency does of me. You also say someone was looking to create trouble and told me some lie; I swear in the conscience of my soul that no one told me anything.10

Having only recently crossed the threshold into literacy, Livia began to worry about the problem of expressing her ideas in writing, perhaps in somewhat the same way that the problem had haunted Giovanni since his earliest attempts to divulge his ideas. Very likely, before placing her seal and handing a letter to the courier, she was now looking more carefully than ever at what she had written. The words made sense to her, but she knew they might look differently to Giovanni. She tried again later that month to explain everything that was weighing on her mind: Palma, 22 January 1617 Would to God that Your Excellency should maintain your good disposition, but I strongly fear not; because distance does awful things and causes many accidents; please God that my thought is wrong; Your Excellency did not want to do that favor that I asked the other day, it wasn’t something important to you, but you did me wrong, but you are the master; you can do what you wish; Your Excellency knows that whoever loves also fears.11

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There was so much writing in the world, she was beginning to think, and such a likelihood of being misunderstood. She would gladly give it up. But for long months, writing was all she had. The lapses between letters seemed interminable, partly because of her imaginings of what might be happening that she did not know about: Venice, 21 March 1617 I am sorry not to have had any letters recently from Your Most Illustrious Excellency; and I don’t know what to make of it, except to blame your many occupations; I know you know very well that I can have no greater happiness than receiving letters frequently from Your Most Illustrious Excellency. I therefore beg you, in as much as I know you love me, not to deprive me of this pleasure and out of your love for me to try to rob a little time to make me happy in this particular, because I cannot be so any other way.12

Such were the letters from those months. The more she thought about them, the more she read into them. Was it all a farce? Was she nothing but the butt of a cruel joke? The possibility was yet another demonstration of the utter precariousness of her position.

g Giovanni liked her to write in her own hand, as he always wrote to her. Maybe she seemed more real that way. “When I see your handwriting I am more assured of your well-​being,” he told her.13 Nothing and no one must come between them. However, as he wrote, he could not be deaf to the voices of a thousand other lovers, presumed lovers, and invented lovers playing in his ears. The son of Cosimo, the friend of Tasso, the challenger of Galileo, the builder of monuments, the hero of battles, was not a trivial lover. His mental world, the world of the learned lover, conscious of himself, is not easily accessible. We only know what we can occasionally prove, to have been his readings and experiences. Would he, for instance, before picking up the pen, have joined the legions of other love writers in summoning Erato the muse of lyric poetry for inspiration and advice? Would his own words have

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mingled in his mind with the words of Plato, Aristotle, and the rest of the Western tradition of writing on, about, and with love, which would have been familiar to him? When finished, would he have admired yet another splendid production of his own mind? Would he view his letters as a lesson on love, for his lover and for future voyeurs that he assumed would peek into his affairs, since, as he knew, perhaps more than anyone else, “words fly, but writing stays”? He gave the voyeurs plenty of food for thought. As always, in his romantic expressions he exceeded the bounds set by Church and censor. He took up a notch Petrarch’s fear that love had made him “love God less.”14 Carefully studied excess was his identifying mark. He crossed the line, ever so slightly, into blasphemy. Perhaps he even imagined what effect it might have on his hypocritical relatives once the documents were revealed. Mariano, 15 April 1617 I am with great desire My Lady to be able to serve you and I reverently supplicate you to indicate to me how I can obey and what is your pleasure; the rest I hold to be trifles; please command and you shall be faithfully obeyed, in everything without exception, as I desire to serve Your Most Illustrious Ladyship as much as God Himself, adoring you as much as I do Him, and perhaps more, so please My Most Illustrious Ladyship accede to my reverent request to be benign in your graces to me and conserve me keeping me constantly in your memory and giving me a sign by commanding me, and I will be most obedient and faithful on every count. If anything important occurs, I will do my duty; nor will I fail to write most frequently and write again, so Your Most Illustrious Ladyship may command me, and I give you reverence and wish God to grant you happiness, health and every goodness.15

Why this total nonchalance about such a weighty subject? Did he really believe that a greater concern for “love thy neighbor” somehow offset a lesser concern for duty to God? Perhaps the outpouring of controversial love-​talk was triggered by yet another expression of Livia’s doubts; if so, no trace of the precise occasion remains in the documents.

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He may have crossed the line into blasphemy, but Giovanni was not obscene. In his letters he included only the most chaste references, even though the palace library, as we know from the documents, was full of authors to fit any mood, if reading went along with lovemaking. Perhaps, for raising the intensity of desire, he would have found some recent still-​permissible authors to be far more powerful than the prohibited ones. Contemporary poets’ allusive references to kisses, breasts, sweaty palms, thighs, sighs and the supreme delight were almost more erotic than the “lubricious sonnets” by Aretino, or the “positions” drawn by Giulio Romano and engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi, or even Aretino’s informative dialogues with Pippa the apprentice whore, all published before the Counter-​Reformation.16 Desire arose from a lack: censorship stimulated a black market for books and a legitimate market for metaphors. From Giambattista Marino’s Rime, among the few texts whose presence on Giovanni’s shelves can be verified without a doubt, he would have read lines, ostensibly written in dialogue with a courtesan, that said one thing and meant quite another: The hard weight lying on that tender thigh of impious mortal sword you lightly bear, O youth for honor’s sake, and others’ pain, Whence come this stiffish pose and valiant mien?17

And if these did not summon images of bedroom frolics, others certainly did: O cruel proud youth be warned Your glance a greater injury does make, and harder strike you naked than when armed.18

The combination of amorous insinuations and military imagery surely would have appealed to “the warrior of both Mars and of Love.”19 Then came: From me with steel so rigid and so mean the earth-​bound angel seems to me to guard the secret part of earthly paradise.20

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Was he ready to enter? Was she ready for him? With the documents still silent, a history of off-​the-​record playfulness awaits a new range of sources.21 Letters he used for mental, not physical seduction. His words, not his arms, would seize her mind and body. He would surround her with the orchestra of his phrases, playing notes of affection amid melodies of passion. He would overwhelm her with courtesies, shower her with promises, and place her on a pedestal: Mariano, 12 May 1617 I desire, My Most Illustrious Mistress, to be conserved by you as a most humble and most devoted servant, because all my contentment has its origin, means and end in you, my only and true Most Illustrious Mistress, so that, if you love me as I believe, I will be able to accept this favor, which is as much as I can ever desire; I hope I will not be denied, because the faithfulness whereby I serve, and will eternally serve, has no greater recompense than this, whereby I will live consoled, if I will have the favor. Command me, Your Most Illustrious Ladyship, and you will be reverently served.22

Her gratitude would break down every resistance, he hoped, and perhaps compensate for whatever foibles she had noticed or whatever inconvenient discoveries she might make. To the world, she was his friend—not the other way around. He could never forget the norms, the structures, and the prejudices that made their life possible and impossible at the same time. His attachment to her was a relation in a world of relations, not just a sensation or a feeling.23 He took advantage of his privilege to play outside the rules, accepting her as his friend no matter who she was, placing her within the circle of his associates, his dependents, and his clients, demanding their acquiescence to him, and expecting their obedience to her. She could never have done the same. When he spoke of her as his “amica” he meant to indicate more than just the casual friendship between lovers occasionally promised by the characters in Matteo Bandello’s novels.24 He wished her to enjoy all the advantages implicit in the idea of amicizia, without the practical aspects of the concept ever spoiling their amore. He would have known very well how skeptical his fellow

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Florentines were about Cicero’s belief that true friendship could only be disinterested, that amicitia and amor were the same thing: they thought friendship needed the benefit of patronage and mutual support, without which the city would fall apart.25 He wanted to have his friend and her love too. At least in his correspondence, they would thus be courtly lovers—but with a twist. His words, according to the pattern set for courtly love by Andreas Cappellanus in the twelfth century, would be the intelligent foreplay before the physical act of love, the heart-​softening exploration of tastes and emotions while waiting for the chance to strike.26 And just as in the sixteenth-​century revivals of medieval chivalry by Ariosto and the other romance writers, popular in the neo-​feudal courts of present-​day Italy including Florence, he would be her knight in shining armor.27 Every act of his would be for her—hopefully without the disastrous consequences of Tancredi and Clorinda or Rinaldo and Armida, cruelly separated on the one hand, cruelly deceived on the other, in Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered. He would behave as her servant and treat her as his lord, just as in the dialogue on love by the current love theorist Sperone Speroni.28 Unlike all of these, which usually preferred two heroes belonging to the aristocracy, he would actually abase himself and raise her up. As in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the clever spoof on the whole tradition, published just in these years, Livia is his Dulcinella, the common girl whom the Don treats mistakenly as his princess. “Her name was Aldonza Lorenzo, and upon her he thought fit to confer the title of Lady of his Thoughts.”29 Unlike Don Quixote, who is mad, Don Giovanni does so with a sound mind, in an elaborate exercise of self-​ conscious role-​playing. Stock phrases, he knew, were never enough. His letters must appear spontaneous while conforming to the pattern. He could obviously not discard the accumulated wisdom of the centuries, concerning how to put ideas into words. He had read his Cicero and his Quintillian, and he knew as well as any educated man how to follow an exordium by a narratio, a petitio by a conclusio.30 He also knew how to pen letters of thanks and congratulations to relatives and dignitaries—in the archival folders dedicated to this part of his correspondence, they are all alike, with a few differences to fit the occasion and compliments enough to

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make the most determined supplicant run out of breath. In diplomatic prose he was on par with the Venetian ambassadors, some of whose reports had become literature.31 As a comic writer, surely, if the scripts had survived, we would find he was as good at turning out model love letters as were the authors of the letter-​writing manuals, from Antonfrancesco Doni’s Three Books of Amorous Letters by Doni for Every Sort and Type of Affair to Francesco Sansovino’s Nine Books of Love Letters, all placed on the Index in 1590 along with anything else encouraging adultery—an obvious indication of the supposed appeal and perhaps the supposed effect.32 Precisely by virtue of his vanity as an author, he would have no ghost-​writer suggesting (straight from Sansovino) “Although I take it for certain, my most dear and most beloved Lady, that you by the very obvious signs must by now have noticed the amorous flames in which for some time I continue to be consumed for you.”33 His words would be all his own; for real love letters must reflect the personality of the writer while taking into account the personality of the receiver. There could be no substitute. To make his words more concrete, he joined to them his plans for their future life together. He painted a picture for her of two lovers in an ideal setting, a locus amoenus, dreams fulfilled, desires satisfied, all but salvation achieved. The suggestion of marriage was vague. He referred instead to “inseparable unity.” Was it the same thing? Marriage after all was love’s assassin, the literature said: adultery was the bed of choice. Maybe he wanted to see how the words of permanence sounded in his own ears before pronouncing them at the altar.34 Fara, at the Venetian Camp, 10 September 1617 For the rest, My Most Illustrious Mistress, I reverently beg you to believe that I live more than ever as a most devoted and obliged servant, and with extreme desire to one day have the honor and the grace that I ask of God, to finally join myself to you inseparably until death, which is my continuous desire, my true and desired aim that makes me tolerate this difference more willingly, which I hope will be the reason, when allowed by God’s majesty, for our being able to have perfect quiet to live united in peace and consolation the rest of life that His Divine Majesty concedes to me, and supposing this is

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pleasing to Your Most Illustrious Ladyship, and I see many signs that it is, and hope for more from your humanity and courtesy than from anywhere else, because no quality of my own is enough to make me believe that this is entirely to your liking, My Mistress: only your innate courtesy, whereby I have always been favored by Your Most Illustrious Ladyship since the beginning of my servitude, and with so many favors that this makes me believe you will continue to obligate me and make me your true slave by this seal, which is my true purpose. 35

In any case, the picture showed a life of joy and freedom, lived at one another’s side. Livia was sure to appreciate that. When writing her he may have tried to put on his most sincere face, and she probably believed him. The feints, the ruses, the tricks of love: he knew them all—or at least, he evidently thought he did. He armed himself as much for her as against her. Love was a battle, he would have read in Ovid’s Amores: Every lover’s a soldier, drafted in Cupid’s legion; Atticus, listen: every lover’s a soldier. 36

Along with every schoolboy, he would have known the Art of Love, not only the descriptions of transcendental pleasure at the end of Book 2, but also the instructions on the correct timing of an attack, whether by him or by her. Maybe he agreed that “delay ever spurns lovers on, if but its term be brief.”37 Driving the passions to the limit required planning, including advice on love-​baiting, which mutatis mutandis could apply to either him or her: “But neither promise yourself too easily to him who entreats you, nor yet deny what he asks too stubbornly.” Dangle the other for a time and see the result: “Cause him to hope and fear together.” Timo et tremo—“temo e tremo”: he would use that line in the letter of October 28, 1617, almost as a signal to the curious historian.38 Rather than on a waxen tablet, like the hypothetical lovers in Ovid’s account, fit to be erased, he would write in stone—or at least, on documents that some archive would preserve. Pain was another of the pleasures of love: this he also surely knew. We find a cheap edition of Pietro Bembo’s Asolani among the items he

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acquired during his book-​buying days. Was this his Bible on the subject?39 He too, as in this dialogue, had no doubt experienced the psychic ambivalence of love, that is, the sensation of being pulled in multiple directions: lovers “dare and fear in the same instant,” one speaker said; they are “most happy and most afflicted in the same hour.”40 He may have wondered how “a single soul should be able to wish two contrary things.” What he controlled by his free will might be in vital conflict with what nature imposed; he could be drawn to the forbidden, delighted by trespassing, whether he wished it or not. Rather than a St. Paul, saved from his sinfulness by his faith, maybe thought he would be a Petrarch, fascinated by the contrast of wills but not entirely convinced that turning his back on his pleasures would be any help. Even thinking about it probably whetted his appetite for more. He was an expert, though a reluctant one, in delayed satisfaction— imposed by war, not by choice. A relevant text would have been Leone Ebreo’s sixteenth-​century dialogue on love, penned, incidentally, in Genoa over a half-​century before Livia was born there. Was it among the many texts in Giovanni’s library whose traces have been lost? There, the reader sometimes wishes the characters would simply shut up and get on with it. But no. Poor Philo, grossly overmatched by the young Sophis, his lady, can only attempt some pointless opening gambit and is soon put in check after a new defense by her. The spiritual and the sensual must go hand in hand, she insists, dodging once more her lover’s advances. There are external and internal senses, and too quickly conceding the satisfaction of desire is a crime against love, cutting short what should instead be prolonged. Delectation, she continues, is all the greater when insatiable; and in potentia it is more spiritual and united with the soul.41 Engaging in the same thinking, perhaps Giovanni felt that abstinence not only refined the imagination, but also sharpened the appetite for the real thing. Writing and loving, in Giovanni’s letters, seem to merge into a single act. Communicating and feeling are each an extension of the other.42 I supplicate Your Most Illustrious Ladyship, My Mistress, to believe that I have no other good in the world except you, My Ladyship, nor do I desire or seek, nor shall I ever seek anything else but to revere

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and serve you, and with this firm and stable determination I will continue until my last breath, always praying and supplicating Your Most Illustrious and dear Ladyship to maintain me in your graces, since this is my true good, and my whole purpose is to be able to possess you perpetually, with Your Illustrious Ladyship’s leave, as I wait for God to grant me the means to perfect this desire of mine by that quiet and stable union that I have always desired, and which is my only goal, and until I have succeeded entirely I will not rest.43

The repetition of concepts in different words with different nuances— “no other good in the world,” “revere and serve you,” “praying and supplicating”—suggest the exercise of a single extended thought, with the attendant emotions, as the physical sense of writing takes over the arm, the shoulder, the back, and head. He wants to “possess” her in every sense, as though, turning a profane glance to a biblical concept, “the word was made flesh.”44 He owned a Bible; maybe he also owned a copy of the recently published letters by Heloise to the teacher Abelard, which had just been published for the first time after five hundred years, articulating the physical experience of the pupil’s thoughts about love, including simulated transports induced by her imagination of love’s embraces occurring even during the sacraments.45 Physiologists and philosophers were now forging new paths to understanding the duality of body and spirit. Descartes had not yet put pen to paper on this subject, but Fabricius ab Aquapendente, lately of Padua and now of Florence, put a knife to the human brain around this time, possibly with some such questions in mind. Giovanni would have known him as the doctor who had cured his nephew Carlo and the Grand Duchess Cristina.46 What image of her did he conjure up in his mind as he wrote? As she was the last time they met? As she was the first time, almost a child? Seeking the connection between beauty and the divine was a Florentine tradition. Marsilio Ficino, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s favorite philosopher, tried to solve the problem by going back to Plato.47 Giovanni may have heard enough about the discussions to know that the true initiate into the mysteries was supposed to be able to see through the physical into the metaphysical.48 The uninitiated, that is, he who is blind to the

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higher significance of beauty, “does not easily rise out of this world to the sight of true beauty in the other” and “looks only at her earthly namesake, and instead of being awed at the sight of her, he is given over to pleasure, and like a brutish beast he rushes on to enjoy and beget.”49 Perhaps Giovanni did not see himself in either role. Somewhat indifferent to begetting, he nonetheless wanted his earthly delights, while contemplating the ideal; that was not bestial, but only human, as he would try to explain to Livia later on in one of his letters. Another more recent contribution came from the Venetian courtesan Tullia d’Aragona, who dedicated her Dialogue on the Infinity of Love to none other than Cosimo I, Giovanni’s father. There the positions in Leone Ebreo were exactly reversed. The character Benedetto Varchi in the dialogue, in real life a Florentine state historian who had lectured on Aristotle’s Ethics, defends friendship as the height of love, not too successfully.50 Tullia shoots back with a brilliant take on Neoplatonism, insisting that union with the beautiful is not just a spiritual but also a physical concept, and the spiritual and the physical must go hand in hand.51 Giovanni was neither pure intellect nor pure sense. One day he would try to explain that to Livia, but soon he would have to explain much more.

g Things went well until September 1617; then Livia began to get suspicious. At first, she just noticed some discrepancies between what she was hearing from the neighbors in Udine and what she was hearing from Giovanni. Some Gradisca city official travelling with a family had been captured on the tenth. She heard Giovanni had separated them, sending the wife and daughter off to the stronghold of Mariano, a one-​time headquarters of the Venetian armies to the west of Gradisca. She thought, and wrote, “there must be some kind of trick” involved in the whole thing, referring to the inaccurate rumor; and in these words she seemed to express the subtle sensation of bitterness that she would have felt whenever she believed Giovanni was making something up at her expense.52 Giovanni, a woman, a girl, a trip. Not a good ­combination.

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Yet Giovanni never bothered to clear things up, and this distance and the solitude were doing strange things to her mind. She told him she was ready to pack her bags and head back to Venice. More information began to leak out; she discovered he had been sending money to someone to get a girl out of trouble. There was no more doubt. Her anger caught Giovanni by surprise, and he shot off a pardon letter of astounding spontaneity: Fara, 19 September 1617 I remain so amazed and astonished by the letter I receive at this moment from the hand of the paymaster, written to me by Your Most Illustrious Ladyship on the 17th, that I do not know what to do and I am as dead, knowing my innocence and my faithfulness. I say no more, My Mistress, except that on my knees before Your Most Illustrious Ladyship, I beg you by the entrails of Jesus Christ, to discover the truth and see my innocence and the malice of whoever has represented to you such an exorbitant and most bestial lie, which I am ready to challenge with my life. My Lady and Mistress, I beg you, for the love you have for me, which I know, to discover the truth, that I am most innocent; nor shall I write more because I die, I don’t know where I am and I am most desperate. God help me. I give reverence to Your Most Illustrious Ladyship; and I write no more because of the passion and pain that are killing me, and God preserve you. 53

Before mailing perhaps he wondered what else might serve to defuse the situation, not bothering to cancel the repetitions and write a second draft. He must have known the strategy of attributing falsehood was weak, but to keep his own equanimity, he had to believe it might do the trick. There was no more space on the page, so he wrote in the margin: Some malicious person, trying to bring about my downfall, is emitting these falsehoods; My Most Illustrious Mistress, I reverently beg you and supplicate you to seek out and you will find me a most innocent and true slave; and someone who wishes me ill, and consequently also Your Ladyship, is sowing discord for our ruin. God help us.

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Then he waited. Livia sulked for the rest of the month and then resumed the offensive. Another excessive penitence for a silly fault renewed her suspicions. We have the impression that she was beginning to see between the lines of what she read, to the different worlds visible in a single phrase. The more skilled she became in reading prose, the more she hated what she saw. As always, she wrote down exactly what came into her mind. Udine, 2 October 1617 That Your Excellency kept the letter of Signor Cosimo Baroncelli and did not send it to me in time is not such a great fault that Your Excellency has to think I am angry, or would have any extraordinary reason to be; it does not seem to me to be such a great sin for me to be so angry, except that under the metaphor of the letter maybe Your Excellency wanted to say something else; because to tell me I might have an extraordinary reason makes me think that what you said recently is true, and that Your Excellency wants to tell me jokingly in a way I understand, so that if I some day complained, Your Excellency could then say, I wrote to you about it, that you had reason to be upset. I thought this because your not having sent me the letter does not seem so important as to require such great excuses; I hope to God I am wrong. 54

The following week she struck again, even harder. Interpreting Giovanni was not only difficult: it was becoming painful. Now she was sure there was another woman. She summoned her best writing abilities and produced a white-​hot tirade: Udine, 10 October 1617 The more I look at those letters, the more they bother me and by God they don’t let me rest. It’s not possible for me to live like this, because I neither sleep nor eat and the constant anger I feel doesn’t let me live. But Your Excellency must find a solution: I neither will nor can be like this, because feeling like this is not good for me and for others. If you love me and want me near you, I beg you, Your Excellency, to make sure I have no such bothers, otherwise I will be forced to take

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some drastic measures, because I could not feel worse. You must forgive me, Your Most Illustrious Excellency, if I write to you in such a resolute tone but I was provoked into this and I kiss your hands. 55

If the writing did not exactly make her feel better, at least it may have made her feel more in control. She added a new request. Show me the woman. Giovanni resorted to the best defense he knew, when there was no defense: to plead ignorance. He would admit everything that was necessary to admit, except his own fault, thus taking the accusation away from the accuser. On October 10, in a letter Livia received a few days later, he acknowledged that there was a woman—no one in particular, just someone in trouble whom he was trying to protect, and there had been some misunderstanding. If Livia really wanted he would be happy to arrange a meeting, but he had no idea where the woman was at present. He had organized for her removal from Friuli at his own expense because her presence there was becoming burdensome. He was very busy with the war and could not worry about every civilian in the area. He would make a few inquiries as to her whereabouts and get back to Livia. There was no rush, he said. So smooth, so superior, so like the general that he knew he was. He played for time, hoping that a better solution would occur to him if the problem did not just go away by itself. Livia already knew the truth because she had the evidence about the physician. Now was the time to use it, citing chapter and verse. What made things worse, we may imagine, was the sensation of being surrounded by the accomplices to her betrayal. It would have been just another reminder that any sense of being in control was actually an illusion, that every scene of her life was directed by Giovanni. She let out another raging tirade, this time repeating her request to see the woman. Udine, 14 October 1617 The letter of Your Excellency of the 10th of this month would have given me great satisfaction if it had been possible for me to believe your words fully, especially concerning that disgraceful woman, which is difficult to do because you, Your Excellency, have deceived

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me so many times regarding this matter that I don’t know if I should believe you this time. But since Your Excellency writes to me that you’ll make sure that I have her in my hands if this is what I want, and because I don’t want to trust a third person any more, I will accept Your Excellency’s offer; therefore I beg Your Excellency to make sure I get my hands on her. Don’t tell me “I don’t know where she is,” because I know very well that Your Excellency knows, because I found in a letter of Giovanni Galetti dated the 17th of April saying that they were having her cured and that she needed a double purge and the money Your Excellency ordered to be paid, were for having her cured, and Your Excellency wants me to think it was to get her out of the way; I was so ashamed in front of these gentlemen that I would have come all the way over there to show Your Excellency how you treat me. But let it please Your Most Illustrious Excellency to believe that I do not want things to stay like this because the anger would kill me. And you, Your Excellency, must take care that I don’t do anything crazy, because, believe me, my anger is eating away at me and I can’t live like this. I speak to you openly because it’s not possible for me to remain serene, because I would die and you, Your Excellency, would have a laugh about it. I say this because if you love me the way you say you do, you wouldn’t give me these afflictions.56

To show his devotion, Giovanni must act now, according to her instructions. Then, at least, she could pretend that her word was his command, as he always claimed. What made things worse was that this was not even the first time. On two other occasions, she had suspected betrayals, but she never had enough information to launch any precise accusations or face her lover with the evidence of his transgression. Back then, she probably made some vague allusions and had been satisfied with the response. This we gather from the absence of any references in the correspondence to the first two of the “three times” of which she speaks in October 1617. 57 Now, very likely, she was as much encouraged by the increasing signs of devotion coming from Giovanni as she was disappointed by the new evidence. The two contrary feelings strengthened her resolve to state openly what her position was and let him fight for her.

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Gabriele Ughi, Giovanni’s agent, obviously on Giovanni’s urging, chimed in from Florence to ease Livia’s mind, adding some comic relief to the developing tragedy. Giovanni, he suggested, had already passed the test of his devotion. How could Livia be so skeptical? Was this fair? The tone shifted from the comic to the serious. However, Livia refused to be taken in by another expert at the letter-​writing arts. She immediately saw the significance of the pseudo-​erudite allusions and was ready with the answer. She happened to know about the ancient legend he cited, of Leucippe and Clitophon, which had made a small sensation in the retelling by Lodovico Dolce published in Venice.58 It was irrelevant to the present case, she said. Leucippe endured a series of dramatic abductions, having to rebuff the advances of abductors far more powerful than she, after which she was still able to prove her virginity, whereupon Clitophon took her as his spouse. There was no virgin in the present case. Udine, 15 October 1617 My dear Signor Gabriello, all the comparisons Your Lordship makes are appropriate except this one at the beginning of the letter, concerning the story of that little work called Leucippe and Clitophon, which does not seem relevant to me, i.e., in relation to the business we both know about. In fact, it’s contrary, because that girl was badly treated, but wrongly, and in this case there is no innocence, because the deeds speak loudly, and you know as much as I do whether I am the reason why His Excellency became a tyrant: and there is no one who is guiltier here than His Excellency, because if he hadn’t made the first mistake, then the second and then the third, of violating his word to me, not one but three times, in this business, we would not be at this pretty pass. 59

Even literature was against Giovanni. All that was left was for him to expiate his sin. Whatever had actually transpired, the basic outlines were enough for Livia. Giovanni may have wondered whether he would ever know everything. Was he the victim of yet another deception? Frustrations at the front in the Friulian war had taken their toll. Alone at the front, despite his hopeful plan to keep Livia within reach, he sought what

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immediate consolation was ready at hand: flattering words and blandishments, the warmth of another body. He bestowed his affections (he wouldn’t have called it love) on a woman of spirit and some resources— apparently a recurring theme in his life. He no doubt thought she would be harmless because she was only in Friuli temporarily on some errand and would soon return home to Florence. But how did things get so complicated so fast? Was she indirectly acquainted with his relatives, who endorsed her goodwill mission, perhaps sending along their greetings? Did they hope she might distract him from Livia? Had they once again stepped in to disrupt his life? In any case, the matter got out of hand, both for him and for her, and apparently the encounters became regular. Months went by. There was a pregnancy. The abortion-​ inducing drug failed to work, or the woman failed to take it, hoping by this to press some claim upon his honor.60 He made clear by words and actions that his involvement would never be more than purely casual. The woman may have returned to Florence to apply some leverage. Her relatives would have taken some interest in the matter: the lover was a Medici prince, after all. By this time Giovanni had nothing more to hide. The basis of his relationship with Livia, had been that abstinence sharpens appetite. Now he had gone too far. Livia had penetrated the armor of his eloquence and ripped the mask off his chivalric persona. All he had left was his contrition and his misery. The point was, what now? He started his letter of the eighteenth with the usual declaration of innocence, knowing how hollow it must ring to her. Fara, in the Venetian camp, 18 October 1617 I remain with an immortal obligation to Your Most Illustrious Ladyship, seeing that everything comes from the affection you have for me, without my deserving it, and I hope to gain pardon for the past, because I am ready and most disposed to make amends, if I can, praying with humility to soften the soul of Your Most Illustrious Ladyship; I beg you not to keep the unfavorable opinion you have of me, because I am certain that in the matter Your Most Illustrious Ladyship writes about, My Mistress, you are making by God a very

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great mistake, taking me for a madman who might have preferred such a woman or considered her equal to you, when I would not leave behind even the shadow of your shoes to follow somebody else, no matter how great her merit, nor would I dream of comparing the sun to the mud. You do me too great a wrong, and by God without reason, because I have never even dreamt of doing such a bestial thing. Indeed I would have behaved brutally as a brute beast, if I had had such a crazy, vain, stupid and evil thought. My idea was most foolish, and I confess that I have erred, my mistress, but the end, by the true and immortal God, was never other than what I have already repeated so many times, so I won’t bore you with it now. I have erred, it’s true, because I didn’t think that my act would cause any harm and I had promised security, but it was a mistake on my part to make such a promise and by God I’m paying for it. In my behavior, My Dear Mistress, there is no willingness to err, no contempt of God, no imaginable regard for such a vile subject.61

The Platonic stereotypes of purity and bestiality seemed a perfect fit for the occasion. He would have to match his words by his acts. Meanwhile he followed the Venetian dictum that nighttime brings good counsel. Tomorrow came, and with it a new plan. Giovanni would agree to Livia’s demand for the woman to be delivered so she could settle the matter in person. He would mobilize various servants to carry out the abduction with the maximum reserve. The pretext would be a new encounter with him; the itinerary, by way of Bologna. Fara, 19 October 1617 Girolamo the porter will conduct her, as I have ordered, and I believe it will take place as I say, as long as he is not too old, but I think he is strong enough. I did not write why or how, only the necessary words so things will proceed infallibly without raising suspicions. I cannot know which day he will arrive, except by guessing, because the trip can take more or less time according to when it starts, and I do not know when this will be.

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He displaced the guilt by turning to the schedule. But if the letters go out with this post, that is, Saturday the 21st, they will be in Florence Thursday, eight days from today, that is, the 26th; and if they leave eight days from Saturday, i.e., the 28th, they will be in Venice fifteen days from today, that is, the 2nd of November; but if they do not leave immediately for some reason and were sent with the other postman, this whole calculation would be extended just so long as the length of the delay.

The next orders took the whole matter out of the personal and into the area of espionage and covert operations. I ordered that as soon as the letters arrived, she has to be told that she must come via Bologna, accompanied by the said Girolamo, and that no one should see her leave: this I told Girolamo; and I frightened the parents into refraining from holding her back or discouraging her, so they should not say anything, and she should just get in the boat and leave. I will order her to go directly to the Florentine post station in Venice, and there Your Most Illustrious Ladyship will command what she has to do; I only mention now that if I do not know to whom she is to be given, perhaps Girolamo will cause some trouble; but I will write as Your Most Illustrious Ladyship will see written in the letter accompanying this one, that Girolamo will consign her to whoever gives him this letter, and this I believe will be enough to make sure he obeys me, seeing my hand, my seal, my signature, so not even I will know who will get her, because Your Most Illustrious Ladyship has no more faith in me.62

If everything went as expected, Livia would appear at the appointed time and make her own position very clear: Giovanni belonged to her, and the couple would not allow any interference, so back off. She would offer cash if necessary. The woman would leave, never to be heard from again. If Livia found some stronger solution, no trace has been left in the records, and the absence of a major scandal may suggest that equilibrium was peacefully restored. We will never know. In any case, the crisis was over, Livia was satisfied, Giovanni was relieved, and life and love went on.

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g Giovanni seems to have drawn a dark veil over the whole matter; yet subsequent letters indicate he knew nothing would ever be the same. Not because of the missing woman or because of Livia and the usual bitterness between lovers scarred from the same wound inflicted by deceit. The whole affair with Livia made him think about himself and the world in ways he may never have thought possible. Perhaps he was surprised to discover what Livia meant to him, and he only began to realize the depth of his involvement when he risked spoiling things by his own behavior. A new path now opened to his own self-​consciousness. He tried to tell her in words she might understand. Fara, in the Venetian Camp, 15 October 1617 Only one thing remains fixed in my mind, My Lady, and it so torments me I could kill myself, and it is, that I believe I am badly considered by Your Most Illustrious Ladyship; and because you are, My Lady, of very powerful impressions and perfect memory, with a soul inclined to desire satisfaction from whoever offends you, the thought that I should forever be seen in this way, viewed with disdain and not liked, so that no action of mine will ever be accepted or considered to be sincere: I do not know how to live with this bad impression of Your Most Illustrious Ladyship, because I serve you in order to be able to revere and adore you quietly, to find peace and consolation, and the way things are I will have a bad life, perpetual restlessness and great anguish, to the point that my every effort will be in vain, my every thought will achieve nothing, and I’ll never please you again, and I’ll be grinding water in a mortar.63

When he attempted to grasp what he really thought and felt, he came up against contraries and contradictions that were becoming unbearable. My Illustrious ladyship, this thought scares me and torments me. In your letter I read such resolute words that I am most desperate about this and I don’t know what to do with myself, because, as God is my witness, this constant suffering at my age, without any hope to find

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peace, after having served you for so long, this impression that I can never hope to erase, although Your Most Illustrious Ladyship has every right [to feel this way], the perpetual tribulation that awaits me for these few years that I have left from fifty onward, the constant torment of knowing that I am always misjudged, always considered to be a perfidious, disloyal bad-​natured person with an unstable mind, to receive this constant mortification, My Illustrious Ladyship, is an arduous task.64

At this point in the letter, after five pages with still more to go, we begin to wonder about the thought processes behind this outpour­ ­ing. Perhaps for the first time, Giovanni wondered whether or not he was a bad person, after all, in the eyes of the world. He needed con­ firmation about his good will from the person whose opinion mattered most. In the documents at hand, we seem to discern an inner conflict. What Giovanni thought about this conflict is something else again. As a youth he had met the master of self-​knowledge, Michel de Montaigne, at the dinner table in Palazzo Pitti.65 Perhaps he knew the Essays in Girolamo Naselli’s Italian translation published in Ferrara in 1590.66 His own tribulations were as far from the skepticism-​based ones of Montaigne, a man tormented by the means for discerning truth, as they were from the faith-​based tribulations of Augustine, tormented by the need to avoid sin. The Giovanni we are coming to know would not have been so concerned about whether things he heard or read were true or not, provided that he could use them; and as for sin, as the theologians defined it, he would repent in the end. What he may have appreciated in Montaigne was the insight that experiences did not present themselves to his consciousness as a unitary whole; he seemed to be overwhelmed with competing wills. He was aware of a self that he would like to repudiate, in contrast with the self that he accepted and adored. He might have said it just as in Montaigne’s words: “We are all made up of patches and put together in so shapeless and diverse a fashion that every piece plays its own game, and there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.”67

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Overcoming the self-​contradictions was a worthy challenge, Montaigne suggested, but not an easy one. Giovanni agreed. He began to measure himself by reflection from her. The experience of their exchanges of love and affection, as well as their battles, gave him the perspective necessary for self-​observation. Did he take to heart Montaigne’s insight that love of a woman was “a reckless and fickle flame, wavering and inconstant; a fever flame, subject to paroxysms and intermissions, and that holds us but by one corner”?68 Unlike Montaigne, he was not discouraged. In fact, he forged his consciousness by by allowing himself to burn in this flame. Pain after all was a drug, for which he had a far greater tolerance than Montaigne. He bore the scars to prove it. His letters, like the Essays, would be an extended imaginary conversation between him and himself, as well as between himself and the idealized Livia. Fara, in the Venetian camp, 18 October 1617 I am not so bestially sensual as not to be able to tell the difference between precious jewels and excrement; by God! don’t consider me to be such a beast, I beg you, Your Most Illustrious Ladyship, because the thought alone leaves me breathless.69

Livia was at once his judge, his punisher, his muse, and his other self. The necessity to commit words to a page, imposed more and more by time and distance, inevitably required deeper thoughts concerning love, affection, the other person, and his own being. Even after the disposal of the rival woman and the return of serenity, the struggle continued: this time, not with Livia, only with himself. Yet once again, Livia was the mirror, the trampoline, the backboard of his ideas. Sperone Speroni, in a dialogue On Love, expressed a similar idea to the one that may have occurred to Giovanni, where a character says, “the lover seems to me properly speaking a portrait of the beloved, and the lover, by love, considering the behavior and the actions of the beloved, may better know the essence and the worth of the latter, than by any other means.”70 Writing letters with a view of the beloved in mind, therefore, was a way of coming to terms with himself. Perhaps he ­wondered whether the contemplating or the loving brought more

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knowledge: surely Aristotle was wrong to prefer the latter path to the former; but the explication of the Ethics by Galeazzo Florimondo, present in his library, gave no insights.71 Mariano, 17 March 1618 Believe me, My Mistress, considering that you are far from me and knowing your great merit and other most noble and most worthy qualities, and knowing my small ability to serve you, not because of any lack of willingness but by lack of power and force, and the small merit I have acquired by my servitude, not having been able to indicate in the tiniest way the extent of my obligation for the infinite courtesies and favors that I have always received from Your Ladyship, My Mistress, makes me so confused in myself, that by God I do not know where I am, whether I am half-​d iscouraged or am almost los­ ­ing my mind, I fear and I tremble, confide and hope, and thus fluctuating, by the true God, I almost do not know what I am doing; I thought I felt your departure in my soul; but truly I did not think it would afflict me so much, because I consoled myself by the power of my thoughts; but now feeling the privation afflict me, and my contentment consisting only of castles in the air, by God, by God, I truly do not know if I can stand it; I continue to depend as always on some sign from Your Most Illustrious Ladyship, who, as my guiding star, will point the direction of every action of mine.72

He wished to do what he could not do; he wished to be what he could not be. It was a conflict of wills: all his own. Seneca had the right words: “Magnam rem puta unum hominem agere: Consider it a great thing to play the part of a single man.”73 Giovanni sought recourse in another form of expression. Now, by God, would be the time to become a poet again; but the occupations prevent me and also the confusion I have in my head from the thousand thoughts that this distance places there.74

Only art could represent, in an instant, a psychological insight that otherwise took volumes to explain. In his mind, he would be a poet; in life, there was no time.

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g Throughout 1618 and 1619, retirement, leisure, and the multiplying ailments triggered new preoccupations. Livia, after all, was a living person, not a figment of his imagination. He was no Dante, envisioning a girl, a woman, whom he would never know.75 She had her needs, and he had his duties. If she was to survive him in anything like the style to which she had become accustomed, they would have to be legally married. Continuing his biological line, making himself eternal by his brood, exemplifying the obsessions of Francesco Barbaro and Sabba da Castiglione, the Renaissance theorists of domesticity, not to mention his own relatives—that was for conventional couples, not for him or for her.76 Their relations and their love existed in some other realm, inaccessible to the traditional family, and for which the best arguments were probably more on the side of the adulterers, or at least, the unofficially joined. However, marriage could at least settle a few of Livia’s doubts about his philandering and give her some peace of mind if the worst should happen. After all, in the event of a tragedy, Livia was once again a woman in trouble. She stood no chance alone in a hostile world, without his name and his property. The annulment proceedings, concluded successfully in June, freed her from her previous marriage. Now was the time. Thus on the 25th of August, Livia and Giovanni became man and wife, by a simple ceremony in San Giovanni Decollato in Venice, a church connected with Florence by way of the city patron. Giovanni chose two witnesses, Bartolomeo de’ Barbieri and Antonio Succarelli, from among the Florentine community that often gathered there. To make sure there was no interference from his relatives, he obtained a dispensation from the patriarch of Venice waiving publication of the banns.77 Now, despite the other Medici, she was part of the family. There was nothing they could do (so he hoped). They would have to respect her and her new child, now seven months in her womb. Thoughts about the future opened a new perspective on the significance of this time in his life. The documents suggest a sense that he was moving toward some kind of final stage. Maybe he quietly rejoiced that he did not yet look like the “third age of man” represented in the

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painting by Giorgione in his father’s collection at Pitti: he could still pass for a lusty prince of pleasure, so there were still a few good years left. Soon there would be a resolution, comfort, and eventually, peace— in the company of Livia. He wrote a stylish tribute to domestic bliss, as he saw it. Villa Torniello, Paluello, 23 September 1619 I beg you, Your Most Illustrious Ladyship, to remember me and keep me in your good graces, for the very devout and obliged servant that I am and will forever be, since I have no other desire than to be certain that you will keep me in your good favor. This is my goal and my concern, and [if I obtain this] I can be sure to live quietly until my dying day. Accompanied by this thought I have sailed through life and I have never feared storms or tempests, and no matter how difficult the voyage I have never given up hope of reaching the harbor and finally I have arrived, and for this I praise God with pure love and I give affectionate thanks to you, Your Most Illustrious Lady­ ship, and I beseech you to grant me with your generosity that tranquility in life that I have always aspired to obtain from your kindness, because in that I find my real rest and in you, Your Most Illustrious Ladyship, I put my trust and place my hopes.78

She was his one certainty in a tumultuous world (just as he was for her). The enigma that had been his life so far was finally solved. There was only one remaining problem: the Medici family—the boon and bane of his existence. Livia, too, could have no illusions about the general opinions circulating in her regard within the Florentine court. Perhaps she occasionally thought about having to face the family again, and the thought repelled her. She would also have been reminded of the insecurities that had plagued her life before Giovanni. Without him, she would be at their mercy, and she could count on there being little enough of that. She appealed to him to think of a way to make her safe forever. That, after all, was the meaning of everlasting love. Grab up your sword, knight, and save your lady, we imagine her repeating, whenever she could. Not one to be daunted by the impossible, he invented an ingenious stratagem. They would set up two legally separate households: one his,

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one hers—one in the villa at Paluello outside Padua, and one in Venice. Hers would contain everything she needed for a dignified life; and his, as much as he needed to get by. Whatever the Medici family might attempt to do, at least she would have her possessions, her child, and her home. Villa Torniello a Paluello, 4 December 1620 I have resolved to put down on this paper the small remedy that I have thought could be adopted, to resolve the doubt Your Most Illustrious Ladyship last expressed, namely, that on my death she would have trouble standing up for her interests, in the house where I lived. . . . ​There is no doubt that the difficulty Your Most Illustrious Ladyship indicates could only come from my relatives, who might pretend that what is in the house is mine, or came from me, and therefore, although wrongly, wish to take possession of it; and they might use as a pretext that it belongs to this poor little son of Your Ladyship and me; in this case I think the best and most secure way is to separate everything that is necessary for my use from everything that is of Your Most Illustrious Ladyship, and keep it separately in a place, and in a separate house, where I will live, so that everyone, including those in the house where you will be, will know that there is nothing more there belonging to me, because, when God pleases to liberate me from the travails of this world, no one whatsoever can say this is mine, except what will be with me, in the house where I will live.79

Having finally set out in words what he had been thinking for a long time, he may have considered that, as a gentleman, as a hero, as a lover, as a man, he had done all he could. He might now rest in peace. But how could he get Livia to agree? Given the terms of their relationship as she now understood them, she would never accept any form of permanent separation. The war letters were a proof of that. The terms therefore had to change. To bring Livia into the plan, he had to make one final sacrifice‑the supreme sacrifice. He had to seemingly turn his back on her. He had to tell her that he saw his own death on the horizon and wished for a solitude that in his heart he really abhorred. Their last years together, he had to say, must take into

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account his advancing years. Above all, he explained, he wished to avoid becoming a burden. He would spare her the “constant demands” typical of “the capriciousness of age.” Their life in each other’s physical presence every day, one constantly in the way of the other, would spoil what they had. They would henceforth live apart: he with his books, she with her child. Any time she wished, he would stay for a few days, a week, a month, or whatever time was necessary to satisfy her desires and bolster her contentment. She only had to say the word and he would come running. “I shall fly to where you are and in a few hours I will be able to serve your every command.” Their “souls would remain wholly united” while their bodies remained apart only to the extent required for living in peace. Harmony would be achieved, in appearance and in fact. Nor, he added, should she imagine that the old bugbear of competing affections would ever bother them again: he was cured, once and for all, of the vice of infidelity. Perhaps Livia suspected that the apparent act of generosity might be the greatest ruse of all. Perhaps she had a presentiment that Giovanni had something new up his sleeve; in any case, when he first presented the project to her she dissolved in tears.80 Whether he was actually trying to cast her aside and go forth once more as a hunter in the fields of love, as Cosimo had done after sidelining Eleonora, she would never know. Soon the final illness overtook him, and Palazzo Cappello, which he had rented in 1620 on the remote island of Murano, a short boat ride from the center of Venice, became his hospital.81 The solitary joys of the countryside, if such were what he really craved, would remain a dream. Indeed, the creation of a dream-​world out of a playful notion of who they were, amid an accumulating inventory of possessions, was a leitmotif of their story.

5 A Place for Things

The inventories, the probate records, and the correspondence with

builders and agents all suggest the framing of a certain kind of life. On a typical evening, a soft tap at the new oak portal and Livia’s butler, Antonio Ceccherelli, would let Giovanni in. Maybe she would be waiting in the hall by the sculpted mantelpiece where her name was set in stone, a none too subtle reminder to their acquaintances that this was her domain.1 A few words, perhaps a quick embrace, and they would pass through to the garden in the back. This feature, apart from the location across via del Parione from Giovanni’s palazzo, had been the main attraction of the property when she got it on a lifetime lease from the Ardingelli family, well-​established owners in this part of Florence.2 If they walked past the freshly planted spring flowerbeds, they might have paused by the central fountain, where the dribbling water gave an undertone to the evening birdsong and the wind just beginning to rustle in the fruit trees. Back in the house, a table of edible and potable delights would await them to accompany their banter concerning the topics of the day. Finally, on a pretext, she would slip upstairs to her bedroom; he would follow. “Sometimes I was the one who undressed him when he went to sleep with her,” Ceccherelli

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later reported to the court attempting to divest Livia of the property left to her by the deceased lover. Maybe she would watch.3 Off would come the dagger, the cape, the doublet, the stockings, possibly not in a heap on the floor but all conveniently laid out as the servant discreetly bowed and left. She would surrender her own garments delicate piece by delicate piece to her lady in waiting. The stage having been prepared so meticulously, the intimacies would begin. She his Venus; he her Adonis: morning would break on a scene of conquest, each by the other, and the day would start anew. Such, at least, was the evident intention, and the records (including Ceccherelli’s testimony) indicate there were some times like that. However, for almost the duration of their life together, the various structures were still being built. While the front and back façades of the house in Parione were under construction, digging went on in the garden. Any movements around the property required stepping over clumps of stone, bypassing piles of earth and tools, dodging workers and shipments of building materials. While they designed Parione, they were shipping things to Venice; and once in Venice, they worked on Montughi. Thoughts of what they needed here and there pervadedtheir conversation when they were together and their letters when they were apart. They wanted whatever Giovanni’s improving position would some day allow, and they spent their days preparing for a future that never came. Their aspirations rose in inverse proportion to the possibility of realizing them. They were a dream in the making, and the making was their life. Between one residence and the next, they rushed breathlessly to manufacture the greatness they thought they deserved. Fortunes came in and went out, spent on immense quantities of jewels, paintings, and sculptures; massive home and garden improvements; and all the clothing to be worn in the various activities that the spaces were meant to contain.4 The movable items, boxed and shipped back to Florence from Venice after Giovanni died, would become a legend at the Court of Wards responsible for keeping track of it all. Status, indeed, depended on the admiration of the inferiors, and admiration, due to the literal-​ mindedness of most people, depended on owning more things. They hardly needed Girolamo Muzio, the theorist of nobility, to tell them

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that.5 Even if there was no one else around to see what they had, things perhaps made them feel more like who they were. Accordingly, when not doing anything else, they spent their time in the company of agents of various kinds—architects, artists, tradesmen of all sorts, writing around to manufacturers and merchants, in what seems to have been a mad rush to make their greatness tangible. While examining the next pearl to be acquired or viewing samples of fine fabric for the next garment to be made, they could muffle, not silence, the nagging thought that the next day might well be their last.6

g At acquiring the trappings of greatness, Giovanni had an enormous head start. His income of some ten thousand scudi per year, and the associated property, made him one of the richer men in Florence.7 The stunning patrimony included what was left to him by Cosimo I plus purchases made through other assets or exchanged with his brothers in return for an annuity (in the case of certain iron mines). Apart from the interest-​yielding hoard of Spanish government bonds held in Rome and deposits in the public bank in Florence (Monte di Pietà), there were dozens of income-​producing properties.8 Such were the three flour mills outside of Florence, including their appurtenances and profits: one near the walls of Pisa, another outside Porta al Prato, and yet another on the Bisenzio River. In the city, there were the mills on the Arno River at Ognissanti, to the west of Ponte alla Carraia. There were farmlands in and around the town of Limite (now Capraia e Limite) on the Arno between Prato and Empoli. There were three entire canals: one around the forest called the Navetta, at the bend in the Arno just above Pontedera; another at Bièntina, just north of Calcinaia; and yet another at Vicopisano, along the Arno to the west of Calcinaia. There were houses adjoining the palazzo della Sapienza in Pisa, the main building of the university then and now the university library. More houses with adjoining agricultural businesses were in Cerreto Guidi, Vinci (near the birthplace of Leonardo), and in Fucecchio and Empoli. Along the city wall at Porta al Prato, there was a building and garden known as La Vaga Loggia, which would be transformed into

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public baths under the Lorraine government two centuries later.9 Last but not least, there was the palazzo in via del Parione. He never worried about where the wealth came from, only what to do with it. The family’s centuries-​long spending spree since their ancestors made a fortune in banking could clearly not stop with him.10 Nor could he bear to look much worse than the other plutocrats in Florence, including the sons of the Riccardi and Strozzi families, and others whose parents and grandparents had survived the bankruptcies, wars, plagues, and confiscations of the past two centuries and funneled wealth carefully down the somewhat (at least in his city) recently discovered path of primogeniture, salting the larger portions away into permanent trusts.11 But he had little inclination to embrace the mission spelled out in these years by state theorist Giovanni Botero, to spend conspicuously for the greatness of his city.12 If his private money contributed in some way to the beautification of the public space, so much the better; he would not look for it.13 He needed no excuse for the gulf between the poor and himself: there was no reason to justify a law of nature. Wealth, he knew, would not make virtue, but it helped. His ideas were probably molded less by the gospel about the camel, the rich man, and the eye of a needle, a staple of zealous preachers in commercial cities, than by the disagreements between Muzio and another late ­sixteenth-​century noble theorist, Alessandro Sardo.14 Of family roots and personal merit, Sardo preferred the former, while Muzio, the latter; but they agreed that the main component of nobility was perfection. That would be Giovanni’s goal, evinced in as many of his endeavors as we have been able to document. To reach perfection, they said, economic means were as important as morality, inasmuch as excellent ­virtues require wealth to inspire great deeds. Wealth therefore was a means not an end: luxury goods, great houses, such were the signs of a potential—a potential to do good—and the sign must be as apparent as it should be rare. If his behavior in any way reflected his thinking, he could not agree more. After all, the chief result of the laxly enforced sumptuary legislation in every Italian city, despite the stated banalities about preventing families from ruining themselves by the rush to spend, was to provide up-​to-​date lists of the latest extravagances for

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those eligible to flaunt them. He was fully committed to doing his part in this, if necessary.15 Beauty was a way of life, Giovanni believed: one worth living to the fullest and protecting with all his power. It was the essence of buon gusto or “good taste” in all things. Thinkers had given the selfish quest for it a good name by the association with such other more obviously useful eternal concepts as “truth” and “the good.” Even his favorite poet, Tasso, had gotten carried away by the ambiguities of Plato’s original word for it in Greek, το καλου, rolling all these concepts into one key value, the only one worth having.16 The question of whether beauty was more prevalent in simple things or in composite ones, furiously debated by writers as diverse as the philosopher Marsilio Ficino and the ex-​courtesan Tullia d’Aragona, probably seemed, if he was familiar enough with their ideas to make a judgment, as pointless as the question of whether the artist was nature’s imitator (a thought attributed to Leonardo) or nature’s perfector (supposedly Michelangelo’s view).17 Whatever the definition, whatever the cause, he knew the acquisition of beauty was an attribute of the greatness to which he aspired. Pursuing beauty required time and talent, and he started at an early age.18 When he was only seventeen, Raffaello Borghini dedicated a dialogue to him on the matter. He knew the main speakers in the work—all Florentine noblemen, knights of the order of Santo Stefano, friends of his family; and he knew the villa Il Riposo belonging to Bernardo Vecchietti, in the countryside outside Bagno a Ripoli, where the conversations were supposed to have taken place. The life depicted there, a far cry from the loud shooting parties at the Medici villa at Artimino in Ferdinando’s day, seemed to represent an ideal worth his striving. He could imagine himself on an afternoon hike down a Tuscan hillside and up another, with the villages of Grassina or Lampeggio or the height of San Giusto a Monterantoli in the distance, rewarded at the end by a visit to a remote chapel, home to a half-​forgotten fresco cycle. The description of humans in harmony with nature was a better essay on painting than so many dry treatises: “They had arrived in a meadow resembling a theater, arrayed by thousands of varieties of flowers appearing to them like a very charming carpet, inviting everyone on it to take a rest. This was densely surrounded by a tall garland of cypresses

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and thick grass, shaded by the cypresses which looked almost black.”19 A metaphorical quest was not enough. He would attempt to acquire as much beauty as he could and enjoy the acquisitions as long as ­possible. He lavished the greatest attention on the palazzo in Parione, his first real residence after Pitti. He had come here looking for independence around 1588, when he began to outgrow his eight small rooms on the ground floor of the family compound (Figure 5.1).20 Most likely, he had no objection to the rooms themselves, situated on the north side of Pitti directly beneath the main kitchens, with high barrel-​vaulted ceilings and a view on the main courtyard. They were as convenient for him as they would be to later planners who turned them into a bar/café serving modern tourists. For conducting business and entertaining visitors, he had easy access to the more impressive public rooms on the first floor where the real art was hung. The kitchen produced victuals fit to delight the most demanding epicureans in Italy. The center of town across the river was accessible in rain or shine, far above the crowds, by way of Vasari’s corridor over the Ponte Vecchio. But as his interests developed, he sought a stage of his own, with no relatives breathing down his neck. To Pitti, for instance, he could never have brought Livia, and as time went on, he needed more and more space for her and his many other acquisitions. Parione was ideal for the way he wished to live: just far enough from the gaze of the court and the curious to give an impression of secluded detachment, yet minutes away by carriage from the cathedral square and Piazza della Signoria. The vicinity to the river, whence the name (pars rionis recalled the ancient times when the whole area was just a riverbank), may well have given him a sense of freedom from the claustrophobic urban canyons. He owned a large complex of buildings on the south side of the street, mostly confiscated by his father back in 1555 from the rebel Altoviti family, among the losers in the Siena war.21 To the east was the basilica of Santa Trinita, redone by Buontalenti shortly before he moved in and containing the famous frescoes by Ghirlandaio of the life of Saint Francis. Due west was the open space where Palazzo Ricasoli overlooked the north end of Ponte alla Carraia. Here the only protocol was what he defined for himself; the guests

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Figure 5.1. ​Plan of Palazzo Pitti, showing Don Giovanni’s rooms (F, G, H, I, K, L, M, N). (Archivio di Stato di Firenze)

came and went as he pleased. No one muttered about the company he kept or the way he, or they, behaved. By the time he got around to decorating the place, he had become a formidable connoisseur.22 Already while at Pitti, surrounded by the best productions and the best producers, he learned to tell the real from the fake, the master’s work from the school’s, the precious from the commonplace. He could have been the model of the well-​bred nobleman mentioned in Baldassarre Castiglione’s famous treatise on courtiership, written in the age of his grandfather; although if ever he consulted it, as can easily be imagined, he would have had very mixed feelings regarding the implicit vein of servitude to princes in the author’s tone.23 Like the characters in the book, he learned about art not only by looking but by making, and he did them one better by becoming a draftsman and an architect in his own right. When in doubt, Buontalenti and the rest of the Medici artists were ready to offer advice. He exemplified Castiglione’s suggestion that a well-​ordered life

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required a thorough knowledge of beauty not only in order to acquire the best objects but in order for the objects to produce their most pleasurable effects on the soul.24 His acquisitions would not only be for showing others but for himself. Interior and exterior space, he knew from education as well as experience, must contain, represent, and celebrate all the disparate strands of a life well lived.25 Although he inherited the basic structure, he alone would be responsible for everything else. He launched into the project with the same enthusiasm he devoted to church façades, fortresses, and stage design. A home was far more than a place to live—any of the Medici residences was proof of this. His nephew Don Antonio had turned the Casino di San Marco, built by Buontalenti in the time of Grand Duke Francesco, into a meeting place for occult interests and natural history collectors among the elite in Florence. The Casino’s tidy compound—rooms, outbuildings, laboratory, and garden, on the west side of via Larga just past the Dominican convent on the way north from piazza San Giovanni—was becoming identified precisely with those areas of the liberal arts that Giovanni wanted as his own preserve.26 His own palazzo had to play host to all these interests and associations, and some more besides. He may have wondered which aspect of himself should be most prominent: scenographer, artist, architect, warrior, alchemist, astrologer, philosopher, or all of these combined. The question would have led him back to the underlying issue of exactly what kind of gentleman he wished to be.27 The warrior came first, we may imagine, at least in the ordering of the rooms; and accordingly, although the documents are unclear about the floor plan, the main hall and salon would very likely have joined two of his main themes: beauty and battle. He had discovered the combination firsthand and dabbled in joining action to image in a few battle diagrams that had made the rounds of the court with some success.28 War to him, far more than a business, was an aesthetic pursuit. Once on the battlefield before the town of Ostend, he described: “From the highest point we saw the enemy’s retreat, a thing well worth seeing, as it was carried out with such elegance and regularity that it seemed to be painted.”29 That the same techniques served to communicate the graceful and the terrible he knew as well as Rubens, who turned, exactly

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in this period, to Leonardo’s lost sketches for the ill-​fated battle of Anghiari fresco in the Palazzo Vecchio to create a new masterpiece. Part of the image of the fresco was engraved and circulated by Lorenzo Zachia before the original disappeared; this Rubens in turn transformed into a lovingly detailed tribute, bringing to life the condensed energy of humans and beasts pressing the limits of endurance in close combat.30 Giovanni apparently preferred a more distant view, the general’s rather than the foot soldier’s. There were plenty of opportunities on the field to hear the screams of agony and terror and smell the horse sweat mixed with manure, burning houses, and putrefying flesh; when possible, he would rest his eyes on the far-​off horizon rather than the foreground, and so would his guests. This distant perspective, we are supposing, is the reason why the paintings in question were designated not by the specific epithet “battle paintings,” but by the much more general and well-​recognized term “paesi,” which doubled as a description of landscapes. The documents attest to eight large paintings, “4⅓ braccia” wide, that is, over 2½ meters, which, considering the size, he may have exhibited in the salon and the hall rather low on the wall. 31 If our supposition is correct, the concept would have derived from the room Giovanni had already helped decorate for his half-​brother Ferdinando at the hillside villa designed by the omnipresent Buontalenti near Artimino, eleven miles west of the walls of Florence. Later known as the “battle room,” it stood across from the other better-​known salon of the fifty-​six-​room mansion, the “villa room,” containing paintings of the twelve Medici villas by Giusto Utens. Up by the ceiling vaults of the “battle room” were a number of semicircular lunette spaces to accommodate battle paintings, on subjects including “the sieges of Ostende and Grave with four or six other paesi,” later raised to seventeen in all, which Ferdinando largely left up to Giovanni to choose while on campaign in Northern Europe. “Some good painter” was sufficient—so there was no need to look for the likes of Rubens, for whom the money set aside for the project was too little anyway.32 The only other criterion was “painted with joy and in gracious colors,” so as not to clash too much with the much larger and more important paintings of biblical subjects lower down on the walls, evoking the theme of leadership (a series of the life of Moses), and portraits.33 Here, as in the

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“villa room,” Medici glory was on display; the battles must therefore include only those that the Medici had either fought or financed or both. In his own rooms, Giovanni—unlike Ferdinando, who had never gone to war—would most likely celebrate battles he had personally fought. Not all, of course; there would be a selection. Sieges would be most prominent, perhaps, because they were more picturesque: of Bergen-​op-​Zoom (1588), of Strigonia in Hungary (1695), of Ostend (1601–4), or of Grave in North Brabant (1602). The paintings would not be lunettes. Like those on the walls of the Salone del Cinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio or the Great Council Room in the doge’s palace in Venice, they would be full-​sized and at eye level. As in the case of the Artimino paintings, a lesser artist was sufficient as long as geographical situation was properly conveyed by typical elements representing the cities in question and historical accuracy was reflected in the placing of the armies. Between his engagements on the field of Flanders, Giovanni scoured the markets for himself and for Ferdinando and had the items shipped back via Amsterdam or else, depending on conditions, by land via Milan. The glories of the other family members should also have their place in the public part of the palazzo, if only as a reminder of the illustrious line from which he sprang. We may imagine that the two fine bronze busts of Cosimo I and Ferdinando, in the latest style, listed among the invoices, would have greeted guests at the entryway or in some other prominent place. When he commissioned them from the sculptor Pietro Tacca, he evidently followed his own instincts, taking a gamble on a rising talent in the Florence art scene, trained by Giambologna but still working in the maestro’s shadow—not yet the flamboyant pioneer of the Florence baroque later evidenced in the great equestrian statue of Henry IV in Paris or the monument to Philip III in Madrid. 34 The physiognomy of Cosimo likely derived from Giambologna’s equestrian monument in Piazza della Signoria, for which Tacca supplied the bas-​relief panels in the base.35 The bust of Ferdinando, on the other hand, was already one of Tacca’s best-​known subjects, an armored figure with full beard wearing the cross of the crusading order of Santo Stefano. Not to concentrate too many relatives in one place, he may

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have placed the three-​quarter length oil on canvas “portrait of the grand duke,” that is, Ferdinando, on one of the walls of the salon. In this case, as in many cases, the inventory gives us only the subject and the dimensions.36 At some distance from the public rooms, he dedicated an area exclusively to study, in the profound hope that one day he would really get around to doing some. The only clue to the location comes from a description by Giovanni’s librarian Benedetto Blanis, who fretted about the disruption of such plans in case the palazzo would have to be rented out while Giovanni was away. Very likely the room said by Blanis to be “near the door on the Arno side,” with a desk and plenty of natural light, would have accommodated a good part of Giovanni’s distinguished collection of early and modern books, licit and illicit. Major concerns were that such a space should have “no danger of dust or water” and yet be “airy.”37 The room designated as the “foundry” ( fonderia) but better described as a “laboratory” was equipped with whatever instruments might serve for his work program, including, scattered around (we imagine) on furniture and floor, the myriads of glass beakers, alembics, tubes, brass pots, scales, grinding tools, pulverizers mentioned in the records, and, presumably in some corner out of the way, a small furnace. 38 Rather than decorating the space with representations of the operations of nature, as Francesco I had done in the study at Palazzo Vecchio, he preferred to surround himself with reminders of scholars who had made something of their studies: seven portraits of “men famous for distillation,” that is, alchemists.39 A minor painter would do; he chose Giovan Maria Casini, who, despite the experience in the workshop of Federico Zuccari, was possibly (and Giovanni could testify to this) a better poet, comic actor, writer, singer, or lute player than a painter.40 The images, while not too distracting, nonetheless had to contain enough elements to identify the sometimes rather esoteric figures. We can attempt to recreate the iconographic scheme drawing upon the few traces that are left and the conventions of the time. There would be Paracelsus (the only subject specified in the documents) and Albertus Magnus, the first probably in the standard representation, with a big sword equipped with a pommel containing a precious sample of laudanum, and the second wearing a

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bishop’s mitre.41 There would also be Hermes Trismegistus, legendary originator of the Hermetic tradition, with a staff of the god Hermes or a phoenix representing the last stage of the alchemical process, and possibly Zosimus, an Egyptian encyclopedist of the time of Constantine, with a Greek omega indicating the title of the major work. The next experts are slightly harder to guess. Was there a likeness of Morienus (or Morienes), supposedly an ancient Roman alchemist, portrayed on the elaborate title page to Oswald Croll’s Basilica Chymica (1609) with two snakes eating each other’s tails to indicate some notion about the circularity between the known and the unknown? What about Geber Ja  ¯bir ibn Hayya  ¯n, the eighth-​century Arab magus, in appropriate Eastern garb, gazing at the heavens, in reference to the divine aspect of the traditions he summarized, like the image in André Thevet’s biographies of famous men (1584)?42 Livia very likely had some doubts about the somber faces leering down through the stench and soot in the laboratory, if she ever had a chance to peek inside, but on the whole, when she first visited the palazzo in 1609, she was probably impressed. She may have still thought beauty and luxury were for others, not for her. We may imagine that she found it difficult to fathom that the person with whom she shared intimacy and friendship owned all these things. The expensive gifts had not yet become routine. As the realities of her position began to dawn on her with the passing months and years, she would have begun to take a more active role in the look and feel of her surroundings. Here were fine objects, but no warmth; value but no comfort; visual display but no lyricism. Did she think that somewhere in this man’s world there ought to be a woman’s touch? Despite her lack of experience, she may have intervened where she could and where Giovanni allowed, yet the evidence is thin. Sometime after she met Giovanni, around 1611, he began acquiring delicate fabrics to cover the walls, floors, and other surfaces. Of tapestries alone, accumulated over several years, the fifty square meters would be more than enough for whatever wall space was still unadorned. Would they decide together which “bucolic” subjects would prevail, whether dances among wood nymphs or scenes of hounds, boars, and hunters? Although the grand ducal tapestry works turned out

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high-​quality wall hangings based on sketches by the likes of Bronzino and Pontormo, including what was shipped down to Rome for display in the Medici villa and cardinals’ apartments, Giovanni wanted something more special.43 He contacted the Venetian Jewish merchant Guglielmo della Baldosa, who referred the order in turn to one of the better-​known factories in the Low Countries, whose fine products the grand ducal works dreamed some day to surpass. To give character to bare tabletops there came a carpet, also from the Baldosa firm, listed as “alla persiana,” of the sort Venetian merchants specialized in importing from their Levantine contacts.44 With Livia on the scene, one of the rooms evidently began to take shape as a place for gentler pursuits, in the company of ladies. Here Giovanni hung the four large paintings “of Venetian women,” which he had framed by the Polletti brothers in their family workshop down the street from the palazzo.45 Paintings of women were fashionable always, but as decorating devices, they had gained a new life in the Mantuan court of his niece when he was a young man. Showing ostentatious hairstyles and splendid fashions denoting Venice, these images made the other paintings of Florentine women in the palazzo look strikingly austere. Maybe he was encouraged by his half-​brother Ferdinando’s growing collection of Palma Giovane and painters from the previous generation—Tintoretto, Titian—and their respective schools, or maybe he had been eying Venetian artwork, with its deep tones and bright lights, ever since he began negotiating his position in Venice.46 By the time he bought the paintings, the thought of a permanent expatriation was already on his mind. Perhaps he never admitted so much to himself, but we may imagine that somewhere beneath his consciousness, he was seeking examples, for himself and for Livia, of the lady she was to become. Livia may have felt most at home in religious art, at least at first, if only because she knew the subject matter better than history or mythology. Neither she nor he had any recorded attachment to the Santissima Annunziata, of which he purchased a much sought-​a fter image. The original, an anonymous medieval icon in the basilica of the same name, next to the foundlings hospital at the end of via de’ Servi, had begun to help intercede in the production of miracles already by

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the fourteenth century. In the opinion of Michelangelo, it was executed “divinely” and by no human paintbrush.47 The grand dukes ordered copies less as religious paintings than as a kind of currency: gifts to be exchanged in return for favors performed or expected. Cristofano Allori made a business of executing such copies for delivery to (for instance) the Duchess of Bavaria, the Governor of Milan, and the Queen of France.48 When Giovanni acquired one such copy in 1618, apart from the beauty, he would have enjoyed the pure prestige value of sharing the company of other distinguished owners of the same work.49 Would he have placed it in the main bedroom, next to a crucifix under which there stood a prie-​dieu?50 The ten or more “images of saints” scattered here and there around the palazzo, framed (says the inventory) by the same Polletti company that did the work on the Venetian portraits, were obviously not just her idea.51 She, after all, was the one who escaped from a Catholic home for wayward girls, and he was the one who liked to place her in his firmament somewhere above God. However they chose the subjects, they no doubt would have paid the customary attention to both ancient martyrs and modern mystics. In a city of friars, St. John Gualbert, founder of the Vallombrosan order, would not be missing, nor, in a Tuscan household, would St. Catherine of Siena, the fourteenth-​century prototype of St. Teresa of Avila and model for so many aspiring girls, nor again, could St. Verdiana of Castelfiorentino, a twelfth-​century founder of convents, fail to be included. If there was St. John the Baptist, patron of Florence, there also had to be St. George, patron of Genoa. St. Lucy, praised for her purity, would have pointed in the direction of Venice, where her body was preserved. Then there might be Francis of Assisi, followed by a gallery of Church fathers, from Ambrose to Augustine. There would have been no St. Livia, since such a person never existed before the nineteenth century. There is evidence of a predilection, on someone’s part, for small objects made of precious materials, especially miniatures and cameos. Whether as gifts or as purchases, we may relate them to Livia. What role might they have played? The same as the religious art, part decoration, part talisman, part commemoration? For one piece dating to this

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period, Giovanni found the perfect craftsman on his travels in Venice: a Florentine miniaturist named Mattia Aronne. He admired Aronne’s work combining tiny paintings set in the most exquisitely worked stone with solid gold or silver fittings. For Livia he ordered a “picture with a bust on a column”—maybe even an image of Livia herself. The forty-​ five-​scudi price mostly went for the gold and the carved “stone columns” inserted on either side of the image, possibly of lapis, the material of other items in the order. 52 The split in the housing arrangements that occurred around 1612 must be explained. For all her attempts to add warmth and comfort to Giovanni’s palazzo, perhaps she never felt at home. As a guest, she would have required permission to touch this or move that. She no doubt appreciated being treated with deference by the servants, but she knew they did so only on Giovanni’s orders. She never asked for more, and she did not have to. One day in 1612 he surprised her with the most amazing gift of all: a house of her own, across via del Parione from his palazzo. Maybe he thought he was only following in the tradition of his half-​brother Francesco, who had a house built by Buontalenti especially for Bianca Cappello, his concubine and eventual wife. After the amazement wore off, perhaps she began to understand that the maturity of their relationship depended on her having something she could call her own. She would not be his kept woman (at least in the pleasant fiction they were creating for themselves); she would be his friend and lover. She would visit him, and he, more often, would come and visit her. There at the door, Antonio Ceccherelli, the butler, would be waiting. Distinguishing “his” and “hers” among the objects in the invoices and inventories is difficult but not impossible. We can imagine that she filled the interior of her own house with newly acquired items that had some elements of familiarity, since she went in with nothing. Like Giovanni, she too would have a workroom: there, if she wished, she could do some weaving, as attested by the bill from the Polletti brothers for a loom “she ordered,” with all the accoutrements.53 Livia did not entirely turn her back on the household arts she knew as a child, despite her new-​found rank and moralists’ prescriptions for women in the

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upper echelons that handwork was passé.54 Perhaps not far away were the two small gold images of her and him, which, mentioned repeatedly in the documents, she would take with her almost to the grave: larger than cameos and most likely embossed, they were more appropriate for her personal quarters than for her salon. 55 “Her room” (so-​called in the documents) was “outfitted . . . ​with tapestries,” possibly of some floral or formal pattern fit to soothe the mind and heighten the senses. 56 In the same order to Domenico Alberighi, a mattress maker from down the street at ponte alla Carraia, she got two linen mattresses and two pillows, along with the necessary bed linens and curtains for the bed. Even on the chilliest evenings, her warmth and her lover’s would be contained in a cozy quadrangle under a canopy of taffeta. By the time they got around to updating the building, they had already left for Venice. Yet Giovanni, at least, always toyed with the notion of returning to Florence in great style, if only circumstances would permit. So he launched into the project as though Livia’s house were a monument to their hopes. 57 Things that were outmoded he ordered to be demolished; when there was a chance to put in a modern flourish, he ordered it done. Tradition and the classics must be respected: scarcely a week passed in 1616 when he did not exchange plans with Francesco Renzi, his agent, for the new door, to be set between two ground-​floor kneeling windows, typical of the Florentine style introduced by Michelangelo. As in all else, he insisted on perfection. In the frenzy to get the visual aspect right, he had upper windows built, only to be ripped out again to harmonize other elements. 58 Visible from the front, there would be a brick aviary with a window at the top, the latest fashion even among those not fond of birds. 59 The main bedroom, newly built over a loggia, would look out over the back garden, through three new windows. The back door, flanked on the outside by niches for appropriate statuary (old and new), would open onto a space from which there would extend two pergolas whose pilasters were set into the stone walkway. While the architects discussed, wind took away the wooden trellises on the pilasters, followed by anxious attempts to rebuild them.60 Stone benches were constructed, which at first appeared too small, so these too had to be redone.61

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Finally, the plantings began: a mix of utility and beauty, of which only the onions and orange trees were specified, the latter, in honor of Livia, procured from a variety called “Genoese.”62 Perhaps sensing Giovanni’s frustration about being unable to view his own creations, toward the end of the job, Renzi wrote encouragingly: “Now I have to tell you that it is truly the most beautiful house in Florence.”63

g In 1615, from a certain Ferdinando Conti, descendant of an ally of Cosimo I whose family benefited from the confiscations of property belonging to the anti-​Medici faction, Giovanni acquired the villa “Le Macine” in Montughi (Figure 5.2), on a narrow road leading out of the city northwards toward Careggi, once again placing it in Livia’s name.64 This time, to mark territoriality (slightly out of range of the Florentine gossip mill), he had an elaborate coat of arms sculpted and affixed to the upper corner of the building: a shield with bands of gold and blue surmounted by a silver half-​moon.65 The more subtle significance of the last element may have amused the astrologer-​prince. Henceforth this device would be called Livia’s, though belonging in fact to a more distinguished Genoese family with a similar name. In an age of genealogical roots being invented by emerging families all over Europe, including the Medici and their satellites, the gesture was not even the most brazen. The same device would be engraved on Livia’s new set of silver, hopefully continuing the impromptu tradition with every dinner guest.66 Quickly, these spaces too filled up with artworks. At least seven landscapes took over the walls in the hall and salon. Here the generic tag “paesi” probably did not refer to landscapes with a siege going on somewhere in the distance, as it did in Giovanni’s palazzo; this was, after all, a lady’s villa, where he would have expected to bask in her glory, not his own.67 The paintings have been lost, along with the names of their authors, so we can only guess about the decorating program at work here. Were the paintings supposed to provide a background to Livia herself, so that the figure in the space would be her, not some mythological or other personage situated somewhere in the

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Figure 5.2. ​Drawing of Villa Le Macine. (Archivio di Stato di Firenze)

painting? Would painters therefore have been chosen who were known for doing works that gave a privileged place to hillsides, meadows, and streams, perhaps with a village in the distance—such as Joos de Momper or Paul Bril among the Flemings and, among the Italians, the school of the Carracci, rather than, say, the school of Giorgione?68 In the vicin­ ­ity there were hung eight depictions of “Old Testament” subjects.69 What themes did they evoke? Rather than political leadership, such as the Moses series in Artimino, perhaps they depicted female virtue— Susanna and the Elders, the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin. Only a quantity, “sixteen,” designates the smaller paintings scattered about, on “tela di fiandra,” the framing company’s list specified, referring to a particular type of linen, with an interwoven lozenge pattern, similar to one used occasionally by Caravaggio, hence Italian as well as Northern European.70 Finally, “many” were the prints, around which there would be applied some fifty “pieces of gold,” so says an overdue bill, possibly referring to “gold leaves,” all similarly presented, with highlights in ultramarine (biadetto) creating a chiaroscuro effect apparently spelled out by Giovanni and carried out according to “his order,” showing the high regard in which he held these objects.71 The garden and adjoining lands gave Giovanni wide scope for creating a special place of quiet refuge for himself and for Livia. A focal point of the area directly behind the main house would be a handsome fountain, built into a lateral wall (Figure 5.3). He drew various versions of it, including one on the back of a letter from his agent dealing partly with gutters, sideways with respect to the text, as though he had lost

Figure 5.3. ​Don Giovanni de’ Medici, design for a fountain. (Archivio di Stato di Firenze)

himself in a reverie of doodling after reading something there.72 From the triangular pediment in the drawing, far too elaborate for a doorway, there protruded a small coat of arms. The final product was perhaps not too different from the sketch. In the region of the fountain he had two dovecotes populated by twenty pairs of pigeons each, inside a tower featuring sculpted exterior surfaces—in the agent’s words, “a real

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joy” to behold.73 The joy of course was mixed with gastronomic gratification, as the couple would never lack birds or eggs for any of the many late Renaissance recipes based on these delicacies. Giovanni’s plan for Le Macine could have been a practical realization of the ideal garden described by Vincenzo Borghini. The visual aspect was capable of inspiring introspective reverence and shared delight, while the plantings supplied the necessities of life.74 Down winding paths bounded by rose bushes and rosemary were plots with produce to whet the most jaded appetites: strawberries here, artichokes and capers there. Giovanni sent the asparagus crowns especially from Venice, the tiny shoots packed in straw to ensure a crop for the first possible harvest three years hence. Livia added cauliflower seeds.75 Some cultivations were designated “alla Napoletana,” apparently referring to a planting style she would have known, although the term has since become meaningless.76 There were at least sixty fruit trees of “every sort”: figs, especially, on the better land, and almonds on the worst.77 Wine would be abundant, from an adjoining farm incorporated into the property, as the old vines were pulled out and fresh plants put in from 15,000 cuttings.78 Already in the first year, over ninety barrels were harvested of the Tuscan variety known as “verdea” for the slightly greenish hue, and more than this amount again in red, of a quality that impressed don Lorenzo and Cosimo II when they came by while Giovanni and Livia were away, perhaps surveying future acquisitions for the family should something happen to the owner.79 Meanwhile, the improvements inspired other neighbors, so that Michelangelo Baglione next door vowed to put hoe to soil on his property at once.80 And yet, to Montughi the couple would never return together; and as for Livia’s house in Florence, three years after moving everything in, they moved everything out.81 Instead, caught up in the obligations of Giovanni’s army career, they drifted from one temporary residence to another in the Venetian Republic. The first dwelling was in the parish of San Geremia, on the Grand Canal between the residences of the Spanish and Imperial ambassadors, in a palazzo belonging to the Trevisan family. Giovanni had rented the eight rooms on the piano nobile as soon as he concluded the first round of job negotiations with

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the Venetian senate back in 1610. A pied-​a-​terre in Venice confirmed his seriousness about working for the Republic. The place would also serve as a headquarters for lobbying the senators and other public officials and foreigners in town, while its strategic location favored espionage on behalf of the Medici family. Here, as to each subsequent home, they dragged as much of their possessions as they thought they needed for their flight from the world around them into a world of their own. To set the scene for their new life in Venice, Giovanni rented a full complement of household furnishings from his friend the Jewish merchant Baldosa.82 A detailed room-​by-​room account included in the rental document allows a partial reconstruction of the sort of life he had in mind. They would most likely arrive at the palazzo by water, and after climbing the stairway from the ground floor wharf to the second floor gallery or portego, they would enter an entertainment space running from one end of the palazzo to the other, with twelve silk-​ backed chairs and twelve small benches along the walls, next to some carpet-​covered tables (in the style of the time). Velvet upholstering would have added warmth to the doors off this space, which led to six elegant rooms fitted out as bedrooms.83 One of these rooms, possibly the largest, featured twelve benches and the same number of wall hangings, decorated, the inventory specified, with “fine figures.”84 Another room, possibly used as a study, had six chairs and six benches, apart from a small table.85 Yet another was decorated with wall hangings showing woodland scenes.86 The master bedroom overlooking the Grand Canal featured a large bed in carved gilded wood and surrounded by a carpet cut to fit, with a pavilion overhead and curtains of fine brocade, wall hangings of red damask with brocade trim, and six green velvet chairs.87 For the short time she stayed here, Livia appears to have settled in well enough, if only because of Giovanni’s attentions to her; but soon it was time to exchange this home for another yet more grandiose one in Palazzo Moro on the other side of the Grand Canal beyond Ca’ Foscari.88 The Friulian War from 1616 to 1617 called for various ad hoc arrangements, none of them satisfactory. To stay within reach of one another, they took a house in Palma and another in Udine. Status was always a consideration: their accommodations must reflect not only them­­

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selves as individuals but also the group to which they belonged; any derogations from elegance might be interpreted as a loss of honor. They attached no other great value to these borrowed places except the pure convenience. Livia hated the locations, but she attempted to keep her emotions in control. They had various possessions brought, only to have them taken away again. Livia’s constant movement back and forth between these places and the house in Venice was nearly as wearing on her as the war was on Giovanni. At war’s end, they settled for a time in the palace on the Grand Canal, ordering whatever could be sent from Florence to be transported here—but not without a further complication, a further thing Giovanni had to have. He wanted a place on the mainland affording an asylum from the bustle of Venice, with easy reentry when necessary. There must also be enough arable land to guarantee long-​term autonomy and enough elegance to accommodate guests for the season of theatrical productions by the Confidenti company during carnival and guests for the sweltering summer when Venice emptied out. He set his sights on a well-​equipped villa belonging to the Torniello family on the road leading between Paluello and San Pietro di Stra, on the south bank of the Brenta opposite the locality of Fiesso d’Artico, which the Venetians were developing by irrigation.89 He would be able to go by water there directly from Murano via Fusina and the Moranzani lock. The flat land had old vines for producing the local varieties: strong reds and gently sparkling whites, favored by soil and climate not far different from the Euganean Hills somewhat to the south. Rather than buying the property outright, he took it on a lifetime lease from the owners, with the understanding that the farms and associated structures in the area would be his to use. The idea of becoming a country gentleman, as we deduce from occasional references in his letters, appealed to him very much. Agriculture was the preeminent genteel art, he could not help agreeing with Cato the Elder; indeed, perhaps he liked Cato’s notion that the best farm was a vineyard.90 Maybe he even joked with himself that his remote ancestor Lorenzo the Magnificent wrote a famous satire on sobriety.91 Before the drinking came the winemaking, and here the role he took

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was that of the experienced vintner. This would not be merely a weekend occupation; he would take it as seriously as he did any of his other pursuits. The most strenuous physical exertion he would of course leave to his farmers, like the Brescian nobleman Agostino Gallo who theorized about gentleman farming a half-​century before. He would reserve to himself the task of animating these “indolent sloths” and teaching them the best techniques. The harvest was upon them, and “they still have not filled a vat,” he complained in September 1619 to Livia, who was waiting for him in Venice. “Tomorrow we will finish filling, and I will press the grapes and conserve the must.” He had his own way of doing this, which he would show to the overseer, “so they will know how to do it themselves.” The sooner they could operate independently the better, because “to be staying away from you and making wine for profit and convenience sounds good, but when all is said and done, I prefer not to,” and they were soon reunited.92 Finally, in 1620, in an effort to tighten control over his spiraling living costs, Giovanni determined to give up the palazzo on the Grand Canal and move permanently to Murano, where stately property was less expensive.93 Far from the social scene, the obligations, the time pressures, and the curious neighbors, maybe this last move would bring peace and rest and not end in delusion. The couple embarked upon the new venture with high hopes and excellent tastes. Palazzo Cappello was of the highest quality, and in subsequent years, with a few modifications, it was taken over first by the bishops of Torcello and eventually by Murano’s glass museum.94 Here the couple lived in style, and for transportation to this rather remote place, they kept four permanent gondoliers, listed on Giovanni’s payroll respectively as “the gentleman’s” and “the lady’s.”95 The hall and salon here, as at Parione, would have been decorated at least in part to reflect Giovanni’s battle glory. Four of the great siege paintings had been transported from the palazzo in Florence.96 Yet this place was, presumably, for Cupid’s battles as well as those of Mars, and of the self against the self, as well as of the self against the world. The artwork evoked reflective moods as well as ­sensuous ones; devout moods as well as introspective ones. Smaller paintings included

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mythological or religious subjects, some in the best Renaissance styles. The painting noted later by the court officials as “not yet recognized as being by Correggio,” but certainly dating to the age of Leonardo, may have been a Madonna and Child, showing the characteristic soft outlines around innocent faces, like the painting in the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, with graceful silent figures and a Northern Italian landscape somewhere in the distance, seemingly a picture within a picture, indicating peace in some far-​off land.97 The bedroom at Murano would have been the largest in any of the couple’s residences so far, judging by the principal furniture to be found there: a huge “bed of damask trimmed with gold worth 400 or 500 scudi” described by the Florentine Ambassador Niccolo Sacchetti just before selling it to pay off Giovanni’s debts.98 This would possibly have been fitted out with some of the bedclothes and furnishings listed in the inventory of goods sent back to Venice to the Court of Wards, for instance, the “24 pieces of lace curtains made with square stitches and separated,” and “a canopy of green Perpignan cloth with tassels of the same.”99 On the mattress, over one of the eighty-​seven bed sheets enumerated in the inventories, there might be the matching Perpignan blanket, and perhaps draped over this, or substituting it for a change, the “large blanket of Bolognese tissue with silk rosettes of different colors.”100 Their sleeping and waking would be wrapped in beauty. Considering that the room was obviously conceived for extended sojourns, we may imagine other objects having been placed here—for instance, a few of the various sideboards, tables, and other furniture, including a leather chair and several silk-​backed ones, which were all sold later to pay off debts. Even the baby, Giovan Francesco Maria, lived in luxury, evidenced by the entire chest (No. 30) devoted to his things. The cradle was lined with “red taffeta cloth bordered with gold fringe” and enclosed within “a bed curtain of red damask with gold and silk tassels, with 17 pendants of gold cloth in all, and similar fringes, lined with red taffeta and two great pieces of curtain.”101 After all, the baptismal ceremony in the church of Sts. Gervasio e Protasio in the presence of the doge of Venice two years after the move to Murano had been almost a state occasion; while the couple turned up in the usual finery, the child

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would have worn the baby clothes listed in the Venice inventory, among which we find “a white baptism veil, with gold weave, and a St. John in the middle,” embroidered in the style used on the island of Burano and protected by the Venetian government since the fifteenth century.102 His body would have been swathed in either one or the other of “two little baptismal coats, one of gold cloth and the other of fine white silk taffeta [ermisino] with gold threads.” On his head, not, presumably, while water was being poured, he would have worn “A head scarf of cloth with gold.” To preserve the orderliness of the surroundings, proper measures had been taken, using yet another item, “a section to place on the ground during the baptism, of red velvet embroidered with gold trimmed with little lilies and a pearl in each of the four gold corners.”103 The items were stashed away afterward with high hopes for a repeat occasion that never came. Armoires, crates, and boxes were stuffed to bursting with everything necessary to build a gorgeous life of ease; in the end, seventy-​six huge sea chests were hardly enough to cart it all away. Stored somewhere near the dining area were no fewer than “543 napkins of many sorts, of Rheims [rensa, linen] ordinary and large, some new, some used.”104 The couple would never be without. For use by servants, but not only, were “77 used snoods [scuffiotti, i.e., knit skullcaps] of different sorts.”105 In piles, perhaps in her boudoir, were “64 pairs of underpants [caleotti, i.e., calzoni alla galeotta] linen and wool, used, or rather, 75.”106 Somewhere again were “61 fine Rheims linen shirts with trim, men’s and women’s.”107 Close by were “29 kerchiefs, fine, of various types, used—or rather, 30.” And since the apotheosis of the collar was at hand in the male and female fashion worlds of their day, at least thirty-​four such items were thought necessary, “including dirty ones and fine white ones, partly ruffled, partly flat.”108 Adornments of the body were a part of beauty, and beauty was a part of the perfection that marked their kind—the exquisite look and feel of a fine brocade against the hand, the slight snagging on dry skin a reminder of the exquisite workmanship in gold or silver thread; the soft caress of silk across the cheek to wipe away a tear; the depth and warmth of velvet to muffle a pounding heart. If they seemed to be infatuated with textiles, they could be excused; so was everybody else.

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In the famous Uffizi portrait of Eleonora de Toledo, Cosimo I’s grand duchess, Bronzino seemed to lavish far more attention on the expressive and sumptuous dress, with its fine black and gold weave generously flowing under her pale hand, than on her impassive face.109 The dress said more than she did—or else, the painter thought he could tell more about her by it than by her physiognomy. Livia and Giovanni were likewise ready to let their clothes do the talking, even if there seemed to be as many dialects and languages as there were fine materials and trim. The English traveler Thomas Coryat thought local fashions were relatively sober, at least compared to what he was used to at home: “whereas they (i.e., the Venetians) have but one color,” the English visitors to Venice “use many more than are in the rainbow,” to the general derision of the natives. Despite the simplicity, “they make it of costly stuff . . . ​as of the best taffetas and satins that Christendom doth yield, which are fairly garnished also with lace of the best sort.”110 Women on the other hand, and not just the courtesans, in his opinion, still wore the famous platform shoes depicted in Carpaccio’s paintings, called chopines in English or calcagnetti in Italian, sometimes over a foot high. Hobbling about the city, accompanied by whoever might aid their movements, they wore long veils covering the face and touching the ground behind, although perhaps Livia and Giovanni did not so much share Coryat’s indignation, in noting how women “do walk abroad with their breasts all naked and many of them have their backs also naked even to the middle.” Nature, they both knew, had a beauty all its own. Trips from Murano to Venice were special occasions, requiring special outfits, depending on the weather and the place. Their exceptional position exempted them from the usual diffidence, even the official regulations, about Venetian nobles mingling too much with foreigners. They would fraternize as they wished, and they went wherever there was music and dancing in the houses of the great. What better way than by “harmonies, games and other delightful and pleasant actions, including dancing . . . ​to excite minds to happiness, and relieve them when oppressed”? The only problem with Fabritio Caroso’s dancing book, which spoke these phrases, was that the steps published some

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ten years before were already out of date.111 As the dances changed, so did the costumes, hopefully, allowing adaptation to the different activities. After the music stopped and the dancers bowed across to one another and then paused for a breath before the next galliard, there would be conversation for the ladies and gambling for the men. From the theaters to the churches to the great confraternity buildings—San Rocco, San Marco, San Giovanni Evangelista—each musical venue required a particular look.112 At the same time, as high-​ranking foreigners, they were also, unofficially, exempt from the sumptuary laws. So Livia felt no compunction when sporting the diamond worth fifty ducats he got her as a pre-​ engagement present via a certain Pompilio Evangelisti known as “the doctor from Palestrina.”113 The same went for her large lily-​shaped emerald studded with diamonds or her seven-​pearl earrings. Did handling them, fondling them, or sensing them become warm in her hands and on her body give her a special pleasure? Did she feel their beauty pass into her, or was it vice versa? Did she imagine that each of the six strings of her largest pearl necklace spoke the glory of her bosom and that not showing it was a shame? Did she consider that her charming face was best framed by the three-​point tiara encrusted with pearls? Must her body not be a great precious trophy covered with lesser precious trophies? She had ten pounds of gold and silver trim ready to place into the hands of her dressmaker for the next masterpiece, some of it “wound on spools” and some in “various trimmings and lace,” along with boxes containing “various perfumed buttons, some covered with gold with a layer of pearls.”114 Let the politicians rant about “all the superfluous and useless expenses of pomp, that the women in this our city make,” especially due to the “frequent changes in the style of dress,” which are “damaging to the faculties of our gentlemen and citizens.”115 The state enforcers of the sumptuary laws (Magistrati “alle pompe”) suspended the rules now and then for the arrival of particular dignitaries.116 She would make them turn their heads every day if she could. He may have thought he looked best in armor, “the gentleman’s second skin” according to modern scholarship about the period, and so, apparently, did many of his portraitists.117 Otherwise he usually

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preferred the Spanish fashion, imported in the sixteenth century, requiring “every shade of black.”118 Like all Florentine men of the age, he eschewed the multicolored tights typical of the earlier Renaissance, and his palette below the waist was more subdued, but tights were still the mainstay. The “six pairs of Rheims [linen] and [ordinary] linen stockings” mentioned in the inventories could well be his, along with the four pairs of leather pants with gold trim.119 His collars became less elaborate over the years, starting with the high ruffled one in Santi di Tito’s portrait in the Galleria Palatina at Pitti and ending with the reduced version barely visible in Jacopo Chimenti’s Marriage of Maria de’ Medici in the Uffizi. As the beard grew out, the collars seemed to grow in. On the other hand, he was not entirely averse to bombast himself, if the presumed image of him nudging his niece ashore in Rubens’ The Disembarkation of Maria de’ Medici, now in the Louvre, was any indication, showing a gorgeous pink cape, or zimarra, trimmed with gold over a jacket of green silk, but here we may instead be observing Rubens’ impression of a later fashion. Fitting the zimarra to the rest of the outfit was serious business, for him and for her. After the underwear and a shirt, it was the garment par excellence. The word came from the Spanish zamarra, but apparently the root went back still further to Arabic, stimulating modern etymological disputes between “sammûr,” meaning sable, or “khimar,” meaning a woman’s veil; the Italian word eventually slipped into English.120 While the early sixteenth-​century version of the garment had already lost any resemblance to the middle-​eastern kaftan, it was still worn loosely about the shoulders. The example in Bronzino’s Turin portrait of Eleonora had arms in sleeves, and the shimmering warm red color bespoke a quiet elegance. Closer to Livia’s time, the one in the portrait of Maria Maddalena d’Austria by Suttermans, shown with the future grand duke Ferdinando, now in the Galleria Palatina, featured decorative sleeves, left to hang unused, as had become the custom (Figure 5.4). There were hundreds of varieties: Livia and Giovanni had them all.121 The fine silk cloth (“tabis”) zimarra, felt-​lined, was gold embroidered with glass beads. Sometimes the fastenings were fascinating in themselves: the model cut from silk taffeta and wine-​colored felt with

Figure 5.4. ​Giusto Suttermans, Portrait of Cosimo II de’ Medici with Wife Maria Maddalena of Austria and Their Son Ferdinando II de’ Medici. (Uffizi)

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satin embroidered trim had 134 gold buttons; the black curly velvet one lined in padded perfumed taffeta had gold buckles and 110 cameos. Another, of worked black velvet embroidered with satin trim, had 150 gold buttons; yet another, of black silk taffeta intercut with gold chains, lined with turquoise taffeta, had little gold half-​buttons in pairs, trimmed. The stitching was sometimes the prominent element, as in the case of the zimarra of fine red and gold wavy silk cloth lined with red taffeta trimmed with gold embroidery with sixty pairs of pearl stitches, or the one of black silk velvet taffeta and embroidered satin trim, with seventy-​t wo pairs of gold stitches.122 Such was the quality and kind of these and the other many models that Livia may have enjoyed trying on more than one before perfecting the outfit for a particular outing. Getting all the elements just right was no easy matter. The manual by Titian’s brother Cesare Vercellio was hardly any use, seeing that the “ancient and modern” clothes it illustrated with such care dated to 1590 at the latest, when the book was published; and anyway the explanations were unrevealingly laconic: “Noble Florentine married women used to wear silk zimarre as outerwear, of pretty colors, embroidered, buttoned only at the chest, and underneath a dress of gold brocade.”123 The Venetian married women, on the other hand, “often change their dresses, which are usually of satin or some other material, decorated always with pearls, gold and jewels of great value.”124 Maybe the explanations were useful for the “painters, draftsmen, sculptors and architects” for whom the book appeared to be written, but they could have applied to almost anything in her wardrobe. She may have devoted some serious thought to matching fabrics, combining colors, and adding accessories, and she would no doubt have preferred to be served by her maidservant, not taught. Special days would require hard choices: would it be the “dress [sottana] of striped linen [cataluffa] turquoise and reddish-​brown [lionata] trimmed with gold” or the “fine linen dress of silver and white with half-​bust”? Then the question was which zimarra fit best—the fine wavy silk brocade of various colors lined with yellow-​green taffeta trimmed with hints of silver, or the one of fine iridescent (cangio) silk

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taffeta (ermisino) embroidered with leather and lined with yellow ­taffeta with eighty-​eight perfumed buttons with gold rosettes?125 If she left her arms out of the sleeves and the sleeves of the undergarment slightly pulled up, she could add the pair of gold bracelets (maniglie) worked in the Turkish style with large rubies;126 then the Milanese-​ style enameled gold chains could go around her neck.127 For footwear, one of the “many” pairs of gold-​embroidered shoes might do.128 For travel on hot days, she would likely remove a fan from its tiny box and bring it along. Fewer clothes meant more accessories. Wearing things was one kind of pleasure; buying was another. Encouraged by Giovanni, Livia may have had the impression that the number of possible acquisitions was only limited by time and the ability of producers and merchants to bring in the goods from wherever they could be found in the East or West. She would have enjoyed studying the various types of zimarre, camisoles, diamonds, and rubies and imagining herself to be one of the beautiful women adorned by this finery. Neither he nor she appears to have thought any more about the ethics of their accumulations than did the others of their set. Perhaps they tacitly agreed with Boccaccio’s principle, now only slightly less sensational than it had been in its time, that creatures were made to use their reason and seek their own advantage. Giovanni’s good fortune and their life together joined nobility and nature: the world rewarded them not only because he was born to privilege and she acquired it through him, but because they together had discovered how to use the world. Buying involved the exercise of a right, not just the carrying out of a transaction. They got none of the items in their wardrobe by so-​called “shopping,” if that meant selective searching in fairly well-​defined shops offering a variety of goods.129 According to the conventions of their social world, goods were acquired mostly by special arrangements with various tradesmen. Giovanni dealt with Milanese merchants via his ubiquitous squire (Cosimo Baroncelli) and his agent in Florence (Francesco Renzi) to acquire pearls worth two hundred scudi, taking care to have them examined by one Ottavio Balatri, a goldsmith, and compared to pearls owned by the family friend Vincenzo Salviati.130

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For a pair of earrings to be worn by Livia, he had Renzi make him impressions in wax and in lead of the pearls on offer.131 Livia ordered an ornament made of solid gold, which Renzi was able to obtain at ten and a half scudi per pound, a good price considering the short notice.132 She ordered silk cloth through the family friend Don Garzia di Montalvo in Florence, and expressed her disgust at the tailor, Messer Benedetto, concerning a certain item of trim on the last order of cloth.133 To forward one particularly valuable bolt of cloth costing no less than 109 scudi, Renzi slipped the piece into a box marked “cheeses.”134 Strategies for eluding greedy officials have never changed. Because of the couple’s status as special customers, they might discuss and even dispute on price, especially through their agents, and receive the usual discount (“tara”) of 5 percent that was customary in all shops; however, most of the time, they did not have the benefit of a shop’s public space for bartering or even for threatening to go to the shop next door. On the other hand, at least in the case of Don Giovanni, money rarely actually changed hands in his presence. The way he distributed money in exchange for goods Giovanni would have regarded as yet another aspect of his privilege. The economics of eminence were based on the power of the promised payment.135 By nature he was supposed to be a man of his word, but his word was never “now”—at least not to inferiors. He could wait as long as necessary and bestow speed or slowness at his will. Whether the law was on his side or not, in this game of nerves, he knew that nonetheless the lawgivers and the courts emphatically were. He received the unquestioning acquiescence of the class of tradesmen as part of that deference, of that obeisance, that suffering which, as Aristotle said in the Politics, was the lot of those who ought to serve rather than be served. Only after he died would a formal claim be made on his estate by one tradesman to the amount of fifty-​six lire for work done twelve years earlier, in 1609, “papering a reception room with gold and turquoise brocade, another five rooms with red velvet, one with green velvet, one with brocade, and two with Bergamo cloth.”136 The size of the bill bore no relation to Giovanni’s promptness to pay, as another tradesman experienced making a claim to the estate for five pairs of black silk stockings ordered in August 1610, along with four felt hats from Lyon

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to be worn by servants.137 If Giovanni eventually fulfilled a promise, at a distance of up to fifteen years or more, so be it; by the very wait itself, he was making things whole.

g To have and to hold—this concept defined Giovanni and Livia’s life together and referred to the rise and fall of fortunes. Certainly, they thought about things; she, after his death, would have nearly a lifetime to recall once having more. Did they ever reflect on the significance of the material world with reference to the immaterial one? Perhaps they admired the famous breakfast paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, with their veiled references to the execrable vices, and the more literal-​ minded vanitas paintings with the obligatory placing of a skull somewhere in the scene.138 But most of the time, they did not seem so deeply troubled as the authors of those works. Occasionally, to be sure, they unwillingly revealed some thoughts about the matter, in the context (for instance) of some talk about the building of a new line, his and hers, of Medici family interests. On another page in the same collection of documents where he left a drawing of a fountain to be built in the garden at Montughi, Giovanni made another drawing, this time of the full Medici coat of arms, as he would have wished to see it sculpted and perched at the top of the pediment of the fountain, surmounted by a grand ducal crown.139 Next to the arms, he made an anagram based on the letters of Christ’s name: IESU. He placed his different solutions neatly one below another: ISUE, SUIE, IEUS, none of which led anywhere until finally he reached EIUS—his and hers. The anagram spoke more eloquently than any treatise on luxury. The conclusion was obvious: possession was not only a good thing—a helper of cities, pleasing to the senses, soothing to the soul, a stimulus to the imagination—it was next to godliness. And yet, they somehow knew, it was not forever.

6 Mind over Matter

Livia had hardly gazed into the void of widowhood, and the Medici

agents were already barking orders around the palace in Murano. She could stand it no longer. Feverish, eight months pregnant, and exhausted from the last painful days of Giovanni’s illness, she finally gave in. At midnight on July 23, 1621, she climbed aboard the boat for the trip down the coast to where land transportation would take her to Florence, never to return. She did not go alone with her butler and the boatman; at least on this much, she had her way. Joining her were her chambermaids, her ladies in waiting, her physician, and a special friend of Giovanni who supplied whatever light-​hearted conversation might be had under the circumstances. For these remaining acts of the life she once lived, she would travel in style. Maybe as a provocation or as an adieu to Venice, anyway, something the Florentine ambassador considered worthy of remark, she demanded her sable pelt—the diamond-​studded one with the solid gold head and feet—to place around her shoulders. Was not a lady entitled to some protection against the breezes of the lagoon? “A Venetian custom,” observed the ambassador months later, still amazed at the apparent indifference to

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reality.1 Maybe for a moment she managed to forget where she was and what was happening, but surely she knew that her troubles had only just begun.

g For Niccolò Sacchetti, the Florentine ambassador, at least seemingly, the worst was over—after what was likely the most harrowing week of his career. When he got this job two years before, a bright young doctor of civil and canon law, he no doubt expected a different conclusion to his search for a profession, imagining perhaps carefree days spent wandering through brilliant halls of state, conversations with powerful masters of the cosmos, glorious rewards. Instead, here he was befuddled by distasteful tasks for which he had little preparation and less aptitude. The prerequisites for success in diplomacy that he might have thought he possessed were skill in the arts of persuasion and wisdom in the ways of the world. Recent events were enough to shake his confidence on both counts. Livia had been running circles around him from the moment when Giovanni expired, tricky to convince and impossible to deceive. At least now she was gone; although he probably suspected the Livia matter would plague him still. The orders had been clear enough: the woman was to be placed in custody so the process of confiscation could run swiftly and smoothly without her interference. To facilitate matters and break Livia’s stout resistance, the grand duchesses sent Giovanni’s erstwhile friend Don Garzia di Montalvo up to Venice, the same Don Garzia who had accompanied the couple on a wild carriage ride through the streets of Florence ten years before, almost to the day. A monastery was the obvious place, allowing the reality of sequestration to be perfumed with the scent of sanctity, keeping an inquisitive public out of grand ducal business— dissolving the person, according to St. Teresa’s principle, “as a drop of water in the sea.”2 The question was, where? The grand duchesses Cristina and Maria Maddalena preferred Venice, perhaps right here in Murano. A simple order to the officials in charge should suffice, they thought. However, in Sacchetti’s judgment, they overestimated their

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credit with the Venetian government. A request to the Senate for immediate confinement might easily be refused, and refusal meant embarrassment. Moreover, convents in Venice did not conform to the strict model that made them such convenient destinies for unwanted women in Tuscany, from Sacchetti’s point of view. In Venice, he suggested, there were actual possibilities of contact with the outside world, and inmates always “had a chance to flee.”3 No, Livia must be brought back to Florence. Sacchetti wrote to the grand ducal secretary unveiling his plan. Once she arrived, he explained, she could be disposed of as necessary. As she began to understand her “new circumstances” and the grand duchesses’ “friendly and courteous treatment of her,” she might even “change her style and conform entirely to the taste and satisfaction of Their Highnesses.”4 He thus implicitly, and with a subtle note of irony, offered the prospect that she might one day make a suitable servant. He may well have suspected that, in writing such words, he would not exactly match the mood of the grand duchesses to whom this letter would be read. The constant presence of a servile Livia in their midst was nothing they could savor with any great relish. If she came to Florence, he must have imagined they would insist on placing her where she would indeed be made perpetually to remember her subservience to the Medici family but the family would be able to forget about her forever. Livia evidently had no such intention. However, we only know her point of view by extrapolation from Sacchetti’s narrative. Judging by her defiance, she must have known she had some rights. A keen observer of male psychology, she would have observed the same mounting anxiety that we detect in Sacchetti’s letters to the grand ducal secretary, drawing her own conclusion: that Tuscan laws and Tuscan lawmakers were irrelevant in the territory of another state. Furthermore, she had no interest in giving up her possessions and dedicating herself to God: there was too much life out there still left to live. She already knew the practical consequences of this particularly favored tactic of Renaissance family planning. She would have heard tell of the sad letters emanating from Eleonora degli Albizi, with their pathetic requests, showing how forty years of convent life could reduce a proud former concubine of Cosimo I to a terrorized mendicant, despite the periodic ministrations

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by Giovanni, the son. Surely her friends in high places would save her if she could only hold out long enough, she must have thought. A simple message to Padavino, the secretary of the College, the highest body of the Venetian government, would be enough—he had in fact announced plans to visit as soon as the news broke concerning Giovanni’s death. 5 All she had to do was present herself in the Senate chamber, the pregnant widow of a hero with the three-​year-​old orphan Giovanni Francesco Maria in tow, who had been held in baptism by the doge, and hearts would melt. While Sacchetti watched the daily mail for a message from the grand duchesses approving his new plan, he heard that Antonio Grimani, of a distinguished Venetian family, had already shown some interest in the widow. Matters now became more complicated. Would there be a courtship and eventually a marriage proposal, thus removing her entirely from the reach of his patronesses? His understanding of the desire for power and things appears to have made him their perfect alter ego, but he was slightly tone-​deaf in the presence of other motivations. He supposed Grimani was after her “thinking she had a great pile of money [peculio].”6 He could imagine no other attraction, and apparently he did not share in the widespread views about her charms. Indeed, the evidence suggests a man far above such temptations. He had not yet taken the vow of celibacy prior to Holy Orders (that would be for when he really had his foot in the door of Medici preferment), but apart from Livia, female acquaintances are nowhere mentioned in his correspondence. He had still heard nothing from the grand duchesses when he finally decided to send Livia to Florence, willingly or unwillingly. Her liberty had to be canceled as soon as possible, especially (so he wrote to the secretary) “here where the word liberty is heard with very delicate ears.”7 He would thus have to disobey orders and stop lobbying the Venetian authorities for her confinement to a convent in Venice. On the 22nd of July, almost as a confirmation that fortune favors the bold, circumstances offered him exactly the “stratagem” he needed. “Really something to laugh about,” he commented in his narrative. That morning, he explained, the mail arrived from Florence. Don Garzia, who had already managed to push aside the members of the household

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while Livia was sick in bed, seized it and sorted it. Livia “demanded to see the letters from Baroncelli,” Giovanni’s secretary and her faithful correspondent over the years.8 Don Garzia stood his ground and insisted on opening whatever looked important. Sacchetti was particularly impressed by the way this wily adventurer took control of the situation and of her. He states that one of the Baroncelli letters, read out by Don Garzia, referred that Livia had been “brutally accused by the Inquisition.” Whether Baroncelli, who had secretly passed to the side of the grand duchesses, was telling the truth or not, we cannot determine; nor have we any other account of the letter’s contents. The plausibility of the story, to Livia’s ears, would have arisen from her likely implication in Giovanni’s many dangerous activities: magic, trafficking in prohibited books, and association with Jews. Having conveyed the information about the supposed accusation, Don Garzia added, there was no way the grand duchesses could prevent the Inquisition from pursuing her “outside of Tuscany.” Sacchetti described the scene: “At this point Don Garzia immediately seized the occasion and put her in such a fright, and I too with diverse inventions, confirmed what he said, so that after chewing on this for a while she finally became inclined to leave here.”9 And no wonder. Compared to the peace and benevolence that surely awaited her under the protection of the grand duchesses, what could she possibly hope from the Venetian Republic, a large impersonal organization? Don Garzia apparently pocketed the letter, and inexplicably, Livia did not call their bluff by asking to see it. Sacchetti breathed a sigh of relief nearly audible in the documents. He could now term Livia’s terrified departure as a voluntary act of “love” rather than as an abduction.10 The characterization fit the legal casuistry of the time. Livia willingly left Venice just as anyone voluntarily jumps away from a charging steed or voluntarily parries a lunge with the sword. How much more difficult things would have been, if physical force had been required, Sacchetti left the grand duchesses to imagine. Not that she was any match for these men who had tested their mettle in feats of violence and endurance, against other males, and perhaps females too. To describe her strength of mind, Sacchetti could only think of the adjective “terrible”; and he remained so altered

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by the experience that he was not ashamed to write it down.11 She was completely, Sacchetti remarked, reaching for a word, “unpersuadable.”12 In the aftermath he reflected, perhaps more deeply than usual, upon what had transpired. The deciding factors in Livia’s acquiescence, he added, were not, alas, his virtuosity or Don Garzia’s, but her illness and advanced pregnancy. “Even in that state, she scares us,” he confessed, adding, “she could give a whole town a hard time, not just Don Garzia.”13 Had she been well, there is no telling how long she might have kept them at bay. When it came to expressing satisfaction for a job well done, Sacchetti was almost as generous with Don Garzia as he was with himself. However, in his correspondence with the grand ducal secretary, he observed that his partner was initially unable to share his spontaneous jubilation. In attempting to account for this strange anomaly, he suggested that the reason had to do with Don Garzia’s incurable chivalry and almost instinctive inclination to “helping the woman.”14 If he knew anything about the years of friendship, the many favors given and reciprocated, the common interests, or the shared adventures, he did not bring these into his explanation. From his standpoint, friendship was conditional upon the possibility of receiving rewards, and since Livia had nothing to give in return, there was no point in giving anything to her. His own relations with the grand ducal court, on the other hand, were a bouquet of friendship, hopefully set to remain in flower for years to come. He noted that despite any scruples, Don Garzia “behaved stupendously in this matter” and in recognition of his service “would be the right person to charge with other matters like this,” no doubt with the promise of adequate compensation.15 Sacchetti himself needed no reminding about whose side he was on, or why. Before him lay the examples of meritocratic rise within the ranks of the Medici bureaucracy in figures like Curzio Picchena, upon whom three new offices had been piled at once, including the corresponding emoluments, in return for unquestioning devotion even in the seediest matters. Sacchetti could have had no inkling of his own future promotion to the bishopric of Volterra at this early stage. However, he knew that any ecclesiastical goals within Tuscany, like any civic ones, depended largely on Medici favor.16 After years of service in

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the diplomatic corps, with a recommendation by his relative, Cardinal Giulio Sacchetti, and by the grand duke, in 1634 he would reach his final destination.17 Even in the relatively minor matter of Livia’s property—only a sampling, we assume, from a wide range of services rendered in return for the desired reward—he carried out his orders with amazing tenacity over a period of several years. Now there remained only the matter of the toddler, a Medici by birth. Clearly he could not stay with the mother. “If the child remained in her power,” Sacchetti reasoned, “a woman of this kind . . . ​would be able to do much scheming.” He made no mention of any fantasies he might have had of how she might use him as bait, as a hostage, as a human shield, for whatever treacherous plot she might be cooking up in her mind. Yet fast action was called for, he went on: “we thought it necessary not to give time a chance.”18 He knew that as soon as Livia perceived there was a plan to abduct the child, she would realize that her own final destiny was the hated monastery and would resume her resistance. She must not be allowed to suspect anything was afoot. Accordingly, in the hours after Giovanni’s death, gondolas were readied for immediate departure and a watch kept for the right moment to move out. On the evening of Wednesday, July 20, Sacchetti managed to separate mother and son long enough to slip the boy on board. Next stop would be the Florentine ambassadorial residence in Venice where transportation would be arranged to have him spirited off to the grand duchesses or their servants, while Livia was being dispatched from the Lido. Sacchetti may have secretly hoped the child, already severely ill, would die of measles along the way (he uses the word “vaiolo”), but he had to prevent the blame from falling upon himself.19 The sick child, he insisted, had been “seen” by Giovanni’s physician, the famous Quattrocchi, before leaving Venice. It is possible the physician saw him more than once: Quattrocchi was close enough to “see” him as he was rushed out of the house in those twelve hours that had elapsed after Giovanni’s death, and the doctor, asked whether the child was dying, replied in the negative. Three days of rattling and rolling in land transportation to Florence was no effective prescription for a child still shivering from fever. At least he would be accompanied by Faustino

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Moisesso, Giovanni’s historian, who was still looking for a handout from the grand duke, and a certain Filippo Sciameroni, looking for the same. Whether one of the two unnamed servants from the Sacchetti household who went along on the trip was competent to care for the child or not could only be judged by the result: he arrived alive, not dead.

g Back in Florence, the city was still in shock, not from the death of Giovanni (more of an annoyance than a tragedy, as far as the family was concerned) but from the death of Grand Duke Cosimo II at the end of February.20 The grand duchesses hardly noticed that Livia came “accompanied by a few more people than might have been anticipated” (as Sacchetti had warned).21 In fact, they hardly noticed her at all. Their main job now was to rule the grand duchy, at least nominally, as guardians of the young heir-​apparent, Ferdinando, now eleven. Although they had expected the perennially infirm Cosimo to expire at any moment, still, the abrupt shift out of the life of leisure and into public affairs (alongside a council of ministers including Curzio Picchena and Belisario Vinta to do the real work) took them somewhat by surprise. Schedules had to be reorganized to accommodate meetings with people whose names they hardly knew, but who had been operating the bureaucracy from behind the scenes for many years. As for Giovanni, even if they had not already been ill-​disposed to him because of the Livia affair, any possible grief was effectively canceled by other more immediate preoccupations. Nor did this particular conjuncture of the Florentine state make the job of ruling any easier.22 It was bad enough for the grand duchesses that they had to learn to navigate a conflict of unprecedented proportions, extending far beyond Europe, with no end in sight (which would last, in all, thirty years). They soon found themselves up against the most severe economic and social crisis in recent memory. They very likely reinforced each other’s apprehensions that the occurrence of famine in the same year as the death of the grand duke might be some kind of divine portent rather than a mere coincidence. An extra hour

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or so now and then in the family chapel was obviously unavoidable, and maybe a few more gifts to the churches. But they also considered that setting an example of devotion was not enough, however much this attitude suited their temperament. As paupers began streaming into the city from areas around the countryside where the harvests had been particularly disastrous, they were reminded by their advisors that plague had been reported across the Alps.23 Measures of public health and welfare, they agreed, must be taken at once, and such measures must be made to reflect and maintain hierarchy and order. They accordingly oversaw the transformation of the convent of the Benedictine monks at San Salvatore, called the Camaldoli, along the western wall in Oltrarno, into a poor house. Into this hospice would be herded as many mendicants as possible, and there they would be set to the discipline of daily work by practice in various arts and manufactures. The austere conditions inside this and the other hospices would serve as a warning to potential users. The policy was not to comfort the unfortunate in their plight but “to discourage by the fear of reclusion” (so said one of the official memoirs on the subject) “any increase in the number of mendicants who might otherwise be tempted to leave their work to go and beg.”24 With Florence free of mendicants, presumably disease could be avoided. There were more pleasant things to attend to than death, funerals, and economic catastrophe. Snatches of information were arriving at the grand ducal court regarding the hoards of Giovanni’s property sent back from Venice in sixty-​seven huge crates. The under-​officials of the Court of Wards, accustomed to combing over things far better than any they could ever have, would no doubt be talking about it for a long time to come. They had heard the rumors, but they were not prepared for either the quantity or the value. Every crate seemed more stuffed than the last, with the materials of elegance, nobility, status, money, and all those qualities that demanded admiration. Arriving at crate number thirty-​six, they dutifully recorded: Zimarra [loose gown] ivory-​colored [cappellino] of fine silk cloth [tabis] lined with felt with gold trimmed with gold embroidery and glass beads [canutiglia]

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Zimarra of silk taffeta with wine-​colored felt trimmed with satin embroidery and 134 gold buttons Zimarra of black curly velvet lined with padded perfumed taffeta with gold buckles and 110 cameos Zimarra of worked black velvet with embroidered satin trim and 150 gold buttons Zimarra of black silk taffeta intercut with gold chains, lined with turquoise taffeta with little gold half-​buttons in pairs, trimmed Zimarra of black silk taffeta worked with stripes lined with pale taffeta with 108 little gold buckles with pearls and gold buttons Zimarra of fine red and gold wavy silk cloth [tabis] lined with red taffeta trimmed with gold embroidery with sixty pairs of pearl stitches Zimarra of black silk velvet taffeta trimmed with embroidered satin with 72 pairs of gold stitches Zimarra of fine silk brocade with waves of ivory and other colors, lined with green taffeta trimmed in traces [riscontrini] of silver Zimarra of fine iridescent [cangio] silk taffeta [ermisino] embroidered with leather and lined with yellow taffeta with 88 perfumed buttons with gold rosettes Zimarra of fine silk [tabis] wavy brocade with silver, lined with taffeta with silver trim.25

And on and on until they got to the gowns: Gown of striped linen [cataluffa] turquoise and reddish-​brown ­[lionata] trimmed with gold Gown of striped linen, worked with red and white, trimmed with gold Gown of striped linen, red and gold, trimmed with gold Gown of striped linen, scarlet, trimmed with gold.26

Ten more items filled out the inventory of just that chest; after which, they proceeded to chest number thirty-​seven, containing yet another fantastic stack of gorgeous finery. What else may have transpired in this room has gone unrecorded. Under erasure in the bare list of possessions may be the officials’ snide remarks about the previous owners,

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perhaps a visual scene of carnivalesque frivolity, a modeling session involving a few of the zimarre, to lighten the gloom induced by the political moment. The grand duchesses knew one thing well: if having power meant they could achieve their ends, achieving their ends also meant having power. Since their commands were symptomatic and constitutive at the same time, they must respond to each challenge, no matter how miniscule, or lose their authority.27 As their attention drifted away from rules, regulations, poverty, disease, and other such issues, back to more familiar questions regarding their own patrimony, the documents show they began to reflect seriously about the opportunities of the Livia affair. There was no doubt. Giovanni’s considerable inheritance somehow slipping into the control of the nonentity Livia would not only put a blight upon the family, but such disorder could encourage defections of all kinds, like the runs on the Medici bank that had occurred from time to time as confidence rose and fell. They followed the grand ducal example by regarding family policy and state policy as more or less the same thing and by regarding the status quo—that is, the family’s role and the state’s independence—as the main imperative. They were committed to using the vast stores of Medici treasure not only to field armies in defense and soldiers in service of advantageous friendships, but to demonstrate the continuity of the family’s potential. To ensure the correct tone, they actually increased the size of the court, even as Tuscany slipped to the third tier of European states. There was no more hope of the grand duchy becoming a real kingdom; nor could they lay any special claim to diplomatic intelligence capable of arbitrating the balance of power in the northern portion of the peninsula.28 But they sensed that the family’s sheer grandeur might somehow save Florence. The incomes were not exactly as dynamic as in former times, and the late Cosimo had given up actively investing even before he got sick. They had other ways to conserve and increase wealth: on the death of Don Antonio, son of Grand Duke Francesco, at the beginning of May, they sent parties of lawyers into the field to collect and secure the property to their offspring. Now they could work on Livia.

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Not surprisingly, the Venetian senators received no response to repeated requests for further instructions on what to do with the body, or even for symbolic financial participation in the funeral arrangements. They had the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo decked out for a state funeral with all imaginable pomp to celebrate the life of their great condottiero and mourn his death. Any differences between them and Giovanni, any misunderstandings about his commitment to the cause or his policies for carrying on the war, were for the time being forgiven and forgotten. After the formalities, they had the body placed temporarily in the church of Santa Lucia, still with no further word from Florence, in a chapel restored and decorated by the family of the Florentine merchant Michelangelo Baglioni. It shared the company not only of other deceased members of the Baglioni family, but also of the shriveled corpse of Saint Lucy herself, who lay in a finely decorated sepulcher upon the altar under Palma il Giovane’s representation of her, celebrated in Sansovino’s late sixteenth-​century tribute to Venetian art and architecture.29 To avoid a diplomatic rift caused by what in any other context would be regarded as a deliberate slight, the senators requested the Medici family to tender at the very least an official note of gratitude, which after some hesitation was grudgingly vouchsafed. The grand duchesses had no doubts about the final outcome of the heredity question; nor did anyone else. They also needed no Sacchetti to remind them that the necessary verdict would require some effort and tedium on the part of their employees. They were, after all, not entirely above the law, and they respected the Medici tradition of ensuring that grand ducal prerogatives advanced just one step behind a system developing to accommodate them.30 What they did was legal, according to the logic of realist politics in every age, because they made laws that made it legal.31 They could by no means meddle with the Cosmian settlement, that is, the tacit agreement of the patrician families in Florence to allow Medici domination in return for peace and order. Too many false steps out of this pattern, too many excesses beyond what was normally allowed to the eminent, might rekindle the smoldering embers of Renaissance republicanism into a major

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c­ onflagration. They were no doubt reminded, every time the topic of Florentine history came up in polite conversation, of the various anti-​ Medici movements, and they knew the memories of resistance went just as deep as did the memories of any good the family ever did. Don Lorenzo, son of Ferdinando I, possessed Michelangelo’s statue of Brutus, conceived by the expatriate artist among other prominent republican expatriates in Rome during a moment of rebellion against the family and now an ambiguous symbol of power—traitor to his lord or martyr for freedom?32 The grand duchesses, Florentine by marriage not by birth, by now knew the pattern well: any arbitrary acts, executions, or crimes of honor had to be papered over with a suitable layer of bureaucratic explication and record keeping, while preserving customary norms long ago born of the rights of the strong over the weak. They could have their way, but not exactly as they wished. In the present case, what played in their favor was the persistent confusion about what belonged to the grand dukes and what belonged to the state. Not that they were particularly familiar with the documents that passed authority on to the family after imperial forces besieged the city in 1530, long before they came on the scene. They did not need to know that the various jurisconsults engaged in engineering the transition from republic to principate were careful to describe the new “dux” as a “servant of many,” brought in to lead a preexisting polity, unlike a typical patrimonial monarch, who inherits the patrimony of a predecessor.33 They had little patience for the subtle argumentation that was supposed to silence the apologists for the other dukes on the peninsula (especially the Gonzaga of Mantua or the Este of Modena), who claimed the Medici were “new” rulers of a “new” state, and therefore less worthy of respect. Such things were for their lawyers, secretaries, and bureaucrats. However, they could feel fairly well at home in the new state language that had replaced most of the republican rhetoric, drawing on contemporary ideas about sovereignty, like “plenitude of power” or “sent by God,” and the like, which circulated in the Habsburg lands and in France, where state and ruler were the same thing.34 While the words gave a more and more actual picture of the facts, they continued to use money as had Cosimo I, namely as though the Medici family’s private assets served its public role and vice

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versa, a situation that would persist until the transition to the new Lorraine dynasty in the eighteenth century.35 The civic officers whose involvement was formally required in the Livia case shared common interests with the grand duchesses. Giovanni degli Alessandri and Pietro Formiconi, magistrates in the Pupilli or Court of Wards, were thrust into the role of legal guardians for Giovanni Francesco Maria and, for a time, according to the documents’ delicate wording, “of Livia’s womb,” where lived the unborn child.36 The first came from among the same patricians who had eased the Medici into power and at present were content enough with their share in the general peace and prosperity not to push them out.37 The second was a grand ducal appointee. They were not allowed to forget who ran the show. Their headquarters were located on the ground floor of the Uffizi building designed by Vasari for Cosimo I. Above was the new picture gallery containing the Medici collections and the entrance to a covered passageway, the famous “Vasarian Corridor,” running directly from here all the way across the river to Palazzo Pitti, where the grand duchesses lived and played. Cosimo had consolidated the civic offices in this space for the same reason that he occasionally allowed himself to sidestep the usual election procedures by directly appointing magistrates: so they would do his bidding when necessary.38 The grand duchesses were committed to continuing the practice, confirmed by the last three grand dukes, of developing the professional bureaucracy as an extension of their household; and to maintain the loyalty of those less directly dependent on their largesse, they handed out noble titles to patrician families. Now more than ever, with a limited amount of time available for the state affairs that were their province since the death of Cosimo II, they needed an obedient and efficient officialdom to achieve their ends.39 They could regard Livia’s undoing as just one more step on the road to the new Tuscan state their contemporaries envisioned. Pandolfo Marchetti, the Medici lawyer, had much to gain from his intervention on behalf of the grand duchesses.40 If successful in pursu­ ­ing their interests in the Livia case and other family business, he could join the long procession of legal practitioners who had parlayed their applied expertise into distinguished careers within Medici ­officialdom

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inside and outside the city. Giovanni Uguccioni, Bartolomeo Valori, and Giovanni Venturi all had begun as lawyers (or at least, as laureates in law) and had gone on in recent years to become Florentine senators, counselors of state, and ambassadors, adding whatever other office their loyalty might secure, guaranteeing their own positions and their families’ prosperity. True, they were all Florentine patricians, whereas the Marchetti house, however distinguished, stemmed from somewhere in the papal state, placing Pandolfo at something of a disadvantage with respect to the rest of the local elite. He had to ensure that the current mission served as the springboard for others great or small: a further mission, say, to Lunigiana (as actually happened), overseeing legal matters very close to the Medici family, and, having confirmed his dependability as a Medici operative, a secure post within the principle offices in Florence and in Siena. Only time would tell. But first, Marchetti had to eliminate Giovanni Francesco Maria as heir to Giovanni’s fortune, and to do that, he had to show that illegitimate children could not inherit. This was not as easy as it seemed. Cosimo I made eight separate donations to Giovanni between 1565 and 1567, stipulating that if their owner had no heirs, the property would pass to Don Pietro and respective descendants, and lacking these, to Ferdinando and descendants. Now Pietro had died in Spain in 1604, leaving only a natural son also called Pietro. Some of the donations specified “to the legitimate and natural heirs” (descendentibus . . . ​legitimis et naturalibus), some of them did not; some again specified “male heirs,” some (such as the donation of iron mines in Florence and Siena) included females.41 Giovanni himself had procured a legal opinion, presumably some time after the birth of Giovanni Francesco Maria, which stated that the phrase “legitimate and natural” meant exactly what it said.42 In 1606 Ferdinando wrote his testament, apparently overriding portions of Cosimo’s gift, by specifying that the property he might inherit from Don Giovanni’s death “without legitimate male heir” would go to his own son Don Lorenzo, excluding, in other words, any “natural” offspring.43 Marchetti procured advice from far and wide, on this or that aspect of the matter: from Alessandro Vettori in Florence, later a state auditor, and even from a certain Franciscus Georgeius, “juris consultus Hispanicus.” Particularly useful was the

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contribution of Raffaello Staccoli, later a state auditor and correspondent of Galileo, who seemed to articulate the general consensus, noting that by and large “the doctors consider it to be a shame for the house and goods of a nobleman to pass into the hands of a natural offspring, excluding the legitimate one.”44 Marchetti’s next move, to establish the child’s illegitimacy, involved still more complications. The birth certificate gave Don Giovanni and Livia as legitimate parents, and the couple had been wed by the Rev. Girolamo Barbieri on August 25, 1619, in the church of San Giovanni Decollato in Venice, in the presence of two Florentine witnesses named Bartolomeo de’ Barbieri and Antonio Zuanelli, with a dispensation conceded by the patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Francesco Vendramin, waiving publication of the banns.45 To make the wedding possible, Livia’s previous marriage had been annulled the same year on the grounds of vim et metu, that is, that she had been forced to consent. When she married Giovanni, she was, legally speaking, a free woman, and the relevant documents, duly archived at the time, were there to prove it. If the child was actually conceived a few months before the couple had been married, nonetheless he was baptized on October 5, in the church of Santi Gervasio e Protasio, in the presence of thirty-​five senators and the ambassador of the duke of Mantua. The godfather had been Michele Priuli, son of Doge Antonio Priuli, also present. Before leaving the scene, Giovanni had done his best to ensure the passage of property would go according to plan—as long as too severe scrutiny was not applied. Rather than on Livia’s marriage to Giovanni, Marchetti and his team focused on the first marriage. Here was some real room for maneuver. The story would be that the annulment had been obtained under false pretenses, and therefore, the first marriage was still valid. Livia willingly and freely married Granara; therefore the provisions of the Tametsi, the new Church legislation regulating marriage, had been met; subsequently she had led a dissolute life until meeting Giovanni, and witnesses in the annulment hearing (so this version went) were either bribed or threatened or both. On this interpretation, minutely referenced to Baldus, the early Renaissance jurist, she could not be tried for bigamy since the second marriage did not really exist.46 They

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would add various petty offenses to the dossier making Livia out as a gold digger and an adulteress as well as a criminal—the last element perhaps adding an air of plausibility to the first, as well as giving the grand duchesses the right to place as severe a sanction upon her as they might wish. However, to avoid drawing too much attention to Medici interests, Marchetti and his team made Battista Granara, Livia’s former husband, not the grand duchesses, the plaintiff in the case. They got the idea from a good source: none other than Pope Paul V himself. The pope proposed it to the Florentine ambassador (so the ambassador reported) in order to “save as much as possible of the appearances before this world,” so the Church and the grand duchy would not seem too obviously allied in a matter of power and greed.47 The lawyers’ task would thus be to show that Livia ran off looking for trouble and Granara was ready to forgive and forget. They already had a head start: soon after the first inquiries had been made back in 1619 on the occasion of the annulment and subsequent marriage to Giovanni, Granara had been abducted by Medici agents in Genoa in S. Pier d’Arena, and confined for a time first in the Livorno fortress and subsequently in the Belvedere fortress in Florence. This last measure was somewhat disingenuously referred to Giovanni as tending to protect his interests by keeping the former husband away from the former wife.48 All they had to do now, with Giovanni gone, was to examine the annulment hearing for points that could be refuted and possible irregularities that could be brought to the attention of the judges. Marchetti and his team did not dare to bring Granara into the courtroom for interrogation. Who knew what he might say, after nearly two years in jail, or what the judge might make of testimony from a plaintiff who had been abducted by those who stood most to gain from the verdict? Instead, they gave him as indisposed and produced a signed affidavit from a parish archive in Genoa, dated some time before and supposedly providing his version of what happened when Livia left. It was a pitiful story. On December 10, 1606, he purportedly said, a certain Francesco Bono (i.e., Francesco del Buono) had broken into his house and stolen a number of things: a walnut box “alla Napoletana” containing two hundred lire in doubloons and eight reals, some other

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money, a number of capes including a striped one (zimarra di frisato), one of goat’s hair, another of “Spanish” wool, another of black coarse wool, and yet another of red and green coarse wool, a pair of hooded capes with a bust of scarlet silk, a pair of long shirts in yellow and another pair in white with yellow trim (new), four collars, five or six shirts, and three or four flat collars, all of which amounted to more than six hundred lire apart from the two hundred lire mentioned before, “besides which, he took my wife.” They hoped the judge would not notice that in Granara’s telling, if this was indeed his story, the loss of Livia seemed to have been thrown in as an afterthought, a mere bagatelle in comparison to the loss of the money and capes.49 Although the document had obviously been pasted into the parish record later and for no apparent reason, they insisted that the handwriting was definitely that of the curate. So far, so good. The grand duchesses were well aware of the maxim of civil procedure, dating back to the time in history when law was taught from memory, not from books, to wit: when attempting to take from others, move quickly; when attempting to keep one’s own, draw things out as long as you can. They knew what was at stake, and they knew time was of the essence. To keep the other side off balance, they obtained, on some plausible grounds, a shift of the tribunal from the original location in Genoa to the small center of Sarzana, where the docket was thinner and the officialdom more malleable. There were other reasons for this strategic choice of a place barely within the Genoese Republic’s territory next to Tuscany. The Medici connection was still strong in Sarzana (not by chance, the citadel today bears the Medici arms). After the family had bought the town in the fifteenth century for a vast sum of money, it had bounced back and forth between different lordships, including the Florentine Republic, finally landing with the Genoese. In a sense, it was Genoese in name only and the officialdom obeyed whoever showed up first with something in their fist. No court outside Tuscany could have been more favorable to Medici interests; and the local bishop, Giovanni Battista Selvaggi, who served as the judge in this case, was somehow beholden to the family. The grand duchesses had their officials write him to the effect that they wished the trial to go forward quickly—adding (with impeccable logic) that neither side could afford the expense of a lengthy process far from

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home. From time to time during the proceedings, they sent along reminders of how grateful they were in advance for his favorable treatment of them.50 Once the Medici machine began to churn, Livia had no chance. Deprived of most contacts with the outside world, she left everything up to Cosimo Baroncelli. Baroncelli, however, like Don Garzia, had changed his allegiances in the direction of the blowing wind. He accordingly left things up to the grand duchesses and their agents and followed direct orders from them not to interfere. To represent the defense, Girolamo Sanguinetti was chosen from among the legal profession of the small town of Sarzana (and not, therefore, from the more distinguished among the legal college in Genoa nor, of course, from Florence). Sanguinetti’s hands were in some ways tied by the conflicting interests of his clients. The Court of Wards, whom he represented as the legal guardians of Giovanni Francesco Maria and the unborn child, in any property dispute not involving other families of the Florentine nobility, would not likely brook any too subtle caviling in Medici business. In fact, they were secretly committed (as the grand duchess later admitted) to referring any of Sanguinetti’s communications directly to the judge.51 Livia, on the other hand, wanted her marriage and her child, and her goods. Somehow, from her guarded retreat in Montughi, through a leak that Sacchetti, the ambassador in Venice, would later demand to be plugged, Livia managed to communicate a few of her thoughts to one or another of her remaining associates, and they to her. In November, 1621, with the tensest portion of the judicial proceedings warming up the onset of winter, she conveyed her anxieties to her brother Giovanni Francesco. She uttered no obvious libel (that would come later); there was nothing actionable under laesa maiestatis, the law on treason. But she was intelligent enough to know matters had been fixed on both sides to lead inexorably to one possible conclusion—she might have said, like any crooked Florentine football match. She made no direct allusion yet to tampering with witnesses; even Livia knew some things were better thought than said, and she would save that accusation for a last resort. Now she asked her brother Giovanni Francesco to stand in for her at the trial to ensure that her interests were represented. Even

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without any legal training, she was sure he could do a better job than Sanguinetti. Of course, the only way to make this happen was to appeal to the judge, which Giovanni Francesco accordingly did, in person. 52 Instead of taking the petition into consideration, the judge dismissed the petitioner. There was no point even discussing the absurdity of the request, the obvious ignorance of the prerogatives of the legal profession, and so forth. He simply wrote to the grand duchesses informing about Livia’s attempts to intervene and explaining his response. The grand duchesses ordered their agent to reply, thanking the bishop for his attention in a matter of such great personal concern to themselves. “Your solicitude in having revealed the design of Giovanni Francesco Vernazza has been recognized by Their Most Serene Highnesses as an act of your singular humanity,” the agent stated. 53 Any dispassionate observer (the agent went on) would be able to perceive immediately the falsehood of the imputations in Livia’s letter—supposing things so obliquely outlined were understood at all. As for the suggestion of having an actual representative of Livia’s wishes at the trial, this was not only outrageous in itself, but would give rise to a suspicion of irregularity. Future interests demanded that even the slightest aspersion cast upon the proceedings must never under any circumstances enter the documentary record. The judge agreed. Sanguinetti had little to gain except his fee, which he was owed whether he won or lost. There was no way in this case to curry favor with the great; the best he could do was to steer a middle course somewhere between excessive zeal and obvious incompetence in what he knew was an impossible job. Apart from the conflicting interests between Livia and the Court of Wards, how could he possibly defend clients he had never met, who failed to show up in court, or, refer­­ ring to Livia, were in custody in another city? Any conclusions based on Livia’s supposed refusal to appear were evidently false. 54 Anyway, a suit regarding a marriage should not be tried in contumacia, he wrote, with no testimony from either of the couple (Battista Granara being likewise indisposed). But apart from these ludicrous conditions, he insisted, this should have been an open and shut case: the documents sent down from the annulment proceedings in Genoa three years

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before gave eloquent testimony to the argument about a forced marriage. The present court had no jurisdiction to appeal a previous well-​ justified decision reached in another court with impeccable attention to all formalities. The suit was obviously frivolous and should be dismissed and the inheritance allowed to run its normal course in favor of the child, without wasting his clients’ slender resources on costly lawyering. The motion was denied. Marchetti’s task, as Granara’s lawyer, paid by the Medici, was in some ways more straightforward, if only in the aspect that there were fewer constraints on his operations. Money was no problem despite the grand duchesses’ complaints about the expense, and no amount of zeal would be considered excessive. In fact, the previous verdict gave him a wide field on which to exercise his ingenuity. Unfortunately for Livia, Giovanni had originally acquired the annulment in the same way that a great man acquired anything else: by asking for it, and leaving the details to others. Death, however, put an end to sprezzatura. Marchetti determined to grind as finely as need be and compiled a list of 115 questions to put to the new witnesses, based on yet another list of eighty-​five points to be established in the case. Of these questions, the one designated as number 79 invited particular reflection. The witness would be asked: “When a Signore recommends the expediting of a trial of a woman or servant of his, do you believe he does anything wrong?”55 The right answer, under the circumstances, was supposed to be “yes”: justice is blind, and throwing aristocratic weight around in the courtroom is unfair. How often the same thing could be asked in regard to the grand dukes, their mothers, their widows, and their dependents was an irony Marchetti preferred to keep to himself. Though the case could not be about Giovanni’s patrimony, Marchetti and his team ensured that no one forgot the importance of the property question. They avoided mentioning the grand duchesses or their offspring, Ferdinando and Lorenzo, at any point in the proceedings. However, they freely referred to Giuliano Borghi, Matteo Maffei, and Francesco de’ Rossi, lawyers representing those few of Giovanni’s various creditors who managed to squeak their claims in when news of the proceedings got out and who had a right to skim a portion off the property as soon as it was subtracted from Livia. They even allowed a

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complete accounting of Giovanni’s massive estates to enter the court record, including the impressive list of real estate mentioned in the donation by Cosimo, alongside a list of debts totaling over 9,000 florins, with a bill for 1,209 florins from Giulio Capponi, silk merchants, and for thirty-​one from Andrea Ferrucci, sculptor, and assorted debts to major barons like Antonio Magalotti, owed 1,000 florins.56 They did not have to spell out the implications: that their success in the case was necessary for justice, in the sense of ensuring to each his (or her) own, in such a fashion as to maintain the status quo throughout the various levels of society. Without once drawing the obvious conclusion, they demonstrated the contrast between this huge wealth and the meager resources of the people in Livia’s childhood environment. Little could be hoped, they implied, of someone who had grown up in a three-​room rented apartment in a large building with many other such apartments, and whose father (by tacit comparison with the mighty rentiers who really counted) was a “poor man who lived by his own efforts.” Her designated husband, Battista Granara, they told the judge, lived in an even smaller space, which was supposed to be the couple’s in the first months of marriage. In their view, because she and Granara were “equal in condition,” a most important element in a successful union, despite the twenty-​five-​year difference in age, her happiness should have been complete. 57 They left the judge to figure out why, if the pair were logically so well suited for each other, before ever meeting Giovanni, Livia braved possible dishonor, expatriation, and temporary indigence just to get away. For them, there could be only one reason: she was a criminal in the making, a bad sort. As such she got her original annulment only in order to benefit from Giovanni’s patrimony, not because of any real injustice. Of Giovanni, on the other hand, Marchetti and his team appeared highly respectful. In reality they were building a case within a case, intending to demonstrate his diabolical intelligence and Livia’s wiles. Their general description in point 55 read almost like a eulogy, as though something about the true Medici genius must inevitably be said in his regard. “The aforementioned most excellent Signor Don Giovanni de’ Medici, apart from his valor in arms, was a very learned

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man, with a full knowledge of all the sciences.” Next came, he “made a profession of letters and knew very well how to discuss and treat in matters of philosophy, theology and civil and canon law.”58 Only such a mind could have conceived the infernal conspiracy that they sought to reveal: from the supposed tampering with witnesses to the solicitation of a favorable judgment in Livia’s annulment, to the murder supposedly attempted or meditated (point 60: Giovanni threatens the life of Granara). He was the one, they attempted to show, who originally contacted the Vernazza brothers with the plan for an annulment—not the party (Livia) who had supposedly been wronged (point 61). Inspired by cunning and armed with dexterity, he personally wrote the drafts of most of the correspondence necessary to set the appeal in motion (point 64), devised the orders to give to the witnesses (point 65), and insisted on looking for more witnesses until a sufficient number of them agreed to his theme (point 70). For all his intelligence, they insisted, he allowed the inferior Livia to drive his actions. As soon as he met her, point 49 insisted, “he fell in love.” Subsequently (point 50), “coming to her house every day and having intercourse with her . . . ​he began to burn with love for her.”59 Desiring to be in her presence always and have her entirely to himself, he first brought her to his palace and then got her one for herself nearby. Wishing to please her (point 52), he kept her outfitted with every kind of luxury and supplied her with staff “as though she were a princess.”60 Next, at point 58, as the newly appointed general of the Venetian forces in Friuli, he brought Livia to Venice, where she kept house with him and dined openly at his table. More damning still, he often had her follow him to war, when he was supposed to be concerned about leading his troops into battle. Only a man completely bamboozled by an evil woman could have engaged in such dangerous brinkmanship on the battlefield, abandoning all sense of honor just to pursue a pointless romance.61 In case anyone doubted his complete infatuation, they filled out the record with the love letters written between them, sequestered during the raid on the palazzo in Murano and now part of the public record.62 The revelation of the letters was an especially brilliant move. The lawyers calculated with unfailing accuracy that the bishop of Sarzana

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would take many expressions amiss. Esteem and even subservience between a man and a woman who loved each other were one thing. But if a woman’s life was duty, what was he to make of “I swear to you, in the name of the love I feel for you, that I can’t live like this”?63 If a man’s duty was domination, what of: “I want to be considered by you to be your most humble servant; this is my true and only goal”?64 The testimony was as moving and human as any he was likely to have encountered among his flock, and yet it revealed dangerous amoral tendencies, hedonism, and even blasphemy. On the paper next to the most scandalous passage in one of the letters, they drew a small finger pointing in the margin. The passage read: “I desire to serve Your Most Illustrious Ladyship as much as God Himself, adoring you as much as I do Him, and perhaps more.”65 Surely if the bishop needed any clearer sign of the devil’s work in this case, here it was. Meanwhile Marchetti went about dismantling the original testimony used in the annulment proceedings. To find weaknesses he did not have to look far. When Giovanni’s agents came to Genoa back in 1619, people in Livia’s neighborhood had taken full advantage of the prince’s generosity. The changing times worked strange effects. At least two of the original witnesses admitted in confession to having been bribed, and as soon as this secret was referred to the court by a scrupulous priest, they received immunity from prosecution in return for their testimony against the annulment.66 Another had meanwhile been sent to jail for various crimes. Livia’s house in Murano, ransacked from top to bottom, yielded precious documents, including a letter from her previous lawyer, which at the time she did not follow instructions to “destroy so it cannot damage our case” and reminding about the amount of money (“a very large sum”) required to loose the tongues of those who might depose in her favor.67 Rather than reexamining the original witnesses one by one and running the danger that they might prove more loyal than necessary to their original engagements, Marchetti declared them all unfit and compiled a new list including only “persons who are honorable and worthy of being believed, above any possible exception.”68 Marchetti and his team took care that the new witnesses should have even more powerful reasons to testify than the simple need for

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cash. Antonio Ceccherelli, for instance, Livia’s former butler, dismissed for dereliction of duty and possible theft, had escaped from Venetian authorities pursuing him for still other crimes and taken refuge in Florence, only to find himself clapped in irons as a likely witness in any case involving Livia. Now he was grateful for having been set free by the late grand duke in a streak of deathbed mercy-​granting and determined to stay that way. In return for lenient treatment for his involvement in the original annulment proceedings as a messenger and amanuensis, moving back and forth between Genoa and Venice, he was only too happy to volunteer the requested opinion regarding the original witnesses in Livia’s favor. They were basically her neighbors, he said, but none could be believed. In general, “they are not considered to be honest men and women.” Most were of poor and vile condition, and as such, could not be trusted. On the grounds of his own experience or, more often, hearsay, he stated that Lazarina Raggi was a “woman regarded badly in Genoa,” whereas Michelangelo and Niccolò Turcotti were automatically discredited by their profession of “cops” (birri)—just slightly better than hangmen in the popular mind. Finally, Francesco and Antonio Rolandi were somehow related to Livia (a textbook reason for exclusion).69 Benedetto Blanis, Giovanni’s former librarian, had the most to gain from cooperating with Marchetti and the other lawyers. Currently confined in the grand ducal prisons due to suspicions of blasphemy, sorcery, usury, and, last but not least, incitement to apostasy among recent converts from Judaism, he hoped to get a reprieve before the Inquisition had time to get involved in his case. He might even have considered himself a scapegoat for the grand duchesses’ disapproval of Giovanni’s dangerous dabbling in magic, flirting with cabala, and trafficking in forbidden books. Although no specific charges were ever made, he knew what he had to do. With the obvious relish of one who resented his former mistress, he indicated, “as far as concerns her having been a woman for hire before the friendship with Giovanni, I heard the same from her mouth and from those who knew her.”70 No matter how hard the lawyer pressed him, however, he would not say that Giovanni did or planned any wrong. The supposed murder plot against Granara was entirely a failed project of Antonio Ceccherelli,

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considering that Giovanni himself was not one to leave important business undone. If Giovanni had been involved, Granara would be dead. As for the tampering with witnesses for the story about domestic violence, “I do not think Livia’s brothers would have decided to break up the marriage between her and Battista Granaro on the grounds of being forced, unless this was the truth.” No, his former master was an honest man, and the accusations were false. In perhaps an oblique reference to the interrogation of Ceccherelli, he volunteered: “In general I can say nothing more than that I believe one must put little store by the words of one who is being examined about a person who has done them wrong.”71 Witnesses played their parts mostly according to Marchetti’s script, confirming the points in his list, with careful encouragement according to the prescribed questions: “Is it true that Signora Livia couldn’t just leave Granara’s house, because the father and brother beat her?” “Is it true that married women have places to go if they need to, but they prefer to leave the state because of popular rumors?” “Did the brothers of Signora Livia bring her to Battista Granara’s house at night or in the daytime?” “Did you ever hear the said Signora Livia call herself Livia Vernazza or Granara, and how many times, where and by whom?” Especially, “ask them if they believe that Signor Bartolomeo Tassarelli [Livia’s lawyer in the first trial] or Livia’s brothers, ever set out to find witnesses who deposed falsely,” considering such behavior behooves not “men of honor.”72 Moreover: “is it true that Don Giovanni de’ Medici studied civil and canon law?” Alessandro Bruni, a solicitor living about a hundred paces from the Vernazza’s, agreed that Livia was “beautiful,” adding, however, that he had “seen other girls as beautiful as she was, and more noble.” Some of these, he said, “took older men for their husbands, even uglier than the said Battista Granara.”73 Ascanio Albo, a musician, said Granara “could have been around forty, but he did not seem old or ugly,” although he was unable to confirm whether or not “the marriage between Battista Granara and Livia was forced.”74 Giovanni Canale, a tailor, revealed that he had been in the room next to where the marriage was taking place and, “I don’t remember how many times she was asked by the priest before she finally said yes, if she responded to the second or the third, because

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here in Genoa the little girls are ashamed to say yes the first time even when they are taking their loved one.”75 And so it went as proceedings dragged on until June 1622. Livia, whose situation at Montughi had not improved, and to whom news arrived by trickles, may have had some difficulty avoiding the downward slope from anxiety into despair. She had been through one lonely summer since leaving Venice and now another was on the way. We can well imagine how she missed Giovanni, the excitement of her old much busier life, the theater, human contact of any kind, and someone with whom to converse and to complain. Worst of all would have been the uncertainty about the future, mixed with a vague prospect of many decades of the same solitude until the end. The house at Montughi must have provided little consolation, having been reduced to hollow walls and empty rooms, since the furniture was removed years ago for the transfer to Venice and now lay under sequester in the Medici warehouses awaiting redistribution or liquidation. In one last effort to do for herself what the lawyers and her fortunes had denied her, Livia prepared a coup de scène. Pen and paper were still to be found in her semi-​imprisonment; she resolved to use them as best she could. Her flagging spirits, either from uncured diseases or mental fatigue, were evident from every line she wrote. And there was no way now to hide behind a secretary’s formal hand. The characters were nothing like those of her earlier autograph letters, large, brisk, and powerful, but rather those of an old person, shaky chicken scratchings tilting down to the lower right corner of the page. She aimed straight for the only person in the world who could help: the judge in the property case, upon whose decision her future ultimately lay. She summoned all her strength and protested that “she could not defend herself,” and that “for nine months they only allowed me to write to Genoa when they wished”—meaning, to the Genoese Republic, includ­ ­ing Sarzana. Now the news had arrived and she was certain: the witnesses for the plaintiffs had been bribed. “My brother advises me that in Genoa, those witnesses who were examined in favor of the other part took money for this.”76 It was a courageous accusation, and she would pay for it.

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The grand duchesses discovered Livia’s designs through Marchetti’s regular reports on what was going on in and around the courtroom, and they reacted immediately. They would deal later with her attempts to communicate with Sanguinetti, which already had resulted in offhand comments between the opposing lawyers about the possibility of contaminated proceedings. They now had to ensure that any such insinuations would not influence the judge while the lawyers were mak­ ­ing their summaries. On the 13th of June, through their agent Andrea Cioli, they once more thanked the bishop of Sarzana in advance for ensuring a rapid outcome, favorable to the Medici side, necessary to avoid “so many irregularities,” reminding him of the importance of the case to the family, and referring to the old friendship.77 Again on the 15th, they repeated the message, adding that any efforts by Sanguinetti, Livia’s lawyer, ought to be repulsed “in the greater interest of all.” 78 The bishop of Sarzana was less impressed by the substance of the accusation than by the temerity of the accuser. He knew exactly what to do: he presented the grand duchesses with Livia’s appeal. “See with what license she puts things on paper and distributes them,” he remarked. Fortunately, no one who knew “the pious mind of Your Highnesses” would ever believe such nonsense, but clearly the woman was dangerous. If any other emanations of a similar kind came his way, he promised to pass them on, as part of the infinite duties of observance to which he felt inclined in the course of his “obligations and service to your Most Serene House.”79 Soon the family would see, he added, how well “I have acted in the execution of your commands during the course of the proceedings.” From the very day “when Dr. Pandolfo Marchetti first came to represent the matrimony case,” he had done his best to accommodate the grand duchesses’ “particular interest.”80 Now that things were finally drawing to a close, they could rest assured that he had done his duty. He even put some slightly unfavorable point in the judgment, he warned, which he considered necessary for the appearance of impartiality. “If I have neglected some small thing in your regard in the interest of justice,” he explained, “this may be considered to be of little importance considering the principal goal.”81 The goods, and the documentary record, were secure.

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The sentence, pronounced on June 27, 1622, was as predictable as it was harsh. At least Livia would not be punished according to the canon law prescription for female bigamists, enshrined in Gratian’s Decretum, by having her hair cut off and her clothes torn to rags.82 Nor would she be forced to go and live with the hapless Granara, who could hardly stand the sight of her at this point: other plans were being made in regard to her freedom. As for the property, Giovanni’s real estate was to be returned to the legitimate side of the family and divided up. A good portion of the movable and immovable assets were added to the patrimony of Don Lorenzo, who had, after all (so his lawyers protested to the grand duchesses) received so little in the previous property divisions, whereas “his Most Serene brothers have received properties with much greater incomes.”83 Here at last was an opportunity for ensuring that justice was adequately served. Lorenzo moved into the palazzo in Parione, filling it with his considerable collection of artworks and commencing a rigorous schedule of entertainments. Soon he would need to sell off the movable assets to pay debts.84 To take some attention away from the partiality of the proceedings (at least such was his explanation), the bishop of Sarzana had decided that a limited number of the creditors, the major ones who had presented their appeals at the beginning of the trial, would get their money back. The actual distribution was up to the Court of Wards, operating according to a clearly defined mandate. Satisfying the major clients was far more important than preserving the good memory of Don Giovanni by honoring his debts. Even while the trial was going on, they let Don Lorenzo pick over the furnishings, books, and other valuables from Venice. Then they sold off a number of lots to the amount necessary for paying off a few more creditors. They passed the rest on to Cosimo Baroncelli, who had not failed to remind them of his rights as the last surviving among the servants to whom household furnishings were to be distributed according to the terms of Giovanni’s original will penned in 1588.85 Anyone else forever held their peace. Livia was ruined. Her property was gone, and her reputation as a fallen woman was legally confirmed. And yet, the grand duchesses had not heard enough words of contrition or seen enough abasement. They

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never expressed their reasons for what happened next, at least not in any document. They merely said the word to staff members capable of interpreting their desires, and their vendetta was complete. By Andrea Cioli, they were informed that “the temerarious insolence of these brothers of Livia grows and grows,” but “in the end it will be the worse for them, because their destruction will be all the greater.”86 They left Cioli to decide how to carry this out. They paid greater attention to Livia herself. In response to the latest letters from Sacchetti in Venice, complaining of another outburst from her containing the usual bestial impertinences, accusing the officials of who knew what illegalities, subterfuges, and general injustice, they decided that house arrest would not do.87 Nor would a convent provide sufficient daily reminders of her duty to God and man. A sterner solution was in order. Even Livia was surprised. Just when she thought she had seen the worst, a year after the trial ended, on the night of August 2, 1623, the Medici officials, different ones this time from those who had invaded her home in Murano two years before, burst into her villa in Montughi.88 They needed no warrant, nor did they owe an explanation to her or anyone else, beyond the vague imperative of service to the grand duchesses. They simply took her straightaway to the fortress of San Miniato, high above the city. There would be no trial, no lawyers, and no judge. She had no champions in Florence, and loosed from her Medici moorings, she was fair game. The officials placed her somewhere in the structure where the cold and dampness would affect her later medical record, but not long enough to kill her. Soon they transferred her to another prison: the Belvedere Fortress, supposedly the Medici family’s refuge in case of attack, situated on the eastern corner of the ­gardens behind the Pitti Palace. Years before, Giovanni had flattered the Grand Duchess Cristina of Lorraine’s desire to add a woman’s touch to the austere military architecture there by designing a small chapel according to some vague specifications. That area was off limits to Livia. She would endure the confinement altogether for sixteen years, without pen or paper or other form of contact with the outside world. Perhaps now she would learn humility; perhaps not. To the grand duchesses’ infinite annoyance, the Livia affair was not over yet.

7 Durable Goods

Forte Belvedere, 10 January 1638 Twelve years of “strict confinement” in the Belvedere Fortress took their toll on Livia, also because of the quality and location of the single room.1 There were apartments in the central villa of the fortress fit to house the grand ducal family, which would actually transfer to this location temporarily during the worst days of the plague of 1630, far away from the contagion raging in the streets of Florence. Considering that Livia lived in the fortress when the grand ducal party arrived, she could not have been lodged anywhere near these spaces.2 Nor would she have shared the secret known to a few trusted officials that somewhere beneath the whole structure was a passageway leading deep down to where the Medici kept their treasure, an immense quantity of gold and precious stones worth the entire wealth of several kings. Her room would have been on the ground floor, in the vicinity of the tiny fortress garrison—although conversation with the soldiers, or with anyone else, was strictly forbidden. She lived, as she referred in a message to the grand duke that one of the guards scrawled for her on a scrap of paper in an unlearned hand, “as in a jail, without being able to

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write or speak to any living person.” After age 40, her health finally broke; from this time on, she would complain (in the few messages that have survived) of undefined illnesses, brought on, presumably, by cold, damp conditions, bad food, bad air, lack of light, lack of movement, and depression. Her experience of Renaissance prison life was in general not unusual, except that she survived it.3 Others who survived apparently blocked it out or else found no way to fit it into the accepted genres of memoir-​ writing, except Benvenuto Cellini, who, true to form, only mentioned the picaresque elements of the sojourns in Castel Sant’Angelo and the Tor di Nona in Rome: vermin, squalor, and a famous escape. Had she been regularly allowed pen and paper, Livia would have written mostly to gain sympathy for her plight, addressing her complaints to the local authorities, and like the imprisoned poet Torquato Tasso, to everyone she knew.4 Day to day, week to week, month to month, many things no doubt occupied her mind. Not being Michelangelo, hiding in a dark and airless cell underneath his New Sacristy at San Lorenzo during the siege of Florence, she drew no pictures on the walls to remind herself of her projects and the world outside, as far as we know. Nor did she, like some other inmates, discover her religious self. Her prison cell graffiti, if she lifted any sharp stone or leg-​iron in anger against a wall, might have included themes of salvation as well as of rebellion, but the crucifixes would most likely have been as protective talismans against the depths of despair and mind-​consuming hatreds.5 Since the familiar correspondence ceases after Giovanni’s death, we have no direct access to her state of mind. In writing to the grand duke, she remarked about the inconvenience of receiving no “relief for the soul” (sollevamento d’anima) in the Medici jails—in her case, “never being allowed to hear a Mass.” But the real purpose of the letter was apparently to gain a transfer to a more comfortable location, not to demand the assistance of a priest. What kept her alive, we may be sure, was her desire for revenge.6 She must have wondered about what she was missing, especially the life she could have had but never would. She still owned a garden on the outskirts of the city, behind Villa Le Macine in Montughi, with a

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graceful fountain designed by Giovanni. The Medici family had allowed her to keep it so the dwindling incomes could pay her jailer and her lawyers, for bad services rendered to body and things. Perhaps she pictured how the farmers working the land marched their oxen across the rose-​lined pathways (as we know from another document), chopped the trees for wood, and stole what olives and grapes there still remained.7 On better days, maybe she thought of how the garden looked when she enjoyed it, with the breezes blowing fresh from the foothills of the Apennines and the scent of rosemary in the air. Maybe she also thought about her secret treasure—nothing like the family’s, but important nonetheless to her. For through all the years of imprisonment, there was one set of her items that remained secure from the grand duchesses Maria Maddalena and Cristina of Lorraine despite all their attempts, and those of their agents, to divest her of these too. Thinking upon them, and their many associations, rather than on the things she lost, may have brought her at least some solace, may have placed her in some oasis of beauty on a mental landscape of ugliness and spoiled dreams. The fading memory may have helped her keep her sanity as well. Again and again she must have turned her mind back to the miserable month of July 1621. In the last hours as she had gazed around her island palazzo in Murano, she must have known she would never return to Venice. Her life was being dismantled before her eyes piece by piece like an elaborate opera set after the music stopped and the singers took their bows. But just as she began to realize her days of freedom were over, with Niccolò Sacchetti and other Medici agents hovering over her drawing up lists of property she would never see again, she made one last gesture of defiance. In the midst of this ignominy, she gathered the objects that contained many of the memories of her former life. As soon as Don Garzia di Montalvo arrived in Murano at noon on the day after Giovanni’s death, to help Sacchetti take possession of the palazzo and of her, she managed to hand three chests over to Cornelia, the midwife, to load discreetly aboard a gondola for a trip to the other side of the island, where the nuns at the two convents of Santo Spirito and of Santi Marco e Andrea awaited with orders to keep them for her until she gave the agreed-​upon sign

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that she wanted them back. Her jewelry and silver, at least, were safe. Now she wondered, would she ever get them back?

g Livia was surely not the only one with memories of that day. Niccolò Sacchetti, now bishop of Volterra, must have occasionally reflected about those first steps in his now-​abandoned career as a diplomat. In taking the vow of celibacy, perhaps he also took a vow never to be fooled by a woman again. By the time he figured out what had happened, on July 24, 1621, Livia was long gone. Yet as the grand duchesses’ representative in Venice, he was personally responsible for getting the property back. The woman was once again up to her old tricks, he likely thought, and eventually she would see there was no use. She would realize all resistance was futile and that full cooperation might avoid matters getting very much worse. For now, however, she was not his problem—his problem was the property. He knew there were jewels, and he had detailed information from the officials of the Medici Wardrobe that Giovanni had ordered a good quantity of the family silver to be sent to Venice for his use in 1615. There was a log notation of the pieces, with the value stated at around four thousand scudi.8 Where were these and where were the other valuables? The grand duchesses ordered him to find out. There had already been one slightly embarrassing moment, two days after Giovanni’s death, on July 19, when he saw a suspicious-​looking strong box being trucked out the door of the palace. Thinking it might contain the jewels, he had the box brought back upstairs and secured the house so nothing else would get out except under his orders. Livia protested, whereupon he had someone try “to calm the woman down as much as possible.”9 Only when she was gone did he discover that the jewels and silver were already in the convents. How to get them out? It would be harder than he imagined. Sacchetti thought these holy women, these women “consecrated to the service of God,” as he put it in his report to the grand duchesses, would do their duty by handing over the goods.10 He was wrong, and the disappointment expressed in his report shows just how high he

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had raised his expectations. Perhaps he had set out for the other side of the island of Murano to the convents of Santo Spirito and San Marco e Andrea playing over to himself the witticisms and courtesies he would use to win their confidence. Although he was no ladies’ man, he knew what supposedly worked to bend the will of the female gender; and after the experience of Livia, we may imagine he needed a boost to his waning self-​confidence in this regard. He would have gone accompanied by the strongest lackeys on his staff to wield the boxes and the chests, making sure there would be room in the boat. However, the varieties of womanhood he encountered to date ill prepared him for what he found when he crossed the threshold of the convent of Santo Spirito. The nuns, it seemed, saw matters rather differently from the way he did, although we can only read their thoughts by his descriptions. Agostina Morosini and Benedetta Benedetti, Livia’s contacts, were disinterested in his problem and curious about the world. They obeyed their abbess, not the Florentine ambassador. In their view, their behavior suggests, they had nothing to gain from paying him the slightest heed.11 The more urgently he appealed to them, the more they seem to have become convinced that he represented the grand duchesses of a far-​off polity and not Livia Vernazza-​de’ Medici. The more he attempted to make of the jewels an affair of state, the more they suspected an intrusion of international politics in their relations with the woman, a suspicion that only increased their sense of self-​importance. They had received the things from Livia with nothing but vague indications of where she was going and with orders to give them to no one but herself. Sacchetti’s very presence here no doubt made them think that Livia had left the island involuntarily and was being held incommunicado.12 His evident hurry to get things done probably reminded them that they had all the time in the world. The ambassador was in a difficult position, and they could play this game of cat-​a nd-​mouse almost ad infinitum. Suor Agostina and Suor Benedetta, as inmates in an institution, knew all about power; and for them, very likely, power was something different from what it was for Sacchetti. Power was a memory of whatever agency their sex normally allowed within secular society. They

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were the younger daughters of the Venetian patriciate or gentry, from whom power was removed on the day when their families forced them to submit to the rules of the convent, and eventually to take vows and join a religious order, so as to give more power to their siblings.13 Family wealth was conserved by male primogeniture and by giving a limited number of daughters away in marriage; any protest was supposed to be smothered by prayers, hymns, and austerities. Some of their fellow nuns, like the daughters of Galileo Galilei in Florence, had been born of common women whom their fathers, perhaps of ancient but impoverished aristocracy, were too embarrassed to marry off for the dowry they could afford. Stored away as children to save money and honor, they spent their best years writing letters to their families about the beauties of the Cross, convent minutiae, and properties only their relatives would see or enjoy, articulated with occasional sparks of insight that might be expected of good brains and endless opportunity for reflection.14 They had few illusions. Only to outsiders would the erudite diatribe, Innocence Undone, also called Paternal Tyranny, written by a fellow nun named Arcangela Tarabotti, recently admitted to the convent of Sant’Anna in Venice, offer any new revelations about the world of forced vocations. To insiders, her comparison (published decades later) of nuns to courtesans and parents to pimps, seducing young girls into a disreputable trade in the service of convents and themselves, would seem amply confirmed by daily experience, even without the sea of citations to every ancient and modern classic that a well-​stocked monastic library might have on hand, and even without the companion piece, Monastic Hell, which remained in manuscript until modern times.15 To be sure, Tarabotti’s picture of a “a little bird, going about in its pure simplicity among the branches of the trees or along the banks of the rivers, sweetly whispering in gentle harmony, pleasing the ear and consoling the heart of whoever listens, when all of a sudden it is caught by the insidious net and deprived of its dear liberty” was perhaps too bleak. Nuns, too, had fun in the convent, attested by their reams of plays, poems, and novellas, written and performed to while away the hours by images of the world outside—the real world of families, children, and lovers that they craved or feared—which modern scholars

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have unearthed in the archives.16 The nuns at Santo Spirito would now have some fun with Niccolò Sacchetti. Unfortunately for Sacchetti, his strategy to elude the nuns was based on a false premise—false, at least, at this stage in the story. In his view, they sought to keep the jewels and silver in order to steal what they could for redistribution to their families, as devoted and unscrupulous agents in family policy. They may already have sent the goods to “the house of some nobleman,” he feared.17 Busy day and night with the conservation and augmentation of Medici property, and his own, he could imagine no other possible motivation for the nuns’ tenacity. The important thing, then, was to have inventories drawn up and report a crime. Eventually, whatever was present at the convents would be compared to the inventory, and the nuns would be forced to give up the missing pieces in return for lenient treatment. Malefactors who refused to cooperate would be dealt with harshly. First of all (so he reported to the grand duchesses), he would have the gondolier who had originally transported Cornelia the midwife and the goods to the convents arrested by order of the Council of Ten.18 Presumably, if the Ten were involved, and not just the police, some metal could be applied to his body and a confession elicited. That might lead to an affirmation concerning other people involved; one person would lead to another, and the investigation might have a snowball effect. Next he planned to have the nuns themselves excommunicated, which would presumably leave them at the mercy of his men. The three ringleaders would be rounded up, namely, Suor Laura Celega, later the abbess of Santi Marco e Andrea, and, at Santo Spirito, Suor Agostina Morosini and Benedetta Benedetti. Especially upon this last, in his words the “shrewdest” of the three, some extra pressure could be put. The law was an instrument for keeping people in their place, not just for punishing crime; justice, after all, meant “to each his own,” that is, in terms of status. Justice was also a matter of paying due respect to heads of state and their families, at home and abroad—a particular specialty of the fine-​tuned Florentine system, missing here in Venice “where justice is rendered with a hatchet” and not, in other words, with a scalpel. Now, it seemed, this Suor Benedetta “is not noble”; therefore, “there is an advantage,” supposing that the scalpel and not the hatchet

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would be applied—because with her the Patriarch of Venice “can proceed with no compunction whatsoever.”19 On receipt of an encouraging response from the grand duchesses, Sacchetti set about his work. He had a note extracted from a reluctant Livia on a false promise of liberty, asking for delivery of her property, along with a power of attorney issued in her name. His first stop was the bishop of Torcello, directly responsible for ecclesiastical affairs in Murano and thus for the monasteries in question. Bishop Zaccaria della Vecchia’s current headquarters were still in Venice; only his successors would live on the island of Murano in the same Cappello palace where Giovanni died. The bishop was no stranger to controversy. As a churchman he could hardly avoid entertaining a slightly uneasy relationship with the Venetian government; families connected to the papacy were routinely excluded from Senate deliberations on ecclesiastical affairs. He himself had been a papal protonotary at the time when Paul V launched a terrible Interdict against Venice for supposed insults to the Church. Above all, he knew about nunneries, because he had to report on them periodically to his superiors in Rome. No one had to remind him that the creatures therein were not simply hooded ciphers waiting to do the bidding of their betters. They were often highly educated, frequently opinionated, not necessarily happy about their fate, and above all, dedicated to studying exactly what they owed to whom, when, and how often. He trusted their judgment about their own affairs and would gladly leave them to their own devices. As for himself, he was happy to offer his services to any of the faithful, including Florentines, of whatever allegiance, although strictly speaking, he was more concerned about their souls than about their property. He was willing to help the Florentine ambassador, to a certain extent. The ambassador could forget about enrolling him as an accomplice in this tawdry business. The bishop accordingly had himself rowed out to Murano with his vicar late on the evening of August 13th to visit the nuns of Santi Marco e Andrea. There were other matters on the agenda, and he ended up staying over two hours. He brought up the question of the property belonging to Livia. They knew all about it. In fact, they had their own theories about what the ambassador was up to, for whom, and for what

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reason. They also had a pretty clear idea of where their own interests and duties lay in this regard. The bishop got back to Venice too late to call upon the ambassador and report what he heard, so he wrote a brief note. Livia’s things, he said, were very safe “and would remain so”; there was no need to worry about that. Likewise, the letter supposedly by Livia and the power of attorney were “safe”—not that the nuns had been too impressed by either one.20 Especially Sister Laura Celega (the bishop recounted) demanded proof that Livia was alive and well and actually desired to avail herself of her things while now in Florence, where she had purportedly returned. Let a list be sent, in Livia’s hand (which the nuns knew very well from the correspondence over the years). Sister Laura had “very loudly” demanded this. “Let us have this list,” the bishop concluded, “and we will overcome everything.” It was not the response Sacchetti had hoped for. He vowed to put more pressure on the bishop and, in turn, on the nuns. Meanwhile he reconstructed for the grand duchesses what had happened, in his own words. It was like having to deal with a whole roomful of Livias. The nuns were “terrible and proud as can be.” Instead of behaving “as reason demands,” that is, obeying grand ducal orders, especially this Sister Laura told the bishop “a thousand impertinences.” She even went so far as to suggest that the letter, purportedly from Livia, and the power of attorney with Livia’s name on it were false, or else had been extorted from Livia by force, and much else fit to make one “lose one’s patience.”21 True or not, such matters were none of their business, and their behavior indicated a dangerous attitude of indifference to the authority of the prince. They had also made a strange request: let Livia give some sign they had agreed upon, signifying all was well. This time, however, he would not be Livia’s fool. The grand ducal agents must make her produce a list of the goods (“half a Bible,” if need be, said the ambassador) and give this sign. This he would take to the next hierarchical level above the bishop in order to make the nuns “do what is proper” (i.e., by threatening them with punishment).22 Confiscation of the property, so he believed, was only a matter of time. By mid-​August his mind was apparently running along several parallel lines, including the problem of extinguishing Giovanni’s debts

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in Venice once and for all. Here the jewels and silver could be a real help. For instance, there was a significant claim against Giovanni’s estate by a certain Primicerio Cornaro in Venice, scion of a major patrician family. Now, there was a danger that “paying off one creditor one would have to pay off all the rest.” But this approach might facilitate “getting Livia’s things back from the nuns on Murano,” because Cornaro was a state official with some responsibility for political oversight of one of the monasteries, and if the prospect were offered of an immediate payment by liquidating the property, perhaps the creditor himself could be enlisted for retrieving it.23 All that was necessary was a little official insistence to secure Medici control, and then Medici officials could either have the goods auctioned off or else assessed and the appropriate portion assigned to the debt as a payment in kind. As the weeks and months went by, with no resolution to the question of Livia’s things anywhere in sight, Sacchetti prepared to pay off the Cornaro debt using other assets. He would have to set aside the eventual destiny of the jewels and silver until he managed to get his hands on them. Livia was still at Montughi in summer 1621, probably wishing she could stay forever but knowing there was more trouble in store. The catastrophe of the trial would have been still fresh in her mind as bits of her property fast disappeared into Medici hands. A sable pelt had been practically ripped from her shoulders by Medici agents as she climbed aboard the boat on the way to Florence back in July (we know this from the later appearance of the same accessory in an account of things sent separately as soon as she was out of sight).24 Such experiences most likely did not quiet her spontaneous diffidence about anyone claiming to act on her behalf. So when Sebastiano Cellesi came around toward the end of August proposing to retrieve her jewels and silver in Venice, she must have wondered whether he really had her best interests at heart. The documents suggest that she responded to questions, perhaps fearing the consequences if she did not, drawing up an inventory “not in her own hand because she was too weak.”25 She recalled the items, although some of the details were fuzzy in her mind. He took the dictation.

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First, a case with a pearl necklace inside, of six strings, and two strings of pearls serving as bracelets; the chain has a gold clasp in gold with black enameling; and the bracelets have two small clasps, and if I remember correctly there is also a round necklace of pearls which, if it was not in the same case was in a kerchief with other gold chains enameled in the Milanese fashion, and in this kerchief there were two chains of Milan, enameled, and one had attached to it a little locket with three little figures on it, and inside was a portrait of His Most Illustrious Excellency, God have him in glory, and also there was a pair of Turkish-​style bracelets with turquoise and small rubies and emeralds and also there was a pair of little hands without enamel, in a plain style [alla piana], and another pair, open, without enamel, and also there was a dagger with a sheath of nacre, and with its points of enameled gold, and a handle of corniola and lapis, and a circle of emeralds attached to the said dagger, and woven chain, and a purse of solid gold in the French style.

The recital must have brought back some memories of the people formerly in her life. She went on for another thirty lines: A small seal made of jasper with my arms engraved on it, and a gold watch with a covering in gold weave, also a pair of earrings with pearls, a pair with five pearls each, and a pair with seven pearls each, a gold chain with nothing, and also a little red velvet cushion with 48 pins in it of enameled gold each with a diamond at the top, a little pin with little turquoises in the middle of its pillow, and also a small case with two pairs of earrings in it, one with three pearls each, round and big, and two small ones, and diamonds mixed in, the other pair all of diamonds with a single pearl, and another case containing a diamond jewel in the form of a lily, another with a jewel of diamonds, rubies, and round emeralds, another case with a broken gold watch in it, and yet another case with a little gold enamel box in it with a portrait of a woman.26

She did not mention, in this particular version, that this last-​noted cameo happened to be a portrait of herself—perhaps some self-​ ­effacement was in order, in view of her present situation. “As far as the

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jewels are concerned, there could be other minor things, which I do not recall,” she commented, adding, “but when I see them I will know if anything is missing.” Significantly, at this early stage in the retrieval, she gave a narrative, not a list. Perhaps her emotional bond to the things was still too strong to be reduced to such bureaucratic formalities. Did she experience a natural diffidence to lists? She said she had to see her things to know if anything was missing; perhaps also, practical person that she was, she also had to see them to feel that they were real. Simply stated, word for word, they would have seemed to be only necklaces, bracelets, rings, or pendants on a page. Without holding them in her hands, she would no longer have felt the exoticism: the stones from faraway places—India diamonds, Burma rubies, New World emeralds—exquisitely worked by craftsmen mostly in Italy but also in Northern Europe. Even the most famous of them all, the diamond-​studded lily, which raised much speculation among the Medici agents about whether it would survive the sticky fingers of the many people through whose hands it was certain to have passed during the time since Livia’s deposit at the convent, seemed to be nothing but words.27 Ten bags containing various types of currency worth one thousand ducats were nothing more than a few figures written in pen. Even the silverware—the goblets, plates, serving utensils, and what not, filling two bulky trunks full of stuff—lost its luster in a bare description. But list or no list, she was sure of one thing: if she could not enjoy them, no one else would either. She put her signature on the sheets of paper where Cellesi had written down the inventory. In the last week of August she dictated letters to the various nuns in the convents, a veritable barrage. Sacchetti made arrangements to get these directly from the Medici agent on arrival in Venice, so he could ensure the next step would be “only what was approved” by him.28 He had them delivered to those concerned and awaited the outcome. However, once again he underestimated Livia’s resourcefulness. From her communications she apparently omitted the previously agreed-​upon sign that the nuns would understand to refer to her actual state of mind. Her requests to have her things placed in the hands of the Florentine ambassador and his men were read for what they did not say: as indications about the house

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arrest, the agents standing over her, and the threat that if she did not behave as they commanded, she would have to suffer more, while the so-​called return of her things really meant their redistribution to the grand duchesses, Don Lorenzo, and the rest. For Livia, trust was a one-​ way street: Sacchetti could not trust her, but what really mattered was that she could not trust him. At the end of August, the bishop of Torcello referred to Sacchetti the latest bad news, that the nuns “would not be forced so easily to satisfy the desires of Your Illustrious Lordship.”29 The grand duchesses got wind of the existence of this interesting property almost as soon as they heard about Don Giovanni’s death.30 If Livia may have experienced some difficulty in conceptualizing her things as a mere list, they quite likely would not have shared any such feelings. They lived by lists—of titles (Maria Maddalena’s father had five), of illustrious ancestors, of progeny, of estates, of property. They had far too much to hold in the hand or to wear around the neck or with which to swathe the body, and far more than they could possibly look at or even count in a day or a week or a month or a year.31 Without lists, there were only piles and piles of unnamed goods in warehouses, in family museums, in family collections of books they would mostly never read, of paintings they would rarely admire, in houses around Tuscany and elsewhere that they occasionally visited but that in themselves were containers for huge quantities of things that could only be fully appreciated, traced, and protected by lists. They had entire staffs of servants dedicated to keeping the books, the files, and the registers of the properties and goods up to date, with the latest appraisals, running after each change, each successive augmentation, each successive revaluation, since objects that dropped off a list, as far as they were concerned, dropped off the earth. They had been married to their husbands accompanied by a list hoping to gain another list, and they would die leaving a list to their heirs. They were determined to add these new things to the masses of other things they had, even if they never lived to touch the things themselves. Using the jewels and silver was not the point. These things were not for using; they were for owning, and the grand duchesses determined to own them at all costs.

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Ownership was power, the grand duchesses knew well; and ownership of the beautiful was, essentially, beautiful. 32 Possessing the beautiful—objects stunning to the eye and exhilarating to the touch—was a way of cheating nature, which had its own (grossly unjust) system for distributing good looks. Therefore, by the logic of an aristocratic ethos committed to correcting nature where nature had been parsimonious, power was beauty. By this definition, the grand duchesses were beautiful enough already. No wonder the court portraitists, in an age of unusual honesty in art (which would not outlive the painters Giusto Suttermans and Santi di Tito), focused on Madama Cristina’s beautiful dress and encrustations of costly ornaments (Figure 7.1). Another generation of painters would resume the tradition of flattering their less comely subjects by erasing the physiognomic effects of serial pregnancies, rich food, and boredom occasionally relieved by intelligent reading, but not yet. Thus the same ambiguous favors were bestowed upon the stocky figure of Maria Maddalena, who, perhaps lacking some of the interior qualities that occasionally embellish the fading luster of youth overcome by middle age, was portrayed in gorgeous costumes studded with precious stones.33 Natural beauty was an insult unless it could be co-​opted or destroyed. The Livia case suggested a combined approach: they would destroy her and take her things. Yet the grand duchesses also belonged to an environment where the power of jewels was impossible to ignore, quite apart from any visual appeal or money value. Their sensitivity to the etymological nuances of their adopted language would have alerted them to the curious transformation of the word used for “jewels” in Italian, derived from the Arabic giohar, or gemstone, commonly called “gioie” or “gioielli,” merging thus with the word that was the same as “joys.” Their jewels were their joys; and the joy of jewels came from much more than the joy of having or of depriving another. Maybe they felt enchanted by jewel magic, one of the few kinds of magic fully authorized in the Bible. If Bible reading was indeed among their devotional pastimes, how could they not think of their own jewels when contemplating Aaron’s jewel-​ studded breastplate in Exodus 28:15–21? Even without St. Jerome’s gloss relating the twelve jewels embedded in the breastplate to the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve signs of the zodiac, or the later medieval

Figure 7.1. ​Santi di Tito, Portrait of Cristina of Lorraine. (Uffizi)

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tradition of writings on the same theme, the heavenly significance was impossible to miss.34 Where jewels were so abundant, surely thoughts about them circulated within the grand duchesses’ earshot. Someone in their midst would have read Marsilio Ficino, master Christianizer of Neoplatonism and courtier of a previous Medici. With one ear to the ground of popular belief and the other to the heights of elite knowledge, he compiled three books on life, tracing, for instance, chalcedony’s effectiveness against illnesses involving black bile, to the influence of the planet Jupiter.35 Closer to the grand duchesses’ own headquarters was the famous Pitti pharmacy, founded by Cosimo I and the site of chemical experiments of every sort, where standard manuals by Dioscorides and Hippocrates informed practitioners that lapis was a cure for snakebite, coral was good for bad skin, and emeralds were a panacea. We imagine they took no sides in the debates about whether Pliny was right to doubt the effectiveness of amber as a goiter remedy or agate as a thirst-​ quencher, or indeed, any gems uniformly colored as a defense against all enemies.36 Likewise we suppose they did not engage in any of the solemn finger-​wagging at Camillo Leonardi’s early sixteenth-​century Mirror of Stones, which attributed powers, more properly consigned to the realm of prayer, such as the ability to increase wealth, divert thunderbolts, calm the weather, and induce princely favor, which circulated for forty years before Lodovico Dolce’s translation of it was finally banned by the Church in 1605.37 If they knew about Gerolamo Cardano’s advice to keep the diamonds out of sight because of the anxiety-​ inducing effects, they could not bear to follow it, although they would have fully endorsed his observation that some special jewels “may make significant changes in the lives” of those who encounter them.38 In Livia’s case, according to their view, these changes must be stopped. The ambassador was less interested in the power of the jewels than in the power of his patronesses; and for making them happy, he was running out of ideas. And a late August appointment with the doge was a total fiasco. At first he may well have been somewhat in awe of Antonio Priuli, an old statesman who had been a military governor against the Turks at the time of the battle of Lepanto and later faced down the Habsburg empire in Friuli.39 And if imagery is a clue for

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c­ apturing the essence of this poorly documented encounter, there is a fine portrait by Leandro Dal Ponte now in the Correr Museum. There we find a countenance at once patient and compassionate, the angular nose and high cheekbones offset by a rounded chin and framed by white hair and beard. The heavy-​lidded eyes betoken measured judgment and the wisdom of years. If that was the stereotypical doge, quite possibly Priuli looked the part.40 Put at ease by this grandfatherly man, Sacchetti seems to have steered the discussion around to the matter of Livia’s property. What he got was not exactly a rebuff, but something worse. The doge assured him that “the silver is in a secure place, and as for the other things the nuns have on Murano, nothing is to be done now until some resolution can be taken that we consider to be in conformity with the owner’s wishes.”41 All Sacchetti could do was to “reply what was necessary” at the moment and, presumably, follow the doge’s agenda for the rest of the meeting, moving on to other matters closer to the Republic’s interests, which the silence in the documents seems to suggest he was simply too stunned to remember. A few weeks after the meeting with the doge, with no noticeable progress to report, Sacchetti unveiled a new plan to the grand duchesses. He would get Livia herself to write directly to the doge, explaining the situation in terms that would guarantee the hoped-​for result. She would lament the nuns’ unfortunate “vendetta” against her (thus making the ill intentions within the convent a matter of public record), and she would insist that the nuns had falsely denied that she wanted her things consigned to the ambassador, and in so doing, they had done her a great wrong. In case the doge wondered why she had recourse to the ambassador at all, indeed, why she left Venice, he would have her explain that she had come to Florence of her own accord, “spontaneously,” to enjoy the mercy of the grand duchesses.42 Such a message, he assured his patronesses, could not fail to “move these gentlemen much more to some resolution” in their favor. What he left out was exactly how Livia was going to be persuaded to pick up the pen: that would be for the grand duchesses’ officials to decide, using any means that might occur to their imaginations. Livia’s letter, however extracted, went to the doge, but there was no new meeting scheduled, nor any progress whatsoever regarding the

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property. As September faded into October, Sacchetti began concocting conspiracy theories to substitute for the absence of any real news. His espionage operation in Venice revealed, he told the grand duchesses, that many key senators did not believe the message from Livia came from Livia, or if they did, they thought she acted under duress. His protests to the contrary only seemed to produce more skepticism in proportion to his zeal in making them. He decided on a different approach. Since there was no way to cancel the negative impression, he would try for a positive one: to anyone who would listen, he would say that the Republic received “more advantage and reputation” from assuming that the documents brought by Sacchetti were authentic in a matter that was none of their business. Even if they were not authentic, the wise prince ought to “dissimulate this, and make as though he did not know it, and not desire to know anything more, thus acquiring more honor.”43 He would urge the senators to focus instead on the great benefits the Republic accrued from its historic alliance with the Tuscan grand duchy, which any false move might put in peril. Apart from the blow to his self-​confidence, Sacchetti may well have begun to think the Livia matter was damaging his effectiveness as a diplomat. His job was to get things done, but the jewels and silver were taking up more and more of his time. No doubt, he would have much preferred to devote himself exclusively to becoming better informed about the main issues, as he saw them, of the politics of the day: namely, the war in Flanders, the restitution of the Valtelline to the Grey Leagues by Spain, and the differences between Milan and Venice concerning certain mountain passes offering conduits for goods and armies.44 Such were the things, mentioned here and there in his letters, that agitated members of the Senate and those who frequented the corridors of power—not the Livia affair. Finding the Medici advantage in the increasingly complex international situation that accompanied the outbreak of the Thirty Years War should have been his chief concern. Instead, here he was having boatmen interrogated about where they took some private property belonging to a widow who had left town. Maybe he wondered, were the other diplomats as deeply thrust into the family affairs of their ruling dynasties as he was, and did it affect their work? Of course, if the jewels and silver could somehow be insinuated

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as tokens in the fast game of political advantage, then there was some sense in all this; but very likely there was nothing to be gained at all. Anything he could not excuse by the sheer perversity of the individuals involved, he blamed on the essential defects of the Venetian system. “Here we are not in Tuscany,” he explained, “or in any other state ruled by a single prince.”45 He added some praise of the Florentine government to divert attention away from his failures. How much better, he sermonized, was a system where “the will of a single prince determines and executes in the same moment.” Here instead, in the Senate, there were “two hundred brains, all different.”46 It was a nightmare. Worse yet, “on things not of public urgency, they all have to agree; so they must be won over one by one.”47 At this rate, his two best weapons were nearly useless, since persuasion was agonizingly slow, while bribery was prohibitively expensive. He had to learn to use a new one: “la flemma”—the weapon of the turtle against the hare, but patience was not in his nature.48 There was a chance that such accounts of the Venetian system would play well back in Florence, especially since Sacchetti could almost have been paraphrasing the manual on politics written by the Medici courtier Scipione Ammirato, dedicated to Grand Duchess Cristina. It was framed as a commentary on the ancient historian Cornelius Tacitus, showing just how much more in tune with the times the history of the Roman empire had recently become, in comparison with the history of the Roman republic, especially now that the insufficiently fawning works of Machiavelli had been successfully consigned to oblivion by Church and prince, amid “much murmuring.”49 The proper role of subjects was to suffer and pray, while topics for the rulers included, in Book 3, Chapter 8, “How to have lots of money” (del modo d’haver copia de’ denari), and in Book 2, Chapter 1, “Whether hunting was the proper exercise of princes.” Sacchetti, we may imagine, fully endorsed concepts such as “any good done by those who serve the prince ought to be attributed exclusively to the virtue and fortunes of the latter.”50 As he waited for his bishopric, he was glad to serve. If Sacchetti was at all familiar with this particular standard reading in the Tuscan court, it seems likely that he would have noticed how a number of Ammirato’s insights fit nicely with the matter at hand. 51 “A

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captain must be eloquent,” it said. That perfectly described Giovanni, for good and for ill. The chapter entitled “What sadness to subjects is brought by the unworthy marriages of their princes” seemed to epitomize the Livia-​Giovanni affair. Many of the brighter minds at court would have noted a subtle strain of criticism in the Lecce-​born historian’s elucidation of the theme of hypocrisy: “only the wicked attempt to cover their designs by religious zeal.” Two generations of Medici princes condemned at a single stroke! Finally, there was some question of whether Ammirato spoke with irony or with catastrophic misjudgment, in saying that “princes and men ought not to pay any attention to rumors among the plebeians.” Why, then, write, as Ammirato had some years before, a book about secrecy—furthermore, one dedicated once again to Don Giovanni?52 Perhaps, some readers must have reflected, the able propagandist was simply attempting to cover his tracks. For all the attractions of government by one (or, in the case of Florence in this period, by the two grand duchesses), many contemporaries thought there were convincing alternatives; Sacchetti remained unconvinced. He may have thought there were other ways to live well, besides being a prince, a courtier, or an exile, but he had certainly not experienced them. For an alternative view, he could have consulted the definitive work on Venice by Paolo Paruta, senator and public historian, published shortly after Livia was born. There he would have found the theme of republicanism tempered by a few adjustments accommodating the myth of Venice to the changing times. He would probably have agreed about the convenience of absolute government, which the work acknowledged, but he would have disagreed with the suggestion that absolute monarchy now existed only in some sort of mix with the other classic constitutional types. Surely, viewing things as he did, he would not have found power to be always shared among a more or less broad group of key families: France, he would have said, was no mix of the three classic polities of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy— and obviously Tuscany was not either. He would have conceded that, for breadth of distribution and for sharing of power, no other system came close to the Venetian one; and there was no doubt about the almost unbroken tradition since the closing of the Grand Council to

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new families in the thirteenth century. That would have given him no reason, however, to admire the system; and if Venice was the home of liberty, a virtue for which he had little use, he much preferred the advantages of monarchical rule for celerity of execution and favors to the obsequious. If he read, “to bear the yoke of one alone was always particularly oppressive to generous men,” he would have thought, they soon get used to it.53 And if in Venice “each good man participated, and could contribute to the common weal,” he would have glossed: and each could contribute to fomenting disorder.54 For the same reasons that there was no way to control the elite in Venice, there was no way, in Sacchetti’s view, to control rumors— especially those regarding foreigners, in matters where the state had no direct interest. Adverse publicity was beginning to spoil his mission. He suspected that Livia might even have had a hand in what he heard in the streets and shops. Certainly, her former servants, who accompanied her to Florence and were abruptly released, once they set foot in Venice, had not followed orders to keep quiet about what they had seen. Instead, they had “filled the city with fabrications and lies” fit to “damage this business immensely.”55 The Venetian ambassador to Florence, too, “must have written more than a little” to the doge and Senate. He found himself having to improvise explanations for “a thousand impertinences” put to him by people nosing around grand ducal affairs, so much as to “ruin everything.”56 It was amazing the way people in the city seemed to show no respect for anyone except whom they chose, simply following their own inclinations, without considering what was due to those truly deserving (i.e., the grand duchesses) and their reputations. Unable to control the rumors already in circulation, Sacchetti decided to circulate one of his own. Perhaps he could do some damage to Giovanni’s reputation, which apart from the overtures of Livia’s supposed wooers seemed to be her strongest suit. So far his patronesses’ effort to cancel her marriage and delegitimize her child had only raised hackles among the patriciate. He could hardly believe his ears when a senator made the point that giving in to his demands for the goods, under these circumstances, would be tantamount to allowing her to be dispossessed. The exactness of the interpretation took the

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wind out of his sails for a moment, but he deftly tacked in a new direction. He considered that the only reason they cared about any of this was because Giovanni was regarded as a hero. He therefore must attempt to make Giovanni out to be a traitor. Among the mountains of papers from the Murano palazzo now being sorted, sequestered, or burned, one in particular had caught his eye: a brief writing that could be interpreted in a number of ways. It could seem to be a would-​be plotter’s plan detailing “how Venice could be taken,” naming the vulnerable structures and indicating possible strategies for a coup. He would subtly draw attention to it. Accordingly, he ensured that it was “not mixed with others” in the latest consignment of sensitive Venice-​related documents in Giovanni’s archives when the Senate Secretary came calling, but stood separately and would be noticed. 57 And sure enough, placed before the Senate, the document was “read immediately” and the senators were “rather displeased.” But the initial curiosity quickly melted into indifference and the document was forgotten. Weeks went by, then months, then the months stretched into years, and Sacchetti gradually subtracted the Livia issue from the central topics of his messages to the grand duchesses. He did not even bother to report the latest episode, when the Senate ordered an inventory of the jewels to be drawn up in the presence of the Grand Chancellor and the bishop’s vicar in April 1624, in the cell of the new abbess, Sister Laura Celega, of the Benedictine convent of Santi Marco e Andrea and had this compared to another account made by Livia herself. 58 By 1627, he was on his way to a new destination, far from citizen committees revolving almost imperceptibly with no end in sight. We may imagine how glad he was to leave Venice for his new post in the legation to the imperial court of Prague, where once again there was one law, one prince, and one opinion. He never inquired again about the jewels or silver, and while the senators’ ardor cooled, so did the grand duchesses’.

g In Florence, public health soon took precedence over all else. The grand duchesses had no way of foreseeing the eventual scope of the

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new catastrophe now gradually unfolding in the cities of northern Italy, in episodes which Alessandro Manzoni two centuries later would make into a great epic novel. They had only just handed power officially over to Ferdinando II, who had reached his majority, and now they were suddenly reminded that rulership was a duty, not just a privilege. What was happening in Florence of course was not their fault. They had nothing to do with the return of North European troops into Italy in large numbers in 1627 for the siege and sack of Mantua, leaving disease and destruction in their wake. Nor could they blame themselves for the disappointing harvest of 1629 after three disastrous harvests in a row. 59 With advice from the recently disbanded regency council, they had Ferdinando bring more grain into Florence from wherever it could be purchased, while closing the city to beggars. The basic problems were beyond their control. Population increases since the last plagues of the late sixteenth century had occurred almost imperceptibly, and so had the mounting burden on structures for food storage and conservation. At first they no doubt imagined they were seeing just the accentuated misery of a miserable population. By 1630 they had a fully fledged contagion on their hands and little knowledge of where it came from or what to do about it.60 Perhaps they thought they saw a pattern: weakness and sickness, poverty and sickness, filth and sickness. If only the poor could be herded out, the city would be sound. But none of the conventional formulae linking poverty, vice, and divine retribution could cancel the regular occurrence of infection at every social level, which no amount of quarantine, bloodletting, and smelling of sweet essences seemed to remove or attenuate as the familiar cycle returned. No wonder they joined the Milanese finger-​ pointers who vented their anger on outcasts accused of spreading secret poisons by way of the holy water stoups in the churches (a likely place for the devil to interfere).61 No wonder, after a time, even the physicians ran away, and likewise, the grand duchesses themselves. They did not run far. The Belvedere Fortress provided a relatively suitable temporary solution, just outside town and equipped, in the central “villa” area on which Buontalenti had lavished particular attention, with spaces of ease and elegance enough to help them forget the squalor prevailing in the city below. The same remoteness that made

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the location an ideal refuge had also made it an ideal prison for Livia, but her path and theirs obviously could not cross. Instead, what particularly concerned them was that the regime’s enemies, as had happened occasionally in the past, might take advantage of the moment to inspire rebellion among the sick and exhausted population. To keep discipline and ensure the regime’s presence in the struggling city, they or their advisors ordered public rituals imploring divine forgiveness, including en-​masse genuflection for silent prayer and public communion. The young grand duke, Ferdinando II, made the rounds of the city with the four princes Gian Carlo, Francesco, Leopoldo, and Don Lorenzo, accompanied by chosen civic officers and ecclesiastics. Finally, on December 5, 1630, a painful meandering procession of sustained mourning brought the body of Sant’Antonino, the fifteenth-​century archbishop canonized in the early sixteenth century, from the monastery of San Marco to the cathedral of Florence.62 Livia heard and saw nothing of this solemn action dedicated to a saint who had died near her residence in Montughi. For Ferdinando II, nicknamed “Buonaventura” at some earlier time when there were better hopes, the experience of the plague and other recent tragedies to some degree shaped his attitude to rulership. His mother Maria Maddalena died in November 1631 near the end of an arduous trip to Vienna, having failed to gain a Neapolitan princess, along with the relevant territories and appurtenances, for her other son Giovanni Carlo. Two years later, amid intermittent deadly reappearances of plague, Ferdinando’s grandmother Cristina began to lose her sight and develop other symptoms of the brain disease that would kill her soon enough.63 Some kind of action seemed necessary. On May 21, 1633, he accompanied a procession bearing the holy image of the Madonna of Impruneta through Florence to the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and back to Impruneta, in the hope that the powerful icon might, as in former years, counter the evil influences that had brought the city to its knees. He was joined by all the local religious orders and confraternities, some 280 people in all, marching under the gaze of a local population ordered to remain indoors for health reasons. It rained torrents. Cold, miserable, lonely, and completely soaked, Ferdinando burst into tears, which the diarist interpreted as a sign of

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his natural piety: “although our Most Serene Grand Duke is twenty-​ two years of age, nonetheless behind that holy image he was seen to weep devotedly.”64 The demonstration undoubtedly reflected the lamentable situation in which his family had left him as a ruler. The road ahead was not going to be easy. Ferdinando had no way of knowing whether or not increased vigilance about unsanitary conditions, along with rigid policies of quarantine, would sharply reduce the likelihood of a new plague outbreak after this one played out. Meanwhile, commerce was at a standstill, with over a tenth of the city’s population dead, amid trading partners (Milan and Venice) that had lost between a third and a half. And no sooner did he begin to inform himself about an increasingly complicated political situation, than Urban VIII took advantage of Duke Francesco della Rovere’s death to take over the duchy of Urbino. Ferdinando had always thought the duchy, in the absence of a male heir, would be destined to the Della Rovere princess he married, namely, Vittoria. Now his hopes of adding the tiny state to the Medici properties were dashed. He was so preoccupied that he missed all the signals in the Galileo matter, as letters from Galileo acquaintances flew this way and that. He turned his head away while the Roman Inquisition trial hurtled to a conclusion that would later haunt him and any philosophers in the grand duchy, not to mention the rest of Europe, for a long time to come.65 In France, the “Day of the Dupes” in late 1630 put an end to the influence and court of his great-​aunt Maria de’ Medici, and now from her exile in Flanders, she was inciting the discontents around Europe against King Louis’ new chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu. Should he take sides? He let Richelieu and his own ministers persuade him to invite Maria to Florence, and a plan was even concocted to abduct her in order to avoid further embarrassments, but he changed his mind at the last minute. Meanwhile he had been playing host to the duke of Lorraine since 1631, in flight after Richelieu took advantage of the duke’s sympathies for Maria and a complex heredity situation to advance French claims to the duchy of Lorraine. Ferdinando had his hands full.66 He had no time for a poor widow languishing somewhere in the regime’s jails, at least for now.

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Not surprisingly, Livia’s first petition to Ferdinando for better treatment, in 1634, was met by total silence and not by a stark refusal, as might have been the case were Madama Cristina still in charge. Supposing that Ferdinando was likely to be unfamiliar with “her miserable situation,” she managed to dictate a message of desperation. Hungry and dressed in rags, she said, she had no money left to pay for food or clothing, usually the responsibility of the prisoner, in this case, her. Those who were supposed to prepare her meals and do her laundry had to be paid a salary plus room and board. If they had to be let go, the reason was only too clear. “Not being able to attend to her own business by herself,” she explained, in the third person, “she has been at the mercy of those who managed her income and possessions brought from Venice.”67 On her estate, and wherever her things happened to be, there was nothing to prevent “one taking this, another taking that, as they wished.” On top of this were the many debts contracted while Giovanni was alive that had been ascribed personally to her and paid out of her slender resources. Thus, “kneeling at the feet of Your Most Serene Highness,” she requested a small increase in the tiny subsidy the treasury had been paying her since the dissolution of her marriage. Might she also be allowed to take up residence at the convent of St. Onofrio of the so-​called nuns of Foligno in Florence, where a small specially built apartment was now free, with the recent death of its previous inhabitant Eleonora degli Albizi, Don Giovanni’s mother? Nothing happened on either account, and Livia waited some more.

g The tide began to turn for Livia in the late 1630s, with help from a wholly unexpected quarter. Her frame of mind was probably beyond desperation, but the death of Cristina of Lorraine at the end of December 1637 may have given her new hope. She could not have been aware of the slow decline that had reduced the grand duchess to an invalid at least since 1634, and when Ferdinando II had failed to respond that year to her petition, she most likely assumed the reason was that he had been held in check by Madama Cristina’s determination to

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divest her of the last shreds of her property and dignity. With the disappearance of this woman, she may have perceived a certain lightening of her burden. The number of those likely to have any firsthand knowledge of the Medici-​Vernazza marriage and the various repercussions was diminishing. Curzio Picchena had died ten years before, and Andrea Cioli, another grand ducal official at the time, had retired. But the absence of all these was not enough for her redemption. Completely out of the blue, a certain Fra Celio da Seravezza appeared in her life, from the Franciscan monastery near the villa Le Macine in Montughi. He was no close family friend, at least not before now. Although he admired Giovanni and shared an interest in astrology and astronomy, there is no record of a meeting. In any case, the two men probably never exchanged more than a few moments of conversation. But he was well-​connected in cultural and political circles, both in Florence and in Venice, and he shared acquaintance with many of the same persons. As vicar of the monastery in Leghorn, he had begun writing to Grand Duke Ferdinando II around 1636 concerning monastery business, and the correspondence had continued with his transfer to Montughi.68 His self-​declared support for Galileo and heliocentrism, widely regarded as the sign of a diabolical mind, had already made him the target of malicious rumors, such as the rumor that he had consulted a famous magician around Montughi about how to gain a cardinal’s hat and was always looking for money and jewels to pay for the spell.69 He was, instead, a “man of prudent goodness, not superstitious,” in the words of Galileo’s correspondent Fulvio Micanzio. He learned about Livia’s predicament in 1638, probably from brothers in the monastery who had seen Livia take communion at the monastery church of Santi Francesco e Chiara many years before. He now made her the object of his pastoral care. Since Livia was in seclusion, he had no direct way to assess either her state of mind or her physical condition. With some carefully placed queries to persons who knew about her because of their business in and around the fortress, he seems to have ascertained that she was alive and still basically in her senses. Anyone could see that she was no danger to the Medici family or the state, if she ever had been. What we know is that he visited her just to make sure, using his privilege as a

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priest. We can imagine what he found. Extrapolating from the circumstances, the lack of hygiene, the flight of the caretakers, the lack of access to proper food, and the sheer neglect, the prospect before him would have been a frail sickly middle-​aged lady. He apparently made an effort to see her again whenever he was in Florence. Meanwhile he offered his own guarantee to Ferdinando: “I believe the ill humors have gone out of the head of the poor girl [poverella], and as I am in continuous communication with her, I promise to ensure that she does whatever Your Most Serene Highness commands.”70 Surely, he added, she would be freer to care for her own affairs if allowed to move back to her property at Montughi. Let her have the freedom of her estate: that was freedom enough, and this for her would be “a great con­ solation.”71 What was more, let her associate freely with the Venetian ambassador in Florence: that would quiet any tongues in Venice that continued to make libelous accusations about the search for Livia’s things being motivated by Medici greed and not by Livia herself. Livia probably never understood why Fra Celio intervened on her behalf, and the evidence at hand gives us no deeper insight. Whatever may have been the interested or disinterested reasons for his attentions, she suddenly got a new lease on life. In these changing times, questions unthinkable when Cristina was alive seemed strangely opportune. Suddenly both the monk and the grand duke were wondering about how she could regain what was hers, as though in a fit of amnesia about all the old reasons why not. No one dared to suggest that she might go abroad to get it, as a fully rehabilitated subject; she was anyway too weak. We can imagine her surprise when she heard that at least as far as the property was concerned, the grand duke desired to defend her rights, even at the cost of getting his own foreign service involved. Still there were complications. Just as she began to enjoy what appeared to be genuine concern for her plight, Livia, by nature prone to pessimism, at least according to the character profile emerging before us, seems to have had a disturbing premonition. The nuns in Murano, she began to think, were no longer saving her property. And even if they were, holding them to promises made so many years before would be fiendishly difficult. She had always assumed it was safe: her

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effort to protect it had gone according to plan. Now with the prospect of actually getting it again and being able to sell off what was necessary to pay for the assistance she needed, she began to consider the realities in a new light. Perhaps she thought back on the absurd comedy with Niccolò Sacchetti sixteen years before. It might have been entitled “The Missing Jewels.” All his efforts to get the property back seemed to send him on another desperate chase. The same could happen to her. Had she been fooled all along? Had the nuns no intention at all of returning her things? And whatever may have been the nuns’ original intentions, very likely, over the years, items had been lost, misplaced, or reallocated. Maybe her jewels had simply begun to enter the convent economy, as part of the considerable quantity of precious items left there from time to time by the faithful and by the nuns themselves. Gifts were needed, cash was short. Assumptions were made: God will forgive, perhaps also the charitable Livia. She had, after all, given the goods to the convent—with what strings attached, was up to interpretation and the vagaries of memory, since nothing (astoundingly) was ever written down. Fra Celio counseled her not to give up: he would do what was necessary. And he dedicated himself to the recovery effort with all the zeal of one wishing to gain credit, in this world and the next, for having righted a wrong. His mission in Venice, as he understood it, was to help Livia retrieve her things, on behalf of Livia and by order of the grand duke, whom he had already persuaded about the gravity of the situation. “You may be assured,” he reported to Ferdinando at the end of July 1638, “since I have been here I have not had a single moment of peace and quiet, while I have been attempting to remove all the difficulties.”72 Among the difficulties was the Venetian government’s careless handling of the silver impounded from the Augustinian convent of Santo Spirito and placed in the Republic’s treasury. Livia’s pieces had been completely mixed up with the Medici family’s pieces, despite her distinctive coat of arms. When a creditor of Don Giovanni named Pier Bettini finally persuaded the government to hand over everything for payment of a debt, no care had been taken to separate hers out and prepare it for restitution to her. Fra Celio proposed the

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note to be sent to the College, to the effect that “the silver of Signora Livia, which she left at her departure for safekeeping to the nuns of Santo Spirito, did not belong to Don Giovanni, but to her;” and therefore “tell Pier Bettini to return all of her silver that he took from the treasury and return it to her.”73 Livia herself would have to guarantee the legitimacy of the proceedings. Only she could persuade the Senate and the nuns that there was a change of heart in Florence and that the appeals for her things were actually coming from her, not the grand ducal court. She agreed to Fra Celio’s suggestion about meeting with the Venetian ambassador in Florence and discussing ways to get her possessions back. She had no doubt been as surprised as the friar had been, when the grand duke consented; and in the last days of August 1638, she began preparing for her first social engagement in seventeen years. She procrastinated slightly, while concerning herself with how to improve her appearance and make a good impression. “In a few days I will be on my feet,” she wrote. But how would she get down the hill in her present condition? “Tell me how I am to come, in any case.” A carriage was the obvious choice. However, her years of imprisonment had taught her, if nothing else, that “I must not use such presumption.”74 Something, at least, remained of the old Livia style. Perhaps she would even ride again. Encouraged by Fra Celio and the changing circumstances, she began to hope, although guardedly. Maybe she would indeed put her hands on her valuables one day. She left the details up to him, of how to deal with the various government agencies in Venice, considering his eagerness to intercede, his candor, and his excellent relations with the grand duke. Meanwhile, she would have to begin a lawsuit against the convents, or at least, a show of legal aggression sufficient to bring the other side to terms. She was not a great friend of the legal profession, given past experience, and all she had to offer were the merits of the case. On Fra Celio’s advice, she engaged Paolo del Sera, a Florentine working in Venice, who was apparently willing to offer his services only on the basis of the amazing list of property in dispute: as good a treasure as most lawyers had ever seen. In discussions about the best strategy to pursue, Del Sera warned that suing the convent of Santi Marco e Andrea would not be easy. And

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sure enough, when he attempted to resolve things informally, he found the other side uncooperative. The abbesses kept repeating the same story: any understanding between Livia and the nuns had been entirely a private matter. They denied all institutional responsibility. The line had been no different when Sacchetti was involved; only now they communicated through their lawyers.75 Del Sera may have thought that because the new abbess happened to be none other than Suor Laura Celega, the person to whom the goods had originally been consigned, this might help his case.76 He soon found that time had erased practically every trace of Livia’s original friendships—he just hoped it had not erased the goods. After a good deal of effort, he managed to have the convent constituted as the defendant in the case. Del Sera’s position would be that Livia had deposited the property in good faith, with every expectation of being treated honestly. There was “a great quantity of jewels, money, writings and other important capital belonging to her,” which she thought would be safe, among “honorable religious persons in a very worthy convent.”77 At the time she accordingly demanded no acknowledgment except for the nuns’ assurance that her things would be there when she needed them. In a clever tactical move, he suggested that Fra Celio should be the proxy for Livia in the proceedings, considering that when the case was transferred for judgment to the Office of Monasteries (Provveditori sopra monasteri), Fra Celio’s habit might be an asset. Clergy against clergy was just the sort of contest that the famously anticlerical Provveditori might find appealing. He had Fra Celio write to the Provveditori denying any personal interest, while informing that the said nuns “refuse restitution on the grounds that they know nothing about the matter,” although clearly some mischief had been done. Del Sera produced the inventory of goods that had been drawn up in the cell of the previous abbess, Suor Francesca Priuli. The convent tried a heart-​wrenching argument: they were broke. As a preventive measure, they had already made their case by way of a petition to the doge and Senate; unfortunately this tactic engaged in a rather unpleasant criticism of Venetian policy in regard to religious foundations. They had, so they said, been milked dry; and the constant demands for benefactions had led to penury. For the “poverty

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and misery” of the convent of Santi Marco e Andrea, they expostulated, addressing the doge, “Your Serenity is largely responsible,” due to the “frequent pious almsgiving” imposed upon them, which had led, in their words, to “total extermination.”78 Now to hold the monastery responsible for the whereabouts of a large quantity of jewels and money that had been deposited was not only unreasonable, it was pointless. They expressed indignation at the “injustice and exorbitance of the pretensions” of the plaintiff. A whole history of friction between the Church and the Venetian government was manifest in every line— not exactly a recipe for reconciliation or amicable redress; but they would have it no other way. Del Sera was delighted. Del Sera demonstrated all the persistence of a seasoned victor. He waited patiently for the Office of Monasteries to come to a decision, and when there was still none after several months, he turned to the State Attorneys (Avogaria del comun), the highest civil court. In late 1640, he was finally able to compare the list of property compiled in the abbess’s cell in 1621 with a new list compiled on the basis of what was now in existence. The good news was that Livia’s things were still there—including, as he put it, “one of the most valuable items,” namely, the diamond jewel in the form of a lily.79 The bad news was that much was missing. There would be some wheeling and dealing, he reported, on the basis of some tough talk with the convent lawyer. If he pressed too hard regarding the cash, for instance, they would insist that whatever was in their bank accounts came from the many dowries of the incoming nuns, not from Livia. However, they were prepared to agree on a basic list of property present and ready for restitution, plus some insight on where the missing pieces might be found. He advised that this was the best they were ever going to get, and Livia agreed to the settlement without hesitation. Throughout the negotiations, Del Sera enjoyed the full support of the “very prudent” Florentine ambassador to Venice Francesco Maria Zatti, whose behavior in the matter had canceled any bad memory of the bungling Sacchetti.80 With Zatti’s help, he conducted the case through the Venetian system in the midst of a good deal of posturing by the ecclesiastical officials on the one side, claiming to defend the liberty of the church, and government officials on the other side,

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claiming to defend the prerogatives of the state. Finally on October 18, 1646, he signed the instrument of restitution drawn up in the monastery of Santi Marco e Andrea, in the presence of Zatti and the counsel from the monastery, a notary, two witnesses, the abbess (once again Suor Francesca Priuli), and a quorum of the whole convent.81 Next he had the inventory from Suor Francesca’s cell in her previous turn as abbess compared to the jewels that were left. On the basis of the obvious discrepancies, the agreement stipulated that the nuns would pay an indemnity of seven hundred ducats. In addition, on the basis of the declared value of the sacks of currency, apparently missing despite the suspiciously large amounts of money still in bank deposits in the convent’s name, Livia would forfeit all other claims upon receipt of a quittance of 3,750 ducats. Under the circumstances, it was a triumph. Livia’s things were not home yet. Getting the nuns to live up to the agreement was only part of the problem, and by the following February, Del Sera had managed “only with great difficulty” to extract four hundred of the promised seven hundred ducat indemnity for the missing jewels. Next, he had to settle the various claims on the goods made in the course of their retrieval, including by the other lawyers, Pozzo and Vaglienti, who had aided him in accomplishing “what others before me had failed” to do.82 He was himself by now understandably fed up with the whole matter, the “years of effort,” and the more or less constant cajoling by Fra Celio. He wanted his part, especially since the honorarium agreed upon between him and Livia in his view was proportionate neither to the difficulties he had to overcome nor to the value of the goods retrieved. Not directly to her, he suggested she might “give me some recompense by allowing me to keep a few of the things recovered, in lieu of cash.”83 He too wished to take away with him not only a good memory but some of the trappings of success, and the papers suggest he had his way. Del Sera’s next problem was moving the things from Venice to Florence. Travel was always risky even without a cargo of this value, and banditry was rife. Anyone carrying such goods was an obvious target, so Del Sera refused to carry anything himself. He would insure the parcels in Livia’s name and hand them over to someone responsible in return for a receipt. The quality of the escort would determine the

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cost of insurance, so in the long run there was no point in cutting corners. The person for the job would have to be honest and well armed—not an easy combination. Still in the middle of February 1647 he had no offers and no candidates in mind. “Simply tell me what to do,” he pleaded to the grand ducal secretary Giovanni Battista Gondi, “and I will immediately obey.”84 As long as he was assured of his payment, he was happy to have the grand ducal agents take the matter over from here. His job was done.

g Thus Livia’s property was returned to Livia sometime in 1647. At this stage even for her (as long ago for the grand duchesses), the possession was far more important than the use. Here at villa Le Macine in Montughi, where she had been allowed to spend her final years, harassed by creditors and farmers and increasingly alarmed by the deterioration of her land, she had few occasions to wear the jewels or set out the silver. From time to time she would entertain or be entertained by the few neighbors in Montughi and elsewhere in the region with whom she had friendly relations or had resumed contact.85 But the sight of the objects, in which so much of her experience was embodied, would have served mainly as a stimulus to memory. And the memory of the two great episodes in her adult life, her improbable decades-​long tug of war with the Medici family, ending in some kind of victory, and her love affair with Don Giovanni, must have afforded two comfortable places for her wandering mind to rest, amid the silence of the crumbling estate. The one guest whose visits left her more disconsolate than when she was alone, who gave her more pain than pleasure, was her son, Giovanni Francesco Maria. She had lived the best years of her life before he was born, and she hardly knew him now. She only knew that his thoughts were poisoned by the Medici education he received at court. Nothing she could do, nothing she could explain, would take from his head the notion, ingrained by the grand duchesses, that she was a whore and that she had insinuated herself into the life of her lover by a form of witchcraft. Perhaps she guessed that his resentment really stemmed

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from her not being someone else—say, a real princess, or a noblewoman by birth. She could not stand his accusations of property mismanagement or his attempts to block her admittedly feeble attempts to make order out of chaos. On one occasion he even had all her papers sequestered, so she had to appeal directly to the grand duke for help in getting them back.86 Her own son then denounced her to the Inquisition for sorcery and threatened her with a harquebus. She had no choice but to seek a restraining order. “I confess and I call God as my witness that to my great mortification,” she told the court, “I must reveal that I have been very ill treated and insulted and threatened by Signor Francesco Maria Medici.”87 In a final gesture of exasperation, she disinherited him and left everything to the Church. Two years after writing her will, in 1652, Livia died from the aggravation of one of her illnesses; no one was there to determine the exact cause. After the usual gifts to the servants, she bequeathed the rest of her things to the Celestine monks of San Michele Visdomini, in whose tiny church along Via dei Servi she was to be buried. She asked that the money be used every year to supply four needy girls from the parish of Montughi with modest dowries. Good husbands, she well knew, were hard to find. For a time, the distribution was carried out, and the monks said a mass for her every year, as the testament required. When these obligations were canceled by the convent’s suppression in the Napoleonic period, what was left of the patrimony achieved semi-​ ­permanent form—masonry, paint, woodwork—in the penultimate restoration of the church in 1823, financed by her estate. Any existing grave marker has long since disappeared; nonetheless the current brochure on sale in the church vestibule renders credit where due.

g The names of Livia and Giovanni appeared together, for a time, in a single instance in the crypt beneath the Chapel of the Princes in the basilica of San Lorenzo: on the casket of Giovanni Francesco Maria, who died in 1689 with enough credit as a soldier to receive recognition, in his epitaph, for having “devoted himself to military affairs on sea

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and on land” during the course of a long career that has yet to be discovered.88 Perhaps he was allowed this distinguished resting place because of his fidelity to the regime, in contrast to his parents, whose intolerable behavior was notorious. But the end of their story is the beginning of another one, of the silences, the reinterpretations, and the re-​incorporations into yet other new narratives.

8 Time and Memory

Baroncelli was no doubt aware of the sound of his own name. “Little

barons” it seemed to say—a whiff of ancient aristocracy, perhaps as befitted his family’s pretensions. When he visited the Grand Duchess Maria Maddalena at the villa of Poggio Imperiale with his son Tommaso, perhaps he liked to remember that the huge construction, recently redone and redubbed “imperial” in honor of her brother, Emperor Ferdinand II, was built around a villa once belonging to the Baroncelli family.1 In time, the family slid so far from its glory days that its members—including himself—had to look for a salary to get by. The villa in some ways exemplified Florence’s history and his own. It began with the Baroncelli, was acquired by the Salviati, another patrician family, in the time of Cosimo I, and was very soon incorporated into the Medici estates on the excuse that Alessandro Salviati had plotted against the Medici family. That was when Florence had finally and irretrievably metamorphosed from a republic—or, more precisely, an oligarchy—into a Medici monarchy. Cosimo Baroncelli too had been taken over by the Medici. And what he had done to Livia, after his metamorphosis, shocked even him. But there was still a chance to make amends.

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g He well knew the bittersweet taste of remorse for vile deeds committed with impunity: he had been richly rewarded for them. His own wickedness disturbed him despite the benefits it brought to his family. For forty years he had served Don Giovanni. Son of the butler of Giovanni’s father, Cosimo I, whose given name he bore, he started as a page, low in the ranks of the court personnel. He had accompanied his master on wars and on diplomatic missions as a private secretary and remained behind to manage the estates at home during the Venice episode. He had suffered patiently the initial humiliations from Livia and eventually become her confidant concerning matters in Florence when she was away. He shared their tragedies and triumphs. When Giovanni Francesco Maria was born and survived, he too rejoiced; when Don Giovanni died, he was devastated—not only about what happened but about what was to come. He could have been expected to help Livia make the transition from wife to widow, and the child from son to orphan. He of all people might have appreciated the child’s predicament, having been an orphan himself. Like Giovanni Francesco Maria, Baroncelli too had lost his father as an infant, and in his case, only the charity of the relatives and his father’s reputation saved him from some much harder fate. Abandoned by his mother, he had enjoyed a life at the Medici court amid luxuries he could not afford, and because of Giovanni’s generosity he had inherited a fortune. Livia, whom he never really liked, was not his problem. But the child was legally his ward, separated from the mother and placed in the care of Baroncelli’s sister Costanza while the Court of Wards officially turned abduction into adoption.2 He knew he should have looked after the child’s interests, ensuring that mother and child were rejoined and the patrimony belonging to Giovanni passed down to the legitimate son and legal heir. Instead, while the Medici lawyers demolished Livia’s annulment from her first unwanted marriage and annihilated her subsequent marriage to Giovanni, he stood by and watched. After a few half-​hearted efforts to see that the court proceedings in Sarzana were carried out with ­sincerity and justice, he received a warning. “I was ordered and commanded in

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person and by voice,” he recalled, “and the agents told me not to look too deeply into matters and not to cavil uselessly against the interests” of prince Don Lorenzo, to whom the patrimony was predestined. “They said, though they gave me the role” of Giovanni Francesco Maria’s guardian, “acting prudently was up to me” and “they would take amiss” any further interference. He obeyed, and the result was plain.3 But he would not allow the travesty to go unrecorded. Perhaps he thought that one day his heirs might ask what it was like being the secretary of such a prince. Perhaps he considered they might wonder how he had managed to remain on such good terms with the Medici despite his continued loyalty to Giovanni and Livia during the period of their estrangement from the rest of the family. As a sign of favor, his own son Tommaso would be inducted into the crusading Order of Santo Stefano by Grand Duke Ferdinando II. Obviously, the only answer that he could articulate in public was insufficient: namely, that the mercy of the grand duke, like that of the grand duchesses of holy memory, rained down indiscriminately on the deserving and the undeserving, and pardon was in their nature. The private explanation was that he had changed his loyalty after Giovanni’s death. He had made his calculation and lived by it, despite any inner inclinations to the contrary. Once he had become a Medici man through and through, his future was secured and likewise that of his family. To borrow a phrase from Giovanni, once he had entered into this dance of service and obedience, he would dance until the end. He was fully aware of the consequences. He was the same man who once translated, for Italian readers, the treatise against courtiership written in the previous century by Antonio de Guevara and had it printed first in Florence and then in Brescia with some success. He knew, because he had written the words introducing that work, about “the disquiet, the adulations” and “the time wasted” in the vicinity of a monarch, as well as “the great advantages of those who retire to their houses to finish the few days they have left, in quiet and repose.”4 He resolved not to confide his final assessment to the impersonal forum of the printed word. Even if print had been possible in the highly controlled Florentine publishing world, he preferred the discreet space

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of the manuscript page. His memoir, like the “Ricordanze” of many a Florentine patriarch, would be destined solely for perusal by his descendants and a few others, but the resemblance to the famous examples of Buonaccorso Pitti or Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli stops there.5 His Discourse to His Children, with the Life of Don Giovanni de’ Medici Natural Son of Grand Duke Cosimo the First is almost as much a biography of Don Giovanni as an autobiography of himself. Considering the close contact between the two men over so many years, the unusual strategy seemed to make sense; and the conclusions were as original as they were controversial. He would tell what really happened, so his descendants would know not only who he was, but who they were, and by what circumstances they had come into their good fortunes. And if they decided to become courtiers themselves, they would know the advantages and disadvantages of obedience and service, and they would be able to make their choice without losing their self-​respect. What had happened was a shame, but at least, he said, he got out “with honor and some profit.” Baroncelli’s account continues to impress by its candor. Frank assessments accompany the firsthand insights and eyewitness reports. He tells of Giovanni’s devotion to the Medici cause in peace and war, the diplomatic legations, the special missions for the marriage of this or that Medici daughter, and the fighting in Flanders, in Hungary, in France. He shows that every time there was the possibility of greater honors within the courts of Spain, France, the Empire, or the papacy, Giovanni had to step aside. Policy dictated that any employment with one of these might seem a slight on the others. Within the regime, however, prominent roles were given to Giovanni’s brothers conceived between the lawful sheets or else to courtiers with no other possible loyalties. “For his own interests,” Baroncelli concluded, Ferdinando, “cut off the fortunes of his brother.” The Venice episode and expatriation were the inevitable results.6 He could not forgive Livia for her arrogance, her haughtiness, and her mistreatments. All her transactions were tinged with her “most vile blood.” She pretended to be a great lady and even to “compete with Their Most Serene Highnesses.”7 No wonder they detested her and

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turned against Giovanni. But he believed her story. Telling of the childhood betrothal against her will, the beatings, the intimidations, the unwanted marriage, and eventually, the annulment to make way for the union with Giovanni, he hewed sympathetically to her version. He was convinced by the “ten witnesses” brought in to confirm what had happened, and the favorable decision by the judge was his judgment too. What happened next made a mockery of the values of justice and equity for which the Medici staked such fraudulent claims. He had been used, he admitted, made to act against his inclinations and against his will. To the very end of the farcical court procedure aimed at reclaiming Giovanni’s goods for the legitimate family line, he had hoped for the best. But the best did not happen. “I would have expected a much more favorable decision,” was all he could say.8 His belief in her innocence and his surprise at her undoing were his legacy to his children. Whether they shared their father’s affliction or not, only time would tell. No one was listening, or almost no one. Despite the numerous copies in manuscript, all evidence suggests Baroncelli’s intention was respected; his account remained unread by any except those for whom it was written, and the official version prevailed.9 It was the beginning of a long amnesia.

g Don Giovanni’s reputation, as so often happens, really began to build after he died; but there was no room, amid the eulogies, for Livia or their affair. Cristoforo Finotti, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Padua, requested by the Venetian government to compose the funeral oration, dedicated the published version to Carlo de’ Medici, Giovanni’s nephew. He said nothing that the Medici family could not endorse, even if the praise might have seemed slightly excessive given the family’s official attitude of bored indifference. A few statements could even appear preposterous. Indeed, only the occasion of the state funeral in Venice could justify, in the adopted country of Galileo, such effusions as “Who was ever more acute” than Giovanni “in ­investigating the arcana of nature, or more ready to explore and

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investigate the properties of things; who was more able to comment on the courses of the skies, the stars, the planets?”10 These achievements (so the eulogy went on) were all the more remarkable in view of Giovanni’s expert oratory, fruit of a thorough knowledge of the classic texts on historiography and eloquence. Finotti concluded by a warm acknowledgement of Giovanni’s commitment to Venice, which began when the young Florentine first came as an orator at age 13, and continued with the triumphs on the field of Friuli. Whether the reference to otherwise undefined “domestic splendor” was about the household shared with Livia, he left up to the listener, or the reader, to surmise. The account in an unpublished manuscript by Giovan Battista Strozzi, fellow academician of the Alterati in Florence, was more personal. It made no mention of any specific loves or losses by the poet known to the academy as “Il Saldo,” even though Strozzi had been an enthusiastic reader of Giovanni’s love poetry. The omission was not casual. As another academician wrote in a work bound into the same manuscript with Strozzi’s account, the purpose of biography was after all to “open the route to immortal glory” for “those who act nobly”; therefore, presumably, certain things were better left unsaid.11 Clearly, at least part of the posthumous silence regarding Giovanni’s intimate life and the Medici cover-​up was due to the very nature of the genre of biography in his time: a chronicle of achievements, in culture or in war. Thus the closest Strozzi came to conveying the personality of his subject was the description of “a mind most ready to penetrate all matters and able to learn all the arts and sciences of whatever sort,” accompanied by “such a fine and perfect judgment that he often knew the nature and quality of a person by the mere outward aspect.”12 He told of the many languages Giovanni mastered, modern and ancient, including, exceptionally, English and “some knowledge of Chaldean.” Truly an aristocrat, Strozzi went on, “he could never abase himself to view or review the accounts of those who managed or spent his incomes”—a reasonable statement in view of the mountains of unpaid bills. He told nothing about Giovanni’s relations with Livia, or indeed, the blasphemous claim to love Livia more than God. Instead, in the section on “theological virtues,” he endeavored to foreclose any possible interpretation of Giovanni as a libertine. The only devotion to

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womankind worthy of note involved the Blessed Virgin, in whose honor Giovanni made a weekly Wednesday fast on bread and wine. The last word on his lips was not Livia’s name, but that of the Virgin’s divine Child (spoken in what tone, Strozzi omitted to say). Faustino Moisesso, the historian of the Friulian war, passed in silence over Livia’s presence at the front, although he should have known about it considering his many hours spent in consultation with Giovanni. Dedicating his work to Francesco Erizzo, provveditore generale of Palma and later doge, he claimed to rescue the real story from the distortions of the malicious. “The truth is naturally covered with the finest diamond,” he warned, “upon which the barbs hurled by others, rather than hurting her, bounce off and injure the hurler.” He instead would tell what he knew, explaining motivation and inner thought processes by having the major players utter made-​up speeches from time to time, following his models Thucydides and Guicciardini. He belonged to a tradition that defined history as a genre for recounting struggles of great importance where heroic actions took place, because heroism was next to divinity. Not by chance, he noted, “many who emerged victoriously from warlike encounters were later killed in holy places: Agamemnon, Achilles, Julius Caesar.”13 His account would inspire great deeds by engaging the reader’s interest in a many-​faceted narrative. There would be “strange and novel accidents, cruelty, courtesy, voluntary and forced capitulations, challenges, destructions, skirmishes, encounters, bloody battles, forays, fires, sieges, furious batteries of towns and fortresses, assaults, treaties, invasions, rushes against houses, redoubts, forts, castles, headquarters and fortified villages.”14 To be sure, in his zeal to present the war and Giovanni in the best light, he seems occasionally to have put coherence where there was chaos and success where there was none, at least judging from a comparison with other accounts and even with modern scholarship. And just as in the other works belonging to this tradition, a few items were missing from a cultural history of warfare—namely, the lives of the soldiers, the interaction with the territory and with the populations, the circulation of goods inside and outside of camp, the representations of the action in verse, prose, and image, and the passions of the generals.

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Women and children were not involved, except as victims of killing and rapine. Six years after Moisesso published his history of the wars, in 1629, Biagio Rith von Colenberg, a patrician from Gorizia, attempted to put in the last word, favorable to the archduke of Inner Austria, now the Holy Roman Emperor, his lord and patron. The interpretation ­harkened back to the anti-​myth propounded by pamphlets like the one signed “Pomponio Emigliani,” which Giovanni himself had once attempted to refute. Rith gave particular prominence to the great failed assault plan of April 1617, typical (he suggested) of attackers who “did not hesitate before any sort of stratagem” in their “tenacious greed to occupy this country.” Only a villainous enemy, he said, could stoop to making fraudulent promises in the hope of inducing mutiny, but the archducal army and especially the inhabitants were too shrewd to be taken in.15 The same tenor persisted throughout, whereupon the Venetian censor condemned the work as nothing but a “perpetual and continuous diatribe” against the whole Venetian effort, and as such, not worthy of the slightest credit.16 Rith developed Emigliani’s interpretation of Giovanni as a leader “regarded with but little esteem,”17 and took it a step further by adding the element of “presumptuous enterprises” that were “not only entirely useless, but very damaging to the Venetian camp.”18 He went on: “Women and children” expressed their public scorn “for the actions and for the very name, of Don Giovanni,” calling him “half Medici.” Such forays into personal invective did not, however, extend to Giovanni’s private life, since this was still not regarded as a fit subject for war writing. The name of Don Giovanni occurred occasionally in Florentine historiography in the following years—never, of course, in the company of Livia. The frontispiece of the Genealogical History of the Noble Florentine and Umbrian Families, volume 1, published in 1668 by Eugenio Gamurrini, a courtier of Grand Duke Cosimo III, bore an image of bearded, surly Time wielding a hatchet to chop down the tree of family renown, while Lady Fame comes to the rescue. Et vox reddita fertur ad aures, reads the Virgilian inscription: “and a voice goes out and reaches my ears”— presumably referring to the voice of noble actions performed by

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Florentine noblemen. The method was propagandistic, although the mythologizing was no more brazen than that of so many other family biographers, such as those of the Sforza family, who two generations before concocted a story tracing the origins back to the Lombard kings.19 According to Gamurrini, attempting to curry favor abroad as well as at home, Tuscan greatness was confirmed by a little-​known and insufficiently celebrated Tuscan contribution to “this most august House of today’s kings of France.” Hugh Capet, the great royal ancestor, belonged to the same family “as that of Charlemagne, which in turn is the same as the Merovingian, which traces its first progenitor to the son of Hercules,” namely, Tusco, the first Tuscan.20 There was a place for Giovanni here, but his achievements in the Friulian war were incorporated into the larger story, omitting the reasons for his estrangement from the grand duchesses and his departure from Florence. Other Medici warriors supposedly stood by Giovanni’s side in these events, including a previously ignored officer named “Cosimo de’ Medici,” possibly one of the three children of Giovanni’s brother Pietro born with the same name.21 Of this personage, and the related exploits, no other evidence has since surfaced.

g New historical genres came no closer to comprehending the whole of Giovanni’s activities. Cultural history was in fashion, but the different areas of human endeavor (spiritual, political, artistic) were each receiving their separate treatments rather than being bound together into a wide-​ranging synthesis. Giovanni’s role, except in war, still went more or less ignored. The only detailed references to his architectural contributions occurred in Filippo Baldinucci’s Notices on the Professors of Design (published from 1681), but even there his drawings and model for the cathedral façade in Florence were only a sidelight in the chapter on Gherardo Silvani (1579–1675), covering the interminable discussions about finishing the church, still ongoing in 1638.22 Also in the chapter devoted to Matteo Nigetti, he received honorable mention, this time because of his work on the Chapel of the Princes in San Lorenzo, which Nigetti actually began building more or less according to Giovanni’s

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plan (with many later changes). He was, according to Baldinucci, “a prince no less valorous in the exercises of war than cultivated in the fine arts, especially those whose progenitor is design.” Prudently omitted were the reasons why there was no monument to him among those dedicated to other members of the family in the structure he designed.23 Municipal history basically disappeared in Florence after the work of Scipione Ammirato in the late sixteenth century, but not in Venice; and long chapters of the official History of Venice by Battista Nani published in 1680 covered Giovanni’s campaigns. The dust had long settled on the Friulian war, and the Venetians lost the island of Crete to the Turks in 1669.24 There seemed no more point in pretending that the Republic’s military history had been an unbroken series of triumphs, and the pendulum began to swing in the other direction toward the anti-​myth. Giovanni fit in here, possibly also under a slight whiff of anti-​Florentine sentiment. Accordingly, we read, the Tuscan general, at least in Friuli, did not live up to the “great fame” he had acquired in Flanders. And he could have done far more with the Dutch reinforcements—“the loveliest and choicest soldiers that Italy had seen in a long time.” Although he ignored any forecasts about the effects on the local population of having Protestant troops in the area, which the Spanish and papal factions attempted to exaggerate for their own ends, nonetheless he failed to prevent hostility among the allies. The pointless controversy with Johann Ernst of Nassau confused the command structure, causing delays and hesitations. And with Giovanni no longer the bold commander he once had been, rumors circulated that “greatly served to consolidate the impression that Medici wished more to carry things out without loss than to end the war with advantage.”25 If his personal motivations did not fall into the categories of religion and politics of which history was made, historiography was not the place for them. Any speculation about the role of Livia and the newborn child was out of bounds. A new genre of historical writing appeared during the course of the seventeenth century promising to accommodate considerations about Giovanni for which there was no space in the standard works. Part chronicle, part history, part news report, the new publications

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drew on a variety of sources of unequal validity, including the ubiquitous newsletters, newspapers, and news books of the time. Titles like Universal Theater of Princes (Giovanni Nicolo Doglioni) and Secret Memoirs (Vittorio Siri) revealed the global strategies of the major players, where Don Giovanni appeared in his best-​known guise as a military prince-​ diplomat in the various wars of Europe. Giovanni’s troubles with his family, possibly because of the sheer curiosity value, for the first time played an important role. Siri came the closest to capturing the change of fortunes between the second and third generations of Medici princes, when the dynasty began to push him to the sidelines due to a newfound reverence for legitimacy. According to Siri, a Medici envoy after Giovanni’s death was recorded to have explained the new policy thus: in former times the grand duchy had been represented by Don Antonio and Don Giovanni, “natural and not legitimate of the House of Medici,” but now “the House of Tuscany only has legitimate princes,” and considering the inconvenience of sending a sister or a brother of the grand duke, they preferred to rely on “qualified persons from the state”—that is, career bureaucrats.26 Only one piece was missing from a full explanation of Giovanni’s political disappointments: his private life. But that was still not regarded as a proper subject of history.

g Decades later, Enlightenment historians began exploring new directions in historiography, in their attempts to shed light on the progress of the human spirit across the ages. Pietro Giannone pioneered a genre that, unlike previous histories, would “not deafen readers with the din of battles,” but instead would attempt to assess long-​term cultural change. Both Voltaire and Gibbon, sharing a similar interpretative ­orientation, awarded a place of honor to the Medici family—not in the epoch of which we speak.27 Cosimo the Elder, the Quattrocento founder of the family’s power, was for Gibbon, “the father of a line of princes whose name and age are almost synonymous with the restoration of learning.” Whereas “his riches were dedicated to the service of mankind,” likewise under Lorenzo, Cosimo’s grandson, “distress was

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entitled to relief, and merit to reward,” as might be expected of a prince whose “leisure hours were delightfully spent” among the loose collection of philosophy lovers imagined as an actual institution by Gibbon, according to the emerging myth of “the Platonic academy.”28 Voltaire claimed to respect a dynasty whose members appeared to shun the excesses of tyranny and foreshadow the philosopher-​kings of his own day. Arts, letters, good government—sixteenth-​century Italy “had it all,” he said, and Medici Florence was surpassed only by the follow­ ­ing age, the France of Louis XIV. Greatness came at a price that excited revulsion while inspiring fascination. “Imagination, super­ stition, atheism, masques, poetry, betrayal, devotion, poisons, assassinations, a few great men and an infinite number of able but unhappy scoundrels,” all crammed into a single sentence, was Voltaire’s assessment.29 The black legend of the Renaissance was born, largely out of the huge mine of materials already supplied by Guicciardini and Machiavelli. But the story was not continued down to the time of Giovanni, when late Renaissance waned into early Baroque. In Florence, only after the last Medici prince was long dead, and a historian managed to combine cultural sophistication with solid research skills, could there be any real attempt to sort out the Giovanni-​ Livia story. What Jacopo Riguccio Galluzzi shared with the other historians of the age of Giannone, Voltaire, and Gibbon was the conviction that the gathering of facts was not antithetical to the formation of judgments, and indeed, that the two actions were mutually reinforcing. Facts could be established, and the history of politics must include fact-​based moral judgments. Indeed, political history and the history of morals went hand in hand—a point Galluzzi no doubt insisted upon in his lectures on moral philosophy at the University of Florence.30 Not only do states change, but the kinds of judgments people are able to make regarding those states change too, he tried to show. The same insight had brought two new types of writing into the world: the civil history, in Giannone’s case incorporating accounts of institutions and religious behavior as an essential support to the standard narrative of political affairs, and, in Voltaire’s case, the history des moeurs et de l’esprit des nations, or “of customs and the spirit of

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nations,” encompassing the history of human progress from ignorance to enlightenment. Individuals in their struggles with themselves and with the state and their behavior to one another were features entering into historical discourse for the first time. Giovanni and Livia could be a test case. Galluzzi wrote his History of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany Under the Government of the House of Medici (Florence: 1781) without footnotes, modelled more on Voltaire than on Giannone, but his work was nonetheless the product of deep archival study. No one in his time knew the documents better than he did. From 1768 he was part of the team responsible for reorganizing the Medici family’s amazingly rich yet chaotic patrimony of personal and state papers, off limits to scholars until the dynasty fell in 1737.31 There he found a vast quantity of relevant material that had been piling up since the dynasty began to make room for it in the age of Don Giovanni’s half-​brothers Francesco and Ferdinando. Controversial aspects hitherto either silenced or interpreted out of existence were now open to scrutiny. While at work in the archive, he set aside so much material for his own use in the History that this aptly denominated Miscellanea Medicea remained permanently separate from the various other collections. The separation continues to this day, and in this Miscellanea we find the love letters between Livia and Giovanni, which Galluzzi put together in a small folder along with a brief description copied directly from the Medici lawyer’s talk­­ing points in the trial record. The statement that Livia was a low-​born adventuress who ensnared a prince was not far from his own evaluation. Arguably, Galluzzi only exchanged the pro-​Medici bias of so many of his predecessors with a new bias drawn from the Enlightenment ideas of which he was a moderate representative. However, new notions seem to freshen the pages of his published account. Not only because the appraisal of Livia as “a woman born so vilely” came along with sincere admiration for “a vigorous and enterprising spirit, a heart capable of the strongest passions, and an extraordinary courage to put into effect any resolution.”32 This remark alone distanced him from the stereotype that had haunted Livia’s memory from the time of her death. He began to build a new stereotype: Livia the strong woman,

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with diabolical intelligence, who clawed her way to the top of a grim and disapproving society that did not want her. He described her actions against the backdrop of a Tuscan government beginning the long decline into imbecility, having completely lost sight of the principles of public welfare that had propelled the early Medici to greatness. The key to late Medici history was for Galluzzi the theme of dynasty decadence. He analyzed the Regency during the minority of Ferdinand II as a period characterized by “the despotic dictates of two women,” the grand duchesses Cristina of Lorraine and Maria Maddalena of Austria, who wasted state resources on “useless luxury” and disguised “vanity by acts of piety and propriety.”33 He was the first to recount, with ironic detachment, the whole story of the dueling court cases for and against Livia’s annulment, the aggression against the legal system on both sides, the inevitable conclusion, and the grand duchesses’ revenge. The history of the Tuscan grand duchy from the death of Cosimo II was not simply a gallery of colorful portraits. It typified, for Galluzzi, the defects of the Old Regime in Europe as a whole. The larger trend could even be read in the Livia case. He expressed his astonishment that “the two grand duchess regents occupied themselves willingly with such trifles” as the Livia-​Giovanni ménage “at a time when the revolution of the European political system required more vigilance for the security of the grand dukedom.”34 He found they were not alone in their drift away from reality. Everywhere he observed the same political and social malaise. With the possible exception of the duke of Savoy (“who alone merited sublimely the title of ‘Great’   ”), monarchies had succumbed to “an extreme weakness of spirit.” Incapable ministers, entrusted with unlimited power and blinded by the “spirit of vainglory and novelty,” he said, “entered on enterprises just for the sake of achieving renown” or enriching themselves.35 If his republicanism began to grow more radical as his historical sense matured, he had good reason, or so he thought: monarchy, after all, had failed. The French Revolution, with which he would share some sympathy, was only eight years away, and his eventual refuge in France, a few more. What made the story of Livia and Giovanni both tragic and compelling was that they were caught up in the first crisis of the Old Regime.

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g A new consciousness of the past emerged in the age of Goethe and Leopardi, and the rich tapestry of Renaissance culture was becoming interwoven with the nostalgic hues of late Romanticism.36 Many readers were drawn in, hoping to be inspired by tales of passion and woe set in simpler times. Perhaps they could more easily admire the courage of a heroic soul, the self-​possession of an individual, when all around them impersonal trends and inexorable movements seemed to have taken control: capitalism, socialism, nationalism, and the struggles of the masses, all reported by the European press in sensationalist tones. When they found the precious qualities of admired individuals set in stunningly beautiful environments built by geniuses harking back to the classical roots of human creativity, they could reflect: if nationhood demanded sacrifice, so does the life worth living. They did not have to worry too much about the veracity of what they read. Their purpose was not to remember names and dates, but to quaff the nectar of the gods, including the new literary gods, and to sniff the scent of greatness, perhaps in order to rise to its level or repeat it. The historical romance was born. And Livia was reborn, this time as a witch. Giovanni Rosini’s The Nun of Monza, first published in 1829, introduced her thus: “Who is the beautiful lady?” the mistress asked Laldomine. “You mean, you don’t know her?” “No. I saw her once and she very kindly made room for me on her bench.” “Why, she is signora Livia Vernazza, the famous witch.” “Witch? How so?” “Yes, of course. She bewitched her husband.” “And who was her husband?” “Don Giovanni de’ Medici.”37

Laldomine the serving girl and Gertrude the nun of Monza are just leaving the church in Florence, and there they see Livia. The encounter will be fortunate, because Gertrude will seek Livia’s help. She needs to regain the love of Egidio, with whose assistance she escaped from the

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monastery in Monza, and whom she hopes to marry after being released from her vows. They have suffered through the plague of Florence, and the quarantine is finally over. While she was in the pest house, he treacherously shifted his affections to the beautiful and talented Barbara degli Albizzi, sister of the very person, Tommaso, who is supposed to intercede for her now with the Holy See. Only Livia can help. Rosini’s story begins at the end of the famous episode in Alessandro Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed (after Gertrude’s infernal life in the monastery, confined there by her heartless family). Now, for Gertrude to triumph over the oppression to which her family (and Manzoni) had condemned her, she needs a special expertise. As Laldomine had told her, Livia “continues to bewitch, when she is well paid down and does not fear the legal consequences.”38 And just as Livia had obtained “by magical arts, total power over the heart of her husband,” so Gertrude hoped to possess Egidio. Accordingly, she met her again coming out of church and made the appeal, at first, without success: “Madam,” Livia replied, “you know how dangerous it is for me to do what you say, but your appearance and your manners and your misfortunes all speak in your favor. I am guarded more strictly than can be imagined; but somehow I will escape the women of the house.”

As the story delves more deeply into the world of Renaissance magic, the incantation requires some materials: “First of all you must get me a wax image of your lover.” Gertrude thought a moment: “It shall be done.” “And a lock of his hair.” “More difficult, but this too shall be done.”39

They proceed along via San Gallo toward the city gate and on a route more or less toward Montughi. Livia tells Gertrude to follow her at a short distance so as not to arouse suspicion, since there are many spies around; and with a last exhortation to deliver the wax statue and the hair, she takes her leave. Thus having arranged the matter, the two separated; Gertrude hop­ ­ing to gain relief and intent on finding an image of Egidi, the other

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to prepare the herbs, the unguents, and every other instrument necessary for the incantation.

Concerning Livia’s education in witchcraft, Rosini conjectures, she was either “initiated into the secrets of cabalism” by the bewitched Giovanni, a noted cabalist, or, more probably, “by her mother.” What the early nineteenth-​century public found so enthralling in the rather cumbersome three-​volume novel, beyond the qualities already mentioned, was apparently also the intense “pathetic effect” noted by contemporaries.40 Published in 1829, two years after the first edition of Manzoni’s The Betrothed, for a time it apparently rivaled the work now considered very much the greater, going through some twenty editions before finally being eclipsed. The author was rather a man of eloquence (and professor of this subject at Pisa) than strictly speaking a historian. He nonetheless knew his material well. Whatever research he did for his scholarly editions of works by Guicciardini and Tasso he applied to the writing of novels and dramas set in the Renaissance. And no sooner did his avid following consume The Nun of Monza, then there came Luisa Strozzi: A History of the Sixteenth Century, and eventually Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, set in the time of Dante. Where the author of The Nun of Monza may have gotten the trope of Livia as witch, a footnote in the relevant chapter reveals. He had evidently read a minor contribution to Tuscan local lore called The Pleasant Pastimes: Notices of the Most Bizarre and Joyful Tuscans, by Domenico Maria Manni, mid-​eighteenth-​century librarian of the Strozzi family and member of the Crusca Academy, custodians of the Tuscan language.41 Manni in turn borrowed material from a seventeenth-​century novel that circulated in multiple manuscript copies (with significant variations from place to place), purporting to describe the life of a charlatan named Don Vaiano Vaiani of Modigliana. In the version Manni used, Vaiani, in the guise of a magician, offers certain services to a credulous friar with big ambitions (identified, in one of the novel’s manuscripts, with Celio di Serravezza, Livia’s savior from the Forte Belvedere and intermediary in retrieving her property).42 If the friar will participate in a certain magical ceremony involving precious jewels, a cardinal’s hat will eventually be his, but he must procure the jewels (and a sum of

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money to sweeten the operation). The friar casts about for possible allies in this infernal business, and his attention fixes on the unfortunate Livia, an acquaintance now living in Montughi, to borrow what is required. She refuses at first, but he prevails. “He pressured this lady so insistently that he got the loan, and he immediately transferred it into the hands of Vaiani.” Vaiani performs the incantation and states in writing that the sacrifice of the valuables has been accepted and the result, in time, will follow. The friar is left to make his excuses to Livia for money and for a pearl necklace she will never see again; and when his superiors find out, he disappears into some holy place never to return. Livia meanwhile (Manni goes on) is thenceforth “blamed for her involvement in witchcraft.”43 From accessory to perpetrator was just a small step, and Livia was an easy target.

g Neither Livia nor Giovanni—or, to be more explicit, neither of their bodies—was immediately affected when the issue of funeral monuments came to the attention of the Italian nation-​builders in the nineteenth century, for obvious reasons. But more obfuscations were in store. The great temples of the dead were being put to new uses, celebrated by the Italian patriot Ugo Foscolo, who fell in love in Florence (perhaps with Florence) and wrote eloquently of the basilica of Santa Croce, where some of Italy’s famous figures were remembered. In the relevant portions of his poem The Sepulchers (published in 1807), according to the translation by Elizabeth F. Ellet, an American poetess in the circle of Edgar Allan Poe, he wrote: The aspiring soul is fired to lofty deeds By great men’s monuments—and they make fair And holy to the pilgrim’s eye, the earth That has received their trust.44

Let not an overzealous government (Foscolo implied) tear the heart out of ancient cities for the sake of some new-​fangled ideas of public hygiene. And notwithstanding his admiration for Napoleon, he thought

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the Edict of St. Cloud, promulgated in 1804 and set to go into effect soon in Florence, went too far. The health benefits of moving the mummified bodies out of churches and into vast new cemeteries to be constructed in the suburbs may have made some sense in France or elsewhere in the Napoleonic Empire, but in Florence, these advantages were far less than the cultural drawbacks. Thus, in the basilica of Santa Croce, he recalled being stirred by the spirit of Machiavelli, When I beheld The spot where sleeps enshrined that noble genius Who, humbling the proud scepters of earth’s kings, Stripped thence the illusive wreaths, and showed the nations What tears and blood defiled them—

Michelangelo came to mind When I saw His mausoleum, who appeared in Rome A new Olympus to the Deity—

Galileo too: And his, who ‘neath the heaven’s azure canopy Saw world unnumbered roll, and suns unmoved Irradiate countless systems—treading first For Albion’s son, who soared on wings sublime, The shining pathways of the firmament— Oh! blest art thou, Etruria’s queen! I cried— For thy pure airs, so redolent of life, And the fresh streams thy mountain summits pour In homage at thy feet. In thy blue sky The glad moon walks—and robes with silver light Thy vintage-​smiling hills; and valleys fair, Studded with domes and olive groves, send up To heaven the incense of a thousand flowers.

Foscolo’s conclusion: leave the monuments alone. The Medici remains were mostly conserved in San Lorenzo, on the

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other side of town; and the prior of the basilica, Domenico Moreni, insisted they too must rest in peace. There must be no digging in the New Sacristy, the site of Michelangelo’s monuments to Giuliano and Lorenzo, nor in the Chapel of the Princes nearby, the site of Pietro Tacca’s monuments to Ferdinando I and Cosimo II, or anywhere else. Two decades had passed since Foscolo’s poem, and the Napoleonic government had given way to the Lorraine restoration. No damage had yet been done, and Moreni hoped none would be attempted.45 Let the well-​ meaning health officials hold their peace, he exhorted. Meanwhile, the reputation of the Medici family must be protected from attackers incited “either by slander or by the most unbridled insolence.”46 The basilica was still endowed by Medici largesse, and he himself would not be accused of faint praise of the benefactors. Anyone who looked closely into the matter could easily observe that “the protection given by the Medici to letters and the fine arts and every branch of sciences along with every kind of noble discipline,” was “great, powerful, uninterrupted and unaffected by changing circumstances or threatening occurrences.” Rightly, they were “far more renowned than any other Italian princes, and deserving of the most solemn, authentic and constant applause.”47 Just as the Lorraine dynasty had continued seamlessly in power after the extinction of the Medici one, so the Medici monument had become the tomb of the Lorraine family too. Moreni’s list of San Lorenzo funerals showed no break between one ruling family and the next. Among the many princes and princesses, here interred was Grand Duke Ferdinando III of Habsburg-​Lorraine, whose corpse had been brought specially from Vienna for the occasion; and the solemn exequies for our “most beloved and lamented Sovereign,” had only recently been celebrated.48 For the time being, Moreni had his way, and nothing was done. Livia still awaited a sympathetic advocate when the emerging ­discipline of modern archeology eventually explored the bones of her estranged relations—this time for scientific, not health, reasons. Giovanni, of course, was not involved, as his bones would be disturbed only much later and in a different city, by the construction of the Venice railway station over the church of Santa Lucia at the end of the century.

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It was now the mid-​nineteenth century, and the Medici remains would be disinterred by order of the last grand duke, Leopold II, “to find a more appropriate disposition” after centuries of minor meddling and gross neglect.49 The grand duchy was on the way to extinction, and the Italian national state was struggling to emerge. In 1849 Leopold had allowed Austrian troops to occupy the city of Florence as a guarantee of stability in the face of an increasingly hostile parliament. Other repressive measures followed, including the reintroduction of the death penalty, turning back the clock on one of the most admired reforms of the Italian Enlightenment. 50 In February 1856, the grand duke’s final departure from Florence was only three years away, and so was the formation of a provisional government that would eventually manage Tuscany’s union with the new Italian kingdom. Surely, Leopold hoped, the initiative to focus attention once again on the tombs of the great might warm the hearts of at least a few of his estranged subjects, winning him a reputation as the Florentine dynasty’s protector from the ravages of time. Luigi Passerini, state archivist and grand ducal antiquary, earnestly hoped the exhumation project would proceed as planned, for reasons of personal as well as professional satisfaction. So far he had dedicated a long career largely to studying and reorganizing the documentary remains of the previous Tuscan regimes and to coordinating the Florence portion of the massive History of the Famous Italian Families then being assembled by the indefatigable Milanese antiquary Pompeo Litta, with separate genealogies for the noble lines of the Panciatichi, the Alberti, and the Corsini. The chance to examine such unusual physical evidence as the bones of the Medici seemed like a historian’s dream. If the project could be of political importance for Tuscany and perhaps for Italy, so much the better. The challenges of working with old bodies were of course far different from the familiar ones of working with old documents. And what he found in San Lorenzo was even more bewildering than what he had found in the archives. The Old and New Sacristies had long been home not only to the remains of the personages supposedly buried within the monuments constructed by Buggiano, Verrocchio, and Michelangelo, but also to those of a host of other Medici greats, nearly greats, and not-​so-​greats,

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c­ ontained in a variety of coffins and vessels of various sizes and shapes, piled here and there helter-​skelter in what seemed more like a musty dungeon where dust and filth were hardened by time. In 1791 the Lorraine government had ordered the removal of this unsightly mess to the crypt below the Chapel of the Princes. There, during the course of the next half-​century, many of these containers were opened and whatever was precious in them had been removed (by robbers or by kin, or both together?). Often, Passerini said, “we did not know what body was inside, and the only way to find out was to look,” comparing, as in any murder case, whatever clues might be found in the files and close by. 51 Unfortunately the grand duchy ended before the project did, but there was some progress in recognizing the bodies. Sketches recorded each of the lifeless cadavers, showing parched lips receding above decayed teeth, eyes shut into slits, limbs atrophied, and fingers curled. The passage of centuries complicated the investigator’s job, and the legends offered little help. The body of Eleonora de Toledo, the first wife of Cosimo I, was supposed to have been buried in a bridal dress, and testimonies from the eighteenth century insisted she had remained, like some holy saints, perfectly preserved. The corpse instead was in relatively bad shape and the clothes were many-​colored. Bianca Cappello, the controversial mistress and then wife of Francesco I, was supposedly cast into a common grave after her death rather than buried as a celebrity. In the absence of any other clues, Passerini ordered the wall to be breached that supposedly sealed the common grave, but all he found was “a vast vault full of human bone fragments and plaster, about two yards high.”52 A few precious things were still in place. In the tomb of Don Giovanni’s nephew Cardinal Leopoldo was a gold cross studded with five amethysts and forty zircons. The tomb of Grand Duchess Maria Maddalena yielded a medal depicting a bird of paradise flying upward with the hopeful inscription “Ethera,” apparently from the Greek word eleutheros for “free.”53 After the first thirty-​three entries in a rather grisly report, at number thirty-​four was the entry for the son of Livia Vernazza and Don Giovanni de’ Medici. Giovanni Francesco Maria was recorded to have died in the seventieth year (and two months) of his life. The body had been placed first in the Old Sacristy along with those of other

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i­ llegitimate children of the various dynasts, in a sad-​looking coffin, which had later been moved to the crypt beneath the Chapel of the Princes, where it had apparently been opened; no one knew when. “There lay a shriveled human corpse dressed in black silk, with a felt had over his knees. He had beside him a sword with a silver-​plated hilt. In his hands was a rosary from which there hung four small medallions, three of them silver plated.”54 To ensure that the body might not again get “lost,” it was placed in a new casket and sealed with the following inscription on a bronze label fixed to the top: “Corpus Ioannis-​ Francisci de Medicis Ioannis filii.” There was no mention of Livia. The original inscription was not displayed, but placed inside, so none but the extremely persistent would ever see that the corpse “had as its father Giovanni, the illegitimate child of Cosimo Grand Duke of Tuscany and the noble lady Eleonora degli Albizi, and as its mother Livia Vernazza” (“Iohannem Cosmi M.  D. Etruriae ex nobili foemina Eleonora Albizzi illegittimum filium patrem habuit, matrem Liviam Vernazzi”). Another erasure. The results of the 1856 exhumations lay filed and forgotten for another half-​century, and they might have languished longer if Guido Sommi Picenardi, Grand Prior of the Military Order of Malta, did not decide on publishing them for the benefit of all “historians of the memory of the fatherland.”55 The exhumation project drew him to the whole Medici story and the lessons to be learned there about the essence of greatness and the fickleness of fortune. Such a “distinguished family,” in his view, deserved attention, not voyeurism; appreciation, not trivialization. Worrying trends of literary “verism” and yellow journalism seemed to exploit the public credulity by stories of “truth stranger than fiction” where lurid exaggerations deviated from the facts. Historical evidence was being treated irresponsibly, whereas the new Italy in his mind needed not spectacles to gawk at, but models of probity, tending to support the mainstays of society in family, church, and state. He gave a few examples of his approach in a history of his own lineage, rooted in Cremona, and in his chronicle of the lives of the grand priors who preceded him in the Order of Malta.56 For the Medici family, he thought he could do better than Florence archivist Guglielmo

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Saltini had done in a book called Medici Domestic Tragedies, Narrated with Documents, where the story of Giovanni and Livia turns up in a long line of murders, betrayals, children born out of wedlock, and general misbehavior.57 Like the reviewer for the Archivio Storico historical journal, he probably considered that the work’s useful (though ineffectual) attempt to explode a number of persistent myths, such as the supposed murder of Garzia de’ Medici by Cosimo I, ought be accompanied not only by a better reading of the evidence and a credible account of causation, motivation, and context, placing blame where deserved and giving credit where due.. 58 Even the foibles of a nearly-​great like Don Giovanni deserved a respectful historian, although the respect did not have to extend to everyone in the account. He thus framed his 1907 contribution as a biography of the “governor of the Venetian army in Friuli” only because that was Giovanni’s last ­position—the focus was really on the person, the concubine, and the property. Not surprisingly, the author who disparaged Eleonora degli Albizi, Giovanni’s mother, for her “vulgar soul” and for her delight in “silly jokes, even impure ones, which passed the limits of respect and devotion,” had little ­sympathy for Livia, attributing Giovanni’s downfall to her “evil intentions.”59 Gabriele D’Annunzio, Italy’s adventurer-​poet, was more influenced by the literary tradition than the archeological one in his evocation of the Livia-​Giovanni matter. The Livia he conjures up, in one curious passage of the Faville del Maglio (“Sparks from the Hammer”) dating to 1924, bears echoes of Rosini’s fictional character. As the “unrepentant witch,” she will be a muse for his own literary creativity as well as a metaphor for his amorous exploits. In a new formless form of artistic and intellectual autobiography resembling, in its visual imagery and frame-​like structure, the new art of cinematography, he recounts his passions and impressions day by day, year by year. Pre-​R aphaelite in sentiment and ultra-​modern in outlook, the poet of the new Italian nation finds the new within the old, harking back to the first glimmerings of modernity in the time of Petrarch, whose admiration he shares for Cola di Rienzo, the revolutionary and putative restorer of Rome’s greatness in 1347.60 In other work, he points the way to the

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a­ estheticization of the new industrial world in the making, later brought to fruition by the Futurists.61 “To Eleonora Duse,” famous silent film actress and still his own lover but not for long, he dedicates the portion of the Faville where Livia appears, within the longer account of The Second Lover of Lucrezia Buti, set in Florence. In these reflections, Eleonora is the “last-​born of St. Mark: a melodious apparition of creative suffering and sovereign goodness.” Lucrezia Buti is only an excuse for a reverie that takes author and reader back and forth between Lucrezia’s time in the Quattrocento, when she was the lover of the painter Fra Filippo Lippi and had him put her face on the Uffizi Madonna, and the present, when the author took Fra Filippo’s place as Lucrezia’s lover. He embarks on a mental search, along with Elura, the lynx-​like muse of his puberty, for “my garden,” presumably, his creative faculty, perhaps his libido, “high upon the hillside and elsewhere, unleashing my lynx and all my lynxian imaginations.”62 There he will find more intriguing fare— including Livia. “Erta canina,” he says, pronouncing the name of the “murderous street” with its steep grade leading from San Niccolò up to the main road and Piazzale Michelangelo, the difficulty of transit belied by its sweet evocation of wild rosa canina or “dog rose.” He notes, “the road is so much the more beautiful as a man strives to climb it.” Likewise “the flower is more beautiful to the extent that it is delicate to our senses for arriving at our soul.” The garden is his reward for the effort, and here “the desirable women were far more numerous and fascinating than the roses.” Elura, the muse of his puberty, pales by comparison. Among them, of course is “Livia Vernazza, the most beautiful Genoese lady.” Indeed, she seems to him “worse than beautiful, worse than nude.” She who managed to have herself wed by Don Giovanni has come here all the way from Montughi, where she has been languishing among the shadows of the dead including Giovanni. She is now (un-​)dressed to kill, “in flesh, as though of icy flames, more striking than ever, more dangerous than ever, more poisonous than ever.”63 Though he seems to see her in her youth, he knew she had already left her “splendid and infamous treasure” to the monks of Visdomini, in a grand gesture, and now wanted it back to give him,

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Gabriele D’Annunzio, in exchange for “one faded rose.” He is drawn to her irresistibly for a moment, and then moves on.

g To find meaning in the lives of Livia and Giovanni re­­quired a new interpretation of the epoch, the episode, and the society, even a new way of doing research—exactly what Gaetano Pieraccini, D’Annunzio’s contemporary, thought he could achieve in the History of the House of Medici. The 1924 work was supposed to draw biology, anthropology, and history all together by the modern theories of evolution and genetics.64 The new story would do service to the new Italian nation as well as to scholarship by solving a bewildering puzzle. Why, he asked, does humanity appear to be locked into inexorable cycles of growth and decay? Why do dynasties, indeed, civilizations, all have a beginning, a middle, and an end? How can populations avoid becom­­ing locked into a cycle of decline? Trained as a physician, not as a ­cultural historian, he had no use for the oscillation between the culturally exuberant and the culturally austere, between the Dionysian and the Apollonian, as in Nietzsche’s literary formulation, or between Renaissance and Baroque, as in Wöfflin’s visual aesthetic, or any of the other standard theories of cultural change. Yet a correct solution might go a long way toward explaining the course of Western history since the fall of Rome and, more importantly, provide a wealth of useful knowledge for social policy in united Italy. The dataset would be a single population with enough documentation available over a long period of time: namely, the Medici family.65 By the time he got around to writing the History of the House of Medici, Pieraccini had already become a leading authority on public health. His work on occupational diseases confirmed a generally socialist political outlook, which also inspired his advocacy for new legislation on worker welfare. Infectious diseases he recognized as social and biological ills arising from a chronic combination of “economic, physical and intellectual” causes.66 Crime too could be explained by social and biological factors. Had not Cesare Lombroso’s new science of characterology shown how craniology and physiognomy could be deployed

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to distinguish the naturally good from the naturally bad?67 Indeed, the unequal distribution of well-​being at one end of the social scale, and at the other, disease, poverty, and crime, seemed to suggest the existence of a “race of the wealthy and a race of the poor.” What set his kind of racism apart from the more classist, authoritarian, and patrician equivalents among, say, the Fascists whom he would risk life and career to oppose, was his belief that the division between the two races arose due to prevailing injustice and not pure biology; and moreover, it could be remedied.68 The new work, subtitled “a treatise of research on the hereditary transmission of biological traits,” viewed Medici history in the light of the nature-​nurture debate. In the case of the Medici, family characteristics such as susceptibility to gout, bulging eyes, a protruding chin, and prominent lips showed impressive continuity over thirteen generations, with some accentuation of this or that trait from time to time. As a control on the variables of life expectancy and fertility, Pieraccini examined the histories of twelve other Florentine families, finding similarities across the whole sample. Personality features such as irascibility, sensitivity to insult, greed, and thirst for power had left an indelible mark on Florentine life and the state. What part came from the effect of premodern society per se and what part from pure heredity was open to question. But the qualities, reduced to quantities, spoke loudly.69 He measured character and personality according to a predefined set of parameters. Don Giovanni scored high in violence, along with Giovanni delle Bande Nere, his grandfather. He also scored among the most intelligent, along with his father Cosimo I, Cosimo the Elder, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Leo X, Ferdinand I, and Cardinal Leopoldo, confirming Pieraccini’s claim, asserted in the relevant biographical portion, that Giovanni could have made a formidable head of state. Jean-​Baptiste de Lamarck, in Pieraccini’s view, was not entirely wrong about the inheritance of acquired traits, despite the scorn poured upon the eighteenth-​century French naturalist by the Darwinians because of this theory. Even Darwin, though a staunch defender of natural selection, understood that biological characteristics may be latent (Pieraccini noted), requiring environmental factors to bring them out.

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In the present case, the Medici family’s accomplishments were unthinkable without the particular conditions favoring their development in Florence. “Great, populous, extraordinarily rich in shops, stores, cash money in gold florins . . . ​certainly the greatest center for the noble arts,” the city was, to anyone with their particular talents, an open field for acquiring wealth and power.70 Did the environment also enhance the same talents? In Lamarck’s favor, there seemed to be evidence that traits such as tiny hands, apparently the legacy of generations spared from manual labor, eventually became fixed into the genetic map and passed on from aristocrat to aristocrat. To determine what other features might also be impressed by the environment would only have required more research—and perhaps a little more imagination. In general, he assumed that “environment had much less of a determining effect on the thought and actions of exceptional people, and more on the middling sort.”71 Few slaves, for instance, were apt to rise, like Aesop and Phaedrus in antiquity, above their miserable condition and gain renown by their pens. In the light of these discoveries, how should society address its main problems of poverty and crime? Clearly, improved conditions would mean an improved race. “A social environment enriched by healthy education, instruction and good examples” could have “a great ennobling influence.”72 Let government policies therefore direct economic development not merely toward the unlimited accumulation of goods, but toward a healthy harmony between economic progress and worker well-​being—the essence of socialism. Against the thesis of the Com­ munists, who split from the Socialist party in 1922, let such legislation stand as an enhancement, not a barrier, to family autonomy and individual free enterprise.73 Furthermore, let government step in to prevent further degenerations. Sparta perhaps exaggerated in the area of eugenics, in Pieraccini’s view; but good breeding, properly practiced, was simply good policy. What sense was there in allowing idiots and criminals to proliferate uncontrolled? Work by Carl Pelman, an asylum director in Bonn, cited favorably also by the New Zealand politician and member of the English House of Commons William Allen Chapple in The Fertility of the Unfit, traced a group of German families that had produced a nearly unbroken line of imbeciles, drunkards, assassins,

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and wards of the state over several generations.74 For the new Italian state, careful programs of sterilization could be beneficial to prevent such outcomes. He left open the great question about the apparent racial divide between the North and South of Italy, raised in the last years of the nineteenth century by Alfredo Niceforo and later by the Fascists. Did the “race of the poor” and the “race of the rich” apply here? What might be an appropriate policy? Without giving any answer, Pieraccini referred to studies in the American state of Maryland, supposedly showing the divergences between white and black on the criteria of intelligence and fitness for certain kinds of work, entering into an area of statistical manipulation and misinterpretation that would leave open wounds in American society through the late twentieth century, evidenced in the “Bell Curve” debate.75 Women, according to Pieraccini’s strange brand of feminism, played a special role in this whole structure. Not as workers in the work force, obviously. That was one of the aberrations that should be corrected in modern society. Women were, after all, “much less resistant than men, to the physical and psychic strains of work,” and great “damage to the female organism” might result from “intense and assiduous intellectual effort.” Any “practicing physician” (he said) knew this well.76 No, women belonged in the home, where they would be chiefly concerned with procreation and perfection of the species. There they served as the intermediaries whereby the genetic patrimony of mankind, consisting of intelligence, talents, and abilities, was handed down from males through females to other males. As a stabilizing influence in this transmission, women brought the hereditary material under control, moderating the more exaggerated features and strengthening the weaker ones. There was nothing to be gained by “masculinizing the woman,” a “modern tendency” that in his view ought to be “combated” with every force. To do otherwise was to risk too much “damage to the species” without contributing anything to her happiness.77 It was a picture in which there was no room for a Virginia Woolf—or for a Livia Vernazza. Inevitably, in this analysis, alongside the glowing appraisal of Giovanni, there was some general disparagement of Livia. “A woman of modest origins and no great intelligence” were the kindest words.

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“Almost a rustic,” he went on, she nevertheless showed herself “an astute manipulator of Giovanni’s passions.”78 By “a thousand tricks” she managed to “keep the affection going,” constantly holding “that soul” captive and “in torment,” even to the extent of simulating “scenes of jealousy,” sometimes staging indignation or pain due to some minor “indiscretion or infidelity.” She instinctively understood her lover’s weaknesses and zeroed in on them. For all the years of their acquaintance, she “kept him chained like a slave to a wagon,” as the letters exchanged between them plainly showed. There, Pieraccini notes, Giovanni bared his soul with embarrassing sincerity, careless of the blot on his otherwise sterling reputation. Due to the quality of the writer, of course the quality of his letters was exceptional, even attaining heights of eloquence seen only later in the writings of Goethe. “The sighs of the Young Werther seem to be contained in them,” he says. For the rest, the Medici assessment of Livia’s conduct before and after meeting Giovanni, confirmed by Cosimo Baroncelli, was entirely on the mark. The whole episode was “not a pleasant page” in Giovanni’s biography. All that was necessary, for a full confirmation of his argument regarding the inheritance of biological traits, was evidence from the physical remains of the members of the family under study. The worthy plan of a new exhumation was at first rejected by the prewar governments in a spirit (so Pieraccini complained) of “resistance to novelty.”79 His chance finally came after the Allied invasion of Italy in World War II and his appointment as the first mayor of a liberated Florence. Michelangelo’s statues and the other monuments in the Medici mausoleum had to be surveyed for damage—a golden opportunity for science and for putting his plan finally into action. In the reinvestigation of the burial sites, he had an unlikely collaborator: the ex-​Fascist anthropologist Giuseppe Enrico Genna. Genna had sympathized with Fascist racial theory before the liberation and could occasionally be heard quoting Mussolini’s phrase about the three great periods in history when Italians had astonished the world: Ancient, Renaissance, and Fascist.80 After the war, their two research programs would in­­ tersect regarding the theme of inherited genius: Pieraccini focusing particularly on artists and musicians, and Genna on Lorenzo the

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Magnificent, regarding whom Pieraccini had already stated his views back when assessing Don Giovanni’s intelligence. The new exhumations accordingly took place at the end of 1945, in conditions much different from those prevailing in the previous one of 1857, when, in Genna’s words, their predecessors had “understood nothing.”81 The two researchers and their collaborators did their work over a period of some ten years. They catalogued the remains with taxonomic devotion to even the most seemingly insignificant details of what they saw. After all, one never knew what kinds of connections future experts might want to make. Ironic detachment was the only possible attitude for accounts like: A part of the bones are wrapped in the illustrated pages of the humorous magazine “Il Brivido”, and of a calendar; in the margin of the magazine there is written in pencil, “foot bones”. . . . ​Inside the zinc box is an identifying slab.82

Under Genna’s direction, plaster skull casts were made of the major personages, for eventual display and future scrutiny by the best anthropologists in a future Medici “craniotheque.” The study and comparison of these specimens was supposed to yield the final answers to the larger questions raised by this line of research—perhaps there could be a battery of quantitative tests comparing the new data to the present and past populations of Florence, of Italy, of the world. But while Florence, Italy, and the world entered a new age, and a postwar economic boom brought about profound changes, the fields of anthropology and public health suggested still other methods and models for answering questions of perhaps more urgency, and the skull research was suspended. For a time, at least, the bones reposed once more.

g Giovanni and Livia do not make the news these days, but the Medici family occasionally does. The newspaper headlines on December 28, 2006 in the Corriere della Sera, were as follows. Four young researchers— three forensic toxicologists and a historian—had solved the mystery of

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the nearly simultaneous deaths of Francesco I and the grand ducal spouse Bianca Cappello, in October 1587, closing a debate that had raged for over four centuries. Donatella Lippi and collaborators had used two relatively new tools: DNA analysis and neutron activation analysis. The exhumations had begun again, and this was the result that made the daily papers. In organic material found in the church of Santa Maria Buonistallo, where according to a legend the flesh (not the bones!) of Francesco and Bianca lay buried, there were traces of arsenic, confirming the hypothesis of a poisoning by Ferdinando I.83 There was soon a polemic. The organic material, said Gino Forniciari and his team, was imperfect; the conditions of the sample could not be guaranteed over such a long period; manipulations were possible. Notwithstanding the supposed similarity between the DNA of the bones of Francesco in the Medici Chapel and that in the Buonistallo sample, the latter was most likely modern and not from the period. The methods used for the DNA test seemed ill-​adapted to samples of the age that was alleged. Instead, the hypothesis bruited at the time of the deaths may well have been correct: namely, malarial fever.84 It was just the latest of a series of controversies sparked by “Progetto Medici,” founded in 2004. “Paleopathology will rewrite history,” said one of several manifestos.85 The group initially involving Lippi, Forniciari, and a number of other researchers set out to investigate all forty-​seven of the now much-​scrutinized sets of Medici remains. The announcements seemed sensational: the team “solves a murder mystery, and turns up a lost treasure.” Young Giovanni and Garzia, sons of Cosimo I and his first wife Eleonora de Toledo, died natural deaths and were not assassinated—one by the other, and the first killer by the father—as one contemporary rumor suggested. Added to the archival refutations of this rumor already presented by Enrico Saltini in his Medici Domestic Tragedies book of more than a century before, there was now forensic evidence.86 The skeletons showed none of the customary symptoms of violence: telltale holes in the sternum or broken ribs. The bones instead seemed whole. X-​rays revealed evidence of growth arrest in the bones, a symptom of serious illness. That seemed to confirm Pieraccini’s old hypothesis of malaria. In the course of rummaging through the coffin of Gian Gastone, coins and a coronet were found, to crown the work.

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“Evidence-​based history of medicine” said the team—that is, based on real things, tangible objects, and not simply the mystifications of witnesses or the imaginings of self-​proclaimed historians—had finally come of age, or so it seemed.87 Livia and Giovanni alas have no bodies or bones left to offer the curious researcher, but their capacity to inspire is still very much alive.

Postscript

Florence, Santa Croce 9, June 29, 2010, 10 pm CET Back on the terrace in Santa Croce after the long walk home from Livia’s last dwelling in via Casamorata, we sat in silence as darkness fell. And then: “Is it the end of romance?” “You mean, the end of the book?” I ask. “You’re not answering.” “I wonder what Livia would think.” “You’re always bringing her up.” “She has her rights.” “How so?” “I just wrote a book about her. Would she approve?” “You’re the historian.” “I think she would.” “You portray her basically in a good light, as far as I can tell, or at least, you don’t treat her too badly.” “I have my reasons.” “What are they?”

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“I think I know what happened.” “You weren’t there.” “But I have the papers, the letters, the documents, and, maybe, some good sense. I even left my tracks so readers can check up on me. It’s all in the footnotes.” “You know what they thought? Your characters, I mean.” “History is the life of the mind itself.” “Talk, talk, talk!” “You mean, like we’re doing now?” “People say a lot of things, even unintentionally. The mind leads different lives.” “And there’s fiction in the archives.” “That doesn’t help your case.” “But it all seems to add up. Really.” “You like this word, ‘really.’   ” “Sometimes the fiction in the archive is as important as the non­ fiction.” “You lost me.” “Something somebody writes may be indicative even when it’s not literally true but because it gives me a sense of how they thought. For instance, what if Giovanni, on the night of his famous carriage ride, was actually rescued from death by Garzia di Montalvo, rather than being pulled back from killing someone else, although that is not what he reported? Would it make a difference?” “You might as well add that accounts can be particularly reliable when relating about nonessential parts of a story. But I’m still waiting.” “For how it all adds up? Well, I put all the different pieces together and if the connections work between one piece and another, and the general argument convinces me, I think I have an answer to my ­question.” “Maybe if you fit things together differently you would get another answer.”

g

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The lights of Fiesole flicker on the far-​off hillside that gives a dull outline against the sky above the synagogue. A whiff of fried fish comes and goes, from some other terrace invisible in the dark.

g “I try different outcomes all the time. Some just don’t seem to work out.” “Are you sure you aren’t just choosing the one you like?” “Maybe it’s a kind of intuition.” “Like Sherlock Holmes?” “Make fun. Call it informed conjecture if you prefer: the sources themselves and the scholarship about them lead in certain directions and I follow them out.” “Doesn’t sound too scientific.” “Lots of things go into science that don’t seem too scientific.” “I didn’t mean that. I mean, look. You have only words to go on, and you can’t replay it in a lab, adding this, subtracting that. It only happens once and then it’s gone. Like this year’s World Cup.” “Maybe, it’s like history?” “That’s just a definition.” “I make thought experiments.” “Virtual History?” “More like the motto of the Experimenter’s Academy in Florence: ‘testing and retesting.’   ” “Give an example.” “Right off the bat: On the night after Giovanni’s death Livia makes an abrupt decision while standing on the wharf; she climbs aboard the gondola next to the trunks containing her jewels, bound for the monastery of Santo Spirito.” “You sound like the book.” “Not exactly. Once she arrives in the sanctuary, there she remains, a religious asylum seeker out of reach of the Florentine ambassador and his men, who had just managed to get their hands on the young orphan, Giovanni Francesco Maria, and dispatch him to Florence,

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before she disappeared. The official line (with a minor adjustment of chronology) will be the child was abandoned by the mother. While plans laid long before are set in motion for confiscating the rest of the property, Pietro Grimani, a young Venetian patrician, hears of Livia’s predicament. A romantic sort, after a few meetings at the convent, he is as fascinated by Livia as Giovanni was some twelve years before, her temporary aloofness adding to her charm and his ardor. Battista Granara dies in custody, complicating the Medici strategy for having Livia’s first marriage reinstated. The grand duchesses reluctantly enter into negotiations with the Grimani family.” “I see what’s coming. But it’s impossible.” “Exactly.” “You have the documents.” “Now you’re helping my case.” “But the whole thing was absurd.” “For the same reasons that another version makes sense.” “What about when the different versions of the story are really close together, not so far apart that one makes sense and the other is pure madness, and what if there are no documents? Don’t say intuition.” “But that’s not what I was thinking. See, I know there is only one possibility, because only one thing happened, not a dozen all at once, at least not to any one of my actors. It’s physics.” “How so?” “Can’t be in two places at once.” “Not all of you, at least.” “Okay, the thing is, something happened. That much is certain.” “Grasping at straws. You and your so-​called facts.” “Try this version: maybe Livia actually did make up the business about the beatings. Maybe she lived in peace with her first husband and ran away with a lover.” “I want to see you get out of this one.” “Or what about: maybe Giovanni was secretly on the Austrian payroll and tried to slow things down in Friuli to spoil the Venetian war effort.” “It’s not fair; you’re choosing interpretations that make no real difference to your basic narrative.”

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“And yet I tend not to believe these versions because the whole mass of documentation seems to flow in another direction.” “Flow?” “Wait. Give me a chance. It’s like conducting a thousand interviews. In the end, you draw up the sums, and you get a basic idea. The anomalies cancel out, the statistical artifacts. You’re left with the generality. Every particular feature of a case is only one of many such features in many such cases, and I try to deduce what I know less from what I know more.” “You want to commit to an intuitional paradigm and an evidential one at the same time.” “So with our case, we can see certain elements make up a pattern—the status-​honor society, the traditional family, the emerging state, the patrimonial system, the dynastic drift. What doesn’t fit the pattern has to be explained to start a new pattern or else omitted because it’s just our misinterpretation, our misreading of the document.” “But what about your telling of the story about the entangled lives? Where does that pattern come from?” “Maybe from something that just stands to reason, or something that comes from the documents.” “Inductive and deductive at the same time?” “Okay, let’s talk about my story.” “An example: how do you know your basic line is not affected, subconsciously or whatever, by interference from other stories?” “I’m sure it is. Television, the movies, even our discussions.” “You can never be ‘pure.’   ” “So to speak.” “How can you tell the story of Livia without thinking about Cinderella?” “Brothers Grimm version or Straparola?” “See what I mean?” “Or Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds.” “I saw that on the night table.” “I would even go further. Somebody said a lot of people started writing about Renaissance luxuries in the years of the boom.” “Or sex, after the Hite report.”

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“Exactly. ‘And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became.’   ” “Was the speaker in the poem talking about making things whole or moving through time?” “Maybe he was looking to his goal.” “The happy ending?” “Not necessarily. But at least, an ending—and a beginning and a middle too.” “Don’t they say you biography folk are always just writing about yourselves?” “How would they know? Anyway, the point is, occurrences, even true ones, are often narrated to us in story form, with the isolated episodes joined by conjecture according to a probable vision of the teller.” “The structure beneath the surface.” “Could be that things have to have varying ingredients of comedy, tragedy, satire, or romance for them to make sense.”

g The gilded sphere atop the cathedral hovers eerily in the west over the vague roofline of the surrounding houses. A light goes on in someone’s flat.

g “Only if you look at it backwards—say, from the account to the structure: you probably didn’t think of it that way when you were writing it.” “You can do it with any writing. Find a structure, I mean. Take the four linguistic figures metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and irony. Somebody said the great historians of the nineteenth century organized their thoughts along those lines, not consciously of course.” “What came first: the experience or the rhetoric?” “That’s what I meant.” “We make history but not any way we like.” “That’s one way of putting it.” “Maybe it’s about intelligibility, inside and outside. We can only do what we understand.”

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“Did the classic social scientists understand emotions?” “I’m sure they knew about them, even if they didn’t talk about them much.” “But emotions make sense too. They did to Giovanni and Livia.” “Back to your dead people.”

g A breeze out of nowhere rustles geraniums in pots hanging precariously in a wire planter off the wrought iron railing.

g “What about us?” “About what makes sense?” “Are we acting out a script?” “The presentation of self, and all that?” “Or behaving like someone we read in a novel or saw on the screen?” “You mean, the intense self-​consciousness of being a person who is expressing emotions, at the same time that we are attempting to feel and express them; and by the time we have gone through all these nested thought processes, the moment has passed? What the psychologists are telling us?” “Is it the end of romance?” “What do you think?” “You’re not going to put this in your book, are you?” “I might.” “Are you sure you’ll get it right? I mean, just as we said it? Will you remember the way it really was?”

g A phone rings and I am suddenly alone, waiting on the terrace for some other cue that the evening is over.

Notes

In the notes, care has been taken to provide sufficient text from the original documents for the reader to compare with my translations. In cases of longer documents where this has not been possible, the reader may refer to the supplementary material published at http://www .earlynewsnet.org/LIVIAPAGE/index.htm.

Prologue 1. Sanitary conditions along the river are analyzed by Paolo Minucci, in his notes, originally published in Florence 1688, to Lorenzo Lippi, Il Marmontile riacquistato, which I read in the Prato edition (Vannini, 1815), vol. 1, p. 41. The situation had not changed substantially by the late eighteenth century, as we know from Domenico Moreni, Notizie storiche dei contorni di Firenze. Parte quarta: dalla Porta a San Frediano fino al Ponte a Greve (Florence: Cambiagi, 1793), 34. 2. The entire document is in Florence, Archivio di Stato, Archivio Mediceo del Principato [hereafter, MdP], filza 5151, from which we translate here at fol. 125r, 6 July 1611, Giovanni to Cosimo II de’ Medici: “Sappi adunque Vostra Altezza Serenissima che havendo hiarsera cenato in casa mia, spogliato interamente, et con una sola zimarra di saietta di Fiandra sopra la camicia, in compagnia del Signor Don Garzia Montalvo et Signor Vincenzio Martelli, che erano parimente in camicia con soli

notes to pages 2–5 324









c­ alzoni, et senza giubbone, dopo cena il Signor Vincenzio andò a sue faccende et io insieme col Signor Don Garzia mi ritirai alle mie camere, et essendovi una giovane con chi ho amicizia, dissi che non sapevo come fare a dormire.” The incident and the document are analyzed in B. Dooley, “Narrazione e verità: Don Giovanni de’ Medici e Galileo,” Bruniana e Campanelliana 2 (2008): 391–405. 3. MdP 5151, fol. 125v: “Et havendo detto il Signor Don Garzia, che andando a spasso a dare una volta quando si era stracco si dormirebbe meglio, dissi che mi piaceva, et che volevo fare quello, che non havevo fatto più questo anno, cioè andar fuori dopo cena, et così feci mettere in ordine un carozzino piccolo, e ci entrammo dentro noi tre soli, cioè quella giovane, il Signor Don Garzia et io, non havendo nè capello in testa, nè giubbone, et io senza calzoni, et senza calzini, con sola la zimarra come ho detto sopra la camicia, et solo quando fui in carrozza, mi feci dare da un mio vecchio di casa una spada corta.” 4. MdP 5151, fol. 125v: “Et in questo bello equipaggio adagio adagio, senza servitori con noi, ci conducemmo a S.to Giovanni.” 5. A reference to the proverb, somewhat modified to suit the circumstances, is in a letter from Livia to Giovanni in MdP 5145, 25 December 1617, fol. 237r, “[ . . . ​] e se ghavete dato il dolce, voglio avere chi gli ha [i]ntanto dato l’amaro.” 6. For this assertion I attempted to interpret lunar data published by NASA at http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/phase/phases1601.html. 7. Regarding illumination I consulted Paolo Cesari, Una luce nel buio (Modena: Artioli, 2009), 106–17. 8. MdP 5151, fol. 126r: “Et quando la carrozza fu vicino alla croce, si partirno da un numero di persone, tre, et vennero alla volta della nostra carrozza, et uno di essi mettendo il capo dentro disse andate a buon viaggio, et guardò molto bene chi noi eramo.” 9. Here and later in the paragraph: MdP 5151, fol. 126r: “Io dissi a Don Garzia, che buone creanze sono queste che si usano di nuovo? et egli mi rispose deve essere qualche imbriaco, et io soggiunsi sia chi vuole, il modo di fare non è nè bello nè buono; et dissi al cocchiere che passasse la piazza verso la Misericordia, et di quivi feci ritornare alla Pancaccia, sempre vicino a Santo Giovanni, per non mi mescolare tra la gente la quale era assai; et sempre veramente tenni d’occhio quelli tre per vedere se ne potevo conoscere alcuno; et Don Garzia mi disse, vedete, quello si è ritirato, che qualcuno gli harà detto chi voi siate, et in vero che in sei volte che passeggiamo con la carrozza aperta da ogni banda et dinanzi, et di dietro, che benissimo potevamo esser tutti conosciuti.”

notes to pages 5– 9 3 25

10. Here and later in the paragraph: MdP 5151, fol. 126r: “Alla sesta passegiata io dissi al cocchiere, va via; et all’ora appunto si accortorno quelli tre medesimi, et quello istesso messe la mano sopra la carrozza et disse Orsù andatevene a casa, che farete bene; et fate a mio modo.” 11. Here and later in the paragraph: MdP 5151, fol. 126v: “Io allora tirai con la spada alla volta del viso di quel tale, che si cansò; et subito apersi la portiera et saltai di carrozza et perchè la carrozza camminava, et io ero in pianelle, la zimarra si avviluppò, et quasi che cadde, perchè messi il ginocchio fino a terra; et nell’istesso tempo quelli due che erano con quell’altro, mi tirorno due cortellate, l’una delle quali parai col braccio sinistro, et l’altra con il fornimento della spada con la man destra; et nell’istesso tempo mi rihebbi, et seguii quello primo che haveva parlato [ . . . ​] mi spinsi gagliardo alla volta sua tirando ben presto 3 ovvero 4 stoccate et imbroccate, et un stramazzone alla volta della testa; in tanto egli cadde, et essendoli io sopra, mi si fece inanzi uno, dicendo fermate fermate che egli è in terra; nondimeno io tirai, se bene non colsi, et questo mi si parò innanzi, et io l’urtai con i fornimenti della spada nel viso, et all’ora conobbi che era il Signor Don Garzia.” 12. The account is in MdP, 5157, fol. 218r, letter from Cosimo Baroncelli to grand ducal secretary Belisario Vinta, dated 16 August 1604. 13. The event is noted in Cosimo Baroncelli, Il discorso del Sig.re Cosimo Baroncelli fatto a’ suoi figliuoli dove s’intende la vita di don Giovanni Medici, ed. Marina Macchio (Florence: NICOMP, 2009), 52. 14. Evidence for the bet is in Florence, Archivio di Stato, Pupilli, 767, fol. 290r, where the lost bet is given as a debt to Francesco Niccolini, contracted on 11 June 1594. 15. MdP, 5151, fol. 44r, dated 15 February 1587, Giovanni to Ferdinando I: “Agnolo Strozzi essendo stato morto violentemente mi lasciò il negozio delle scommesse che havevo seco tanto male incamminato et governato con sì poca fede, che per sciorlo come comporta l’onore mi fu forza ottenere dal Gran Duca di potere servirmi della somma di undicimila scudi degli ottanta mila che ho sul Monte standone a calculo con carico di rimetterli, il che ottenni, et ho pagato a chi si deveva; ma non l’intera somma perchè ne restano ancora circa duemila scudi i quali mi pagherebbe costì per farmi servizio Zanobi Carnesecchi ripigliandoseli a poco a poco delle rimesse che mi si fanno costì delli danari d’ordine di Vostra Altezza ogni mese.” 16. For these assignments and the political context, see Chapter 1. I consulted Alessandra Contini, “Aspects of Medicean Diplomacy in the Sixteenth

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Century,” in Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy: the Structure of Diplomatic Practice, 1450–1800, ed. Daniela Frigo, tr. Adrian Belton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Idem, “Dinas­tia, patriziato e politica estera: Ambasciatori e segretari medicei nel Cin­ quecento,” Cheiron, special issue entitled Ambasciatori e nunzi: figure della diplomazia in età moderna, vol. 30 (1998), 57–131. More broadly, Franco Angiolini, “Diplomazia e politica dell’Italia non spagnola nell’età di Filippo II,” Rivista storica italiana 92 (1980), 432–69. 17. I have taken account of how Alison Brown’s collected essays, The Medici in Florence: The Exercise and Language of Power (Florence: Olschki, 1992), and those published by Michael Mallett and Nicholas Mann, eds. Lorenzo the Magnificent: Culture and Politics (London: Warburg Institute, 1996) have modified the insights in J. R. Hale, Florence and the Medici: The Pattern of Control (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977). 18. Concerning this theme in general, I considered the essay by William Bouwsma, The Waning of the Italian Renaissance, 1550–1640 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), especially chaps. 1 and 12. With particular reference to this period in Florentine history, I compared Eric Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), Books 1 and 2, as well as his Italy, 1530–1630, ed. Julius Kirshner (New York: Longmans, 1988), chaps. 4–7, to the more negative view of Furio Diaz, Il Granducato di Toscana: I Medici (Turin: UTET, 1976), chaps. 2–3. A recent reappraisal of the role of Cinquecento Florence is Marcello Fantoni, “Il Rinascimento fiorentino,” in Il Rinas­ cimento Italiano e l’Europa, vol. I (Treviso: Angelo Colla Editore, 2005), 265–284. 19. Giorgio Spini, Cosimo I e l’indipendenza del principato mediceo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1980), part 1, chaps 1–3. 20. On this aspect I consulted Caroline Callard, “La fabrication de la dynastie médicéenne,” in Une histoire politique de la Toscane (XIVe–XIXe siècles) (Rennes: PUR, 2004), 399–418; as well as, more exhaustively, Carmen Menchini, Panegirici e vite di Cosimo I de’ Medici: tra storia e propaganda (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 2005). 21. Concerning these themes from a comparative standpoint, I consulted the articles in Carla Penuti and Paolo Prodi, eds., Disciplina dell’anima, disciplina del corpo e disciplina della società tra Medioevo ed età moderna, (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994). 22. The aspects in question have been widely discussed not only in works such as the three volumes of Gaetano Pieraccini, La stirpe dei Medici di Cafaggiolo, 2nd ed. (Florence: Vallecchi, 1947); but also in Marcello Vannucci, Le donne di Casa Medici: da Contessina de’Bardi ad Anna Maria

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Luisa, Elettrice Palatina, tutte le protagoniste della storia della grande famiglia Italiana (Rome: Newton & Compton, 1999), 130, 156, etc. 23. Much of the following information is from Filippo Luti, Don Antonio de’ Medici e i suoi tempi (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 2006), chaps. 1–2. 24. Filippo Salviati, Orazione funerale nell’essequie di . . . ​Ferdinando Medici (Siena: Luca Bonetti, 1609), no pagination.

1. The Family Business 1. Strozzi’s account, penned in 1621, is in Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Magl. cl. IX cod. 124, fols. 55ff: “Di natura così ardito e coraggioso, che assistendo un giorno da fanciullo d’anni 7 al serenissimo gran duca Cosimo suo padre e al serenissimo gran principe Francesco suo fratello, che nuotavano in Arno, fu domandato dal padre se egli haverebbe saputo fare, come essi facevano, et havendo risposto di sì il gran duca Ferdinando lo dimonò come farebbe, il che udito da lui, tosto da un poco di altura dove stava, così vestito come era, si lasciò in Arno in parte profondissima, et aiutossi con piedi e cole mani come è spesso notatore ad usare, et uscisse.” 2. Florence, Archivio di Stato, Archivio Mediceo del Principato [hereafter, MdP], 613, fol. 264r, Antonio Serguidi to Bartolomeo Concino de Conti, dated 24 February 1573: “È comparso il capitano Jacopo Pucci et dommatina sarà introdotto a Sua Altezza la quale è stata hoggi benissimo trattenuta dal S. Don Giovanni al quale feci mettere l’armatura mandatali dal Principe Nostro Signore, et comparire con la picca et mazza ferrata avanti suo padre che ne prese un gusto infinito piagnendo di tenerezza a veder quello fanciullo con quanta gravità et bravura appariva sotto quelle arme, et mi ha pregato che io ne ringratii per sua parte il Principe mio signore.” Cited also by Gaetano Pieraccini, La stirpe dei Medici di Cafaggiolo, 2nd ed. (Florence: Vallecchi, 1947), vol. 2, p.  217. Pieraccini is still the most authoritative source for material regarding Giovanni’s life in general, including a wealth of archival references. In addition, there is Domenica Landolfi, “Don Giovanni de’ Medici, ‘principe intendente in varie scienze,’   ” Studi seicenteschi 29 (1988): 125–62. Other contributions regarding more specific aspects will be mentioned below as necessary. 3. Chapter 5 will give a fuller account of these donations, which are also mentioned by Giuseppe Parigino in Il tesoro del principe. Funzione pubblica e privata del patrimonio della famiglia Medici nel Cinquecento (Florence: Olschki, 1999), 107, 112, 185. 4. G. Sommi Picenardi, “Don Giovanni de’ Medici, governatore dell’esercito veneto in Friuli,” Nuovo archivio veneto, n.s. 7, 25 (1907), 108.

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5. Concerning the role of Pitti in the Medici building plan, I consulted R. Burr Litchfield, Florence Ducal Capital, 1530–1630 (New York: ACLS e-​book, 2008), 50–51. 6. For my account of the Pitti educational environment, I draw on Maria Pia Paoli, “Di madre in figlio: per una storia dell’educazione alla corte dei Medici,” Annali di storia di Firenze 3 (2008), 82. In general, for life at Pitti, I consulted Sergio Bertelli and Renato Pasta, eds., Vivere a Pitti. Una reggia dai Medici ai Savoia (Florence: Olschki, 2003). For the sake of comparison, regarding Florentine childhood, I was also informed by Richard C. Trexler, Power and Dependence in Renaissance Florence, v. 1: The Children of Renaissance Florence (Binghamton, N.Y. : Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1993); and Ilaria Taddei, Fanciulli e giovani : crescere a Firenze nel Rinascimento (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 2001). 7. Concerning Baldini, I consulted the entry in Giulio Negri, Istoria degli scrittori Fiorentini (Ferrara: per Bernardino Pomatelli, 1722), 75. He is best known for his panegyric: Vita di Cosimo Medici: primo Gran Duca di Toscana (Florence: Nella Stamperia di Bartolomeo Sermantelli, 1578). 8. Baccio Baldini, Discorso del’essenza del fato: e delle forze sue sopra le cose del mondo, e particolarmente sopra l’operazioni de gl’huomini (Florence: Stam­ peria di B. Sermartelli, 1578), 4. 9. The flatterer in question is Filippo Cavriani, quoted in Carmen Menchini, Panegirici e vite di Cosimo I de’ Medici tra storia e propaganda (Florence: Olschki, 2005), 203. 10. I used Jean Boutier, “Trois conjurations italiennes: Florence (1575), Parme (1611), Gênes (1628),” Melanges de l’École française de Rome. Italie et Méditeranée 108 no. 1 (1996): 318–75, as well as Jean Boutier et al, eds., Florence et la Toscane, XIV–XIX siècles, les dynamiques d’un État italien (Rennes: Presses Universitaires, 2004), articles by Olivier Rochon, Hélène Chauvinau, Caroline Callard. Concerning the emerging structure of the state, the chapter by Elena Fasano Guarini in Julius Kirshner, ed., The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300–1600 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Luca Mannori, Il sovrano tutore: pluralismo istituzionale e accentramento amministrativo nel principato dei Medici, secc. XVI–XVIII (Milan: Giuffré, 1994), chaps. 1–3 and 12; as well as the chapters by Elena Fasano Guarini and Enrico Stumpo in Storia della civiltà toscana, vol. 3: Il principato mediceo (Florence: Le Monnier, 2003); and concerning the patriciate, R. Burr Litchfield, Emergence of a Bureaucracy. The Florentine Patricians, 1530–1790 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), chaps. 1–10. 11. Concerning the regime’s artistic policies, I consulted Luigi Zangheri, Massimiliano Rossi, and Matteo Casini in Elena Fasano Guarini, ed.,

notes to pages 20 –22 329











Storia della civiltà toscana, vol. 3: Il principato mediceo, (Florence: Le Monnier, 2006), 391–414, 415–438, and 461–484, respectively; and many of the chapters in Konrad Eisenbichler, ed., The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2001), as well as Henk Th. van Veen, Cosimo I de’ Medici and His Self-​Representation in Florentine Art and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 12. Concerning Giovanni’s involvement with the Accademia del Disegno: Piero Pacini, Le sedi dell’Accademia del Disegno (Florence: Olschki, 2001), 11, 14, 19, 70, and passim. 13. Giorgio Vasari expresses this view in La vita di Michelangelo, vol. 1, ed. Paola Barocchi, (Naples: R. Ricciardi, 1962), 3. 14. Apart from Elizabeth Pillod, Pontormo, Bronzino, Allori: A Genealogy of Flo­­ ren­tine Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), I also took account of Caterina Caneva and Francesco Solinas, eds., Maria de’ Medici. Una principessa fiorentina sul trono di Francia. Catalogo della mostra (Firenze, 19 Marzo–4 Settembre 2005) (Florence: Editore Sillabe, 2005), chaps. 1 and 2; Miles L. Chappell, ed., Disegni di Lodovico Cigoli (1559–1613): catalogo della mostra, Gabinetto disegni e stampe degli Uffizi, vol. 74 (Florence: Olschki, 1992), passim; Franco Faranda, Ludovico Cardi detto il Cigoli (Rome: De Luca, 1986), 17–69. 15. For what follows, I rely on Roger Savage, “Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts: The Institution of Greco-​Roman Theater and the Development of European Opera,” and Michele Napolitano, “Greek Tragedy and Opera: Notes on a Marriage Manqé,” Ancient Drama in Music for the Modern Stage, eds. Peter Brown, Suzana Ograješek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), respectively, at 1–30 and 31–46; as well as Howard Mayer Brown, “Music: How Opera Began: An Introduction fo Jacopo Peri’s Euridice (1600),” in Eric Cochrane, ed., The Late Italian Renaissance, 1525–1630 (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 401–444; Donatella Restani, L’itinerario di Girolamo Mei: dalla ‘Poetica’ alla musica, con un’appendice di testi (Florence: Olschki, 1990), Introduction; Claude V. Palisca, ed., Music and Ideas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996), chaps. 5–7. 16. The inventory entry is in Florence, Archivio di Stato [hereinafter ASF], Pupilli [hereinafter Pupilli], 767, fol. 410. My main source on guitars is, Dinko Fabris, “La notte a Firenze e i giorni a Napoli,” in Dinko Fabris et al., eds., Rime e suoni alla spagnola, atti della Giornata internazionale di studi sulla chitarra barocca: Firenze, Biblioteca Riccardiana, 7 Febbraio 2002, (Florence: Alinea Editrice, 2003), 32–35. 17. There is an interesting summary of intellectual life by Amalia Bettini in Storia della civiltà toscana, vol. 3: Il principato mediceo, 333–354.

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18. Charles B. Schmitt explains the role of Pisa in “The Studio Pisano in the European Cultural Context of the Sixteenth Century,” in F. Diaz, et al., eds., Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell’Europa del Cinquecento, vol. 1: Strumenti e veicoli della cultura, Relazioni politiche ed economiche (Florence: Olschki, 1983), pp.  19–36; and Brian W. Ogilvie discusses Cesalpino’s Aristotelianism in The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 223–224. 19. On the early Galileo, I compared Alistair C. Crombie, Science, Art, and Nature in Medieval and Modern Thought (New York: Continuum Inter­ national Publishing Group, 1996), chaps. 10 and 11 (with Adriano Carugo); and William A. Wallace, Galileo and his Sources: The Heritage of the Collegio Romano in Galileo’s Science (Princeton, 1984), chap. 5; as well as Michele Camerota and Mario Helbing, “Galileo’s ‘De Motu Antiquiora’ and the Quaestiones de Motu Elementorum of the Pisan Professors,” Early Science and Medicine 5, no. 4 (2000): 319–365. New research on Galileo’s early associations is in Massimo Bucciantini, Galileo e Keplero: Filosofia, cosmologia e teologia nell’età della Controriforma (Turin: Einaudi, 2007), especially chaps. 2 and 3. 20. The orientation here corresponds to Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, eds., The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), especially chapters by Daniel Garber, Ann Blair, and Paula Findlen, to which contributions I refer for the relevant bibliography. 21. On Rudolf II, I utilized the insights in Eliška Fuc  ˇíková, ed., Rudolf II and Prague: the Court and the City (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), especially articles by Paula Findlen, Rudolf Distelberger, Nicolette Mout, Gyorgy E. Szonyi, and Penelope Gouk; and the classic study by R. J. W. Evans, Rudolf II and His World (Oxford, 1973), especially chaps. 6 and 7; not to mention the article by H. R. Trevor-​Roper in Princes and Artists (London, 1976), chap. 3. 22. Vieri’s discourse is preserved in Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana MS. Acquisti e Doni 29, “Breve discorso di M. Francesco di Vieri detto il Verino secondo,” fols. 2–21. Concerning the whole topic, I referred to Luciano Berti, Il principe dello studiolo (Editore Edam, 1967); as well as Giuseppe Olmi, “Science-​Honor-​Metaphor: Italian Cabinets of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” O. Impey and A. MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-​Century Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 5–16; interesting though somewhat fanciful are the conclusions of Giulio Lensi Orlandi, L’Arte segreta. Cosimo e Francesco de’ Medici alchimisti (Florence:

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Nardini, 1978), tracing the Medici decoration of Palazzo Vecchio to alchemical concepts. 23. The comment is in M. Rat, ed., Journal de voyage en Italie par la Suisse et l’Allemagne en 1580 et 1581, (Paris: Garnier, 1955), 86. 24. Pierre Villey, ed., Les essais de Michel de Montaigne: Nouvelle édition, vol. 3, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1930), bk. 3: 8, 274–321: “L’art de conferer.” 25. Regarding Aldrovandi, I benefited from Paula Findlen’s Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), which includes a detailed study of the correspondence, with a description of the visit to Florence on p. 358; I also consulted Salvatore De Rosa, “Ulisse Aldrovandi e la Toscana. Quattro lettere inedite dello scienziato a Francesco I e Ferdinando I de’ Medici e a Belisario Vinta,” Annali dell’Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, VI, fasc. 1 (1981): 203–216; as well as Ulisse Aldrovandi, La vita di Ulisse Aldrovandi cominciando dalla sua nascita sin’à l’età di 64 vivendo ancora, ed. L. Frati, in A. Baldacci, Studi intorno alla vita e alle opere di Ulisse Aldrovandi (Bologna: Beltrami, 1907), 25–26. 26. Franco Borsi, “Don Giovanni de’ Medici, principe architetto,” in his Firenze del Cinquecento (Roma: Editalia, 1974), 352–58; Luigi Zangheri, “Quattro disegni veri di Don Giovanni de’ Medici,” Artista. Critica dell’arte in Toscana 3 (1991): 158–65; and further bibliography below. 27. Gargano Gargani, intro. and ed., Cinquanta madrigali inediti del Signor Torquato Tasso alla granduchessa Bianca Cappello nei Medici (Firenze: Tip. di M. Ricci, 1871), no. 26. 28. Concerning the grand ducal court, I consulted Sergio Bertelli and Renato Pasta, eds., Vivere a Pitti. Una reggia dai Medici ai Savoia (Florence: Olschki, 2003), especially the chapter by Hélène Chauvineau. For a consideration of the bibliography and the legend regarding Bianca, see Irene Cotta, “L’attesa dell’erede tra legittimazione personale ed esigenze dinastiche,” in Giulia Calvi and Riccardo Spinelli, eds., Le donne Medici nel sistema europeo delle corti, XVI–XVIII secolo (Firenze: Polistampa, 2008), vol. 1, 51–66. 29. For instance, Duecento novelle (Venice: 1609), pt. 2, novella 1, included by Salvatore De Carlo in his edition of Novelle scelte (Rome: De Carlo, 1944), 145–163. 30. I found the event recorded in Samuele Romanin, Storia documentata di Venezia, vol. 6 (Venice: Naratovich, 1857), 379. 31. MdP 2986, fol. 161, dated 23 July 1579, Ottavio Abbiosi to the grand duke.

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32. The work in question was Marco Docciolini, Trattato in materia di scherma (Florence: Sermartelli, 1601). 33. V. Follini and M. Rastrelli, Firenze antica, e moderna illustrata, Volume 3 (Florence: J. Grazioli, 1791), 244. 34. Concerning the Mantua festivities, Venice, Museo Correr, Cod. Cic. 191, Descrizione del magnificentissimo apparato e dei magnifici intermidii fatti per la commedia rappresentata in Firenze alle nozze del Signor D. Cesare d’Este e la S.ra donna Virginia Medici, Firenze, 1585 in 4, esp. fols. 30r–33v. 35. These escapades are described in Gregory Hanlon, The Twilight of a Military Tradition: Italian Aristocrats and European Conflicts, 1560–1800 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1998), chap. 2. 36. The description by Giovanni occurs in MdP, 5151, fols. 162, 165, 166, etc. I give a more detailed account in “Sources and Methods in Informa­ tion History,” News and Politics in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800, ed. Koopmans, Groningen, 2005, 29–46. Concerning the events in general, my interpretation takes account of Garrett Mattingly, The Armada (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), a basic narrative of the events; David Howarth, The Voyage of the Armada. The Spanish Story (New York: Vik­ ­ing, 1981), which provides an alternative narrative; Felipe Fernandez-​ Armesto, The Spanish Armada: The Experience of War (Oxford University Press, 1988), chaps. 4–8. I studied the news reports analyzed in Oswald Bauer, Zeitungen vor der Zeitung Die Fuggerzeitungen (1568–1605) und das frühmoderne Nachrichtensystem (Berlin: Akademie Verlag Berlin, 2011), pp.  301–30; as well as in Bertrand T. Whitehead, Brags and Boasts: Propaganda in the Year of the Armada (Stroud: A. Sutton, 1994). 37. MdP 5151, fol. 251, Giovanni to Ferdinando I, dated 19 November 1587. 38. I say more about the assassination theory in Chapter 8; some of the documentation I consulted is mentioned in Francesco Mari, Aldo Polettini, Donatella Lippi, and Elisabetta Bertol, “The mysterious death of Francesco I de’ Medici and Bianca Cappello: an arsenic murder?” British Medical Journal 333 (23–30 June 2006): 1299–301; the rumors are discussed by Jacopo Riguccio Galluzzi, Istoria del granducato di Toscana: sotto il governo della casa Medici (Capolago: Tipografia Elvetica, 1841–1842), vol. 3 (1841), 376. 39. MdP 5151, fol. 9, dated 9 January 1588, Cosimo Baroncelli to Ferdinando I. 40. The testament is found in Pupilli 768, c. 963; and again in ASF, Carte Alessandri 11. 41. This action is described in Giovanni’s letters to Ferdinando I, in MdP, 5151, fol. 188r; and MdP 276, fol. 8r. For the background, I rely in general

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on Léon van der Essen, Alexandre Farnèse, prince de Parme, gouverneur général des Pays-​Bas (1545–1592), vol. 5 (1585–1592), (Bruxelles: Nouvelle Société d’Editions, 1937), chap. 5; Geoffrey Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road revised ed. (Cambridge: Cambrdige University Press, 1990), especially Part 1; Idem, The Dutch Revolt, revised ed. (London: Penguin, 2002), Part 5; as well as, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), especially chaps. 6–9. 42. Concerning what follows, I rely upon James M. Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as Theatrum Mundi (Yale, 1996). 43. Giuseppe Odoardo Corazzini, ed., Diario Fiorentino di Agostino Lapini: dal 252 al 1596, ora per la prima . . . ​(Florence: Sansoni, 1900), 307–309; also Amelio Fara, Bernardo Buontalenti (Milan: Electa, 1995), 21; as well as Idem, “L’architettura fortificata nella delimitazione del giardino di Boboli. Un fronte bastionato d’Oltrarno, la forma delle cittadelle e la fortezza di Belvedere,” C. Acidini Luchinat and E. Garbero Zorzi, ed., Boboli 90 (Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi per la salvaguardia e la valorizzazione del Giardino, Firenze, 9–11 marzo 1989), (Florence: Edifir, 1991), vol. 2, 403–410. 44. MdP, 5151, inserto 2, fol. 3, 19 March 1590: “Ho ordinato che sia fatto a Belvedere la cappellina che V. A. ha comandato, et Aless.o ne mostrerà il disegno, se sarà a suo gusto, s’eseguirà subito; se nò, comandi la sua volontà.” 45. The facade project is analyzed in A. Morrogh, “La facciata del Duomo,” in H. Millon et al, eds., Rinascimento da Brunelleschi a Michelangelo (Milan: Bompiani, 1994), 575–585. Direct documentation for the fortification assignments is spotty, but I found some in MdP, 283, fol. 79, in a letter dated 27 November 1591. On Giovanni’s military architecture in general, A. Gambuti, “L’altra architettura di Don Giovanni de’ Medici,” in Scritti di storia dell’arte in onore di Roberto Salvini (Florence: Sansoni, 1984), pp. 455–60; as well as L. Zangheri, “Quattro disegni veri di Don Giovanni de’ Medici,” Artista. Critica d’arte in Toscana 3 (1991), 158–165. 46. To imagine the church as it would have looked at the time, I consulted Alberto Busignani and Raffaele Bencini, Le chiese di Firenze, vol. 5, tom. 1: Quartiere di S. Giovanni (Florence: Le Lettere, 1993), 82, drawing on Giuseppe Richa, Notizie istoriche delle chiese fiorentine divise ne’ suoi quartieri, vol. 6, (Florence: Pietro Gaetano Viviani, 1756), 57. Concerning projects by Giovanni and by Buontalenti, I consulted Fara, Bernardo Buontalenti, 147–49, including illustrations of both. 47. Landolfi was unable to find traces of his activity there in researching “Don Giovanni.” However, it is possible that he attended a few meetings.

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In addition, Lezzioni di M. Benedetto Varchi accademico fiorentino, lette da lui publicamente nell’Accademia Fiorentina, Raccolte nuouamente (Florence: per Filippo Giunti, 1590). In general, I follow the interpretation of Eric Cochrane, “The Renaissance academies in their Italian and European setting,” in Fredi Chiapelli, ed., The Fairest Flower, The Emergence of Linguistic National Consciousness in Renaissance Europe, (Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1985), 21–39. 48. Landolfi “Don Giovanni,” 134, refers to the attendance lists in the academy’s Diario, conserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale Laurenziana, cod. Ashb., 558, vol. II, fols. 64v–74r. Concerning the Alterati, I learned from Massimiliano Rossi, “Per l’unità delle arti: La poetica ‘Figurativa’ di Giovambattista Strozzi il Giovane,” I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renais­ sance 6 (1995), 170; and Michele Maylender, Accademie d’Italia, Volume 1 (Bologna: Editore L. Cappelli, 1930), 154; I noted also Maylender’s source, Lorenzo Giacomini Tebalducci Malespini, “Notizie dell’accademia degli Alterati,” in Collezione d’opuscoli scientifici e letterarii ed estratti d’opere interessanti (Florence: Stamperia di Borgo Ognissanti, 1808), vol. 5, 20–39. 49. My evidence is in Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, Cesare Guasti, ed. (Florence: Le Monnier, 1854), vol. 2, 138. 50. I quote MdP 5151, part 1, fol. 184r, Mantua 7 September 1587, Giovanni to Ferdinand I: “Ma non minor gusto ho preso oggi di ragionare con Torquato Tasso, il quale, come che ei sia alterato et si conosca agli occhi, è però in ragionar di poesia o d’altra cosa curiosa per qualche tempo, molto sensato et dentro ai termini.” 51. Concerning these discussions, Michel Plaisance, “I dibattiti intorno ai poemi dell’Ariosto e del Tasso nelle accademie fiorentine: 1582–1586,” Massimiliano Rossi and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi, eds., L’arme e gli amori. Ariosto Tasso and Guarini in Late Renaissance Florence (Florence: Olschiki, 2004), vol. 1, 119–135. 52. I quote from Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, Cesare Guasti, ed., vol. 4, p. 195. There are further archival indications about this last visit in Angelo Solerti, Vita di Torquato Tasso vol. 1 (Turin: Loescher, 1895), 653–654. I also noted the letter by Cesare Minerbiti to Andrea Cioli dated January 23, 1614, in MdP 1351, fol. 34r: “Sono stato hoggi dal Sig.r Giovanbatista Strozzi per informarmi del particulare che si desiderava sapere da loro S.S. et egli mi ha detto ch’il Sig.r Don Giovanni Medici et il Sig. Don Virginio Orsini furono presenti l’anno 1590 alle orazione che recitò pubblicamente il Sig.r Lorenzo Giacomini nell’Accademia degl’Alterati sopra le lodi di Torquato Tasso [ . . . ​] quando egli fece l’orazione

notes to pages 37–38 3 35

nell’Accademia Fiorentina sopra Pietr’Angeli da Barga servitore di questa Ser.ma Casa, il sig.r Don Giovanni Medici l’honorò ancora della sua presenzia. Di più mi ha detto ch’ha memoria d’haver udito dire da più vecchi di se, ch’il Ser.mo Granduca [cancelled: di] Cosimo di gloriosa memoria soleva andar nell’Accademia Fiorentina fondata da S.A. [ . . . ​] à udire lezioni et orazioni fatte dal Varchi e da altri accademici, ma non sa se quell’orazioni erano in lode di persone [ . . . ​] o trattavano di scienzie [ . . . ​].” 53. On late Renaissance poetics, Bernard Weinberg is still useful: A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), where the quarrel over Tasso and Ariosto is explained in vol. 2, chaps. 19–20. The companion piece to this text was B. Weinberg, Trattati di poetica e retorica del Cinquecento, 4 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1970–74), where Giovan Battista Strozzi’s “Dell’unità della favola,” recited in the Animosi in 1599, is in vol. 4, 335. 54. Giovanni’s work is in a manuscript in Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, ITA 575, c. 323. 55. The grand ducal secretary uses this epithet in MdP 815, fol. 284r, 27 April 1590 to Ferdinand I. 56. Bibliography for what follows includes Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 133, revising an earlier view of Antonio Favaro, “Galileo Galilei e Don Giovanni de’ Medici,” Archivio storico italiano, 5 serie, 40 (1907), 106–121. 57. This version is in Niccolo Gherardini, Vita, in Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, Edizione Nazionale, ed. Antonio Favaro, 20 vols. (Florence: G. Barbèra, 1890–1909) [hereafter, OG], vol. 19, 638: “In quei giorni havea proposto il S.r D. Giovanni ch’ in Pisa si facesse una certa fabbrica, non so già se di fortificazione o d’altro edifizio. Per l’effettuazzione del disegno si era concluso di metter in opra alcune macchine, quali, con il parere de’ periti, erano giudicate molto a proposito solo il S. Galileo s’oppose, e con ragioni forse troppo vive procurò impedirne l’esecuzione. Quello che seguisse io non lo so; so bene che la contradizione non fu grata al S.r D. Giovanni, il quale con parole di molto sdegno ne mostrò risentimento: di che sì intimorì il Sig. Galileo di maniera, che stimò bene non dopo molto tempo domandar licenza da quella condotta.” 58. This other version is found in Vincenzo Viviani, Racconto istorico della vita del Sig. Galileo Galilei, in OG, vol. 19, 606: “Molti filosofastri suoi emuli, fomentati da invidia, se gli eccitarono contro; e servendosi di strumento per atterarlo del giuditio dato da esso sopra una tal

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­ acchina, d’invenzione d’un eminente soggetto, proposta per votar la m darsena di Livorno, alla quale il Galileo con fondamenti meccanici e con libertà filosofica aveva fatto pronostico di mal evento (come in effetto seguì), seppero con maligne impressioni provocargli l’odio di quel gran personaggio, ond’egli, rivolgendo l’animo suo all’offerte che più volte stette gran tempo vacante, per consiglio e con l’indirizzo del Sig.r Marchese Guidobaldo s’elesse, con buona grazia del Ser.ma Gran Duca, di mutar clima.” 59. Fara, Buontalenti, 22. 60. MdP, 280, fol. 37r, letter from Ferdinand I to Jakob Heller dated 27 March 1590; fol. 46r, letter dated 7 May 1591, Belisario Vinta to Napoleone Cambi. 61. MdP, 283, fol. 79r, letter from Ferdinando I to Giovanni dated 27 November 1591; MdP 5152, fol. 496r, letter from Giovanni to Ferdinando I, dated 9 December 1591. 62. OG, vol. 10, p. 45, G. Del Monte to Galileo, 8 December 1590: “Mi è poi assai piaciuto di veder che ella sia tornata al centro della gravità; et ha fatto assai haver trovato quanto mi ha scritto; et io ancora ho trovato alcune cose; ma non posso finir di trovar una contingente che mi fa disperare.” 63. Lettere ed. Vincenzo Spampanato (Bari: G. Laterza, 1927), p. 390. In addition, Luigi Amabile, Fra Tommaso Campanella, la sua congiura, i suoi processi e la sua pazzia, vol. 1, part 1 (Naples: Morano, 1882), 57, and for bibliography, the entry by Luigi Firpo, “Tommaso Campanella,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani 17 (1974). 64. The phrase is in Edizione nazionale delle opere di Torquato Tasso, vol. IV, Rime, Parte 3, Volume 3, ed. Franco Gavazzeni and Vercingetorige Martignone (Edizioni dell’Orso, 2004), 136. 65. G. Sommi Picenardi, “Don Giovanni de’ Medici, governatore dell’esercito veneto in Friuli,” Nuovo archivio veneto, n.s. 7, 25 (1907), 118. I also consulted the thumbnail sketch in Robert A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918 (Berkeley: University of California, 1974), 41; not to mention Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-​Purgstall, Geschichte des Osma­ nischen Reiches, vol. 4: 1574–1623 (Pest: C. A. Hartleben, 1829), 313, and Karl Heinrich Joseph Ritter von Coeckelberghe-​Duetzele, Histoire de l’empire d’Autriche depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’au règne de Ferdinand I, Empereur d’Autriche: en six époques (Vienna: C. Gerold, 1845), 5: 298. I took into account Giovanni’s involvement in Hungary as analyzed in G. Marri, “La partecipazione di don Giovanni de’ Medici alla guerra d’Ungheria (1594–95 e 1601),” Archivio storico italiano 99 pt. 1 (1941): 50–59.

notes to pages 40 –45 337

66. Vincenzo’s progress northward is reported in MdP, 2942 (unnumbered folios), letter dated 1 September 1595, sent by the Duchess of Mantua Eleonora de’ Medici to Grand Duke Ferdinando I. 67. Some of the exchange is in MdP, 4925, fol. 375r, dated 6 December 1597, a message from Francesco Guicciardini, resident in Madrid, to the Medici court, mentioning a portrait of Maria to be shown to Prince Philip. 68. Reference to the painting is in MdP, 5153 fol. 103r, 15 July 1597, Ferdinando to Giovanni: “Madama [Cristina] manda la tela che mancava perchè la si mandi al duca di Guisa acciò che volendo caminare con quello amore et sincerità che ha affermato non manchi da una bagattella come questa.” I would add this example of Ferdinando’s gift-​giving to those covered in Suzanne B. Butters, “The Uses and Abuses of Gifts in the World of Ferdinando de’ Medici (1549–1609),” I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance 11 (2007), 243–354. Some of Ferdinando’s instructions to Giovanni are in MdP, 5153 fol. 81r, 25 June 1597, Ferdinando to Giovanni: “In Castel Dit [sic] vi ha da essere del grano abbondantissimo, et anco della polvere da potersene in questo mentre valere fin che arrivi il subsidio et supplim. che se le invia conforme al tenore della alligata nota, tengo per sicuro che si sia livellato et ben squadrato il sito, che ella ha preso a fortificare; et havendolo fatto con consenso uniforme del consiglio, che ella ha, sò che non si può esser preso errore.” I endorse the general interpretation of Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps des troubles de religion, vers 1525–vers 1610 (Paris: Editions Champ Vallon, 2005), taking into account the review by Philip Benedict in Social History, vol. 17, no. 1 (Jan., 1992), 117–120. The Chateau d’If enterprise is only mentioned in passing by Augustin Fabre, Histoire de Provence (Marseille: Feissat Ainé et Demonchy, 1834), vol. 3, 425. 69. A good example of the enthusiasm is Michelangelo Buonarroti il giovane, Descrizione delle felicissime nozze della Christianissima maestà di Madama Maria Medici regina di Francia e di Navarra, originally published in 1600, and edited by Pietro Fanfani in Opere varie di M. A. Buonarroti il giovane (Florence: Le Monnier, 1863), 407. I rely on this for the day-​to-​day festival plan, as well as on Alois Maria Nagler, Theatre Festivals of the Medici, 1539–1637 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 94; and C. Caneva and F. Solinas, eds., Maria de’ Medici. Una principessa fiorentina sul trono di Francia, chap. 2. 70. Nagler, Theatre Festivals, 97–100. 71. Angelo Solerti, Musica, ballo e drammatica alla corte Medicea dal 1600 al 1637 (Florence: Bemporad, 1905), 24, citing the letter published in the

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Verona, Tumermani 1737 ed. of Guarini’s Opere, vol. 2, 111. In addition, I consulted S. Mamone and Francesco Venturi, Firenze e Parigi, due ­capitali dello spettacolo per una regina: Maria de’ Medici (Milano: Pizzi, 1987). 72. The cannon are mentioned in MdP 5154, fol. 226, 30 August 1600; fol. 27, 11 October 1600. 73. I follow the analysis of the painting by Ronald Forsyth Millen, “Rubens and the voyage of Maria de’ Medici,” Rubens e Firenze, ed. Mina Gregori (Florence: Nuova Italia, 1983), 147. 74. I agree with the general conclusions of Carla Sodini, regarding Tuscan involvement in foreign wars, in L’Ercole tirreno: guerra e dinastia medicea nella prima metà del ’600 (Florence: Olschki, 2001), 93. For details I also rely on Gunther Erich Rothenberg, The Austrian Military Border in Croatia, 1522–1747, Volume 48 in Illinois studies in the social sciences (Urbana-​ Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1960), 61. 75. In December, Giovanni is still hopeful his ideas will be followed: MdP, 5155 fol. 19r, 15 December 1601, Giovanni to Ferdinando: “La quale proposta come verrà all’ orecchio dell’arciduca [Matthias] cagionerà che ogni volta che si tentasse questa impresa come messa innanzi da me ancor che io fusse assente sempre si crederà che io sia stato a Vienna per questo effetto, e non essendo approvata dall’arciduca e non si tentando, farà conoscere almeno a Sua Altezza che io zelante del servitio comune vo continovamente pensando al modo come poter recuperare piazza di tanta conseguenza.” 76. As Giovanni reports in July: MdP, 5155, fol. 27r, 23 July 1601. 77. Details on this episode are in part collected from Hugo Grotius, De rebus belgicis, read in the English translation by Thomas Manley published in London, 1665, books 10 and 11. In addition, I used Anna E. C. Simoni, The Ostend Story: Early Tales of the Great Siege and the Mediating Role of Henrick van Haestens (Houten: Hes & de Graaf, 2003). 78. The general interpretation is from Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 1985), 236. 79. MdP, 5157, fol. 57r, 4 March 1604, Giovanni to Belisario Vinta: “Niuna cosa mi mosse a suplicar Sua Altezza Ser.ma mio Sig.re [Ferdinando I de’ Medici] a contentarsi che io venisse qua in Fiandra, se non il desiderare una volta di vedere se io potevo, col travagliare, et con l’affaticarmi, arrivar a meritar tanto, che qualche gran principe, servendosi di mè, mettesse fine alla mia povera fortuna.” 80. Ibid. “Qua si spende assai, assaissimo, non dico a gettar via, no; ma a stare poveramente et male, senza vivere alla corte, et con andare in

notes to pages 47–49 339

campagna meschinamente, et senza sfoggi nè livree, nè per se, ne per la sua casa, et senza quasi le necessità; poichè per falta di 100 scudi non che altro, non ho mai fatto una carrozza, che non ci è mercatuzzo scrocco, che non l’habbia.” 81. Ibid. “Il Conte Teodoro Trivulzio luogotenente generale della cavalleria, con non gran casa, et senza far stravaganzie, spende 500 scudi la settimana, di ordinario, nè strafà in vestire, et con tavola buona ma non straordinaria. Il principe di Pelestrina spende 2000 scudi il mese nella casa che tanti ne da al maestro di casa, senza la sua guardaroba et straordinarii necessari. Quel di Caserta passa 2500 di ordinario, et con li straordinarii arriva a 3000, ma questo è una bestia, nè so se durerà. Di maniera che V. S. vegga che può far il povero Don Giovanni con mille scudi il mese, et cento di più che si fa dare per li straordinarii.” 82. MdP 5157, c. 57r, Don Giovanni to Belisario Vinta, 4 March 1604: “La mia mala sorte, et il mio povero stato sempre mi è stato contrario; et l’haver io del mio tanto poco, ha cagionato che senza gli aiuti di Sua Altezza io non ci sarei manco potuto stare fino a hora, se non tanto poveramente, che in vece di honore, harei guadagnato disprezzo, perchè non basta il bene et virtuosamente operare per fuggire il dispregio, mentre non vi sia tanto o quanto di honorevolezza, guadagnata col dispendio, non strabocchevole, o straordinario, ma proporzionato alla nascita, et al parentado.” 83. Ibid. “Vorrei stare ancora un poco a veder quello che hà da essere, tanto più che questo anno senza fallo si son per vedere cose notabili, et eserciti grossi a fronte, perchè ciascuno si prepara; ma non so come mi cominciare, se a V. S. non pare che sia impertinenza io dirò il mio bisogno; che alla fine sarebbe, haver da mettermi in ordine per la campagna, et tutto il tempo che vi si stà, poter spendere 2000 scudi il mese. Se V. S. non harà faccenda, legga da se l’inclusa nota de mia bisogni.” 84. Giovanni protests to grand ducal secretary Belisario Vinta that such activities give him no satisfaction: MdP 5157, fol. 57v, dated 4 March 1604: “Io piglio ardire dall’offerta che mi fa Sua Altezza Serenissima, et però se sarà con suo gusto, non solo questa campagna, ma sei ancora cene farei volentieri, perchè questo è l’humore mio peccante, come altri ha, al gioco, altri alla caccia et altri a varie cose.” 85. Poetry by Giovanni is conserved in Florence, Archivio di Stato, Carte Strozziane III serie, 187, fol. 216. 86. I draw upon Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori scultori e ar­­ chitettori, nella redazione del 1550 e 1568, text ed. Rosanna Bettarini, with commentary by Paola Barocchi, vol. 6 (Florence: SPES, 1987), 407–408:

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“Non ho mai potuto aggiungere, nonchè superare, la grandezza dell’­ animo suo [i.e., di Cosimo I], come chiaramente vedrassi in una terza sagrestia ch’e’ vuol fare a canto a San Lorenzo, grande e simile a quella che già vi fece Michelagnolo, ma tutta di varii marmi mischi e musaico, per dentro chiudervi, in sepolcri onoratissimi e degni della sua potenza e grandezza, l’ossa de’ suo morti figliuoli, del Padre, madre, della ­magnanima duchessa Leonora sua consorte, e di sè. Di che ho già fatto un modello a suo gusto e secondo che da lui mi è stato ordinato; il qual mettendosi in opera, farà questa essere un nuovo mausoleo magnificentissimo e veramente reale.” Concerning Herrera, I consulted Catherine Wilkinson-​Zerner, Juan de Herrera, Architect to Philip II of Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 103–104. On the Escorial pantheon, I used Henry Kamen, The Escorial: Art and Power in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), chap. 3. The wider context is analyzed in Giorgio Spini, ed., Architettura e politica da Cosimo I a Ferdinando I (Florence: Sansoni, 1976), Introduction, and the entry by Elena Fasano Guarini on Cosimo I, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani 30 (1984), with relevant bibliography. 87. Domenico Moreni, Delle tre sontuose Cappelle Medicee situate nell’Imp. Basilica di S. Lorenzo. Descrizione istorico-​critica (Florence: Carli, 1813), 301–302, Nigetti to Giovanni, 3 August 1602: “Sua Altezza Serenis­ sima . . . ​n’ha auto tanta gran soddisfazione, che non si sazia mai di guardarlo, ogni matina viene gente nuova con Sua Altezza Serenissima a vederlo con tanta gran sodisfazione de’ veggenti, che non lo potrei mai narrare a Sua Eccellenza.” Although Nigetti collaborated on the next stages in the design, he is better known for other works, for which, see Un episodio del Seicento fiorentino: l’architetto Matteo Nigetti e la Cappella Collaredo: documenti e disegni, Firenze, Palazzo Medici-​R iccardi, 5 December 1981–5 February 1982 (Florence: Centro Dì, 1981). 88. Extant documents are reproduced in Moreni, Delle tre sontuose Cap­­ pelle, 310–311. The stylistic significance is considered in Carlo Cresti, L’architettura del Seicento a Firenze (Rome: Newton Compton, 1990), 77–93. 89. ASF, MdP, filza 5155, c. 401r, 28 March 1603, Cosimo Baroncelli to Marcello degli Accolti, includes information on the transportation of marble. 90. ASF, Carte Alessandri 11, insert 5, Giovanni’s Testament. “E prima il detto testatore raccomanda l’anima sua con ogni devozione a Iddio Onnipotente alla Gloriosa Vergine Maria et a tutti li santi del Paradiso; et il corpo suo alla terra santa, desiderando che sia portato e sepolto in

notes to pages 51–53 341

Fiorenza nella chiesa collegiata di S. Lorenzo. Item il detto testatore lassa un offizio annuo in detta chiesa di San Lorenzo comforme a quello che si fa in detta chiesa per li quondam Ill.mi e Ser.mi Principi Cosimo Vecchio e Giovanni Medici, lasciando per tale offitio et effetto quanto fa di bisogno per elemosna, et acciò che preghino dio per l’anima di esso testatore.” 91. MdP 5157, fols. 375r–7v, contain information about this trip. This episode and any subsequent dealings in regard to the prince of Wales are not mentioned in Leeds Barroll, Anna of Denmark Queen of England: A Cultural Biography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 92. The sonnets are mentioned in Emilio Russo, ed., Marino e il barocco, da Napoli a Parigi: atti del convegno di Basilea, 7–9 giugno 2007, Manierismo e barocco Volume 10 (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2009), 28. 93. Giovanni’s initial success was discussed by the Venetian ambassador in France, Angelo Badoer, in his report to the doge in 1605, published in Nicolò Barozzi and Guglielmo Berchet, Relazioni degli stati Europei lette al Senato dagli ambasciatori Veneti nel secolo decimosettimo, vol. 2, pt. 1 (Venice: P. Naratovich, 1857), 104. Concerning the episode in general, as well as what I recount below, I learned from M. Paiter, “Toscani alla Corte di Maria de’ Medici regina di Francia,” Archivio storico Italiano 96 pt. 2 (1940), 83–108; as well as Salvo Mastellone, La reggenza di Maria de’ Medici (Messina-​Florence: G. d’Anna, 1962); Jean-​François Dubost, Marie de Médicis: la reine dévoilée (Paris: Payot, 2009), 483. 94. Il discorso del Sig.re Cosimo Baroncelli fatto a’ suoi figliuoli dove s’intende la vita di don Giovanni Medici, ed. Marina Macchio (Florence: NICOMP, 2009), 54: “Concino astuto e tristo non perdé punto tempo.” 95. Il discorso del Sig.re Cosimo Baroncelli, 14. 96. MdP 5157, fol. 760, dated 20 April 1608, Giovanni to Ferdinando I: “Non havendo trovata fortuna appresso una grande regina, alla quale Iddio mi haveva fatto parente, io mi tengo tanto malfortunato et forse disutile et imprudente, che io non spero più fortuna altrove, nè mi resta più altra cosa, havendo dato bando alle speranze et all’ambizione, che il credere che Vostra Altezza, ovunque la fortuna mi darà modo di poter solamente vivere, io viverò, nella buona grazia di Vostra Altezza, della quale io fo solamente stima, conoscendo che nel resto, il tutto è vanità per me, che non son nato per gran fortuna.” 97. I consulted Asdrubale Barbolani di Montauto’s report on Giovanni’s reception in Venice, conserved in MdP 3000, fol. 376r, dated 17 May 1608. Pallavicino’s position is explained in Kenneth Setton, The Papacy and the

notes to pages 53–57 342

Levant, 1204–1571, vol. 4: The 16th Century (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1984), 610. 98. On the figure, E. Galasso Calderara, La Granduchessa Maria Maddalena d’Austria: un’amazzone tedesca nella Firenze medicea del Seicento (Genoa: SAGEP, 1985). 99. My description comes from Camillo Rinuccini’s Descrizione delle feste fatte nelle reali nozze de’ Serenissimi Principi di Toscana D. Cosimo de’ Medici e Maria Maddalena, Arciduchessa d’Austria (Florence: Giunti, 1608). 100. Galileo’s qualities as a client are analyzed in Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier. The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 16. 101. Here and below, Le Opere di Galileo Galilei: Edizione Nazionale, ed. Antonio Favaro, 20 vols. (Florence: G. Barbèra, 1890–1909) [hereinafter, OG], vol. 10, p.  221–23. On this letter and the lodestone, Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier, 120–121, 123–126. 102. I draw here upon Nagler, Theatre Festivals of the Medici, 111–115. 103. I recounted the whole quarrel in more detail in “Narrazione e verità: don Giovanni de’ Medici e Galileo,” Bruniana e Campanelliana, 14 no. 2 (2008), 389–405, with relevant bibliography, including Massimo Bucciantini, “Reazioni alla condanna di Copernico: nuovi documenti e nuove ipotesi di ricerca,” Galileiana 1 (2004) 3–20. 104. OG 4: 32 n.3, where a cancelled portion of the original dedication of the Discorso intorno alle cose che stanno in su l’acqua o che in quella si muovono reads: “Io so che l’Altezza Vostra benissimo si ricorda come quattro anni fa mi occorse alla presenza sua contradire al parer di alcuni ingegneri, per altro eccellenti nella professione loro, li quali, nel divisare il modo di contessere una larghissima spianata di legnami.” On this portion of the episode, I also took into consideration Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography (Toronto: General Publishing Company, 1978), 133. 105. OG 4: 32 n.3: “Sopra della qual credenza io dissi, che non bisognava far capitale che quella macchina, ancor che spaziosissima, fusse per sostenere niente di più di quello che sosterrebbero le sue parti disgiunte e separate, o in altra machina, di qual si volesse altra forma, riunite: concludendo io generalmente, che la figura non poteva essere di aiuto o disaiuto a i corpi solidi nell’andare o non andare al fondo nell’aqqua.” 106. ASF, Miscellanea Medicea 4, insert 3, fol. 18r, dated 19 October 1617. 107. Ottavio Lotti in London writes about the match to Belisario Vinta in MdP 4189, unfoliated, dated 29 April 1610: “Sono stato più volte col Ser. mo Principe [Henry] il quale accetta i vini, come un segno dell’affezione

notes to pages 57– 61 343

108. 109.

110.

111.

112. 113.

114. 115.

116.

che il Padrone Ser.mo [Cosimo II] gli porta, per cosa carissima et mostra di tenerne cordialissima obbligazione.” Cosimo II writes about this match to Giovanni in MdP 5153, fol. 380r, dated 4 July 1612; and fol. 389r, dated 7 July 1612. Concerning the whole matter I consulted Katharine Watson and Charles Avery, “Medici and Stuart: A Grand Ducal Gift of ‘Giovanni Bologna’ Bronzes for Henry Prince of Wales (1612),” The Burlington Magazine 115 (1973), 493–507. The death is reported by Costantino de’ Servi in MdP 4190, fol. 135r, dated 24 November 1612. Concerning Don Antonio and the general environment, I consulted P. Galluzzi, “Motivi paracelsiani nella Toscana di CosimoII e di don A. dei M.: alchimia, medicina ‘chimica’ e riforma del sapere,” in Scienze, credenze occulte, livelli di cultura. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi . . . ​ 1980 (Florence: 1982), which on p.  36, refers to the following by Don Antonio: Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Manoscritti Maglia­ bechiani, cl. XVI, cod. 63 I–IV. The collaboration between the two is recorded in MdP 5158, fol. 83, dated 10 May 1606, Don Giovani to Don Antonio: “Ricevo per favore singolare da Vostra Eccellenza che ella mi faccia gratia del libro ove è quella ricetta, caso che ella non sene serva, perchè vi è qualcosa della quale ho necessità per finire quella poca opera che col favore di Vostra Eccellenza ho cominciata, et se la mi vuol favorire basterà che l’habbia messer Giovanni suo di fonderia.” This collaboration is recorded in MdP 5154 fol. 375, dated 3 March 1609; fol. 535, dated 11 April 1614. Concerning the figure, B. Dooley, Morandi’s Last Prophecy and the End of Renaissance Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), especially chap. 2. The details here are from M. Biagioli, Galileo Courtier, chap. 2. For all aspects except for Giovanni’s role, I used Biagioli, Galileo Courtier, chap.  3. On Giovanni, other than in my article “Narrazione e verità,” there is some information in Francesco Paolo De Ceglia, De natantibus. Una disputa ai confini tra filosofia e matematica nella Toscana medicea (Bari: Laterza, 1999), 12, 150, 169. Discorso al serenissimo Don Cosimo Il Gran Duca di Toscana intorno alle cose, che stanno in s l’acqua, che in quella si muovono (Florence: 1612). The notice is recorded in Angelo Solerti, ed., Musica, ballo e drammatica alla Corte Medicea dal 1600 al 1637. Notize tratte da un diario (tenuto da Cesare Tinghi), con appendice di testi inediti e rari (Florence: 1905), 60–61. Pupilli, reg. 767, fol. 382, dated 14 September 1610; in addition, fol. 446r. Concerning these and other performances in Giovanni’s theater,

notes to pages 63– 64 344

Domenica Landolfi, “Su un teatrino mediceo e sull’accademia degli Incostanti a Firenze nel primo Seicento,” Teatro e storia 6 (1991), 57–88. Giovanni’s innovations in the theater are noted in Siro Ferrone, “Dalle parti scannate al testo scritto. La Commedia dell’Arte all’inizio del secolo XVII,” Paragone Letteratura, no. 398 (April 1983), pp.  53 ff.; and Idem, Attori mercanti corsari. La commedia dell’arte in Europa tra Cinque e Seicento (Turin: Einaudi, 1993), 138–190. 117. For instance, there is Giovanni’s account of the possible match in MdP 5152, fol. 145r; and of a meeting with the ambassador in this regard, on fol. 74r. 118. The only complete history, from which I drew some details, is Fernanda Sorbelli Bonfà, Camilla Gonzaga-​Faà: storia documentata (Bologna: 1918). I also consulted the entry in Dizionario biografica degli italiani 43, 591–593, by F. Satta. Concerning the memoir, I read Valeria Finucci, “Camilla Faà Gonzaga: the Italian Memorialist,” in Katharina M. Wilson and Frank J. Warnke, eds., Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century (Athens, GA and London: 1989), 121–137. For this period in Mantuan history, I ­consulted the exhaustive entry on Ferdinando by Gino Benzoni in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani 46 (1996), as well as Giancarlo Malacarne, I Gonzaga di Mantova: una stirpe per una capitale europea, vol. 4: Splendore e declino da Vincenzo I a Vincenzo II (1587–1627) (Modena: Il Bulino, 2007), 254–294. 119. MdP 6105, fol. 1, dated 26 February 1617 includes a 25-​page “memoriale” concerning legal conditions under which Caterina de’ Medici was married to Duke Ferdinando Gonzaga in 1617. 120. Flavio conveys the invitation to Giovanni in MdP 5150, fol. 515, dated 22 June 1618: “Iersera venni il S. Duca [Ferdinando I Gonzaga] come è suo solito sul palco dove io pigliai occasione di raggionar di Venezia, e del magro carnevale che si farà, mi domandò s’io avevo nova de Vostra Eccellenza e qui si pigliò il ragionamento ch’io desideravo; Sua Altezza [Ferdinando I Gonzaga] con volto alegro me disse le precise parole vedi tu Flavio, che Sua Eccellenza, se lo invitasse a venire a fare il carnevale a Mantova, mi favorisse; io al meglio ch’io seppi, li risposi de si.” 121. MdP 5150, fol. 474r, dated 23 May 1618: Flavio to Giovanni: “Il Sig. duca [Ferdinando I Gonzaga] scriveva a Vostra Eccellenza perchè’ella li conceda la compagnia per questo carnevale, perchè la compagnia non farà senon quello che Vostra Eccellenza l’inporrà.” 122. This possibility is mentioned in MdP, 3007, fol. 59r, Niccolò Sacchetti to Cosimo II, 23 February 1621. See Edward Goldberg, Jews and Magic in

notes to pages 64– 66 3 45

Medici Florence: The Secret World of Benedetto Blanis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 249. 123. For the water arrangements, Flavio to Giovanni in MdP 5150, fol. 515, dated 22 June 1618. “Ragionando sopra la venuta de Vostra Eccellenza mi disse [Ferdinando I Gonzaga] s’io credevo s’ella avesse auto caro un Bucintoro; io li risposi creder de si.” Concerning Gonzaga festivals in general, I consulted Paolo Fabbri, Gusto scenico a Mantova nel tardo Rinascimento (Padua: Liviana, 1974). 124. An account of this success is in Siro Ferrone, Claudia Burattelli, Domenica Landolfi, Anna Zinanni, eds., Comici dell’arte: corrispondenze (Florence: Le Lettere, 1993), vol. 1, 508, in a letter dated 3 November 1618. 125. This is the view held by Flavio in MdP 5150, fol. 550, dated 18 August 1618, to Don Giovanni; similar sentiments reappear in Comici dell’arte, vol. 1, 506. 126. The program is mentioned in MdP 5150 fol. 485r, dated 1 September 1618, Flavio to Don Giovanni. 127. The background of my analysis is a controversy-​ridden historiography, including partial attempts at rehabilitation such as Giorgio Spini’s preface to Galasso Calderara, La Granduchessa Maria Maddalena D’Austria, and articles by Xenia von Tippelskirch, Francesco Bigazzi, and Roberta Menicucci, in Le donne Medici nel sistema Europeo delle corti, ed. Giulia Calvi and Riccardo Spinelli (Florence: Polistampa, 2008), vol. 1; and, in vol. 2 (Florence: Polistampa, 2008), by Riccardo Spinelli and Ilaria Hoppe.

2. The Mattress Maker’s Daughter 1. The following interpretation is based on the annulment tried in Genoa in Spring 1619, copied from the Genoese original (for the purposes of a subsequent trial), in MdP 5160, where the deposition by Lazzarina di Benedetto Biagi is at fol. 288r, dated 12 April: “Una volta mentre detti Bernardo et figli battevano et maltrattavano detta Livia perchè volevano che acconsentisse di prendere per marito detto Battista, essa Livia scappò di loro casa et venne in casa mia piangendo et si lamentava che detti suoi padre et fratelli volevano che prendesse per marito detto Battista et diceva che non lo voleva, et che non glie lo havrebbe mai fatto prendere, et che mai non sene vederia bene, et così di paura delle dette battiture et bravure fatteli dalli sudetti padre et fratelli, voleva essa Livia cacciarsi giù dal mio balcone in piazza. Però io l’afferai nel mezzo et la tenni, che

notes to pages 67– 68 346











non si gettasse giù dalla finestra, dicendoli che si acquietasse . . . ​et detta Livia all’hora ancora mi disse che non voleva detto Battista per marito in modo alcuno.” 2. From the testimony of Marietta, dated 15 April, in MdP 5160, fol. 89v. 3. Also from Marietta, in MdP 5160, fol. 91r: “essendo io presente mi accostai a detta Livia et perchè ancora non conosceva il Battista, essendovi alcuni huomini, dissi a detta Livia quale era quello, che volevano che prendesse per marito, et lei mi mostrò detto Battista dicendomi è quell’orso là. Lo prenderò per marito per forza perchè non posso far altrimenti.” 4. Lazzarina’s epithet, in MdP 5160, fol. 288r. 5. On the theme of agency, Anne Jacobson Schutte and Thomas Kuehn, “Introduction,” Time Space and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anne Jacobson Schutte, Thomas Kuehn, and Silvana Seidel Menchi, Sixteenth-​Century Essays and Studies, 57 (Clarksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2001), xvi. More in general concerning women’s lives, apart from the more specific bibliographies below, I am in general agreement with Merry E. Wiesner’s survey, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), chap.  1, as well as Olwen Hufton, The Prospect before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, Volume 1: 1500–1800 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), chaps. 1–6; and Gabriella Zarri, Recinti: donne, clausura e matrimonio nella prima età moderna (Bologna: Editore Il Mulino, 2000), 145–56. 6. For contemporary appraisals of mattress making I draw on Tommaso Garzoni, La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (Venice: Pietro Maria Bertano, 1638) (orig. pub. 1585), discourse 103. Concerning ignorance, I draw on the assumptions recorded in trial proceedings reported by Federica Ambrosoli, L’eresia di Isabella: vita di Isabella da Passano, signora della Frattina (1542–1601) (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2005), 92. 7. I reconstruct the urban environment based on Edoardo Grendi, “Mor­ fologia e dinamica della vita associativa urbana. Le confraternite a Genova fra i secoli 16 e 18,” Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria, n.s., no. 5 (1965): 239–311; and regarding guild ceremonial in general, with scattered references to Genoa, I refer to Richard Mackenney, Tradesmen and Traders: The World of the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c. 1250–c. 1650 (London: Routledge, 1987), chap. 4. 8. Ennio Poleggi provided the history of the street in Strada Nuova: Una lottizzazione del Cinquecento a Genova (Genoa: Sagep, 1968), chap. 3; and I also consulted A. Dagnino, “Sant’Andrea della Porta,” in eds. Colette

notes to pages 68– 69 347

Dufour Bozzo and Marco Marcenaro, eds., Medioevo demolito: Genova 1860–1940 (Genoa: Pirella, 1990), 25–50. I also consulted Storia illustrata di Genova, vol. 4: Genova nell’età moderna, ed. Franco Ragazzi et al., (Genoa: E. Sellino, 1995), the two chapters by Elena Parma Armani on urbanization and architecture. 9. Concerning the famine, I consulted Edoardo Grendi, “Pauperismo e albergo dei poveri nella Genova del Seicento,” Rivista storica italiana 87/1 (1975): 626; and for the larger context, Guido Alfani et al., “The Famine of the 1590s in Northern Italy. An Analysis of the Greatest ‘System Shock’ of the Sixteenth Century,” Histoire & Mesure, 26, 1 (2011); as well as John A. Matthews and Keith R. Briffa, “The ‘Little Ice Age’: Re-​ Evaluation of an Evolving Concept,” Geografiska Annaler Series A, Physical Geography, 87, no. 1, Special Issue: Climate Change and Variability (2005): 17–36; and Wolfgang Behringer, Hartmut Lehmann, and Christian Pfister, “Kultereller Konsequenzen der ‘Kleinen Eiszeit’? Einer Annäherung an die Thematik,” in Eidem, Kultereller Konsequenzen der “Kleinen Eiszeit” (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 7–31. Still useful were the chapters of Peter Clarke, ed., The European Crisis of the 1590s: Essays in Comparative History (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1985), especially by N.  S. Davidson, Peter Burke, and Timothy Davies. Con­ cerning the long history of this discussion, and relevant updates, I referred to Journal of Interdisciplinary History, special issue on “The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Interdisciplinary Perspectives” 40 no. 2 (2009), articles by T. K. Rabb, Jan De Vries, and Anne E. McCants; also “AHR Forum,” American Historical Review 113 no. 4 (2008), articles by Jonathan Dewald and Geoffrey Parker. Also, Paolo Malanima, “A Declining Economy: Central and Northern Italy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Spain in Italy: Politics, Society, and Religion 1500– 1700, ed. Thomas Dandelet and John A. Marino (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2007), chap. 12. 10. Thomas Kirk, “Genoa and Livorno: Sixteenth and Seventeenth-​Century Commercial Rivalry as a Stimulus to Policy Development,” History 86, issue 281 (2001): 3–17. Also, Dino Puncuh, ed., Storia di Genova. Mediterraneo Europa Atlantico, (Genoa: Società Ligure di Storia Patria, 2003), chapters by Carlo Bitossi and Arturo Pacini. 11. Giacomo Bonfadio, Gli annali di Genova . . . ​divisi in cinque libri, tr. Bartolomeo Paschetti (Genoa: Bartoli, 1597). 60. Population figures, including the presumed numbers of the poor, are in Giuseppe Felloni, “Per la storia della popolazione di Genova nei secoli xvi e xvii,” Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria 38/1 (1998): 1177–1178.

notes to pages 70 –73 348

12. Information and quotations are from Edoardo Grendi, “Ideologia della carità e società indisciplinata: la costruzione del sistema assistenziale genovese, 1470–1670,” Timore e carità: i poveri nell’Italia moderna. Atti del convegno, Cremona, 28–30 marzo 1980, ed. Giorgio Politi et al. (Cremona: Libreria del Convegno, 1982), 68. 13. The phrase is uttered by Marietta Castagnisci in MdP 5160, fol. 89v, in testimony dated 15 April 1619. 14. Mattress making is discussed in Emilio Pandiani, Vita privata genovese nel Rinascimento (Genoa: Società Ligure di Storia Patria, 1915), 92–93; but I got most of my technical information from Angelo Paganini, Vocabolario domestico genovese-​italiano: con un’ appendice zoologica (Genoa: Gaetano Schenone Successore Frugoni, 1857), in the section on “Mas­serizie,” 114. The intricacies of the traditional practice of mattress making are meticulously set out in Dictionnaire technologique ou nouveau dictionnaire universel des arts et métiers, vol. 7 (Brussels: Lacrosse etc., 1839), article on “Matelas, Matelassier,” 118. 15. Deborah Howard, Jacopo Sansovino: Architecture and Patronage in Renais­ sance Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), chap. 1. 16. In Bernardino Ramazzini, De morbis artificium diatriba (Utrecht: Guglielmus van de Water, 1703), 241–247. On the same topic, some years later, Luciano Allegra, “Un medico nel ghetto: Michele Francesco Buniva e gli ebrei torinesi negli anni della Restaurazione,” Zakhor: Rivista di storia degli Ebrei d’Italia 7 (2004): 62. 17. The testimony is in the deposition of Lazzarina in MdP 5160, fol. 288r: “Suo padre, quale era infermo, cio faceva acciò che detta Livia non restasse in mano delli detti suoi fratelli.” 18. Francesco Podestà, Il Colle di S. Andrea in Genova e le regioni circostanti, Volume 33 of Atti della Società ligure di storia patria (Genoa: L. Sambolino, 1901), 174. 19. Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300– 1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 87–88. Consider also Robert Black, “Italian Renaissance Education: Changing Perspec­ tives and Continuing Controversies,” Journal of the History of Ideas 52, No. 2 (1991): 315–334, and the rejoinder by Grendler, 335–37. In addition, Ottavia Niccoli, “Creanza e disciplina: buone maniere per i fanciulli nell’Italia della controriforma,” in Disciplina dell’anima, disciplina del corpo e disciplina della società tra medioevo ed età moderna, ed. Paolo Prodi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994), 929–963. 20. I rely, concerning instruction in Genoa, on Angelo Massa, “Documenti

not es to pages 73– 74 349

e notizie per la storia dell’istruzione a Genova,” Giornale storico e letterario della Liguria 7 (1906): 169–205. 21. On the theme of family violence, Ottavia Niccoli, Il seme della violenza. Putti, fanciulli e mammoli nell’Italia tra Cinque e Seicento (Bari: Laterza, 2007), chap. 2. 22. I considered the evidence for beatings in Joanne Ferraro, Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 48. In addition, Marina Graziosi, “Women and Criminal Law: The Notion of Diminished Responsibility in Prospero Farinacci (1544–1618) and Other Renaissance Jurists,” Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. Letizia Panizza (Oxford: European Humanities Research Center, 2000), chap.  10, along with Christine Meek, “Women between the Law and Social Reality in Early Renaissance Lucca,” chap. 11 in the same work. 23. Moderata Fonte, Il merito delle donne: ove chiaramente si scuopre quanto siano elle degne e più perfette de gli uomini, ed. Adriana Chemello (Mirano [VE]: Editore Eidos, 1988) (orig. ed. Venice: 1592). 24. Compare the case of Caterina Paluzzi, whose autobiography is translated in part in Brendan Dooley, Italy in the Baroque: Selected Readings (Garland, 1995), p. 540, and Giovanni Antonazzi, ed., Caterina Paluzzi e la sua autobiografia, Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà, 8 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1980). 25. The standard reference to noisy congregations was Paul, Cor. 14: 13. See Domingo de Soto, In quartum sententiarum (Salamanca: 1560), Di­­ stinctione 13. That things changed little by the late seventeenth century is suggested by Girolamo Frezza, Templum morale confessorum (Venice: Ruinetti, 1694), 346: “Quaeres: Ad praecepti huius impletionem est absolute necessarium, ut sacrificantem videas, audias, etc.? Res. Negat.; sed sufficere, si ita praesens sis moraliter, ut ex signis quibusdam colligere possis, quid a sacrificante agatur.” 26. An example: Ilarione Genovese, Delle qualità che con la Divina Gratia debbe procacciare di ottenere chiunque . . . ​(Genoa: Bartoli, 1588), 8v. My guide to preaching in Genoa was Francesco Zanotto, Storia della predicazione nei secoli della letteratura italiana (Modena: Tip. Pontificia ed Arcivescovile dell’Imm. Concezione, 1899). On Ilarione in particular, I learned from Jean François, Bibliothèque générale des écrivains de l’ordre de Saint Benoît, vol. 1 (Bouillon: Société Typographique, 1777), 497. 27. The concept is extrapolated from Raphael Patai, Sex and Family Life in the Bible and Middle East (New York: Doubleday, 1959).

not es to pages 74– 75 35 0

28. Saint Catherine of Genoa (Caterinetta Fieschi Adorno, 1447–1510) has so often been studied for her teachings on purgatory that she has become known as “the great theorist of purgatory”: Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 69. Her life was already written in 1590: Cattaneo Marabotto, Vita della beata Caterina Adorni da Genova: con un dialogo diviso in dua capitoli, tra l’Anima, il Corpo, l’humanita, l’Amor proprio, & il Signore, composto dalla medesima (Genoa: Gio. Battista Bonfadino, 1590). 29. I learned about Battistina from D. Solfaroli Camillocci, “La monaca exemplare. Lettere spirituali di madre Battistina Vernazza (1497–1587), in Per lettera: la scrittura epistolare femminile tra archivio e tipografia: secoli XV–XVII, ed. Gabriella Zarri (Rome: Viella, 1999), 235–61. There is more in Elisabetta Graziosi, “Arcipelago sommerso: le rime delle monache tra obbedienza e trasgressione,” in Gianna Pomata and Gabriella Zarri, eds., I monasteri femminili come centri di cultura fra Rinascimento e Barocco, (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2005), 158. 30. Concerning the S. Andrea neighborhood, Giuseppe Banchero, Genova e le due riviere (Genoa: L. Pellas, 1846), 614. 31. I learned of the attempts to implement the reforms of St. Teresa of Avila at convents in Genoa, and Genoese convent culture in general from, A. Roggero, Genova e gli inizi della riforma teresiana in Italia (1584–1597) (Rome: Sagep, 1984). Concerning the family economics of nunneries: Anthony Molho, “Tamquam vere mortua. Le professioni religiose femminili nella Firenze del tardo medioevo,” Società e storia 12 no. 43 (1989): 1–44; convent life in Florence and especially the change to Counter-​ Reformation is the topic of Sabine Plakolm-​Forsthuber, Florentiner Frauenklöster von der Renaissance bis zur Gegenreformation (Petersberg, Ger­ many: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2009). On convent culture in general elsewhere, also Prudence Renée Baernstein, “The Counter-​Reformation Convent: The Angelics of San Paolo in Milan, 1535–1635,” (unpubl. Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1993); and I studied monasteries as an option for girls in Gabriella Zarri, Recinti, 156–184. 32. Battista Vernazza, Opere spirituali della reuerenda et deuotissima Vergine di Christo, donna Battista da Genoua . . . ​ : in tre tomi distinte . . . ​con tre tauole vtilissime et copiosissime (Venice: eredi di Francesco Ziletti, 1588), where I quote from the preface by Don Dionisio da Piacenza, p. vii: “Sono ripiene le opere di questa veneranda madre, tutto è posto nell’annichila­ tione di se, et union con Dio; perilche l’anima da tal spirito posseduta, con ugual prontezza e abbassa se et in se inalza e glorifica Dio.”

notes to pages 75–77 35 1

33. I read the instructions to Don Giovanni for this trip in MdP 257, fol. 65, dated 29 September 1581, “Istruttione a voi S. Don Gio. di quello che l’Ecc. V. ha da fare in questa sua gita.” 34. I make no pretense to resolve the debates about Columbus’s life before 1492, only referring to the still authoritative treatment in Felipe Fernández-​Armesto, Columbus (Oxford-​New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), chap. 1, and, with an appraisal of this and other scholarship, Carol Delaney, “Columbus’s Ultimate Goal: Jerusalem” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 2 (2006): 260–292. 35. I draw upon Lauro Magnani, “Temporary Architecture and Public Decoration: The Development of Images,” in Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe, vol. 1, ed. J.  R. Mulryne (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 256 and note 15. 36. Magnani, “Temporary Architecture,” 255, including the following quotes. 37. A transcription from the document of the discourse is in Andrea Spinola, Scritti scelti, ed. Carlo Bitossi (Genoa: SAGEP, 1981), pp. 261–64. For the context, I consulted Rodolfo Savelli, La repubblica oligarchica: legislazione, istituzioni e ceti a Genova nel Cinquecento (Milan: A. Giuffré, 1981), especially 238–239. Savelli updates some of his arguments in his chapter on Genoese society in the sixteenth century in Van Dyck a Genova, ed. Susan J. Barnes (Milan: Editore Electa, 1997). 38. The literature on children’s experiences is still scarce and needs more cases like Livia’s. In The Past and the Present Revisited (London: Routledge, 1987), 311–342, Lawrence Stone famously debates the conclusions of Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1965). Tending toward a more positive revaluation of family life are Giulia Calvi, Il contratto morale: madri e figli nella Toscana moderna (Bari: Editore Laterza, 1994), and Steven Ozment, Ancestors; the Loving Family in Old Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-​Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) reconsiders Ariès from the standpoint of parents’ relation to their children. For childhood per se, I went to Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 (London: Longman, 1995); as well as Egle Becchi and Dominique Julia, Histoire de l’enfance en occident, vol. 1, De l’antiquité au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2004). 39. I consulted Storia illustrata di Genova, vol. 4: Genova nell’età moderna, chapter by Franco Ragazzi, regarding theater performances. 40. La tragedia di F.  N.  B. intitolata Libero arbitrio (n.p.: 1547). The work is analyzed by Francesco Millocca, “La tragedia ‘Libero arbitrio’ di

notes to pages 77–79 35 2

Francesco Negri Bassanese (sec. 16.),” Esperienze letterarie 16, no. 1 (1991): 51–64. 41. Alessandro D’Ancona, Sacre rappresentazioni dei secoli XIV, XV e XVI, vol. 3 (Florence: Successori Le Monnier, 1872), 516. 42. In this regard, I found useful Piero Camporesi, Rustici e buffoni (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), chap. 1. I noted also Judy Rawson, “Marrying for Love: Society in the Quattrocento Novella,” Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, chap. 24. In addition, Allardyce Nicoll, The World of Harlequin: A Critical Study of the Commedia dell’Arte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 17, 27. 43. The tradition is explored with relevant bibliography in Raffaele Morabito, ed., La storia della Griselda in Europa. Atti del Convegno, L’Aquila 12–14 maggio 1988, (L’Aquila: 1990); with bibliographical updates and European reflections in Barbara Sasse, “Vom humanistischen Frauendiskurs zum frühburgerlichen Ehediskurs: Zur Rezeption der Griselda-​Novelle des Boccaccio in der deutschen Literatur des 15–16 Jahrhunderts,” Daphnis: Zeitschrift für Mittlere Deutsche Literatur und Kultur 37 (2008): 408–32. On home education in the period, I drew upon Patricia Fortini Brown, “Children and Education,” Marta Ajmar-​Wollheim, Flora Dennis, eds., At Home in Renaissance Italy (London: V & A, 2006), chap. 9; also Alberto Fiorin, “I giochi dell’infanzia tra evoluzione e continuità,” Nadia Maria Filippini, Tiziana Plebani, eds., La scoperta dell’infanzia: cura, educazione e rappresentazione: Venezia 1750–1930 (Venezia: Editore Marsilio, 1999), 209–219. 44. An aspect discussed in Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 220–244. 45. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, tr. G.  H. McWilliam, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2003), 787. 46. The point is emphasized by Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice and the Fairy Tale Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), chap. 3. 47. The concept is noted in James Bruyn Andrews, Contes ligures: Traditions de la Rivière, recueillis entre Menton et Gênes (Paris  : Ernest Leroux, 1892), 283. 48. Giovanni Francesco Straparola, Le piacevoli notti, ed. Giuseppe Rua, vol. 1 (Bari: Laterza, 1927), 71–80. 49. Concerning the specifics of Genoese folkways, I consulted Beatrice Solinas Donghi, Se ti veu che ta conte: Fiabe a Genova (Genoa: SAGEP, 1972), 17–24.

notes to pages 79 –81 35 3

50. A particularly acute analysis of the mentality described here is in Brian Vickers, “Analogy Versus Identity: The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 1580–1680,” Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe, Ingrid Merkel and Allen Debus, eds., (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1988), 95–164. I also drew upon the comments on magic by Claude Lévi-​Strauss, La pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962), pp.  292–94. I also draw upon Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 3rd ed. (Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2009), especially part 2; as well as my Morandi’s Last Prophecy and the End of Baroque Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), chap. 8. For the relation between popular and learned culture, I referred to Paola Zambelli, “Uno, due tre mille Menocchio,” Archivio storico italiano 137 (1979): 51–90. 51. Here I am conveying an insight of Peter Burke, “Rituals of Healing in Early Modern Italy,” in his The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), chap. 15. 52. My impression comes from Giuseppe Delfino and Aidano Schmuckher, Stregoneria, magia, credenze e superstizioni a Genova e in Liguria (Florence: L.  S. Olschki, 1973). By comparison with another region, Giuliana Zanelli, Streghe e società: nell’Emilia e Romagna del cinque-​seicento (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1992). The wider significance is explained in Carlo Ginzburg, Storia notturna. Una decifrazione del sabba (Turin: Einaudi, 1989). Regarding the competition for healing, in a different context, David Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d’Otranto (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), chap.  5. I also noted Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., History from Crime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1994), chaps. by Silvana Fiume and Sabrina Loriga. 53. I consulted the analysis of Michele Rosi, “Le streghe di Triora in Liguria. Processi di stregoneria e relative questioni giurisdizionali nella seconda metà del XVI secolo,” Rivista di discipline carcerarie in relazione con l’antropologia 23 no. 7 (1898): 325. 54. The object is listed among other objects brought back from Venice in the inventory in Pupilli reg. 767, c. 361. 55. The wage figure is from Christopher F. Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 165. 56. The phrase is in MdP 5160 fol. 92v, in the testimony of Marietta Castagnisci: “Detta madre di Livia mi diceva, che bisognava che si contentasse di quanto volevano suo padre et fratelli, che lo facevano per

notes to pages 81–85 35 4

bene di detta Livia, perchè il detto Batt.a era huomo riposato, et che havea qualche cosa, et che la Livia saria stata bene.” 57. Quoted in MdP 5160 fol. 288r, the testimony by Lazzarina di Benedetto Biagi: “ciò faceva acciò che detta Livia non restasse in mano delli detti suoi fratelli.” 58. An example of this appraisal is in MdP 5160 fol. 291r, in the testimony by Michelangelo Turcotta: “Non arrivava all’età di 13 anni.” Another witness makes a similar claim on fol. 89r. 59. I consulted I libri della famiglia, Cecil Grayson ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1960), p.  111. In general concerning love and marriage, I draw on Brian Richardson, “Amore maritale: Advice on Love and Marriage in the Second Half of the Cinquecento,” Letizia Panizza, ed., Women in Italian Renais­ sance Culture and Society, (Oxford: European Humanities Research Center, 2000), chap. 12. 60. In Venice a century before, a marriage had been declared invalid in part because of the improbability of an eighteen-​year-​old marrying a thirty-​ year-​old patrician: Stanley Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­­ sity Press, 2000), 53. On age I also consulted Anthony Molho, “Decep­tion and Marriage Strategy in Renaissance Florence: The Case of Women’s Ages,” Renaissance Quarterly 41, no. 2 (1988): 193–217. 61. From the deposition of Lazzarina di Benedetto Biagi in MdP 5160 fol. 287v: “Detta livia non mostrava più età dall’aspetto perchè era una vechiettina, et fraschettina, che giocava con li miei figlioli.” 62. From the deposition of Lazzarina di Benedetto Biagi in MdP 5160 fol. 288v: “Diceva che non lo voleva, et che non glie lo havrebbe mai fatto prendere, et che mai non sene vederia bene.” 63. Canons and decrees of the Council of Trent; original text with English translation, by H. J. Schroeder (St. Louis, MO, London: Herder, 1941), 181. I learned about the Tametsi controversy in Zarri, Recinti, pp. 210–22 and 234–38. Concerning the wider significance, I consulted Giovanna Da Molin, Famiglia e matrimonio nell’Italia del Seicento (Bari: Cacucci Editore, 2000), chap. 6. 64. Quoted in MdP 5160, fol. 314r. 65. The scene is described in MdP 5162, fol. 293r. 66. As much as is known about him is in MdP 5159. The volume is articulated in two parts that will henceforth be designated as MdP 5159, part 1 and part 2; in this case, the material is in part 1 at fol. 53v. 67. Claudia Burattelli, Domenica Landolfi, and Anna Zinanni, eds., Comici dell’arte: corrispondenze: G. B. Andreini, N. Barbieri, P. M. Cecchini, S. Fiorillo,

notes to pages 85–86 355

T. Martinelli, F. Scala, edizione diretta da Siro Ferrone (Florence: Le Lettere, 1993), 1: 44. 68. The reclusion is documented in MdP 5162, fol. 404v, and 5159, part 1, fols. 15r and 40r. 69. Concerning such assumptions, I refer to Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, eds., Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), especially intro. by Bennett and Froide, and chapters by Merry E. Wiesner and Monica Chojnacka. In addition, Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner, eds., Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York: Pearson Education Ltd., 1999), especially the editors’ intro. and chapters by Lyndan Warner, Isabelle Chabot, and Giulia Calvi. 70. My history of the place comes from Giovanni Battista Semeria, Storia ecclesiastica di Genova e della Liguria dai tempi apostolici sino all’anno 1838 (Turin: Tip. e libr. Canfari, 1838), 308–309. 71. Quoted in MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 44r: “Io so che questa portinara nominata Marietta Fravega che si ritrova prigione teneva molta strettezza con la Livia . . . ​L’havevano ripresa più volte per l’ambasciate che lei portava alla detta Livia, per li huomini che l’havevano messa qui, e di questo le signore donne che hanno cura di questa opera ne l’hanno più volte ripresa, e la detta Livia sentendo fare queste riprensioni alla detta Mariettta diceva sempre che non li voleva stare e che voleva andare con Bono.” 72. The scene is described in MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 42r: “Le dette Margherita e Livia hanno portato via le robe sue di dosso, e la sig.ra ha detto, che li manca le sue gioie, et una camiscia . . . ​La sig.ra stessa fu la prima che so se ne accorse che chiamando la margherita, perchè si era amorto il lume e non rispose, e venne alla nostra camera, a chiamare, a picchiare. . . . ​La detta Livia, quando andammo in letto, voleva che ammorzassi il lume, et io le dissi, che non lo volevo ammorzare, che la sig.ra ne haveva detto, che lo tenessimo acciò non facessimo disonesta, ma detta Livia per ammortarlo li tirò un scosale, ma non si amortò. . . . ​Quando la sig.ra venne la lampa non era accesa, ma era amorta.” 73. MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 51r. 74. I adapt the approach of Christiane Klapisch-​Zuber in her, “Introdu­ zione,” to Michela De Giorgio and Christiane Klapisch-​Zuber, eds., Storia del matrimonio (Bari: Laterza, 1996), xvii. 75. The report comes from MdP 5150, fol. 455, dated Bologna, October 6, 1620, Flaminio Scala to Don Giovanni: “Qui per la festa di San Petronio si è corso il palio; vi è stato il S. Generale et alcuni principalissimi sig.ri

notes to pages 86 – 90 35 6

Genovesi, con dame adobate richiss.te; ma io che desideravo la Ill.ma Padrona, sì perch’ella avesse gusto sì anco perchè con la sua presenza s’avesse a vergognar quelle dame, e far conoscere anco a questa città come son fatte le dame belle.” 76. The references are in MdP 5162, fol. 77r: “ritratto della S. Livia in oro”; and later in fol. 543r: “ritratto di una donna.” However, I found, in Paola Barocchi and Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà, Collezionismo mediceo e storia artistica (Florence: Studio per edizione scelte, 2005), vol. 2, part 3: 565, referring to the Medici collections inventory of 1638, the following possibly significant entry: “Un tondo in noce con guardia d’ebano, tocco in cima d’oro macinato e sotto un ovato ur d’ebano lavorato a fogliette d’oro macinato, drentovi vi è un ritratto di bassorilievo al naturale di cera, d’una gentil donna veniziana, con vezzo e collana e orecchini e fascetta al braccio di perle piccoline.” 77. Concerning the whereabouts of Livia’s habitations, MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 669r, deposition of Francesco Renzi, 7 January 1621, referring to Giovanni: “la levò dove habitava di casa al canto al Galeone, et per qualche tempo habitò dal Centauro, poi dopo tornò nella casa di Parione.” 78. An appraisal of the work and its function is in Giambologna: gli dei, gli eroi. Genesi e fortuna di uno stile europeo nella scultura. Catalogo della mostra (Firenze, 2 Marzo–15 Giugno 2006) ed. Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi, Dimitrios Zikos (Florence: Giunti, 2006), 175. 79. The reference is in Giovanni Cinelli Calvoli, Le bellezze della citta di Firenze (Firenze: Gugliantini, 1677), 211. 80. Doubts about the structure of the work were expressed by Filippo Baldinucci, Delle notizie de’ professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua, ed. Domenico Maria Manni, vol. 7 (Florence: Stecchi & Pavani, 1770), 106. Further bibliography in the edition of Baldinucci by Paola Barocchi (Florence: S.P.E.S.) vol. 2 (1974). 81. Concerning prostitution, an example of the bibliography on Florence: John K. Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà and the Control of Prostitution, 1403–1680,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 24, no. 2 (1993): 273–300. 82. Let a single example suffice, consulted on 30 September 2010 at http://www .tangodiva.com/index.php?page=features&j=1&cat=2&story_id=266. 83. The letter is in MdP 6355, fol. 637r, dated 3 April 1610, Giovanni to Giulio Cesare Alberighi, Archdeacon of Genova. 84. Evidence is in C. Burattelli, D. Landolfi, A. Zinanni, eds., Comici dell’arte: corrispondenze, vol. 2, 92, 94, 95. In addition, important information in Domenica Landolfi, “Su un teatrino mediceo e sull’accademia degli

notes to pages 90 – 92 35 7

Incostanti a Firenze nel primo Seicento,” Teatro e storia 6 no. 1 (1991): 57–88. 85. The full text of MdP 5145, fol. 3r, 25 April 1614 is as follows: “Illustrissimo et Eccellentissimo Signore mio, Ho ricevuta la di Vostra Eccellenza de’ 22 quale mi ha portato gran contento nel sentire che Vostra Eccellenza si ricorda di me sua humilissima serva e ancora sentire il suo bene essere che è quello che desidero [so]pra tutte le cose; io sto benissimo di corpo ma non da anima per essere lontano ogni suo bene; in quanto alla fiera io [p]ag[h]erei a chi fasesse tornare Vostra Eccellenza, che io non curo a [nulla] se non haverla p[r]esso di me. Di novo supplico Vostra Eccellenza di favorirmi di fare quanto la può per seviso2 di Cosimo Lambrini; ne terrò obbligo a Vostra Eccellenza grandissimo perchè è caso veramente di compassione; prego Vostra Eccellenza perdonarne del fastidio li do e con questo [le] fo humilissima reverenza e li prego Dio ogni [suo] magior contento. Di Firenze il dì 25 di aprile 1614. Di Vostra Eccellenza Illustrissima humilissima et obbligatissima serva Livia Vernazza.” A critical edition of all the letters is B. Dooley, ed., Amore e guerra nel tardo Rinascimento: le lettere di don Giovanni de’ Medici e Livia Vernazza (Florence: Polistampa, 2009), of which the present example is no. 1. 86. MdP 5145, fol. 3r. The archival indications for the following items in the paragraph are, in order, MdP 5145, fols., 4r, 4r, 5r, 216r, 213r, 5r, 48r, 78r. 87. ASF, Miscellanea Medicea 4, insert 3, fol. 34v, dated 1 January 1618: “È vero che mi è cresciuto, qualche poco, quel tumere che mi comiinciò già un pezzo fà nella gola, che par quasi che mi sia venuto il Gosso.” 88. MdP 6108 fol. 791, dated 18 September, 1618: “Ci è comparsa oggi una staffetta di Venezia con avviso che il S.r Don Giovanni [de’ Medici] stava con pericolo della vita per essersi fatto tagliare un gonfio che haveva nella gola.” 89. MdP 6108, fol. 791r dated 18 September, 1618: “Il Gran Duca [Cosimo II] vi ha mandato subito per la posta il Cap.no Piero Capponi per visitarlo et per havero l’occhio a ogni cosa. Et che stando egli in termine di poca speranza, mandi la signora fuori di casa, però honorevolmente.” In addition, MdP 5138, fols. 366r, 367r. 90. MdP 5171, fol. 458r, dated 22 September 1618: “Io mi ritrovo in stato quasi d’intera sanità, senza esser mai il mio male arrivato tanto oltre quanto è stato descritto.” 91. Concerning concubinage as a means against misalliances, I referred to Lucia Ferrante, “Consensus contubinarius: un invenzione giuridica per il principe?” Trasgressioni: seduzione, concubinato, adulterio, bigamia:

notes to pages 92– 94 35 8

(XIV–XVIII secolo), ed. Silvana Seidel Menchi and Diego Quaglioni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004), 120, and, on Lodovico Sardi’s Tractatus de naturalibus liberis, legitimatione, ac successione eorum (1544); and concerning the case of Faa di Bruno, note Silvana Seidel Menchi, “Il matrimonio finto. Clero e fedeli post tridentini tra sperimentazione liturgica e registrazione di stato civile,” in Ibid., 555–56. 92. MdP 2955 ins. 11, dated 7 February 1619: “Quando fussi certo o che egli l’havesse sposata, o che fosse per sposarla, non vorrei che fosse mai più chiamato di questa famiglia et farci conto di non haverlo pur conosciuto.” 93. MdP 2955 ins. 11: “Ho voluto confidentemente avvertirla, come faccio per corriere espresso, che io non tengo detta donna se non per puttana.” Again, MdP 6108 fol. 563, dated 7 February 1619; and yet again, MdP 6108, dated 12 February 1619, fol. 182. 94. MdP 2955 ins. 11: “non sapendo sotto che titolo egli conduca detta donna, nè in che forma ella possa esser trattata dal S.r Duca [Ferdinando Gonzaga] et da Vostra Altezza [Caterina de’ Medici].” 95. The places are mentioned in MdP 2949, fol. 18, dated 22 February 1619, by Annibale Chieppio. 96. Apart from the sources mentioned above concerning the Tametsi, I found confirmation for this interpretation in Ferraro, Marriage Wars, 4. 97. The example is in Irene Fosi, “Da un tribunale all’altro: il divorzio fra Benedetta Pinelli e Girolamo Grimaldi, principe di Gerace (1609– 1653),” Silvana Seidel Menchi and Diego Quaglioni, eds., Coniugi nemici. La separazione in italia dal XII al XVIII secolo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000), 429. 98. MdP 5160, fol. 13, 18 August 1618: “ho sentito la buona cortesia e opera che Vostra Signoria usa verso di me, il che gliene sarò perpetuo in obligo, dell’opara mi fa verso di mia sorella, hora circa che Vostra Signoria mi scrive per conto della fede desidero che mi scriva il schiso come ha da essere e con quanti testimonii, ha da essere che io farò quanto si potrà fare umanamente, si bene sono ancora sospeso come ho detto a Vostra Signoria.” 99. MdP 5160, fol. 285: “Testes, ad instantiam Bartolomei Tassarelli . . . ​che detta Livia, da che contrasse detto matrimonio con detto Battista escluso il tempo quando sene fugiva in casa del detto suo padre non può esser stata in casa di detto Battista salvo alcuni mesi, et che non possono arrivare a poco più d’un anno, et per tutto quel tempo, che stette in casa di detto Battista si stette per forza, et perchè di continuo suoi padre et frelli la minacciavano, et per spavento che le facevano et non per altro

notes to pages 95– 96 35 9

si stava et habitava è ben vero che sempre et di continuo si lasciava intendere che ciò faceva per timore delle minaccie sudette, et che mai voleva detto Battista per suo marito.” 100. Turcotta’s testimony is in MdP 5160, at fol. 291r: “Essa Livia a mio giudizio non arrivava all’età di 13 anni perchè era una figlioletta, che veniva senza guardia in su le nostre stanze, che tenevo sopra la stanza di detto Bernardo Vernazzo, et quando si sentì che detta Livia fu promessa parve strano a tutti.” 101. The testimony is in MdP 5160, at fol. 92r: “Un giorno havea piaga in testa, et mi disse che suo frello l’hevea dati per la testa un par di chiave grosse per che dicea che non volea andare nè ritornare a casa del detto Bernardo.” 102. The sentence is located in MdP 5159, part 1, fol. 14r, dated 12 June 1619: “Decernimus et declaramus, matrimonium . . . ​inter dictum Baptistam Granarium ex una et d. Liviam Vernatiam ex altera contractum fore et esse annulandum et invalidandum, non solum modo et forma praemisso, sed et omni meliori modo.” 103. MdP 6101, fol. 174 circa (unnumbered); dated 24 July 1619: “Qua s’intende che [cancelled: il S.D.G. de M. procu] ^quella Livia femmina del signor don Giovanni Medici procura^va di far dichiarar al foro di Vostra Signoria che quella [cancelled: L. sua femmina sia] ^d’essere^ sciolta, e non maritata a fin di poter^si maritar di nuovo^ [cancelled: lo prender per moglie]. Hor perchè questa ^sua leggerezza^ tocca molto a questa Casa e se succedesse saria con disgusto notabile di tutti noi, mi è parso d’avvertirne Vostra Signoria acciò nel agitarsi questa pretension al suo foro come vero amico mio e di questa Casa ella possa haverci quel riguardo che par conveniente e procurarne la diversion che sovverrà alla sua molta prudenza et amorevolezza, dalla qual aspetto anco di sentire se la detta pretensione sia stata tentata.” This and the following were transcribed by the team at the Medici Archive Project. 104. MdP 6081, fol. 578 circa (unnumbered); dated 2 August 1619: “Mi dispiace bene che l’aviso [ . . . ​] insieme col cenno della sua volontà sia stato tardo, poichè, havendo preso secreta informazione, trovo che quella Livia [Vernazza] mentre son stato a Roma li mesi passati, havendo agitato contro del marito [Batista Granara] e formato processo inanzi al mio vicario e provato che da principio lo prese per forza e mai si contentò di habitare, nè stare con esso lui, ha otenuto sententia di nullità di matrimonio. Onde, trovandosi il negotio in questo termine, non saprei che mi poter fare per servire come molto desidero Vostra Altezza Serenissima.”

notes to pages 96 – 98 360

105. MdP 5160, fol. 44r, dated after July 1619: “Ho detto al S. D. Grazia in voce tutto più largamente, pero’ adesso mi rimetto e per obedire a Vostra Altezza Serenissima le dico in scritto che non sono nè sarò mai in altri termini con la S.ra Livia Vernazza che nelli medesimi che ero inanzi che il matrimonio che già seguì tra lei e Battista Granara fusse annullato, nè per tale annullazione, e da me con stato innovato ne si innoverà cosa alcuna.” 106. MdP 5160, fol. 44 July 1619. 107. Concerning Cristina, apart from sources indicated below, note an attempt at rehabilitation in Ilaria Pagliai, “Luci e ombre di un per­ sonaggio: le lettere di Cristina di Lorena sul ‘negozio’ di Urbino,” in Per lettera: la scrittura epistolare femminile tra archivio e tipografia: secoli XV–XVII, 464. 108. On which, articles by Riccardo Spinelli and Ilaria Hoppe in Le donne Medici nel sistema Europeo delle corti, ed. Giulia Calvi and Riccardo Spinelli (Florence: Polistampa, 2008), vol. 2. 109. Concerning Cristina’s religious program, Francesco Martelli, “Cristina di Lorena, una Lorenese al governo della Toscana medicea: prime linee di ricerca,” in Alessandra Contini and Maria Grazia Parri, eds., Il Granducato di Toscana e i Lorena nel secolo XVIII: incontro internazionale di studio, Firenze, 22–24 Settembre 1994, (Florence: Olschki, 1999), 71–81. 110. Carte Strozziane, prima serie, 48, fol. 117v: “Quando un marito et una moglie per poter tenere vita dissoluta, o per maritarsi di nuovo con più suo vantaggio, et a persona più potente, procurino l’annullazione de’ precedenti matrimoni con un mezzo così fattamente inventato.” Concerning norms on behavior, the article by Judith C. Brown, “A Woman’s Place Was in the Home: Women’s Work in Renaissance Tuscany,” in Margaret W. Ferguson et al., eds., Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 206–24. 111. Florence, Archivio di Stato, Carte strozziane prima serie 48, fol. 112, letter of Cosimo II to the ambassador in Rome, 6 August 1619: “Ma per essere il caso tanto pericoloso, non possiamo assicurarci che sia bastante questa nostra diligenza, et però ci siamo resoluti di participar tutto il fatto a S. Santità, la quale per bontà sua mostra di portar tanto amore alla casa nostra che si moverà a compassione di noi.” Also, fol. 138. 112. On this aspect, I was informed by Ludwig Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages: Drawn from the Secret Archives of the Vatican and Other Original Sources, vol. 25, trans. Ernest Graf (London: Kegan Paul, 1899), 68; as well as by Maria Antonietta Visceglia, “Factions in

notes to pages 99 –101 361

the Sacred College in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Gianvittorio Signorotto, Maria Antonietta Visceglia, eds., Court and Pol­ itics in Papal Rome, 1492–1700, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 99–131. 113. Florence, Archivio di Stato, Carte strozziane prima serie 48, fol. 112r: “Hora havendo noi molta ragione di temere, che questa donna diabolica habbia a saper tanto inviluppare il Signor Don Giovanni, che lo faccia cadere nella rete del matrimonio, ci è parso di pigliare un’espediente necessario, di mandare a Venezia per la posta Don Garzia di Montalvo amico suo conidentissimo, per fargli sapere, che habbiamo scoperto gli inganni della Livia, acciò che egli si possa guardarci di non commettere una tale indegnità, la quale noi non potremmo mai tolerare in maniera veruna, protestandogli che lo priveremmo della grazia nostra, et del refugio di questa casa in perpetuo.” Giovanni Rosini, La monaca di Monza: storia del secolo XVII (Florence: Le Monnier, 1857). In Chapter 8, there will be a fuller discussion of this work. 114. Florence, Archivio di Stato, Carte Strozziane, prima serie, 48, fol. 126r, dated 6 August 1619: “Mi hanno adunque commesso di soggiungere a Vostra Eccelenza che eseguisca tutto quello che il granduca le scrive, fuorche l’instanza, che la donna, pendente la lite, sia depositata in luogo honorato et sicuro, parendo loro che di questo non si debba trattar hora, ma riservarlo ad altro tempo.”

3. The Heart of Combat 1. MdP 5159 is articulated in two parts, of which the second, containing letters mostly between Giovanni and Livia, will henceforth be designated MdP 5159, part 2. In the present case we refer to part 2, fol. 590r, dated 12 September 1617, from Giovanni to Livia: “Con questa speranza mi vo consolando in questa lontananza, et in tanto preparo con queste mie povere fatiche, se mi riescirà corona di gloria a Vostra Signoria Illustrissima e quiete, e contento a me stesso, che accompagnato per tutta la vita da cosa tanto cara, e da me pregiata mi reputo felice.” This and the other letters between Livia and Giovanni mentioned in this text have been published in B. Dooley, ed., Amore e guerra nel tardo Rinascimento: le lettere di don Giovanni de’ Medici e Livia Vernazza (Florence: Polistampa, 2009), in the present case, at no. 43. Concerning the wider context of war letters as a source, I have utilized Andrew Carroll, War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars (New York: Scribner, 2001), as well as Clemens Schwender, “Formale und inhaltliche Erschließung von Ego-​Dokumenten aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg—

notes to pages 101–103 362











Erfahrungen aus der Feldpostsammlung Berlin,” Manfred Seifert and Friedrich Sonke, eds., Alltagsleben biografisch erfassen. Zur Konzeption lebensgeschichtlich orientierter Forschung, (Dresden: Thelem, 2009), 79–92. 2. For the early modern period and wider context, there are interesting observations by Jeremy Black throughout his Why Wars Happen (London: Reaktion Books, 1998). I considered also the Introduction to Hidemi Suganami, On the Causes of War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) and compared this with Larry H. Addington, The Patterns of War Since the Eighteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); as well as Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: a Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 4th revised ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2006). 3. Here I draw on Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), chap. 4. 4. An updated version of this key thesis of Gaetano Cozzi is in his Venezia barocca. Conflitti di uomini e idee nella crisi del Seicento veneziano (Venice: Il Cardo, 1995), chap. 1. 5. Michael Mallett and J. R. Hale, The Military Organization of a Renaissance State: Venice c. 1400–1617 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), chap.  10; besides, Piero Del Negro, Guerra ed eserciti da Machiavelli a Napoleone (Rome/Bari: Laterza, 2001), 41–80; as well as Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution, 1500–1800: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chaps. 1–3; and Jeremy Black’s rejoinder, A Military Revolution? Military Change and European Society, 1550–1800 (Humanities Press: London, 1991). 6. William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty; Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 162. Still relevant is Alberto Tenenti, Piracy and the Decline of Venice, 1580–1615, trans. an introduction and glossary by Janet and Brian Pullan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), especially chaps. 1–4 concerning the types of pirates. 7. Concerning these and other aspects, I consulted the chapter by Roberto Oresko entitled “The House of Savoy in Search for a Royal Crown in the Seventeenth Century,” in Roberto Oresko et al., eds., Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); as well as that by Claudio Rosso entitled “Il Seicento” in Pierpaolo Merlin, et al., Il Piemonte sabaudo: stato e territori in età moderna (Turin: UTET, 1994). Also pertinent I found Mantova: La storia, 3 vols. (Mantua: Istituto Carlo D’Arco per la storia di Mantova, 1958–1965), vol. 3 (1963): Da Guglielmo III duca alla fine della seconda guerra mondiale, ed. L. Mazzoldi, R. Giusti, and R. Salvadori. For the political conjuncture I

notes to pages 104–106 363













found insightful, though dated, the analysis in Romolo Quazza, Preponderanze straniere (Milan: Vallardi, 1938), part 2, chaps. 1–2. 8. Relevant here and below are: John Martin, “The Venetian Territorial State: Constructing Boundaries in the Shadow of Spain,” Spain in Italy: Politics, Society, and Religion 1500–1700, ed. Thomas Dandelet and John A. Marino (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2007), chap. 8. In addition, I benefited from Geoffrey Parker’s strategic analysis in The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), chap. 10. 9. Anna E. C. Simoni, The Ostend Story: Early Tales of the Great Siege and the Mediating Role of Henrick van Haestens, Bibliotheca Bibliographica Neerlandica, vol. 38 (‘t Goy-​Houten: HES & De Graaf Publishers, 2003), 10. For battle statistics, 93. 10. Robert A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 41. 11. MdP 5155, fol. 270, dated 13 December 1602, Giovanni to the grand ducal secretary Belisario Vinta. 12. Desiderius Erasmus, Colloquies, tr. Craig Ringwalt Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 56. On the theme, Jürgen Wilke, “Krieg als Medienereignis—Konstanten und Wandel eines endlosen Themas,” Kurt Imhof and Peter Schulz, eds., Medien und Krieg—Krieg in den Medien (Zürich, 1995), pp. 21–35. In addition, I learned much from the methodological approach of Marian Füssel, “Theatrum Belli. Der Krieg als Inszenierung und Wissensschauplatz im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” in Flemming Schock et al., eds., Dimensionen der Theatrum-​Metapher in der Frühen Neuzeit. Ordnung und Repräsentation von Wissen: Dimensions of the Early Modern Theatrum-​Metaphor. Order and Representation of Knowledge, (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2008). 13. MdP 5157, fol. 243r, dated 14 September 1604, Giovanni to Ferdinand I: “Oltre che quà non sono altre nuove, le cose di quà per quello che io veggo sono avvisati con tanta passione et parzialità che mi par ragio­ nevole che V. A. sappia il vero di ogni minuzia, et quello che gli scrivo io la si assicuri pure o che io stesso l’ho veduto, o che è per relazione di persone non interessata, et di che io posso fidarmi.” 14. MdP 5157, fol. 243v, dated 14 September 1604, Giovanni to Ferdinand I: “V. A. S. non si maravigli se forse io l’attedio con tante minuzie della presa di Ostenden.” 15. MdP 5157, fol. 145, 24 June 1604, Giovanni to Ferdinand I: “Uno che si venne a arrendere dice che oltre alle due retirate che l’inimico fa in ciascuno baluardo, che queste l’habbiano di già viste, adesso di nuovo vanno facendo certe mezze lune innanzi il fosso della retirata grande, che

notes to pages 106 –108 364

saranno come la contrascarpa che havevano innanzi i baluardi che hora si combattano, perchè gli mettano l’acqua attorno.” 16. On Targone, I consulted Karl Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, vol. 33 (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 397, as well as Christopher Duffy, Siege Warfare, vol. 1: The Fortress in Early Modern World, 1494–1660 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 86. 17. The drawing is in MdP 5153, ins. 2, c. 69r, 10 January 1603. 18. MdP 5155, fol. 499r, dated 3 July 1603, Giovanni to Ferdinand I. 19. MdP 5155, fol. 532, dated 28 August 1603, Giovanni to Ferdinand I: “Poi si metterà la macchina, la quale è finita, e accomodata di tutto punto con sei pezzi di cannone sopra, i quali si maneggiano con un invenzione trovata dal Targone che in vece di rinculare gli fa girare; ma io dubito che di questa havrà più difficultà a muoversi e a condursi al luogo dove egli la vuol fermare per essere grande e pesante, e forse bisognerà che aspetti alla nuova luna per havere le maree più grosse che la possino alzare.” 20. MdP 5155, fol. 532, dated 28 August 1603, Giovanni to Ferdinand I: “E quanto all’artiglieria che vi è sopra parmi esser certo che a i primi tiri habbia a guastare e spezzare il bilico dove è accomodata, e oltre a ciò il fumo habbia a far tal danno a i soldati che vi saranno sopra che havranno poca piazza che non habbia a servire a niente.” 21. The only information on him appears to be from the anonymous Histoire de l’Archiduc Albert gouverneur general et puis prince souverain de la Belgique (Cologne: Chez les héritiers de Corneille Edmond, 1693). 22. MdP 5155, fol. 303, dated 21 October 1603, Giovanni to Ferdinand I: “Doppo la visita fatta, il conte lo mandò a invitare a desinar seco, ove stettero in bonissma conversazione, et i discorsi di guerra e de’ successi di questi paesi furno lunghi e gustosissimi, et Ostenden et il Targone n’heb­­­bero la sua parte dicendo in ultimo il conte, che si maravigliava, che S. A, si affidassi di pigliar la villa di Ostenden con una gabbia da pappagalli (trattando della macchina); e soggiunse che la villa sia per tener buono ancora 8 anni, ma che S. A. la voleva comprare, ghe gli Stati per un milione e mezzo d’oro l’harebbon data, e simil altre burle.” Compare the account by John Lathrop Motley, History of the United Netherlands, From the Death of William the Silent to the Twelve Year’s Truce— 1609, 4 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1865–1878), chap. 40. 23. MdP, 5157, fol. 99, dated 23 April 1604, Giovanni to Ferdinand I: “Le nuove di Ostenden le vedrà V. A. nell’aggiunto foglio che è cavato

notes to pages 108–109 365

da più lettere che il Cav. Melzi et altri amici mi scrivono di là con­ tinovamente; nè più di questo saprei dirle cosa alcuna poi che non si ragiona d’altro che di quest’espugnazione, la quale va veramente a buon cammino.” 24. MdP, 4256, fol. 268, dated 23 April 1604, an anonymous newsletter (by Melzi and others): “Scrivono da Ostenden che il cav. Melzi con il suo Terzo d’Italiani si è impatronito del revellino della porta, molto felicemente, e con perdita di pochi de suoi.” 25. MdP 5155, fol 458r, n.d. but 1603, a deciphered insert in the letter on the same day, Giovanni to Ferdinand I: “Si dice ancora fra la soldatesca assai liberamente che sieno cagione di questo ritardamento per ciò che Rives che comanda in capite ne cava grandissimo profitto di molti et molti scudi il giorno.” 26. MdP 5155, fol. 458, n.d. but 1603, Giovanni to Ferdinand I, in a deciphered insert in the letter on the same day: “Per dirla a V. A. alla libera a me pare che si faccia piuttosto la guerra a i denari del re che alla villa.” Villa here, in the French manner, refers to the “city” of Ostend. 27. MdP 5155, fol. 319, 23 January 1603, Giovanni to Ferdinand I. 28. Francisco de Vitoria, De Indis Relectio Posterior (1539), in a modern edition by Ernest Nys, (Washington: The Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917); and a new translation of portions of this in Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1991), 293–328. Another text in question might have been Erasmus Querela pacis undique gentium ejectae profligataeque (Basel: Joh. Froben, 1517), modern edition in Ausgewählte Schriften ed. Werner Welzig, 8 vols. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967–1980), vol. 5. 29. For the modern debate about the last chapter of The Prince, I refer to Corrado Vivanti, Niccolò Machiavelli: i tempi della politica (Rome: Donzelli, 2008); as well as Maurizio Viroli, Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), chap. 5. 30. Ammirato’s views were expressed in Discorsi . . . ​sopra Cornelio Tacito (Florence: Giunti, 1598), esp. p. 530; Botero’s in Della ragion di stato (1st ed. Venice: Gioliti, 1589) included in the Ferrara: Baldini, 1590 edition a final chapter calling for unity against the Turk [see the modern edition by Chiara Continisio (Rome: Donzelli, 1997), Appendix 8]; the appeal directed to Spain was more explicit in Saggio dell’opera de’ principi e capitani illustri (Venice: Alessandro Vecchi, 1617), where the preface is dated 1607. Useful mise-au-point, Federico Pommier Vincelli, “Tra Spagna e

notes to pages 109 –112 366

Italia. Unione e disunione nella cultura politica della Controriforma,” In Alberto Merola, ed., Storia sociale e politica: omaggio a Rosario Villari, (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2007), 263–281. Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Gov­ ern­­ment, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 71–72. 31. MdP 5151, fol. 121, to Ferdinando, dated 20 May 1588. 32. Note the comments in Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 135, 163–164, referring to the change from early to modern soldiering, and the emergence of the notion of the soldier as a mechanical extension of his weapon. 33. MdP 5152, c. 376, dated 20 August 1616: “Mi dispiace sentire che a Milano già siano incavalcate et imbarcate le artiglierie, et che si faccino ponti sopra i fiumi, et che siano in essere i guastatori et buoi per detta artiglieria, et che alli 26 ovvero alli 28 il più tardi, marcieranno con più di 30m fanti et più di 5m cavalli [ . . . ​] et dico che questo mi dispiace perchè questo camminare alla destruzzione de’ principi d’Italia, o sia di Savoia, o di altri, non può piacere a buoni Italiani.” 34. Here and below regarding the Mantua episode, Jacopo Riguccio Galluzzi’s account still holds up: Istoria del granducato di Toscana sotto il governo della casa Medici (Leghorn: L. Marchini, 1822), vol. 6, book 6, chap. 3, 184–186. 35. Apart from the sources already indicated, I consulted Luigi Cesare Bollea, Una fase militare controversa della guerra per la successione di Monferrato (April–Giugno 1615) (Alessandria: GM Piccone, 1906); not to mention the already cited Romolo Quazza, Preponderanze straniere, pt. 2, chap. 2. 36. In general, for this and the following paragraph, I used Riccardo Caimmi, La guerra del Friuli 1615–17 altrimenti nota come Guerra di Gradisca o degli Uscocchi (Gorizia: LEG, 2007), chaps. 1–7; I also found a useful bibliographical comment in Ruth Simon, “The Uskok ‘Problem’ and Habsburg, Venetian, and Ottoman Relations at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century,” Essays in History, Published by the Corcoran Depart­ ment of History at the University of Virginia 42 (2000); on the Venetian side, there is useful material in Samuele Romanin, Storia documentata di Venezia, 10 vols. (Venice: Naratovich, 1853–1861), vol. 7 (1858), chap. 2, 108. A contemporary testimony, partly inspired (as we will explain) by Don Giovanni, is Faustino Moisesso, Historia dell’ultima guerra del Friuli (Venice: Barezzi, 1623), book 1, chaps. 1–3; and from the same period is Paolo Sarpi, La Repubblica di Venezia la casa d’Austria e gli Uscocchi: Aggionta e supplimento all’istoria degli Uscochi trattato di pace et accommodamento,

notes to pages 113–118 367

ed. Gaetano and Luisa Cozzi (Bari: Laterza, 1965), 73–112, including the note by Gaetano Cozzi on 424–426 For Giovanni’s role, Sommi Picenardi, “Don Giovanni de’ Medici,” in Nuovo Archivio Veneto n.s. 7 vol. 25 (1907), 128–136. Finally, Mauro Gaddi and Andrea Zannini, eds., “Venezia non è da guerra.” L’Isontino, la società friulana e la Serenissima nella guerra di Gradisca (1615–1617) (Udine: Forum, 2008), especially the chapter by Egidio Ivetic on the Uskok myth; as well as Gaetano Cozzi, Il doge Nicolò Contarini: richerche sul patriziato veneziano agli inizi del Seicento (Venice: Istituto per la Collaborazione Culturale, 1958), 149–169. 37. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 57, 107. 38. Tenenti, Piracy and the Decline, 61–62. 39. Sale e saline nell’Adriatico, secc. XV–XX ed. Antonio Di Vittorio (Naples: Giannini, 1981), chapter by T. Raukar, 145–156; as well as Jean-​Claude Hocquet, Le sel et la fortune de Venise, 2nd ed. (Villeneuve-​d’Ascq: Université de Lille, 1982). 40. Carlo Morelli di Schönfeld, Istoria della contea di Gorizia, 4 vols. (Gorizia: Paternolli, 1855–1856), vol. 2 (1855), 18–23. 41. Faustino Moisesso, Historia della ultima guerra, part 1, 25. 42. Orfeo di Strassoldo in the chronicle printed by Antonio Battistella, “Un ignoto narratore della guerra gradiscano del 1615–17,” Atti del R. Istituto Veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti, 87, part. 2 (1927–1928), 309. 43. Moisesso, Historia, 1: 25; and for the rest, R. Caimmi, La guerra, 124. 44. The general context is explained in Edward Muir, Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1999), chap. 1: “The Friulian Enigma”; and there is plenty of material regarding city and territory also in G. Bragato, Guida artistica di Udine e suo distretto (Udine: 1913). 45. Moisesso, Historia, 1:36. 46. On the rebellion, Peter H. Wilson, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 101. 47. Marino Sanudo, Itinerario per la terraferma veneta nel 1483, Roberto Bruni, et al., eds. (Padua: CLEUP, 2008), 324. 48. Sergio Polano, ed., L’architettura militare veneta del Cinquecento, Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio (Milan: Electa, 1988), especially articles by C. Pedretti, André Chastel, John Hale, and Sergio Masini. 49. Moisesso, Historia, 1: 42. 50. Morelli, Istoria, 28; Moisesso, Historia, 2, chap. 2. 51. MdP 5152, fol. 204r, dated 5 March 1616, Giovanni to Cosimo II: “Io alloggio in mezzo all’Ambasciadore di Spagna, et all’Agente della Maestà

notes to pages 118–119 368

dell’Imperatore che mi è appunto a canto accasato, et trovandosi egli spesso con questi [Veneziani], parrebbe che io consultassi seco, et egli con questi, quello che io dicesse poi per via di discorso.” 52. MdP 5152, fol. 261r, dated 2 April 1616, Giovanni to the grand ducal secretary Curzio Picchena: “Sono questi signori et questa Serenissima Repubblica hormai tanto affaticati dalle estraordinarie spese pubbliche et ancora particolari mediante i presenti moti, che sono stati astretti a mettere nuove impositioni, et tali, che molte hanno più tosto del Tirannico che del ragionevole; onde conviene quasi concludere di necessità, che nel pubblico non sia tesoro, et che i particolari, come è uso di questa Repubblica, pensino più tosto all’interesse privato che al ben pubblico.” 53. MdP 5152, fol. 290r, dated 29 April 1616, Giovanni to Cosimo II: “Io so dire di certo a V. A. S. che il Vincenti detto a Milano haveva ordine di far offitio che fussi data solamente qualche apparente satisfazzione alla Repubblica, che tutto si sarebbe accomodato, consistendo tale satisfazzione nel levare et gastigare alcuni capi delli Uschocchi, perchè con questa harebbono restituito subito tutte le cose occupate al Ser.mo Arciduca.” 54. MdP 5152, fol. 280, dated 16 April 1616, Giovanni to Cosimo II: A misleading translation of a letter from the king of France has been diffused giving the impression that the king approved of the Venetian troop levies in Switzerland. 55. MdP 5152, fol. 304, dated 11 May 1616, Giovanni to Cosimo II. 56. Morelli, Istoria, 30. 57. Caimmi, La guerra, 137. 58. Much of the boasting was well-​founded, as one sees in the account by Vania Santon, “Pompeo Giustiniani, Mastro di Campo a Gradisca,” in M. Gaddi and A. Zannini, “Venezia non è da guerra,” 35–48. 59. Mario Savorgnano, in Arte militare terrestre e maritima (Venice: Franceschi, 1590), p. 93, refers to “Le donne loro e l’altre genti inutili alla guerra. . . .” I found useful Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), especially Chapter 1 concerning the “cross-​cultural consistency of gender roles in war.” 60. MdP 5137, fol. 98r, dated 16 June 1616: Francesco Renzi to Don Giovanni: “L’Illustrissima Signora Leonora fa riverenzia a Vostra Eccelenza Illus­ trissima et dicie che Vostra Eccelenza Illustrissima dica all’Illustrissima Signora Livia [Vernazza] che vadi tirando a fine il suo parto, che non mancha di far fare orazione.”

notes to pages 120 –122 369

61. MdP 5150, fol. 135r, dated 15 June 1616. Benedetto Blanis to Giovanni: “Al openion nostra sperarei che fusse questo il maggior homo ch’habbi a esser al mondo, quello che per Isaia viene fra gl’altri titoli, cognominato forte e mirabile, la dove dice, Parvulus enim natus est nobis et factus est principatus super humerum eius et vocabitur nomen eius Admirabilis Consiliarius, Deus Fortis, Pater futuri saeculi Princeps Pacis, che tanto spero deva succedere di un frutto di tal Albero.” 62. Famously remembered by Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, Robert Baldick, trans., (London: Johnathan Cape, 1962), 344. Concerning childbirth, I considered also Claudia Pancino, Il bambino e l’acqua sporca: storia dell’assistenza al parto dalle mammane alle ostetriche (secoli XVI–XIX) (Milan: Angeli, 1984), chap. 1. More in general, Margaret L. King, “Concepts of Childhood: What We Know and Where We Might Go,” Renaissance Quarterly 60 (2007): 371–407. 63. MdP 5152, c. 376, dated 20 August 1616, Giovanni to Curzio Picchena: “Mi dispiace sentire che a Milano già siano incavalcate et imbarcate le artiglierie, et che si faccino ponti sopra i fiumi, et che siano in essere i guastatori et buoi per detta artiglieria, et che alli 26 ovvero alli 28 il più tardi, marcieranno con più di 30m fanti et più di 5m cavalli [ . . . ​] et dico che questo mi dispiace perchè questo camminare alla destruzzione de’ principi d’ Italia, o sia di Savoia, o di altri, non può piacere a buoni Italiani.” 64. Hermann Hallwich, “Marradas, Baltasar Graf,” Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 20 (Leipzig 1884): 421–28. Moisesso, Historia, book 1, chaps. 22–24. 65. Biagio Rith di Colenberg, Commentari della guerra moderna passata nel Friuli e ne’ confini dell’Istria e di Dalmatia divisi in otto libri (Trieste: Antonio Turrini, 1629), 90; concerning this source, see below. In addition, Moisesso, Historia, book 1, chaps. 30, 33. 66. Moisesso, Historia, book 1, chap. 34. 67. MdP 5152, fol. 412r, dated 14 November 1616, Giovanni to Curzio Picchena. In addition, Moisesso, Historia, book 2, chap. 1. 68. MdP 4866, fol. 158r, dated 1 December 1616, Curzio Picchena to Matteo Bartolini Baldelli: “Vostra Signoria havrà forse inteso à quest’hora, come il Sig. Don Giovanni Medici fù dichiarato dai Signori Veneziani Gov.re Generale delle loro Armi per comandare il loro esercito in Friuli, et si potrà imaginare che il Gran Duca ne habbia havuto disgusto non piccolo, poiche va à offendere l’Arciduca suo cognato [Ferdinando II von Habsburg], ma Vostra Signoria sa ancora come Don Giovanni si governa nelle cose sue, senza voler consiglio di nessuno.”

notes to pages 122–125 370

69. MdP 5145, fol. 5r, dated 2 December 1616, Livia to Giovanni: “ . . . ​veramente è un compitissimo cavalliere.” Reproduced in B. Dooley, Amore e guerra, no. 4. 70. MdP 6355, dated 16 November 1617, Giovanni to Baroncelli: “La Signora Livia si trasferì in campo e coraggiosamente andò visitando li forti, posti e trincere. Conoscendo il valore di questa signora, si honorò e salutò con cannonate . . . ​il che seguì in grado di honore et reverentia.” Quoted also in Sommi Picenardi “Don Giovanni,” Nuovo archivio veneto n.s. 7, vol. 25 (1907): 138. 71. The city was featured in Buonaiuto Lorini, Delle fortificationi nuovamente ristampate (Venice: Francesco Rampazetto, 1609). Edward Muir discusses it as a failed town in Mad Blood Stirring, p.  18. In general, Wolfgang Braunfels, Urban Design in Western Europe: Regime and Architecture, 900– 1900, tr. Kenneth J. Northcott (Chicago: Unversity of Chicago Press, 1990) pp.  156–60; and especially, Gino Pavan, ed., Palmanova: fortezza d’Europa: 1593–1993, (Venice: Marsilio, 1993). 72. MdP 5145, fol. 5r, Livia to Giovanni: “. . . ​sono realmente dui garbati cavalieri ciovè giovenetti, e sapeveno tanto ben dire il loro concetto che mi trovai molto intrigata.” 73. John-​Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari, eds., Food: A Culinary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), Introduction to the Early Modern period by Flandrin. 74. MdP 5145, fol. 16r, dated 2 December 1616, Livia to Giovanni: “Non mando nè starne nè cotornice, perchè Francesco di Baldo mi dice che costì se ne trova.” 75. Moisesso, Historia dell’ultima guerra, lib. 2, p. 3. 76. Gabriel Michaud et al., Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne, vol. 10 (Paris: Desplaces, 1855), pp. 80–81; and note Dampierre’s subsequent history in Josef V. Polišenský and Frederick Snider, War and Society in Europe, 1618–1648 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 46, 52, etc. 77. This aspect is explored in Anton Gnirs, Österreichs Kampf für sein Südland am Isonzo, 1615–1617 (Vienna: Verlag L. W. Seidel, 1916), 106. 78. MdP, 5145, fol. 12r, dated 2 January 1617. 79. Here and below, Moisesso, Historia, 16–17. Compare Machiavelli, Art of War, trans. and ed. Christopher Lynch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), book 3. On which Harvey Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), chap. 8. 80. Mario Savorgnano, L’Arte militare terrestre et marittima (Venice: Franceschi, 1599), 111. 81. Moisesso, Historia, 2: 18.

notes to pages 126 –130 371

82. Geoffrey Parker, “The Limits to Revolutions in Military Affairs: Maurice of Nassau, the Battle of Nieuwpoort (1600) and the Legacy,” The Journal of Military History 71 (2007): 331–72; in addition, G. Parker, “Introduction,” in Marco van der Hoeven, ed., The Exercise of Arms: Warfare in the Netherlands, 1568–1648 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), x. 83. Moisesso, Historia, 2: 19. 84. Concerning the planning and preparation, Gnirs, Österreichs Kampf, 125. 85. The whole operation and the outcome are described in Moisesso, Historia, book 2, chaps. 11–14; and analyzed in Gnirs, Österreichs Kampf, 126–130. 86. MdP 5145, fol. 77r, Livia to Giovanni: “Sto con ansia grande di sentire continovamente lettere di Vostra Eccellenza, sperando che segua qualche buono progresso de suoi pensieri, che seguendo come spero, ne resterò molto ambitiosa; sapendo sicuramente che tutti li senatori di questa città gli daranno infinita gloria.” 87. MdP 5145, fol. 78r, Livia to Giovanni. 88. Moisesso, Historia, book 2, chap. 14. 89. Ibid., chaps. 12–13. 90. I consulted the relevant entry in the Enciclopedia monografica del Friuli-​ Venezia Giulia, vol. 3, part 1 (Udine: Editore Instituto per l’Enciclopedia del Friuli-​Venezia Giulia, 1971), 209. 91. That is reported by Gnirs, Österreichs Kampf, 128. 92. MdP 5145, fol. 78v, Livia to Giovanni. 93. MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 598v, dated 12 May, Giovanni to Livia. 94. Caimmi, La Guerra del Friuli, 159. 95. The point is also made in Mauro Vigato, “La Guerra Veneto-​a rciducale di Gradisca (1615–1617),” Che fastu. Rivista della Società Filologica Friulana, 70 (1994): 223. 96. Concerning this work also Arnaldo Momigliano, “Polybius Between the English and the Turks,” in his Sesto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, vol. 1 (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1980), p.  136, but see Johann Hahlweg, ed., Die Heeresreform der Oranier: Das Kriegsbuch des Grafen Johann von Nassau-​Siegen (Wiesbaden: Selbstverlag der Historischen Kommission, 1973); as well as Hahlweg’s Habil­ itationsschrift, Der Heeresreform der Oranier und die Antike; Studien zur Geschichte des Kriegswesens der Niederlande, Deutschlands, Frankreichs, Englands, Italiens, Spaniens und der Schweiz vom Jahre 1589 bis zum Dreissigjährigen Kriege (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1941) later republished (Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1987).

notes to pages 131–139 372

97. Romolo Quazza, Preponderanze straniere, 128. 98. G. Cozzi, Venezia barocca, 133. 99. The quote is in Moisesso, Historia, 2: 129. 100. M. Vigato, “La Guerra Veneto-​a rciducale,” 223. 101. Excellent is the summary of this plan and its action in Anton Gnirs, Österreichs Kampf, 149–150. 102. Moisesso, Historia, 2: 137. 103. M. Vigato, “La Guerra Veneto-​a rciducale,” 226, drawing upon Vincenzo Joppi, Lettere storiche sulla guerra del Friuli, 1616–1617 (Udine: Seitz, 1882). 104. M. Vigato, “La Guerra Veneto-​a rciducale,” 227, drawing once again upon Joppi, Lettere storiche. 105. Moisesso, Historia, 2: 160. 106. Ibid., 152. 107. Ibid., 153 for the last two quotes; 149 for the first. 108. R. Caimmi, La guerra del Friuli, 161. 109. MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 607r, dated 23 June 1617, Giovanni to Livia. 110. In this case the best description is in Morelli, Istoria, 46–47. 111. This is the topic of Muir, Mad Blood Stirring; see chaps 2–4. 112. MdP 5145, fol. 170r, dated 5 August 1617, Livia to Giovanni: “In quanto alle cose di costì Vostra Eccellenza mi scrive non ne dico niente, per che è prodentissima la sa più lei vegliando che gli altri dormendo però non ne dico altro; se poi quelli providitori non danno quella sistenza che bisogna, deveno haver poco voglia di fare guerra, deveno esser strachi, et hanno raggione; dicano che verselli sia preso sicuramente non havendo altro che dirli solo mi resta di suplicarla della sua buona gratia; me li ricordo servitrice, et le baccio la mano con hogni riverenza.” 113. Still insightful is the analysis of Golo Mann, Wallenstein: A Life Narrated (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1976), 64–67. 114. Angelika Geiger, Wallensteins Astrologie: eine kritische Überprüfung der Überlieferung nach dem gegenwärtigen Quellenbestand (Graz: Akademische Druck-​u. Verlagsanstalt, 1983), 36–37. 115. MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 605r, 4 September 1617, Giovanni to Livia. 116. M. Vigato, “La Guerra Veneto-​a rciducale,” 229; Caimmi, La Guerra del Friuli, 165; Biagio Rith di Colenberg, Commentari, book 8. 117. MdP 5159, part 2, fols. 607r, 609r, both dated 10 September 1617, Giovanni to Livia. 118. MdP 5145, fol. 183r, dated 13 September 1617, Giovanni to Livia. 119. MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 607v, dated 10 September 1617, Giovanni to Livia. 120. I draw upon the entry “Pietro Barbarigo” by Angelo Ventura in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 6 (1964): 79.

notes to pages 139 –143 373

121. MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 607v, dated 10 September 1617, Giovanni to Livia. 122. M. Vigato, “La Guerra Veneto-​a rciducale,” 230; Caimmi, La Guerra del Friuli, 167; G. Cozzi, Venezia barocca, 134–135. 123. MdP 5145, fol. 202r, dated 30 September 1617, Livia to Giovanni. 124. MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 591v, dated 28 October 1617, Giovanni to Livia. 125. MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 593v, dated 4 November 1617, Giovanni to Livia. 126. MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 591v, 28 October 1617, Giovanni to Livia. 127. MdP 5145, fol. 209r, 26 October 1617, Livia to Giovanni. 128. ASF, Carte Alessandri, 2, fol. 244r, dated 16 November 1617 from Udine. 129. ASF, Miscellanea medicea (henceforth Miscellanea Medicea) 4, ins. 3, fol. 24v, 23 December, Giovanni to Livia. 130. Miscellanea Medicea, 4 ins. 3, fol. 30r, 28 December 1617, Giovanni to Livia. 131. Miscellanea Medicea, 4 ins. 3, fol. 34r, 1 January 1618, Giovanni to Livia. 132. Gaetano Pieraccini gives a detailed account of the progress of the illness in La stirpe dei Medici di Cafaggiolo, 2nd ed. (Florence: Vallecchi, 1947), 2: 241. 133. Venice, Archivio di Stato, Provedditori da Terra e da Mar 242, dated 29 December 1617, noted also in Caimmi, La Guerra del Friuli, 174n. 134. Miscellanea Medicea, 4 ins. 3, fol. 30r, 28 December 1617, Giovanni to Livia. 135. Miscellanea Medicea, 4 ins. 3, fol. 24r, 23 December 1617, Giovanni to Livia. 136. MdP 5150, fol. 223, dated 3 February 1618, Blanis to Giovanni. On this period, note Edward Goldberg, Jews and Magic, chap. 9. 137. Gaetano Pieraccini, La stirpe dei Medici di Cafaggiolo, 2nd ed. (Florence: Vallecchi, 1947), 2: 241. 138. G. Cozzi, Venezia barocca, 164; and Cozzi’s Introduction to Paolo Sarpi, Opere, ed. Gaetano and Luisa Cozzi (Milan: Ricciardi, 1969), cxxv. Marco Foscarini, writing in the eighteenth century, claimed that Vincent Placcius, a German bibliographer of the century before, was the first to attempt an attribution of the work, but he is skeptical. Della letteratura veneziana, ed. Francesco Berlan (Venice: Tipi di T. Gattei, 1854), 309. 139. Pomponio Emigliani, Guerre d’Italia, 46. 1 40. Ibid., 61. 141. Moisesso, Historia, 2: 137, explains this activity. 1 42. This conjecture rests on a somewhat adventurous reading of MdP 5150 fol. 181r, Giovanni to Blanis, 25 March 1617: “Sotto il dì 15 di febbraio scrissi a V.E.I. una mia lettera nella quale gli mandavo una carta

notes to pages 143–147 3 74

disegnata di mia mano nella quale gli narravo circa all’Impresa di Gradisca quello havevo potuto sottrarre da un homo che si trova qui.” 143. ASF, Carte Alessandri, 10, fols. 215r–227v. The engravings are mentioned in MdP 5147, fol. 120v, and 5141, fols. 44r–v and 79r. I also consulted the catalogue of the exhibition curated by Paulette Choné, who kindly indicated it to me, entitled Jacques Callot: 1592–1635: Musée historique lorrain, Nancy, 13 Juin–14 Septembre 1992 (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1992), 536–537. 1 44. ASF, Carte Alessandri, 10, fol. 215r. 145. Ibid., fol. 216r. 1 46. Ibid., fol. 217r 147. Ibid., fol. 222v. 1 48. MdP 5146, fol. 86r, 18 August 1619, Cosimo Baroncelli to Giovanni: “Mi mandò poi Sua Altezza da Madama Serenissima la quale mi disse che Sua Altezza per le cagioni che io potevo considerare, e particolarmente per rispetto della Serenissima, desiderava che Vostra Eccellenza pigliasse in buona parte che questa scrittura non si stampasse qua, e mi soggiunse Sua Altezza che se la fusse stata di tal prudenza da poter dar consiglio a Vostra Eccellenza l’havrebbe persuasa a non la fare stampare ne anco costà ora che essendo fatto la pace e potea farlo; perchè dice che in essa scrittura ci sono molte cose da potere imparare assai, le quali Sua Altezza vorrebbe che servissino solamente per i parenti di Vostra Eccellenza, e per qual che suo vero caro e confidente amico, e gli altri andassino ad arriscare la vita e spargere il sangue e sudore sotto l’arme come sia fatto Vostra Eccellenza se volessino impararle.” 1 49. Delle opere di Gabriello Chiabrera, in questa ultima impressione tutte in un corpo novellamente unite, tomo primo, contenente le Canzoni eroiche, le lugubri, le morali, e le sagre (Venice: Angiolo Geremia, 1757), 305. 150. Here is the original poem at the foot of the engraving, which is reproduced in Il discorso del Sig.re Cosimo Baroncelli fatto a’ suoi figliuoli dove s’intende la vita di don Giovanni Medici, ed. Marina Macchio (Florence: NICOMP, 2009), at 73. The original engraving exists in Venice, Museo Corrrer. Ma tu, duce Toscan, che con lo sguardo Atterì chi s’oppone al tuo furore, Domator degli eserciti gagliardo, Nato al impero et a più degno onore; Non fu a l’impresa mai timido o tardo Quantunque gravi il tuo sovran valore

notes to pages 147–151 3 75

Che con nuovo consiglio, industria et arte Mai sempre vinci, gran figliuol di Marte. 151. MdP 5136, fol. 480r, Moisesso to Atanasio Ridolfi, Giovanni’s secretary, 26 August 1619. 152. Moisesso, Historia, 2: 137. 153. Caimmi, La Guerra del Friuli, 177. 154. Ibid., 179. 155. Caimmi, La Guerra del Friuli, 166; Samuele Romanin, Storia documentata di Venezia, vol. 7 (Venice: Naratovich, 1858), 130; Giorgio Spini, “La congiura degli Spagnoli contro Venezia del 1618,” Archivio storico italiano 107 (1949): 17–53 (here, 31–32). The article and its sequel in Archivio storico italiano 108 (1950): 159–74, utilized also below, are reproduced in Spini, Barocco e Puritani: Studi sulla storia del Seicento in Italia, Spagna e New England (Florence: Vallecchi, 1991), 159–205. In addition, Giuseppe Coniglio, “Il Duca d’Ossuna e Venezia dal 1616 al 1620,” Archivio veneto 5th ser. 54–55 (1955): 42–70. 156. Some information in Paolo Negri, “La politica veneta contro gli Uscocchi in relazione alla congiura del 1618,” Nuovo archivio veneto 17 (1909): 338–384. 157. Apart from the writings by Spini mentioned earlier, there is useful bibliography in Richard Mackenney, “A Plot Discover’d? Myth, Legends, and the ‘Spanish’ Conspiracy against Venice in 1618,” in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-​State, 1297–1797, ed. John Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 185–216, although the author oddly does not seem to be aware of Spini. In addition, William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty, chap. 8. 158. The document of the Council of Ten, dated 17 May 1618, is cited in Pierre Antoine Daru, Storia della Repubblica di Venezia: con note ed osservazioni, tr. from the French and ed. with integrations by A. Bianchi-​Giovini, vol. 7 (Capolago: Mendrisio, 1834), 448.

4. Writing the Passions 1. Livia’s discovery, including the reference to the message about purges, is noted in Miscellanea medicea (henceforth Miscellanea Medicea) 4, ins. 3, fol. 6r, to Don Giovanni, dated 14 October 1617: “. ​. ​. ​io lo trovo [in] una lettera di Giovanni Galetti del 17 d’aprile che tratta che la fasevano medichare e che ella aveva bisogno di prurga duppia e i danari che Vostra Eccellenza li fesse pagare, avevano a servire per farlla medicare.” The

notes to pages 152–154 376







letter, along with the other Livia-​Giovanni correspondence, is reproduced in Brendan Dooley, ed., Amore e guerra nel tardo Rinascimento: le lettere di don Giovanni de’ Medici e Livia Vernazza, (Florence: Polistampa, 2009), in this case, no. 52. This chapter is informed, apart from the other sources mentioned below, by a careful reading of Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical Review 107 no. 3 (2002): 821–845; and regarding love letters as a source, Rebecca Earle, “Letters and Love in Colonial Latin America,” The Americas: A Quarterly Review 62 (2005): 17–46; Idem, ed., Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-​Writers, 1600–1945 (Aldershot: 1999), especially the Introduction by Earle; and the recent studies in Edith Saurer and Christa Hämmerle, eds., Briefkulturen und ihr Geschlecht. Zur Geschichte der privaten Korrespondenz vom 16. Jahrhundert bis heute (Vienna: 2003), especially the editors’ Intro­ duction and the chapter by Rebecca Earle (an earlier version of the article in The Americas). 2. For the theater trope in this period, recently reproposed by William N. West, “Knowledge and Performance in the Early Modern Theatrum Mundi,” metaphorik.de 14 (2008): 1–20, I will make no attempt to introduce a critical bibliography; instead, I refer to William Bouwsma, who however considers it to be a sign of the decline of the Renaissance aesthetic, in The Waning of the Renaissance 1550–1640 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), chap. 9 and notes. 3. Miscellanea Medicea 4, ins. 3, fol. 4r, dated Udine, 10 October 1617: “Vostra Eccellenza ci pigli qualche rimedio perchè in questa maniera non puosso nè voglio stare, perchè se io stessi in questa maniera non fa nè per me nè per altri; però prego Vostra Eccellenza a fare in qualche modo che io non abbi questi fastidi se la mi vol bene e ancora se la mi volle apessa di sè.” 4. MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 589v. 5. The information is from the later trial regarding Livia’s annulment: MdP 5159, fol. 483v, deposition of Antonio Ceccherelli, 11 January 1622: “Io so che detta sig. Livia quando capitò alle mani del detto s.r don giovanni non sapeva scrivere, onde Sua Eccellenza gli fece insegnar scrivere da un maestro, che si chiamava Urbani, che habita in Fiorenza, et io ancora gl’ho insegnato più volte qual poco ch’io potevo, e sapevo, quanto poi alla sua accortezza e prudenza la lascio nel suo grado.” For what follows, Per lettera. La scrittura epistolare femminile tra archivio e tipografia, secoli XV–XVII, ed. Gabriella Zarri (Rome: Viella, 1999), in particular, the Introduction by G. Zarri and chapters by Adriana Chemello, Tiziana

notes to pages 154–156 377











Plebani, Marina D’Amelia, and Maria Pia Fantini. Consider also Maria Grazia Nico Ottaviani, Me son missa a scriver questa letera—: lettere e altre scritture femminili tra Umbria, Toscana e Marche nei secoli XV–XVI (Naples: Liguori Editore, 2006). 6. MdP 5145, fol. 5r: “[H]o poi ricevuto due sue lettere, nelle quale,[h]o sentito con molto mio gusto e contento il suo ben essere; mene ralegro infinitamente. In quanto al desiderio mio di rivedere Vostra Eccellenza non occore che di questo ne tratti; li lasero giudicare a lei se io ne [h]o desiderio o no.” 7. MdP 5145, fol. 12r. “Le lettere di Vostra Eccellenza mi sono state carissime particolarmente quella di sta mattina per havere sentito quello mi scrive in torno al suo bon aquisto; piace a nostro Signore Idio che segua per magior sua gloria e contento, poichè vengo anco io a participare di quella; io poi sto aspettendo ritorno di Vostra Eccellenza con grandissimo desiderio, quanto li si poule inmaginare.” 8. MdP 5145, fol. 13r: “Vostra Eccellenza non si havrebe a maravigliare che io li scriva che sono fantastica, perchè stando in queste parti ­malinconici et aria non troppo bona, non è da maravigliarsi che sia fantastica e continovamente sola e malo indisposta, ma Vostra Eccellenza con queste sue sclamatione mi vo chiudere la bocca, e che non parli mai di cosa nessuna, con dirmi che la farà e che la dirà; io non desidero se non la sua grandezza e la sua gloria, come benissimo Vostra Eccellenza sa.” 9. MdP 5145, fol. 15r: “Mi ralegro poi che Vostra Eccellenza si mantengha con bonissima cera et allegramente, che così bisogna fare, e nella sorte, e che la si pigli de spatii20 che danno cotesti paiesi; Vostra Eccellenza mi scrive una lettera lungha lungha, non so se la scrive in collera ho no; io non ce starò a rispondere a tutti li particolari perchè non ho tanto sapere, per mettere in carta tante cose; aspetterò di risponderli a bocca, se piace addio che io habia tanto tempo di poterli rispondere; dirò ben questo solamente a Vostra Eccellenza: che l’scrivere tanto larghamente e che faccio quello che voglio e che ogni cosa è rimessa in me, l’intendo troppo bene; l’è un volere dire ‘non mi importa niente, fa quel che li pare che non ci bado’; Vostra Eccellenza ha raggione perchè quando si ha cose grande a che pensare, le minime si gettano da un canto, così è il dovere.” 10. MdP 5145, fol. 16r: “Ieri ricevei una di Vostra Eccellenza che mi è stata molto cara, per sentire il suo ben essere e ancora l’havevo sentito la buona volontà che Vostra Eccellenza continova verso di me, contra ogni

notes to pages 156 –159 378











mio merito; Vostra Eccellenza mi scrive che con me non si puole nè tenere nè scorticare, come sarebbe a dire che sono fastidiosa; però, se havessi scritto qualche cose che gli havesse datto disgusto la mi ­perdone, che non incorrerò più in simili errori; quando ho scritto che Vostra Eccellenza stia allegramente non l’[ho] scritto per mal nessuno; ma non [c’]è peggio cosa al mondo che esser tenuta in mal concetto, come sono tenuta io da Vostra Eccellenza; la dice poi che qualcheduno è venuto a mettere male e mi ha detto qualche bugia; li giuro in cosc[i] enza dell’anima mia che non mi è stato detto cosa nessuna.” 11. MdP 5145, fol. 18r: “Dio voglia che Vostra Eccellenza si mantengha in questa buona dispositione, ma temo fortemente di no, perchè la luntananza fa delle gran cose, è cauosa di molti accidenti; piace a Dio che il mio pensiero sia fallace; Vostra Eccellenza non mi ha volsutto fare quel piacere che li chiesi l’altro giorno, questa non era cosa che gli havesse a importare, però la mi ha fatto torto, ma è padrone: puol fare quel che la vole; chè Vostra Eccellenza sa benissimo chi ama tema.” 12. MdP 5145, c. 51r: “Mi dispiace sin ora di non havere hauto lettere da Vostra Eccellenza Illustrissima; nè so che mene dire, se non dar la colpa a molti suoi affari, io che lo sa benissimo che non puosso havere il maggior contento, quanto è il ricevere spesso lettere di Vostra Eccellenza Illustrissima. La prego dunque per quanto so che la mi ama, a non mi privare di questo gusto et per mio amore cercare di arrubare un tantino di tempo per farmi contenta in questo particolare, poichè non posso esser per ora in altro.” 13. Miscellanea Medicea 4, ins. 3, fol. 8r, dated 15 April 1617. 14. I am referring to Canzoniere 360: “Questi m’à fatto men amare Dio / ch’ i’ non doveva.” 15. Miscellanea Medicea 4, ins. 3, fol. 8v. Transcribed in Amore e guerra, no. 27. 16. Ragionamento della Nanna e della Antonia (“Parigi” [Venice] 1534), followed by Dialogo nel quale la Nanna insegna a la Pippa (“Torino” [probably Venice] 1536). David O. Frantz, Festum Voluptatis: A Study of Renaissance Erotica (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1989), 46–51; Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), chap. 5, where the poems are reproduced in the Appendix. 17. Florence, Archivio di Stato, Pupilli 765, fol. 329v, lists, among other titles in Giovanni’s library, Marino, Rime (Venice: Ciotti, 1604), from which we translate p. 21 (sonnet “Sovra il tenero fianco”). 18. Marino, Rime, 22 (sonnet “Qual ti vegg’io”).

notes to pages 159 –161 379

19. Ibid., 21 (sonnet “Sovra il tenero fianco”): “O di Marte e d’Amor vago guerrero.” 20. Ibid., 23 (sonnet “Piaghe non men ch’al cor”). 21. Thus the area covered by the growing bibliography on intimate behavior can only serve as a suggestive background to our story: in general, Katherine Crawford, European Sexualities, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2007), and considering the prominence of birth control as a concern for couples in lopsided relationships, Angus McLaren, A History of Contraception: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); not to mention, for every aspect of intimacy, Rudolph M. Bell, How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), chaps. 2–3. 22. MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 598v. The letter, along with the others between him and her, is in B. Dooley, ed., Amore e guerra, in this case, no. 30. 23. On this theme of emotionality as a human relation I found particular illumination in Daniel M. Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 24. Matteo Bandello utilizes the term “amica” to refer to a lover, in novel no. 30 of Il primo volume delle novelle del Bandello nuovamente ristampato (Milan: Giovan’Antonio degli Antonii, 1560), fol. 261v: “Egli che pur l’amava, perchè era bellissima e molto gratiosa, largamente le pro­ metteva di tenerla sempre per amica.” Giovanni calls Livia his “amica” in his message to Cosimo II de’ Medici dated 6 July 1611, in MdP 5151, fol. 125v. 25. On which, Dale V. Kent, Friendship, Love, and Trust in Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), especially chap. 1. 26. I have in mind Andreas Capellanus, Trattato d’amore: Testo latino del sec. XII con due traduzioni toscane inedite del sec. XIV, ed. Salvatore Battaglia (Rome: F. Perrella, 1947). I referred also to the special issue of L’immagine riflessa n.s. 15 (2006) edited by Margherita Lecco, entitled “Studi sul De amore di Andrea Cappellano e sulla sua posterità volgare,” where the articles by Marco Bernardi, Ferruccio Bertini, Paola Busdraghi, and Margherita Lecco were particularly relevant. 27. The classic study on this tradition is Georg Weise, L’ideale eroico del Rinascimento e le sue premesse umanistiche, 2 vols. (Rome: Edizioni Sci­ entifiche Italiane, 1965); although new light has more recently been shed on it by Michael Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). I am not necessarily espousing the

notes to pages 161–162 380

concept of “refeudalization” that came under criticism already in the 1970s: Domenico Sella, Crisis and Continuity: The Economy of Spanish Lombardy in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer­­ sity Press, 1979), 148–149. Concerning noble retrenchment, I follow Claudio Donati, L’idea di nobiltà in Italia, secoli XIV–XVIII, revised ed. (Rome: Laterza, 1995); Jonathan Dewald, The European Nobility, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 1996), 21–22; Hamish M. Scott and Christopher Storrs, “The consolidation of Noble Power in Europe, 1600–1800,” in Hamish M. Scott, The European Nobilities in the 17th and 18th Centuries, vol. 1: Western and Southern Europe (2nd ed.) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd ed. 2006), 1–60. 28. Sperone Speroni, Dialoghi (Venice: Giglio, 1558), 7v. 29. On the significance of Cervantes in this context, I rely on José Montero Reguera, “Cervantes and Renaissance: A Chapter in the History of Hispanic Studies,” B. Dooley, ed., Renaissance Now! (Peter Lang, forthcoming). The quotation is from the John Ormsby translation, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1885), book 1, chap. 1. 30. For the humanist take on the rhetorical tradition, I referred to Gian Carlo Alessio, “L’ars dictaminis nel Quattrocento italiano: eclissi o persistenza?” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 19, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 155–173. 31. Gino Benzoni, “Ranke’s Favorite Source: The Relazioni of the Venetian Ambassadors,” The Courier 22.1 (1987): 11–26. 32. Index des livres interdits, ed. J. M. de Bujanda et al., vol. 9: Jesús Martínez de Bujanda, René Davignon, and Ela Stanek, Index de Rome 1590, 1593, 1596: avec étude des index de Parme 1580 et Munich 1582, Québec, Université de Sherbrooke, Centre d’études de la Renaissance (Paris: Librairie Droz, 1994), pp. 415, 425. The two books were: Antonfrancesco Doni, Tre libri di Pistolotti amorosi per ogni sorte generatione di Brigate (Venice: Ferrari, 1558); and Francesco Sansovino, Delle lettere amorose di diuersi. . . . ​(Venice: appresso gli heredi di Alessandro Griffio, 1587). Concerning this tradition, especially enlightening is the introduction to Amedeo Quondam, ed., Le “Carte messaggiere.” Retorica e modelli di comunicazione epistolare: per un indice dei libri di lettere del Cinquecento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1981), pp. 13–156. Also helpful were Gigliola Fragnito, “Per lo studio dell’epistolografia volgare del Cinquecento: le lettere di Ludovico Beccadelli,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 43, no. 1 (1981): 61–87; and for the comparative perspective, Roger Chartier, “Secretaires for the People? Model Letters of the Ancien Régime Between Court Literature and Popular Chapbook,”

notes to pages 162–164 381

in Chartier et al, Correspondence: Models of Letter-​Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, tr. Christopher Woodall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 33. Francesco Sansovino, Delle lettere amorose, p. 36v: “Ancorchè io tenga per fermo carissima e amantissima Signora, che voi da molti chiarissimi segni siate hoggimai fatta accorta delle amorose fiamme, nelle quali da buon tempo in quà di continuo mi consumo per voi.” 34. I am not suggesting that marriage pleasure was disparaged in the early seventeenth century any more than it was in the Quattrocento: Anthony D’Elia, “Marriage, Sexual Pleasure, and Learned Brides in the Wedding Orations of Fifteenth-​Century Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 55, no. 2 (2002): 379–433; and especially Robert Muchembled, Orgasm and the West: A History of Pleasure From the 16th Century to the Present (Oxford: Polity, 2008), chaps. 1–3. The traditional view against the premodern family as a site of love is expressed in Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1965) and modified in Lawrence Stone, The Past and the Present Revisited, 1987, 311–342, now refuted in Giulia Calvi, Il contratto morale: madri e figli nella Toscana moderna (Bari: Editore Laterza, 1994); and Steven Ozment, Ancestors; the Loving Family in Old Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). I also take account of Stanley Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice. Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2000), chap. 7. 35. MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 607v. 36. From Amores, I, 9, tr. with Introduction by Tom Bishop (New York: Routledge, 2003), 21–22. Here and below, Barbara Weiden Boyd, Ovid’s Literary Loves: Influence and Innovation in the Amores (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 37. Here and below, Ovid, The Art of Love and Other Poems, Loeb Classical Library no. 232, ed. J.  H. Mozley, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), book 3, lines 469–477. Concerning the reception of Ovid, I learned much from Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, “Gracious Laughter: Marsilio Ficino’s Anthropology,” Renaissance Quarterly 52, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 712–741. 38. MdP 5159, fol. 596r: “. ​. ​. ​temo e tremo, confido, e spera, e così fluttuando per Dio vero, non so quasi quello che mi faccia.” 39. Giovani’s copy is listed in Florence, Archivio di Stato, Pupilli 765, fol. 329v; the standard edition is, Pietro Bembo, Gli Asolani e Le rime, ed. and notes by Carlo Dionisotti (Turin: Unione Tipografico-​Editrice Torinese, 1932).

notes to pages 164–166 382

40. Bembo, Gli Asolani, 1?, 12. 41. Leone Ebreo, Dialoghi d’Amore. Hebraeische Gedichte, Herausgegeben mit einer Darstellung des Lebens und des Werkes Leones, Bibliographie, Register zu den Dialoghi, Uebertragung der Hebraeischen Texte, Regesten, Urkunden und Anmerkungen, ed. Carl Gebhardt, Bibliotheca Spinozana, vol. 3 (Heidel­ berg: Societas Spinozana, 1929), Dialogo Primo. On Leone Ebreo and his text, I viewed the special issue of the journal Bruniana e Campanelliana 14 no. 2 (2008), especially articles by Delfina Giovannozzi, Aaron W. Hughes, James W. Nelson, and Rossella Pescatori. 42. I draw upon Niklaus Luhmann, Love as Passion. The Codification of Intimacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), chaps. 2–4, 12–13. On the theme of communication, also Roland Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977), tr. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978). 43. MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 607r. 44. For what follows, Thomas R. Insel, “Implications for the Neurobiology of Love,” Stephen G. Post et al., Altruism and Altruistic Love: Science, Philosophy and Religion in Dialogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 254–263. 45. The contemporary edition was edited by Andre Duchesne, Petri Abaelardi . . . ​et Heloisae conjugis ejus . . . ​Opera, nunc primum edita ex mms codd. v. illus. Francisci Amboesis, . . . ​cum ejusdem praefatione apologetica (Paris: N. Buon, 1616). A good account of the recent bibliography is in Constant J. Mews, The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), chap. 2. 46. Andrew Cunningham, “Fabricius and the ‘Aristotle Project’ in Ana­ tomical Teaching and Research at Padua,” in Andrew Wear, Roger French, and I. M. Lonie, eds., The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century, (Cambridge, 1985), 195–222; but also G. Zanchin and R. De Caro, “The nervous system in colours: the tabulae pictae of G.F. d’Acqua­ pendente (ca. 1533–1619),” The Journal of Headache and Pain 7, no. 5 (2006): 360–366. 47. James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Leyden: Brill, 1990). 48. For the classical tradition, I consulted A. W. Price, Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 49. The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), vol. 1, 457. 50. On the real-​life Varchi, I consulted Richard S. Samuels, “Benedetto

not es to pages 166 –174 383

Varchi, the Accademia degli Infiammati and the Origins of the Italian Academic Movement,” Renaissance Quarterly 29 (1976): 616. 51. I found an analysis of these passages in Lisa Curtis-​Wendlandt, “Conversing on Love: Text and Subtext in Tullia d’Aragona’s Dialogo della infinità d’amore,” Hypatia 19 (2004): 77–98. 52. MdP 5145, fol. 183r, dated 13 September 1617: “Qui si dice che ànno preso un cancelliere di Gradisca et Vostra Eccellenza mi scrive che sia un gentil­huomo, et ancora che havesse la moglia secho e una figliuola, ma che Vostra Eccellenza habbia mandato dette donne a Mariano; hora questo non si confronta con la lettera di Vostra Eccellenza. Dubito che non ci sia qualche matassa sotto.” 53. Miscellanea Medicea 4, ins. 3, fol. 10r. 54. MdP 5145, fol. 203r, 2 October 1617. 55. Miscellanea Medicea 4, ins. 3, fol. 4r, 10 October 1617. 56. Miscellanea Medicea 4, ins. 3, fol. 6r, 14 October 1617. Perhaps the Galletti in question is the same one mentioned in grand ducal correspondence with Rome between 1591 and 1602. M. Del Piazzo, G. Antonelli, and A. D’Addario, eds., Archivio mediceo del Principato: inventario sommario, Pubblicazioni degli Archivi di stato, 1 (Rome: Ministero dell’Interno, 1966), 115. 57. Miscellanea Medicea 4, ins. 3, fol. 6r, 15 October 1617: “Perchè se non havesse fatto il primo errore e ancora il secondo e di più il terzo, di mancarmi di parola, non che una volta tre, in questo negotio tanto, non veniva a questa necessità.” 58. Lodovico Dolce, Amorosi ragionamenti: Dialogo nel quale si racconta un compassionevole amore di due amanti (Venice: Giolito, 1546), based on the third-​ century work of Achilles Tatius. Substantially based on the same material is Annibale Caro, Gli straccioni (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1582). 59. Miscellanea Medicea 4, ins. 3, fol. 6r, 15 October 1617. 60. Everything here is extrapolated from Livia’s letter of 14 October 1617, in Miscellanea Medicea 4, ins. 3, fol. 6r, excerpted and translated above, as well as Giovanni’s letter on 19 October, excerpted and translated below. On the topic, I found useful the following: John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); and Idem, Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 61. Miscellanea Medicea 4, ins. 3, fol. 16r, 18 October 1617. 62. Ibid., fol. 18r, 19 October 1617.

notes to pages 175–178 384

63. Ibid., fol. 13v. 64. Ibid., fol. 14r. 65. M. Rat, ed., Journal de voyage en Italie par la Suisse et l’Allemagne en 1580 et 1581, (Paris: Garnier, 1955), 95. 66. Discorsi morali, politici, et militari; del molto illustre sig. Michiel di Montagna, tr. Girolamo Naselli (Ferrara: Appresso Benedetto Mammarello, 1590) 67. The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans. Jacob Zeitlin (New York: Knopf, 1934–1936), 2: 7, citing the 1580 version of book 2, chap. 2. In general, for a more negative view of Renaissance individualism, compare John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), William J. Connell, ed., Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), with the more positive view in Karl Weintraub, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), drawing on the tradition of Jacob Burckhardt. 68. The Essays, vol. 1, book 1, chap. 28, p. 163. Concerning some of the aspects here, I drew on Sandra Mancini, Oh un amico. In dialogo con Montaigne e i suoi interpreti (Milan: Angeli, 1996). On Montaigne’s texts and their fortunes in Italy, I consulted Montaigne e l’Italia: atti del congresso internazionale di studi di Milano-​Lecco, 26–30 Ottobre 1988 (Geneva: Slatkine; Moncalieri, Torino: Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerche sul “Viaggio in Italia,” 1991), especially the papers by Enea Balmas, Anna Maria Raugei, Michel Simonin, and Gaudenzio Boccazzi. 69. Miscellanea Medicea 4, ins. 3, fol. 16r. 70. Speroni, Dialoghi, 21r–v: “L’amante (come a me pare) è propriamente un ritratto di quella cosa che egli ama, la quale i modi e gli atti considerando, che fa l’amante per amor suo, può meglio sapere ciò che ella sia, e quanto ella valga, che per veruno accidente, che fosse suo proprio, non saprebbe.” 71. Florence, Archivio di Stato, Pupilli, 765, fol. 330, mentioning Aristotle’s Ethics with comment by Galeazzo Florimondo, published in Venice by Niccolini, 1567. The distinction between contemplation and love was an important one, I learned from Kristine Louise Haugen, “Aristotle My Beloved: Poetry, Diagnosis and the Dreams of Julius Caesar Scaliger,” Renaissance Quarterly 60 (2007): 843. Concerning love and introspection, I consulted Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), especially chap. 10; and the chapter “Friendship and the Good in Aristotle,” in John M. Cooper’s Reason and Emotion. Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 336–355.

notes to pages 178–184 385

72. MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 596r. 73. The phrase from Seneca, Moral Epistles, CXX, 21–22, occurs in Montaigne’s Essays, book 2, chap. 1. 74. MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 596v: “Hora sì per Dio sarebbe il tempo di ritornar poeta, ma l’occupatione me lo vietono et anco la confusione che io ho nella testa per mille pensieri che mi mettono nel capo questa lontananza.” 75. I found the autobiographical episode commented in Franco Ferrucci, Dante: lo stupore e l’ordine (Naples: Liguori, 2007), 20 76. These authors are analyzed by Margaret L. King, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 92–98. 77. MdP 5159, part 1, fol. 193v. 78. Miscellanea Medicea 4, ins. 3, fol. 36r. 79. Here and below, MdP 6355 fol. 617r, dated 4 December 1620, reproduced in Pieraccini La stirpe de’ Medici, vol. 2, 231. 80. MdP 6355 fol. 617r, dated 4 December 1620: “Le lacrime che ho vedute mi han tanto compunto, che dopo haver fatto l’istesso, mi sono messo a scrivere con animo franco e sincero, resolutissimo di quanto scrivo.” 81. Concerning the palazzo, Sommi Picenardi, “Don Giovanni de’ Medici,” in Nuovo Archivio Veneto n.s. 7 vol 25 (1907), 138.

5. A Place for Things 1. MdP 5137, fol. 39r, 19 December 1615, Giovanni to Francesco Renzi: “Quanto a fare intagliare ne cammini e nel fregio della finestra dove comanda il nome et il casato della Sig.ma mia patrona [Livia Vernazza] conforme a quelle di villa detti la lettera a M.re Raff.llo Ansaldi il quale trovo assai pronto. [ . . . ​] Ho poi menato a Montui m.ro Francesco Fossi et uno altro capo maestro a vedere la fonte.” 2. Concerning the issue of ownership, MdP 5158, fol. 460r, 18 July 20: “Sento poi quanto devo fare per conto della liberazione della casa che Ill.ma Sig.ra Livia haveva tolta ha vita dagli Ardinghelli et che io sia con il Sig. re Gabriello [Ughi] et M.re Francesco Salici che tutto farò.” The hypothesis concerning the current location of the house is in G. Sommi Picenardi, “Don Giovanni de’ Medici, governatore dell’esercito veneto in Friuli,” Nuovo archivio veneto, n.s. 7, 25 (1907): 132. 3. MdP 5159, fol. 489r, testimony dated 11 January 1622: “Perchè in quel tempo io servivo detta signora Livia, e vedevo venire nella casa, dove ella habitava, detto signor don Giovanni a mangiare, e a dormire, et alcune volte io ero quello che lo spogliavo quando andava a dormir con lei.”

notes to pages 184–185 386

4. Their pattern of acquisition belongs to the framework proposed by Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York: Talese, 1996), chap. 6, as well as Richard Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1993), pp.  243–56, keeping in mind the critical observations of Lauro Martines, “The Renaissance Birth of Consumer Society,” Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 193–208, as well as the theoretical perspective of Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Vanguard Press, 1926), chap. 4: “Conspicuous Consumption.” 5. Girolamo Muzio’s comments on wealth and virtue occur in Il gentilhuomo (Venice: Valvassori, 1575), book 1. On this aspect, note Matthew Vester, “Social Hierarchies: The Upper Classes,” Guido Ruggiero, ed., A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance (Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2002), p. 237. Indispensable also is Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), chap. 1. Considering the effect of princely power and courtiership on patterns of accumulation, Norbert Elias, The Court Society, tr. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), chaps. 5 and 6. For a comparative perspective, Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991), chap. 6. 6. The reflections on material culture here draw upon Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods. Towards an Anthropology of Con­ sumption (New York: Routledge, 1979), chaps. 1 and 3; Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chap.  1 (Appadurai); as well as W. David Kingery, ed., Learning from Things. Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies (Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1996), chaps. 1 and 9; Daniel Miller, ed., Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), chaps. 1 (Miller) and 6 (Neil Jarman). In particular relation to the period, I took into account the Introduction to Michelle O’Malley and Evelyn Welch, eds., The Material Renaissance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); and Paula Findlen, “The Material World of the Italian Renaissance,” American Historical Review 103 (1998): 83–114. 7. The calculation is from G. Sommi Picenardi, “Don Giovanni de’ Medici, governatore dell’esercito veneto in Friuli,” Nuovo archivio veneto, n.s. 7, 26 (1907): 11. I compared this with the calculation by Giuseppe Parigino in Il tesoro del principe. Funzione pubblica e privata del patrimonio della famiglia Medici nel Cinquecento (Florence: Olschki, 1999), 112.

notes to pages 185–186 387

8. MdP, filza 5158, fols. 807r–812v, contains a summary of all the donations of property made by Cosimo I de’ Medici to his children Ferdinand, Francesco, Pietro, Isabella, and Giovanni. This I compared with Giuseppe Parigino, Il tesoro del principe, 107, 181. 9. I derive this future use from an article in Gazzette toscane uscite settimana per settimana vol. 15, no. 24 (Florence: Pagani, 1780), 94. 10. For the original accumulation of the Medici fortune, Dale Kent, “The Dynamic of Power in Cosimo de’ Medici’s Florence,” F.  W. Kent and Patricia Simons, eds., Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 63–79; and concerning the collections more in particular, Idem, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); the classic work on the Medici bank is Raymond De Roover, Il Banco Medici dalle origini al declino (1397–1494) (Florence: Le Monnier, 1970). In regard to the fortunes lost and gained by the Siena war, Arnaldo D’Addario, Il problema senese nella storia italiana della prima metà del Cinquecento (La guerra di Siena) (Florence: Le Monnier, 1958), especially pp.  282–84, 324–25. Concerning Cosimo I’s finances, besides bibliography already cited, Anna Teicher, “Politics and Finance in the Age of Cosimo I: Public and Private Face of Credit,” in Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell’Europa del Cinquecento (Florence: Olschki, 1983), 343–362. 11. A classic in the literature: R. Trifone, Il fedecommesso. Storia dell’istituzione in Italia (Naples: Atheneum, 1914). Since we are not able in this note to account adequately for the literature concerning the Florentine families and their economies in the period, we only include a few obligatory references such as Franco Angiolini and Paolo Malanima, “Problemi di mobilità sociale tra la metà del Cinquecento ed i primo decenni del Seicento,” Società e storia 4 (1979): 17–48; Enrico Stumpo, “I ceti dirigenti in Italia nell’età moderna. Due modelli diversi: nobiltà piemontese e patriziato toscano,” in Amelio Tagliaferri, ed., I ceti dirigenti in Italia in età moderna e contemporanea. Atti del convegno, Cividale del Friuli, 10–12 Settembre, 1983 (Udine: Del Bianco Editore, 1984), 151–198; Sandra Gasparo, “Gerarchie economche e gerarchie sociali,” Studi storici 21 (1980): 865–75; as well as R. Burr Litchfield, The Emergence of a Bureaucracy: The Florentine Patricians, 1530–1790 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), part 3; in addition, P. Malanima, “L’economia dei nobili a Firenze nei secoli XVII e XVIII,” Società e storia no. 54 (1991): 829–849; focused on a later period but with useful remarks are Valeria Pinchera, “Richezza, redditi e consumi della nobiltà nel XVII e XVIII secolo: il caso del Granducato di Toscana,” Quaderni del Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche

notes to pages 186 –187 388









della Facoltà di Economia dell’Università degli Studi di Pisa, no. 57 (2000): 1–29; Idem, Lusso e decoro. Vita quotidiana e spese dei Salviati di Firenze nel Sei e Settecento (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 1999). Other studies on single families include: Ingeborg Walter, Die Strozzi: Eine Familie im Florenz der Renaissance (Munich: Beck, 2011), 203; as well as Paolo Malanima, I Riccardi di Firenze. Una famiglia e un patrimonio nella Toscana dei Medici (Florence: Olschki, 1977). Concerning the economy in general, Richard Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2009), especially 567–582; and, focusing on a later pe­­ riod, while insisting on the concept of decline, P. Malanima, “A Declin­ ­ing Economy: Central and Northern Italy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Spain in Italy. Politics, Society, and Religion 1500– 1700, ed. T.  J. Dandelet and J. A. Marino (Leiden-​Boston: Brill, 2006), 383–404. 12. In the edition edited by Luigi Firpo, Della ragion di Stato di Giovanni Botero: con tre libri delle cause della grandezza delle città, due aggiunte e un discorso sulla popolazione di Roma (Turin: Unione Tipografico—Editrice Torinese, 1948), lib. 2, cap. 12. 13. On the theme of private spending in the building of Florence, I consulted Richard Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp.  23ff and 79ff. In addition, R. Burr Litchfield, Florence Ducal Capital, 1530–1630 (New York: ACLS e-​book, 2008), chap. 2. 14. Alessandro Sardo, Della nobiltà, in his Discorsi (Venice: Gioliti, 1586), p.  44; Muzio, Il gentilhuomo, book 1. In regard to preaching, a typical example is: Sermoni predicabili per tutta la Quaresima scritti dal R.  P.  M. Serafino Razzi dell’ordine de’ Frati Predicatori e professo di San Marco di Firenze (Florence: Bartolomeo Sermartelli, 1590), where Matthew 19:24 is glossed on p. 99. The debate about luxury became particularly intense in the eighteenth century: Vittorio Alfieri, “Del lusso,” in his Opere, vol. 10 (Padua: Nicolò Zanon Bettoni, 1810), chap.  13; Gaetano Filangieri, “Del lusso,” in his La scienza della legislazione, vol. 1 (Florence: Le Monnier, 1864), chap. 37; Cesare Beccaria, “Del lusso,” in his Elementi di economia pubblica, in Scrittori classici Italiani di economia pubblica, Parte moderna, vol. 12 (Milan: Stefanis, 1804), chap. 5. 15. Concerning sumptuary law, I draw on Daniela De Bellis, “Attacking Sumptuary Laws in Seicento Venice: Arcangela Tarabotti,” Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. Letizia Panizza (Oxford: European Humanities Research Center, 2000), chap. 14; not to mention Catherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy 1200–1500, Oxford

notes to pages 187–189 389

16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

Historical Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chap. 7, as well as M. Giuseppina Muzzarelli and Antonella Campanini, Disciplinare il lusso. La legislazione suntuaria in Italia e in Europa tra medioevo ed età moderna (Rome: Carrocci, 2003), which does not deal directly with Florence, but the chapter by Giulia Calvi and the Introduction by Muzzarelli include pertinent general remarks. Tasso’s Dialogues: A Selection, with the “Discourse on the Art of the Dialogue,” tr. with Introduction and notes by Carnes Lord and Dain A. Trafton, Issue 4 of Biblioteca Italiana (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 214–216. Ludovico Antonio Muratori later gives a similarly broad definition of taste in Delle Riflessioni sopra il buon gusto nelle scienze e nell’arti, 2 vols. (Venice: Pezzana, 1736–44), vol. 1, part 1, chaps. 2 and 3, where he attempts to turn the existing concept of “buon gusto” into a major cultural value. In general, Hellmut Wohl, The Aesthetics of Italian Renaissance Art: A Reconsideration of Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially chap.  4. Consider also Władysław Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, 4 vols., ed. C. Barrett (The Hague: Mouton, 1970–1974), vol. 3: Modern Aesthetics, 137, 149. Here from the sources on Giovanni’s early education, already mentioned in Chapter 1, I refer only to Maria Pia Paoli, “L’educazione alla corte dei Medici,” Annali di storia di Firenze, 3 (2008): 81. Raffaello Borghini, Il Riposo, tr. and ed. Lloyd H. Ellis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 52. For the layout of those rooms, I referred to M. Chiarini et al., Palazzo Pitti. L’arte e la storia (Florence: Nardini, 2000), 35. The area and the ownership are described in Marcello Vannucci, Splendidi palazzi di Firenze (Florence: Casa Editrice Le Lettere, 1995), 105. I use the term guardedly, keeping in mind Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 18, as well as Bernard Berenson, “The Rudiments of Connoisseurship,” in his The Study and Criticism of Italian Art. Second Series (London: George Bell and Sons, 1902), pp. 111–49; Carlo Ginzburg and Anna Davin, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” History Workshop, no. 9 (1980): 5–36; as well as Denis Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art and Theory (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1971), 315. Concerning these aspects of Castiglione’s book, I consulted Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 35.

notes to page 190 390

24. Baldassarre Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, tr. Charles S. Singleton (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), book 1, 82. 25. For understanding domestic space, I referred to the more recent contributions to the expanding literature on this topic, including Raffaella Sarti, Europe at Home: Family and Material Culture, 1500–1800, tr. Allan Cameron (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 1–8, 75–85, containing much that applies not only to the subaltern but also to the elite; whereas the exhibition catalogue At Home in Renaissance Italy, ed. Marta Ajmar-​Wollheim and Flora Dennis (London: V & A, 2006) contains valuable insights on noble lifestyles, especially the chapters by Brenda Preyer (on Florentine homes), Anna Bellavitis, and Isabelle Chabot (people and property). For a comparative perspective in regard to Venice and a slightly earlier period, I referred to Patricia Fortini Brown’s article in the same catalogue, as well as her Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture, and the Family (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), chap. 3. In addition, concerning concepts of public and private, Vita pubblica e vita privata nel Rinascimento, Atti del XX convegno internazionale (Chianciano Terme, Pienza 21–24 Luglio 2008), ed. Luisa Secchi Tarugi (Florence: Cesati, 2010), editor’s Introduction and chapters by Eric Haywood and Isabella Nuovo. 26. Current work on Don Antonio’s activities includes Filippo Luti, “Don Antonio de’ Medici, ‘professore de’ secreti,’   ” Medicea. Rivista interdisciplinare di studi medicei 1 (2008): 34–47; as well as, Idem, Don Antonio de’ Medici e i suoi tempi, Fondazione Carlo Marchi Quaderni 27 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2006); and Idem, the detailed entry in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani 73 (2009). Useful also for the discussion about occult interests is Paolo Galluzzi, “Motivi paracelsiani nella Toscana di Cosimo II e di don Antonio de’ Medici: alchimia, medicina ‘chimica’ e riforma del sapere,” in Scienze, credenze occulte, livelli di cultura. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi . . . ​1980 (Florence: Olschki, 1982), 31–62. Con­cern­ ­ing the construction of the compound, R. Burr Litchfield, Flor­ence Ducal Capital, 1530–1630 (New York: ACLS e-​book, 2008), 67; and Amelio Fara, Bernardo Buontalenti e Firenze (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1998), 27. 27. Certainly Erving Goffman’s thesis in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), 1–25, is suggestive here, especially in the context of Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-​Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 1–76, keeping in mind Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s axiom that “material objects . . . ​constitute the framework of experience that gives order to

notes to pages 190 –191 391

our otherwise shapeless selves.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalya, in Mihaly Csikszentmihalya and Eugene Rochberg-​Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 16. 28. MdP 5151, fol. 286r, Marco Giani to Belisario Vinta, 17 December 1588: “Ha fatto l’Ecc.mo mio Sig.re l’alligato disegno di Berghes [Bergen-​op-​ Zoom] con tanta bella espressione di quello accampamento che chiunque l’ha visto è restato veramente stupito, et ha di più fatto con sua propria mano quell’ornamentino che include la descrittione.” 29. MdP, 5157, fol. 120r, dated 27 May 1604, Giovanni to Ferdinando: “Arrivato così con S. A. alla piattaforma dalla sommità di essa si vedde la ritirata fatta dall’inimico, la quale certo è cosa degna di esser vista essendo fatta con tanta pulitezza, et tanto ben finita che par dipinta.” 30. Barbara Hochstetler Meyer, “Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari: Proposals for Some Sources and a Reflection,” The Art Bulletin 66 (1984): 367–382. 31. The probate inventory in Florence, Archivio di Stato, Pupilli (hereafter, Pupilli) 767, includes the following information at fol. 560r: “Adì 9 di novembre per n.o 8 adornamenti di cornice a torno a 8 paesi di braccia 4 1/3 e fatto sotto il telaio e tirato la tela di mio ordine del signiore di mio lire 72.” Much of the discussion in these pages is based on the probate records contained in the archive of the Magistrato ai Pupilli; for the sake of comparison, based on similar kinds of records in Venice, I referred to Isabella Cecchini, “Material Culture in Sixteenth-​Century Venice: A Sample from Probate Inventories, 1510–1615,” Working Papers. Department of Economics, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice 14 (2008): 1–18. In general, concerning the use of these records, A. Schuurman, “Probate Inventories: Research Issues, Problems and Results,” in Probate Inventories: A New Source for the Historical Study of Wealth, Material Culture and Agricultural Development, A. Van der Woude and A. Schuurman eds. (Utrecht: Hes & De Graff, 1980), 19–31. 32. ASF, MdP, filza 5153, ins. 2, fol. 25r, from Ferdinando to Giovanni, undated but datable to the end of 1602: “Mentre che V. E. svernerà in Anversa, harò caro, che ella mi faccia fare in quadro grande, simile alle tele che si fanno ordinariamente costà, da qualche buon pittore, l’assedio d’Ostenden, et quello di Grave con quattro o sei altri quadri di paesi, o, altro, per mettere alla mia Villa Ferdinanda, che farò ordinare costì alli Ximenes, che paghino tutta la spesa.” Later the number was raised to 17. Regarding the genre, see the Introduction to D. Kunzle, ed., From Criminal to Courtier: The Soldier in Netherlandish Art 1550–1672 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 6.

notes to pages 191–193 392

33. ASF, MdP, filza 5153, ins. 2, fol. 39r, 2 February 1603, Ferdinando to Giovanni. Concerning the whole matter, and the discussion in the next paragraph: B. Dooley, “Le battaglie perse del principe Don Giovanni,” Quaderni Storici 115 (2004): 83–118. 34. Tacca’s extant Medici portraiture is thoroughly analyzed in Jessica Mack-​Andrick, Pietro Tacca, Hofbildhauer der Medici (1577–1640): Politische Funktion und Ikonographie des frühabsolutistischen Herrscherdenkmals unter den Grossherzögen Ferdinando I, Cosimo II und Ferdinando II (Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2005). 35. The portraits, which have not yet been identified, are mentioned in Pupilli 765, fol. 956r: “Adì 19 aprile 1622: Noi Felice Palma e Baccio Lupicini scultori chiamati per istimare dui ritratti di metallo di un Gran Duca Cosimo Primo e Ferdinando Primo fabricati dal sig. Pietro Tacha ad istanza della felice memoria del sig. don Giovanni Medici; abbiamo viste e considerate le fatiche e spese intorno a detti ritratti; stimiamo e unitamente concordiamo valere nel grado che sono oggi schudi du­gento di tutti dua e io Felice Palma eletto la parte del sig. don Giovanni afermo quanto di sopra. Io Baccio Lupicini chiamato da il sig. Pietro Tacha afirmo quanto di sopra.” 36. Pupilli 767, fol. 273r: “Prima deve dare questo dì sopra detto lire dodici quali sono per aver messo doro fine a mordente . . . ​a uno hornamento grande per uno ritratto del Granduca Ferdinando sino al ginocchio e dato di nero a olio a detto hornamento . . . ​lire 12”; and again, fol. 559r: “Adì 3 di agosto per un adornamento di cornice rilevate per un ritratto del granducca Ferd. di braccia 2 5/6 braccia 2 1/8 lire 12.” 37. Regarding the positioning of the rooms in Parione, I drew upon a description in MdP 5150, fol. 97r, where Benedetto Blanis writes to Giovanni, 3 September 1616: “Siamo in dubbio in qual camera si devino accomodare [i libri], se pure seguisse l’affittatione del palazzo al nuntio; il Ferroni mi fece vedere un cammerino dietro alla fonderia dove non è pericolo di polvere, nè d’acqua, solo è poco arioso, però stavo in dubio di quello o un’altra che ve n’è di sopra dove vi è uno scrittoio, et è presso alla porta di verso Arno.” Useful regarding the typology of such rooms, I found Dora Thornton, The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), chaps. 1 and 2. 38. Pupilli 765, fol. 242r and following, bill from Giovanbattista Gagnetti dated 23 August 1619: “15 ott. 1611: 4 orinali grandi da stillare, 2 cappelli per detti, 4 palle grosse di vetro, 3 ricipienti, 2 cappelli per detti, 1 boccia grande, 1 simile, 1 casinella di vetro grande, 8 bacinelle, 19 boccia grande

notes to pages 193–195 393

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45. 46.

di fiaschi dieci, 2 fanali grandi; 12 luglio 1613: 24 tazze a tondo piano di più sorte, 36 di più sorte, 24 orinali di più sorte, 4 perlicani, 12 boccie, 12 minore, 6 minore, 4 boccie d’aqua vite con il collo sugero, 4 seperatori grandi, 12 imbuti di più sorte, 26 cappelli di più sorte, 10 ricipienti, 6 bocce grandi; 23 agosto: 1 campana da zolfo.” Pupilli 765, fol. 120r. Undated. (Note identifies the sender as “Giovan Maria Casini pittore.”) “L’ecc.mo sig. d. Giovanni Medici de’ dare: Prima per sei ritratti di huomini illustri per estilatione fatti fino l’anno 1610 a suo ordine et con segniati alla sua persona a ducati tre luno = 18.” Concerning Casini: Anna Maria Testaverde, “   ‘Valente Pittore ed eccellente Poeta’: Giovan Maria Casini tra drammaturgia e ‘primato della Pittura,’   ” Culture teatrali no. 15 (2006): 15–33. Pupilli 765, fol. 120r: “E più per un altro ritratto nomato il Paracellso di braccia dua in circa in ovato fatto con l’istesso ordine, e consegniato similmente ducati cinque.” On Paracelsus iconography, I follow Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, 2nd ed. (Basel: Karger Publishers, 1982), 103. Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illvstres, grecz, latins, et payens, recueilliz de leurs tableaux, liures, medalles antiques et modernes (Paris: G. Chaudiere, 1584), fol. 73r. The work of Croll that I consulted was Basilica Chymica (Frankfurt: Apud Claudium Marnium, 1609). I referred to Louis Godart, ed., Giuseppe negli arazzi di Pontormo e Bronzino: viaggio tra i tesori del Quirinale (Rome: Segretariato Generale della Presidenza della Repubblica, 2010). Pupilli 768, fol. 676, “Adì 13 di feb.o 1611 in Ven.a. Si dichiara per il presente scritto qualmente l’Ill.mo et Ecc.mo S. D. Gio. Medici si chiama vero et legittimo debitore del S. Guglielmo della Baldosa di ducati 400 di lire 6, 4 per ducato, et questi sono per l’amontare di un fornimento di razzi a boscaglie alti braccia 5 di giro braccia 37 et a braccio quadro braccia 185 et più un tappeto figurato alla persiana per i tavolini tagliato dalle bande che in tutto fa la somma di ducati 400.” The information was not detailed enough for identifying among the types of Persian and Turkish carpets listed in Donald King and David Sylvester, The Eastern Carpet in the Western World From the 15th to the 17th Century, Hayward Gallery, London, 20 May–10 July 1983 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1983). Pupilli 767, fol. c. 381, “Adì 7 detto [giugno] de dare lire dieci tanti sono per havere fatto gli adornamenti e telai a 4 quadri di donne vinitiane.” Concerning Ferdinando’s collecting habits: Paola Barocchi and Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà, Collezionismo mediceo e storia artistica, vol. 1 (in

notes to pages 196 –198 394

two parts): Da Cosimo I a Cosimo II (Florence: Studio per Edizione Scelte, 2002), which rarely gives acquisition dates but has a thorough index; focused on the correspondence, on the other hand, is the earlier in­­ stallment, Paola Barocchi and Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà, Collezionismo Mediceo: Cosimo I, Francesco I e il Cardinale Ferdinando (Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 1993), in which material on Ferdinando is scattered throughout. 47. Eugenio M. Casalini, Tesori d’arte dell’Annunziata di Firenze (Florence: Alinari, 1987), 94. 48. MdP, 302, fol. 54r, 20 December 1609, Belisario Vinta to Vincenzo di Francesco Giungi. 49. MdP, 5147, fol. 109r, Cosimo Baroncelli to Giovanni de’ Medici: “Il Bronzini sta contuamente a trattenere Sua Altezza e servire alla Serenissima di alcuni ritratti che li fa e non si partendo punto di palazzo non può dare l’ultima perfezione alla Santissima Annunziata di V. Eccellenza. L’ha ben ridotta a termine e in pochi giorni la spedirà.” 50. In particular reference to the placement of religious art, Donald Cooper in At Home in Renaissance Italy, ed. M. Ajmar-​Wollheim and F. Dennis, chap. 14. 51. Pupilli 767, fol. 560v, dated 1613: “Adì 12 di gennaio per no. 10 adornamenti a diverse immagine di santi e a tutti fatto il telaio e tirato le tele e doppo un altro telaio e sopra le cornice con fregio e’ large 1/5 grandi no 4 di braccia 2 e braccia 1 2/3 uno di braccia 2 ¼ e braccia 1 ¾ uno di braccia 2 e braccia 1 ½ uno di braccia 1 2/3 e braccia 1 1/3 e 3 di braccia 1 3/5 e braccia 1 1/5 di mio in tutto di mio lire 90.” 52. Pupilli 768, fol. 674r: “Adì 6 febrero 1610 l’Illmo et Ecc.mo Sig don Giovanni di Medici de dare per l’ap[p]iè robbe avute da me Madio Arone fiorentino miniatore alla Speranza in Venecia un quadro con un busto alla colona grande con colone di pietra nel suo fornimento miniato scudi 45.” 53. Pupilli 767, fol. 381r: “per uno telaio da maglia quadra con sua rigoli . . . ​ per la S.ra Livia fece fare.” 54. For the moralists’ insight, I rely on Luca Molà, The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 423–459. 55. For example, MdP 5162, fol. 77r: “ritratto della S. Livia in oro”; and later in fol. 543r: “ritratto di una donna.” 56. Pupilli 767, fol. 278r: “Adì 30 di genn. 1613. conto delle rede di Dom. Alberighi materassaio alla Carraia . . . ​1 23 lire”; fol. 280r: “1613, per

notes to page 198 395

f­ attura di dua materasse di panno lino, un capezale et dua guanciali fatte di nuovo et cucito, et panni di b.a 3 et ¾ et 3 per il letto di telletta turchino di casa della sig.ra Livia. lire 5. . . . ​per aver parato et sparato lo stanzino della Commedia lire 3.10; per aver parato la camera della sig.ra Livia di panni darazo; rizato il letto et messo di cortinaggi lire 7.” 57. Evidence of the original restoration project is in MdP 5158, fol. 204r: “Ser. F.co de’ Medici Gran Duca B. M. nella donatione fatta all’Ecc.mo S. don Gio: il dì 21 di luglio 1587 rogato da Zanobi Paccalli tanti miglioramenti nella casa di Parione quanti sieno sufficienti per detta somma, e con altre conditioni e cautele, come tutto per conto rogato. . . . ​3168 scudi.” 58. MdP 5137, fol. 13r, letter dated 29 August 1615. 59. MdP 5137, fol. 36r, letter dated 31 October 1615, Renzi to Giovanni: “Questa settimana si comincierà a mettere su la porta di Firenze che vole mostrare benissimo in mezzo alle due finestre inginocchiate che quella uccieliera finita col colore di pietra e di mattoni sta squisitamente et fa una bella apparenza per fuora.” 60. MdP 5137, fol. 114r, dated 13 August 1616, Renzi to Giovanni: “Qui non ci resta a fare altro che lenposte delle porte et finestre et mettere su quei legni per le pergole che io vegho quei pilastri che ballano che come dissi a V. E. Ill.ma ogni vento gli può fare ire giù.” 61. MdP 5137, fol. 138r, 12 November 1616, Renzi to Giovanni: “Quanto a Firenze si è fatto quel tanto che V. E. Ill.ma comandò, ci resta solo gli bellamenti et li panchini per fuora; non si mettono se bene son fatti e fatti nel modo che l’architetto gli vedeva giornalmente, hora riescono piccini a sua detta; inperò si farà quanto V. E. Ill.ma comanda, la perdoni se io parlo di questo omo così perchè appresso a V. E. Ill.ma aparirò inpertinente, ma il sapere che V. E. Ill.ma mi a fatto inparare mi fa parlare così.” To get a sense of what Giovanni might have had in mind for this space, I consulted work on the art of gardening in this period, including L’arte dei giardini: scritti teorici e pratici dal XIV al XIX secolo, ed. Margherita Azzi Visentini (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1999), vol. 1, especially the editor’s preface. Moreover, Mirka Benes and Dianne Harris, eds., Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), especially the two introductions by the editors, and the essay by Suzanne Butters; as well as John Dixon Hunt, ed., The Italian Garden: Art, Design and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially Hunt’s Intro­duction and

notes to pages 199 –200 396

the essay by Edward Wright; and more in general, Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto, Medici Gardens: From Making to Design, Penn Studies in Land­ scape Architecture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); interesting from a comparative perspective, because it focuses on gardens not in Tuscany, was Elisabeth Blair MacDougall, Fountains, Statues, and Flowers: Studies in Italian Gardens of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1994). 62. MdP 5137, fol. 285r, 22 September 1618, Renzi to Giovanni: “Quanto alla casa e l’orto della Ill.ma Sig.ra Livia [Vernazza] di Firenze, s’è ac[c]omodata et sono sicuro chella rimarrà soddisfatta; s’è fatto ne quattro quadri li scompartimenti colle sue mezzane et se messo un melarancio di quei di Gienova colle sue melarancie per quadro nel mezzo del quadro e posto le sue cipolle che fa un belissimo vedere.” 63. MdP 5137, fol. 85r, 30 April 1616, Renzi to Giovanni: “Ci resta a fare le poste delle ferrate della strada et la porta et le pergole et ci è a diverre [i.e., lavorare or “plow deeply”—Vocabolario dell’Accademia della Crusca] uno quadro, et ci è bisogniato che era nell’orto ma torna squisitamente la casa. Horsù dico al sicuro che l’è la più bella casa di Firenze, per casa.” 64. MdP 5137 fol. 79r, dated 10 July 1616, is a list of Giovanni’s expenses in Florence, to be paid by Francesco Renzi, including payment of duties for Livia Vernazza’s acquisition of property belonging to Ferdinando Conti in Montughi. 65. On this subject, Sommo Picenardi, “Don Giovanni de’ Medici,” Nuovo archivio veneto, n.s. 7, 25 (1907): 135, refers to Florence, Archivio di Stato, Carte Celestini 110, fols. 35–38. 66. MdP 5137, fol. 22r, 19 September 1615, Renzi to Giovanni: “Ho man­­ dato la riceuta del orafo che fecie l’arme degli argienti della Sigra Livia [Vernazza] a V. E. Ill.ma.” Concerning fabulous genealogies, see Jean Boutier, “Un ‘Who’s who’ de la noblesse florentine au XVIIe siècle: l’ Istoria delle famiglie della città di Firenze di Piero Monaldi,” Sociétés et idéologies des Temps modernes. Hommage à Arlette Jouanna (Montpellier, Presses de l’Université de Montpellier, 1996), vol. 1, 79–100. 67. Pupilli 768, fol. 166r, dated 6 September 1622, item no. 3374 in the list of the Court of Wards, included bills still unpaid for: “7 quadri di paesi di 2 misure, ornamenti d’albero tinti per Montui lire 343.” 68. To get a sense of what was available, I consulted Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf, Ideal Landscape: Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin, and Claude

notes to pages 200 –202 397

Lorrain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Klaus Ertz, Josse de Momper the Younger (1564–1635): The Paintings with Critical Catalogue Raisonné (Freren: Luca Verlag, 1986). 69. Pupilli 768, fol. 166r, dated 6 September 1622, item no. 3375: “8 quadri del testamento vechio piu picholi per Montui ornamenti tochi loro, lire 168.” item no. 3376: “uno quadro a olio vi e ramo conforme a lartri [gli altri] per a Montui lire 31.10.” 70. Pupilli 768, fol. 166r, dated 6 September 1622, item no. 3826: “16 quadri di tela di fiandra senza ornamento per Montui lire 504.” Use of this fabric I found in Phoebe Dent Weil, “Technical Art History and Archeometry II: An Exploration of Caravaggio’s Painting Techniques,” Revista Brasileira de Arqueometria, Restauração e Conservação 1 (2007): 106–10. 71. Pupilli 768, fol. 166r, dated 6 September 1622, item no. 3826: “Pezzi 50 doro fine per dare in margine a molte sua stampe spesi di mio contanti lire 6.6.8.” Finally, “E più de’ dare per dua giornate lavorate intorno a dette stampe e messo oro e dato biadetto e azzurro a proffili chiari e scuri secondo il suo ordine lire 6 [note: sopra a Montui].” 72. MdP 5137, fol. 49r, 2 January 1616. I profited from Brenda Preyer’s comments on “The Acquaio (Wall Fountain)” in At Home in Renaissance Italy. 73. MdP 5137, fol. 13r, 29 August 1615: “Se V. E. Ill.ma la vedessi la pare una gioia la torre colle due colombaie et ariciato di fuora con le sue mostre finte di pietre et cantonate et drento fornito et cietto che gli [h]a mattonati delle tre stanze et messo su le trave alla tinaia che he [è] di sfogo b[raccia] 9, il palcho che pare una signora quando vi s’entra et il muratore ha fatto da sè che non v’è stato se non due sol volte che le trave v’andasino bisognio che io andassi al opera io et far le tirare perchè gli è tanto ben voluto che non gniene volevano dare ma perchè il debito mio he [è] per servire a V. E. Ill.ma non sono per restare mai sino a che aro vita.” In addition, fol. 15r, 5 September 1615: “S’è messo venti paia di colonbbi per colombaia.” Of interest here for the culinary significance, I found Clotilde Vesco, Cucina fiorentina fra Medioevo e Rinascimento: usanze, ricette, segreti (Lucca: M. Pacini Fazzi, 1984), as well as the text of Giovanni and Livia’s contemporary Giovanni Del Turco, in Anna Evangelista, ed., Epulario e segreti vari: Trattati di cucina toscana nella Firenze seicentesca, (Bologna: Forni, 1992). 74. Here I refer to the eighteenth-​century edition, Vincenzo Borghini, Il riposo (Florence: Moücke, 1730), 9. 75. MdP 5137, fol. 339r, 6 April 1619, Renzi to Giovanni: “La Illustrissima Signora Livia [Vernazza] mi mandò una scatoletta di seme di cavoli fiori

notes to pages 202–203 398

per porre, hora sono riuscite radicie.” In addition, here: fol. 51r, 16 January 1616, same to same: “Pare adesso una bella cultivazione, et hè finita la viottola che va alla bartola et quella che viene dalla vignia a piè del prato et rimesso dove manchava alla viotola grande et hora si diveglie alla cultivazione degli sparagi e delli bronchoni a me comandatami et si tira in nazzi; ho fatto gli orticini alla casa ho lasciato il prato di dodici braccia che in vero non si poteva lasciare meno a volervisi ringirare che stessi bene ma mi trovo che le grondai danno nel mezzo degli orticini.” 76. MdP 5137, fol. 339r, 6 April 1619, Renzi to Giovanni: “Quanto alla cultivazione alla Napoletana bisognerà fare come dicie Vostra Eccellenza Illustrissima et aspettare alla fine della vendemmia perchè ora non si può fare.” 77. MdP 5137, fol. 147r, 10 December 1616, Renzi to Giovanni. In addition, fol. 38r. 78. MdP 5137, fol. 89r, 20 August 1616, Renzi to Giovanni. 79. MdP 5137, fol. 93r, 31 May 1616: “Andò nella cantina et si ficie spillare tutte tutte le botte della verdea et lodò asai le botte et gli piaque.” 80. MdP 5137, fol. 155r, 14 January 1617, Renzi to Giovanni: “Il divelto grande si va faciendo conforme a che la comandò et abbiamo fatto venire voglia al Sig.re Michelangelo Baglione il cultivare cha a confine al divelto grande; fa fare anchora lui uno divelto ma non sarà si grande.” 81. MdP 5137, fol. 351r, 11 May 1619, Renzi to Giovanni: “Mi resta digli come quanto a delle cose dalla casa di Firenze della Ill.ma Sig.ra Livia come sono i quoi e casse e tavolini e credenze e sgabelli di nocie, io le venderò se Vostra Eccellenza Illustrissima vorrà.” 82. ASF, Carte Alessandri 10, ins. 56, fols. 206r–7v: “Fornimento del pal. Trevisano per mezo il traghetto di S. Geremia, per il S. don Gio. de’ Medici, 1 nov. 1610. Patti tra i fornitori ebrei e un Ebreo che forniva loro il negozio. Venezia 1 nov 1610. Scritta con gli Ebrei fornitori, Venezia 1 novembre 1610; dichiarazione di Cosimo Baroncelli e Francesco Accolti, 17 novembre 1610, ed atti notarili che si riferiscono a detti ­fornitori.” 83. ASF, Carte Alessandri 10, ins. 56, fol. 206r: “Per il portego fornire di spalieri a saietta di più careghi di bulgero nel dodese; di più scagni di bulgaro n.o dodese; doi tavolini con doi tapeti; port[i]ere di veludo verde n.o sette.” 84. ASF, Carte Alessandri 10, ins. 56, fol. 206v: “Camera 2: Razzi a figure fini canghi no. dodese e scagni n.o dodesi; un paio di cavedoni [i.e. capitoni]; un tavolin fornito; un litera dorata con il suo pavion di damasco zallo

notes to pages 203–206 399

con il letto fornito come di sopra con il suo tapedo da terra con una port[i]era.” 85. ASF, Carte Alessandri 10, ins. 56, fols. 207r: “Camera appresso la scala: razzi overo rasetti; un letto fornito con il suo pavion; sei careghi e sei scagni e un tavolino.” 86. ASF, Carte Alessandri 10, ins. 56, fols. 207v: “4a camera: razzi a ­boscaglia; una lettora [lettiera] dorata fornita con il suo letto; un tornaletto di dommasco crimisino; un tapedo da terra; un par di gavedoni; caroghe di veludo no. 6; scagni no. 6; un tavolino fornito; una portiera.” 87. ASF, Carte Alessandri 10, ins. 56, fols. 206r: “P.a camera: cavo il Portego della banda del Canal; Damosche cremisini con frisi di brocadello; careghi di veludo vardi n.o sei scagni doradi p.o sei; uno litora dorada con un paianiso doi stramazi un cavezal un cossino; un paio di lenzuoli una filzada una coltra; un pavion di brocadello; un tapedo da tornaletto da terra con un tavolin fornito.” 88. Goldberg, Jews and Magic, chap. 9, note 29. 89. The rental arrangement is mentioned in MdP 3007, Niccolo Sacchetti to the grand ducal secretary, 24 July 1621, fol. 235r. For the irrigation works in this area I referred to Salvatore Ciriacono, Building on the Water: Venice, Holland and the Construction of the European Landscape in Early Modern Times. (New York, Berghahn Books, 2006), chaps. 1–4. 90. M. Porcius Cato the Elder, De Agricultura, 1. 91. Lorenzo de’ Medici, Simposio, ed. Mario Martelli, Biblioteca dell’Archivum Romanicum, Serie I: Storia, Letteratura, Paleografia, 84 (Florence: Leo S. Olscki, 1966). 92. Miscellanea Medicea, 4, ins. 3, fol. 36r, 23 September 1619. 93. ASF, Carte Alessandri 2, fols. 453r, 542r. Goldberg, Jews and Magic, 249. 94. Sommi Picenardi, “Don Giovanni de’ Medici,” Nuovo archivio veneto, n.s. 7, 25 (1907): 138. 95. MdP 5137, fol. 137r. 96. MdP 5137, fol. 351r, dated 11 May 1619. 97. MdP 3007, fol. 374r, Niccolo dell’ Antelle, dated 18 September 1621: “La scatola de due quadretti comparse, at pervenne nelle mani de lor Altezze, et si consegneranno a’ Pupilli; et solo vi è quel quadretto tenuto di buona mano ma non già riconosciuto da questi periti per mano del Coreggio; se bene è l’istesso come atesta Gabriello Ughi et il Sig. Cosimo Baroncelli.” 98. MdP 3007, fol. 254r, July 1621, Sacchetti to grand ducal secretary: “un letto di damaso guarnito d’oro di valuta intorno a 4 o 500 scudi.”

notes to pages 206 –209 400

99. Pupilli 2659, fols. 673r: “Inventario dell’heredità dell’ Ill.mo et Ecc.mo Sig. Don Gio Medici delle robe venute di Venetia” (hereafter, Venice Inventory), cassa n. 27. 100. Venice Inventory, cassa n. 27: “una coperta grande da letto di velo di Bologna con rosette di seta di diversi colori.” 101. Venice Inventory, cassa n. 30: “Una coperta di taffetta rossa imbottita da letto; un cortinaggio di damasco rosso con cerri doro et seta con pendenti di teletta di oro et frange simili soppanato di taffetta rosso et due gran pezzi di cortinaggio di n.o 17 in tutto.” Our translation adjusts the secretarial syntax to facilitate reading. Concerning child fashions, I consulted K. Aschengreen Piacenti et al., I principi bambini: abbigliamento e infanzia nel Seicento, exhibition held in the Galleria del Costume in Palazzo Pitti, 21 April 1985 (Florence: Centro Di, 1985); and in addition, Jacqueline Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), where some of the textiles involved in childbirth are discussed, as well as, more generally, the meanings of these and other objects. 102. Venice Inventory, cassa n. 30: “un velo da battesimo bianco ricamato d’oro et canutiglie et un S. Giovanni in mezzo.” 103. Venice Inventory, cassa n. 34: “uno stratto da mettere in terra quando si battezza, di velluto rosso ricamato d’oro con giglietti in torno et quattro pere sulle cantonate d’oro.” 104. Venice Inventory, cassa n. 15. 105. Ibid., cassa n. 16. 106. Ibid., cassa n. 15. For the kind of item, I referred to Pietro Bertelli, Diversarum nationum habitus (Padua: Bertelli, 1594–1596), fig. 8. 107. Venice Inventory, cassa n. 22. 108. Ibid., cassa n. 16. 109. The observation is borrowed from Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 6–7. 110. Thomas Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities hastily gobled up in five moneths travells in France, Savoy, Italy, Rhetia commonly called the Grisons country, Helvetia alias Switzerland, some parts of high Germany and the Netherlands (Glasgow: J. MacLehose and Sons, 1905), p. 399. 111. Fabritio Caroso, Nobiltà di Dame (Venice: Muschio, 1600), p. 1 112. For bibliography and basic concept, Nicola Mangini, “Alle origini del teatro moderno: Lo spettacolo pubblico nel Veneto tra Cinquecento e Seicento,” Biblioteca teatrale n.s. 5/6 (1987): 87–103; Idem, I teatri di Venezia (Milan: Mursia, 1974); as well as Franco Mancini, Maria Teresa Muraro,

notes to pages 209 –210 401

and Elena Povoledo, I teatri di Venezia, 2 vols. (Venice: Corbo e Fiore, 1995–1996). 113. Pupilli, 767, fol. 236r. The collection invites comparison with the inventories studied by Isabella Bigazzi, Dianora e Maddalena. Due donne e il loro corredo nella Firenze del Seicento (Florence: Polistampa, 1995). 114. Venice Inventory, cassa n. 51. 115. Venezia, Archivio di Stato, Senato, parte presa 15 October 1504, quoted in Pompeo Molmenti, La Storia di Venezia nella vita privata, 2nd ed. (Turin: Roux e Favale, 1880), 280. 116. Molmenti La Storia, p.  283. In general, Catherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy, chap. 6; as well as the chapter by Luca Molà in M. Giuseppina Muzzarelli and Antonella Campanini, Disciplinare il lusso. In general, Patricia Allerston, “Clothing and Early Modern Venetian Society,” Continuity and Change 15 no. 3 (2000): 367–390. 117. His portraits are collected in Karla Langedijk, The Portraits of the Medici, 3 vols. (Florence: SPES, 1981–87), p. 1020–25. Armored examples are the engraving by Dominicus Custos (fig. 55.10 in Langedijk), by Cristofano dell’Altissimo in the Uffizi (fig. 55.1, Uffizi inventory 1890, no. 128), the engraving by Francesco Allegrini (fig. 55.1a), the anonymous portrait in the Uffizi (fig. 55.2, Uffizi inventory 1890, no. 4253), as well as a medal by Antonio Selvi (fig. 55.17). On the topic of armor, I consulted Amedeo Quondam, Cavallo e cavaliere. L’armatura come seconda pelle del gentiluomo moderno (Rome: Donzelli, 2003), 77–96. 118. For instance, the portrait by Santi di Tito in Palazzo Pitti (Inventory Galleria Palatina no. 287). In regard to the somber male style, I referred to Amedeo Quondam, Tutti i colori del nero. Moda e cultura del gentiluomo nel Rinascimento (Vicenza: A. Colla, 2007), 119–154. 119. Venice Inventory, cassa n. 51. 120. Concerning etymology, Ottorino Pianigiani, Vocabolario etimologico della lingua italiana (Roma: Società editrice Dante Alighieri, 1907). In addition, Jill Condra, ed., The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Clothing through World History, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), 2: 24. For the following paragraphs, regarding clothing in general and its symbology, Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and especially for Florence, Carole Collier Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). The theory of fashion, including examples from early modern Italy, is the subject of Georg Simmel, “Philosophie der Mode,” in his Philosophische Kultur. Gesammelte Essais (Leipzig: Kröner, 1911), 29–64; in

notes to pages 210 –214 402

addition, an application of Veblen’s leisure class theory to the subject, Quentin Bell, On Human Finery, 2nd ed. (London: Hogarth Press, 1976). A semiotic approach is Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, tr. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). An interesting contribution, mainly focused on Paris in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Regime, tr. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 121. Comparing Florentine and Venetian fashions in this period, Rosita Levi Pisetzky, Il costume e la moda nella società italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), pp. 241ff. In respect to the textiles, Doretta Davanzato Poli and Stefania Moronato, Stoffe dei veneziani (Venice: Albrizzi, 1994). 122. All in Venice Inventory, cassa n. 36. 123. Cesare Vecellio, De gli habiti antichi et moderni di diverse parti del mondo libri due (Venice: Damiano Zenaro, 1590), 153 124. Ibid., 83. 125. From Venice Inventory, cassa n. 36: “una zimarra di tabi broccato a onde cappellina et altri colori soppannuta di taffetta verde giallo guarnita di riscontrini d’argento; una zimarra d’ermisino cangio ricamata di cuoio et con foderata di taffetta gialla con 88 bottoni di profumi con rosette d’oro . . . ​una sottana di teletta d’argento et bianca con mezzo imbusto . . . ​ una sottana di cataluffa turchina et lionata guernita doro.” 126. MdP 5162, fol. 77r: “un paio di maniglie d’oro lavorate alla turchescha con rubini grossi.” 127. MdP 5162, fol. 543r. 128. Venice Inventory, cassa n. 51. 129. I was particularly informed here by Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), chap. 1. 130. MdP 5137, fol. 456r, 30 June 1620, Francesco Renzi to Giovanni. 131. MdP 5137, fol. 408r, 8 February 1620, same to same. 132. MdP 5137, fol. 373r, 27 July 1619, same to same. 133. MdP 5137, fol. 389r, 15 October 1619, same to same: “Il Sig.re Don Garzia di Montalvo mi ha chiesto scudi nove per conto di cierte sete che deve mandare all’Ill.ma Sig.ra Livia [Vernazza]. [ . . . ​] Ho sentito il disgusto dell’Ill.ma Sig.ra Livia per conto della guarnizione che m.re Benedetto gli doveva fare fare.” 134. MdP 5137, fol. 97r, 3 June 1616, same to same: “Ho il drappo appresso di me et ho speso scudi 109 lire 6/5 il quale asetterò come mi à detto m.r Francesco di Baldo et lo a mettere in una cassetta con brucioli et lo a

notes to pages 214–220 403

mandare in dispensa con dire che sieno marzolini et quivi sarà bollato.” 135. I took into account the reflections of Evelyn Welch, “Making Money: Pricing and Payments in Renaissance Italy,” in Michelle O’Malley and Evelyn Welch, eds., The Material Renaissance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 77. 136. Pupilli, 767, fol. 276r: “Adì 4 di maggio per aver parato una sala di broccatelli turchini et d’oro et cinque camere una di velluto rosso una di velluto verde una di broccatelli e dua di tele di bergano et messo insieme più teli et pezi et copera porti alla tela.” 137. Pupilli, 767, fol. 250r, entry dated 9 August 1610. 138. Concerning this imagery, I consulted Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches. An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987), 159–161, keeping in mind Ivan Gaskell’s review in Burlington Magazine 130 (1988): 636–637. 139. MdP 5137, fol. 49r, 2 January 1616.

6. Mind over Matter 1. MdP 3007, fol. 378r, dated 11 October 1621, from Sacchetti. The trip is first recorded in the same file, fol. 247r, dated 23 July 1621, from Sacchetti. 2. Teresa of Avila, Las Moradas, 6, chap. 11, para. 6. 3. MdP 3007, fol. 239r, 21 July 1621, from Sacchetti: “Questi monisteri sono di tal sorte, che dalla mattina alla sera ella potrebbe sempre fuggirsi senza alcuna difficoltà, et far poi quel che più le piacesse.” 4. MdP 3007, fol. 235r, 24 July 1621, from Sacchetti. 5. MdP 3007, fol. 222r, 19 July 1621, from Sacchetti. 6. MdP 3007, fol. 462r, dated 18 October 1621, from Sacchetti. 7. MdP 3007, fol. 244r, 23 July 1621, from Sacchetti. “Al sicuro questo Principe non haverebbe potuto esser mosso da quegli affetti, et da quei rispetti, da i quali vengono mosse l’Altezze loro, et massimamente trattandosi di impedir quasi in un certo modo la libertà della donna, la quale voce di libertà è sentita qui con delicatissime orecchie.” 8. MdP 3007, fol. 244v, 23 July 1621. 9. MdP 3007, fol. 244v, 23 July 1621: “Et venendoli alle mani la lettera, nella quale scriveva il Baroncelli, che li era stato detto da lor Altezze che la Livia era stata bruttamente querelata all’Inquisitore, et che non ha­­ verebber potuto impedire, che quel magistrato non l’havesse travagliata fuor di Toscana; allora Don Garzia abbracciando subito la congiuntura, la messe in tale spavento et io poi con diverse inventioni, insieme con

notes to pages 220 –222 404













esso ve l’ho sempre confermata, et in effetto cominciò (masticato che hebbe alquanto la cosa) a inclinare di partirsi di quà.” 10. MdP 3007, fol. 247r, 23 July 1621, from Sacchetti: “Il vantaggio è stato haver saputo farli far questo passo per amore, perchè per dirglela dubitavo che saressimo poi infine stati sforzati di farglilo far per forza, et nè anche sarebbe bisognato indugiar molto, perchè l’indugio havrebbe pigliato qualche vitio.” 11. MdP 3007, fol. 247r: “Ella è terribile.” 12. MdP 3007, fol. 244r, 23 July 1621: “Quando mercoledì io scrissi a Vostra Signoria Illustrissima col corriere di Ferrara il sig. Don Garzia et io non speravamo niun buon esito della negotiatione cominciata con la Livia, et eramo disperati, perchè conoscevamo l’uno et l’altro et egli anche meglio di me, la qualità di quel cervello, et io poichè hor mai ho qualche pratica di questo paese, apprendevo alcune grandissime difficultà, cioè l’esser la donna impersuasibile.” 13. MdP 3007, fol. 239v, dated 21 July 1621, from Sacchetti: “In somma è tale che anche in questo stato ci mette paura, et darebbe che travagliare a un Comune nonch’à D. Garzia.” 14. MdP 3007, fol. 244r, 23 July 1621, from Sacchetti: “che spalleggiasse questa donna.” 15. MdP 3007, fol. 247r, 23 July 1621, from Sacchetti: “Il Sig. Don Garzia si è portato in questo negozio stupendamente; e veramente è personaggio di garbo e di destrezza grandissima, e che merita che se ne faccia conto grande . . . ​sarebbe soggetto da saper trattare altri negozi che questi.” 16. For the Medici nomination rights, I consulted the relevant bibliography, Giovanni Greco, “I giuspatronati laicali nell’età moderna,” Storia d’Italia, Annali 9: La Chiesa e il potere politico dal medioevo all’età contemporanea, ed. Giorgio Chittolini and Giovanni Miccoli (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), 556–561. 17. P. Gauchat, ed., Hierarchia Catholica, vol. 4, (Regensberg: Typis Librariae Regensbergianae, 1935), 372. 18. MdP 3007, fol. 239r, 21 July 1621, from Sacchetti: “Fratanto per non perder punto di tempo ci risolvemo il S. D. Garzia et io di mandar hiersera a casa delle Altezze il Puttino, che è la più bella creatura che si possa vedere, vivace et tutto gratioso, per metter sul sicuro, poichè pieni di sospetto del trattare di quella donna giudicammo che non fosse espediente dar tempo al tempo, poichè in questo paese da una donna di questa sorte che ben si accorge quanto li può importare il torre dalla sua educatione il putto, et che da questo scorge la conseguenza di doversi poi esser emessa in un monistero, et che vuol che questa sia l’ultima cosa al

notes to pages 222–224 405

certo, si sarebber potuto tramar molte cose per assicurarsi il più che potesse di questo con l’havere in suo potere il fanciullo.” 19. Edward Goldberg, Jews and Magic in Medici Florence: The Secret World of Benedetto Blanis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 230, citing MdP 3007, fol. 236r, dated 24 July 1621; and f. 252r, dated 31 July 1621, both from Sacchetti. I also consulted G. Sommi Picenardi, “Don Giovanni de’ Medici, governatore dell’esercito veneto in Friuli,” Nuovo archivio veneto, n.s. 7, 26 (1907): 117. 20. Giovanni Baldinucci, Quaderno. Peste, guerra e carestia nell’Italia del Seicento, ed. B. Dooley (Florence: Polistampa, 2001), 56: “Dolse la sua morte non solo a tutto il suo stato, ma a tutto il mondo.” A list of fifteen of the musical and prose compositions related to the funeral exists in Edouard-​Marie Oettinger, Bibliographie biographique universelle: dictionnaire des ouvrages relatif à l’histoire de la vie . . . ​des personnages célèbres, vol. 1 (Paris: Editore A. Lacroix et Cie., 1866), cols. 564–565. 21. MdP 3007, fol. 235r, 24 July 1621, from Sacchetti. 22. Concerning the regency government, I take into consideration Francesco Martelli, “Cristina di Lorena, una Lorenese al governo della Toscana medicea: prime linee di ricerca,” in Il Granducato di Toscana e i Lorena nel secolo XVIII: incontro internazionale di studio, Firenze, 22–24 Settembre 1994, ed. Alessandra Contini and Maria Grazia Parri (Florence: Olschki, 1999), pp. 71–81. Franco Angiolini reexamines the vexed question of whether the period of the regency and subsequent century constituted “decline or stability,” in his chapter of Storia della civiltà toscana, vol. 3: Il principato mediceo (Florence: Le Monnier, 2003). Ilaria Pagliai attempts a reevaluation of Cristina of Lorraine in “Luci e ombre di un personaggio: le lettere di Cristina di Lorena sul ‘negozio’ di Urbino,” in Gabriella Zarri, ed., Per lettera: la scrittura epistolare femminile tra archivio e tipografia: secoli XV–XVII (Rome: Editore Viella, 1999), 464. 23. Baldinucci, Quaderno, p. 58: “Questo anno 1621 mediante il non lavorare e gran carestia era tatta la quantità di poveri che dormivano per le strade et alle pioggie e freddi e si morivano di fame, che fu preso spediente di rinchiudere tutti li poveri mendicanti.” Plague reports from 1619 are in MdP 2955, fol. 8r, 17 September. On the public health aspects, I refer to Carlo M. Cipolla, I pidocchi e il granduca (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1979), 29, 63, 64. Concerning the distribution of food, A. M. Pult Quaglia, “Per provvedere ai popoli.” Il sistema annonario nella Toscana dei Medici (Florence: Olschki, 1990), 127–140; as well as Idem, “Politiche annonarie, risorse e alimentazione nel Seicento in Italia,” La popolazione italiana nel Seicento, vol. I (Bologna: CLUEB, 1999), 387–409, 437; connecting this crisis to a

notes to pages 224–227 406

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

crisis of manufactures was Ruggiero Romano, “Tra XVI e XVII secolo. Una crisi economica: 1619–22,” Rivista storica italiana 74 (1962): 480–531, a view that was somewhat contested by Paolo Malanima, “Firenze fra ’500 e ’700: l’andamento dell’industria cittadina nel lungo periodo,” Società e storia 1 (1978): 237–55. For the international conjunction, I consulted the chapter by Mette Ejrnaes in Karl Gunnar Persson, Grain Markets in Europe, 1500–1900: Integration and Deregulation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Daniela Lombardi, “Poveri a Firenze. Programmi e realizzazioni della politica,” Timore e carità: i poveri nell’Italia moderna (Cremona: Biblioteca Statale, 1982), 177. Pupilli 2659, fols. 673r and ff: “Inventario dell’heredità dell’ Ill.mo et Ecc. mo Sig. Don Gio Medici delle robe venute di Venetia” (hereafter, Venice Inventory), cassa n. 36. Ibid.: “una sottana di cataluffa turchina et lionata guernita doro; una sottana di cataluffa a opera di r.e pagonazza et bianca guarnita doro; una sottana di cataluffa pagonazza et dore guarnita doro; una sottana di cateluffa incarnatina guarnita d’oro.” The concept here is loosely based on Max Weber in Economy and Society, tr. G. Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley: University of California, 1978), vol. 1, part 1, chap. 3. Concerning what follows, I referred to Estella Galasso Calderara, La Granduchessa Maria Maddalena D’Austria: un’amazzone tedesca nella Firenze medicea del ’600 (Genova: Sagep, 1985), 99–101; as well as Giuseppe Vittorio Parigino, “Il patrimonio di Ferdinando II de’ Medici. Una prima ricognizione,” Ricerche storiche 6 (2009): 485–486. Francesco Sansovino, Venetia città nobilissima (Venice: Altobello Salicato, 1604), p. 148. The destination of Giovanni’s body is mentioned in MdP 3007, fol. 222r, 19 July 1621. For the legal context, I consulted G. Pansini, “Il Magistrato Supremo e l’amministrazione della giustizia civile durante il principato mediceo,” Studi senesi 85 (1973): 283–315; as well as Elena Fasano Guarini, “The Prince, the Judges, and the Law: Cosimo I and Sexual Violence, 1588,” Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy, ed. Trevor Dean and K. J. P. Lowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 121–141. Concerning Cosimo’s personal interventions in internal affairs, John M. Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200–1575 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 469–471; John K. Brackett, Criminal Justice and Crime in Late Renaissance Florence, 1537–1609 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 141. On state theory, Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State: The

notes to pages 227–229 407

Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics 1250–1600 (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chap. 6. 31. I was inspired here by Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1985), 169–186. Particularly striking is the discussion by Clement Fatovic, Outside the Law: Emergency and Executive Power (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), tracing the notion of extralegal prerogative from Machiavelli to Thomas Jefferson. 32. D. J. Gordon, “Giannotti, Michelangelo and the Cult of Brutus,” Fritz Saxl (1890–1948). A Volume of Memorial Essays, ed. D. J. Gordon (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1957), 281–96; as well as Joost Pieter Keizer, “History, Origins, Recovery: Michelangelo and the Politics of Art” (Ph.D. dissertation, Leiden, 2008), updating the classic study by Giorgio Spini, “La politicità di Michelangelo,” Rivista storica italiana 76 (1964): 557–600. 33. The basic theory is explained by Luca Mannori, Il sovrano tutore: pluralismo istituzionale e accentramento amministrativo nel principato dei Medici (Secc. XVI–XVIII) (Milan: Giuffré, 1994), 84. 34. The development of administrative practice is synthetically described in Elena Fasano Guarini, “Produzione di leggi e disciplinamento nella Toscana granducale tra Cinque e Seicento. Spunti di ricerca,” Disciplina dell’anima, disciplina del corpo e disciplina della società tra medioevo ed età moderna, ed. Paolo Prodi and Carla Penuti (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino, 1994), 659–690. 35. Concerning the relation between personal and state patrimony, Giuseppe Vittorio Parigino, Il tesoro del principe: funzione pubblica e privata del patrimonio della famiglia Medici nel Cinquecento (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1999), 199–200. For the continued confusion under Cosimo III, Paola Benigni, “Francesco Feroni: da mercante di schiavi a burocrate, in La Toscana nell’età di Cosimo III,” La Toscana nell’età di Cosimo III: atti del convegno, Pisa-​San Domenico di Fiesole (FI), 4–5 Giugno 1990, ed. Franco Angiolini, Vieri Becagli, and Marcello Verga (Florence: EDIFIR, 1993), 165–183. The Lorraine transformation is aptly characterized by Emmanuelle Chapron, “Ad utilità pubblica”: politique des bibliothèques et pratiques du livre à Florence au XVIIIe siècle (Genève: Droz, 2009), chap. 5. 36. MdP 5159, part 1, fol. 16v: “procurator . . . ​Ill. Dom. Cosmi de Baroncellis Patritii Nob. Florentinae curatoris ventris praegnantis dominae Livia Vernazzae.” 37. On the bureaucracy I follow R. Burr Litchfield, Emergence of a Bureaucracy: The Florentine Patricians, 1530–1790 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

notes to pages 229 –232 408

Press, 1986), 364, and in general, for the discussion here and below, chaps. 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, and 8. 38. Concerning this arrangement, Sergio Bertelli, “Palazzo Pitti dai Medici ai Savoia,” La corte di Toscana dai Medici ai Lorena, Atti delle giornate di studio, Firenze, Archivio di Stato e Palazzo Pitti, 15–16 Dicembre 1997, ed. Anna Bellinazzi and Alessandra Contini (Rome: Ministero per I Beni e le Attività Culturali, 2002), 14. Anthony Molho speaks in terms of a “patrimonial state,” in “The State and Public Finance,” J. Kirshner, ed., The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300–1600 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 126. 39. The point is made in Litchfield, The Emergence of a Bureaucracy, 34–36, referring also to Guido Pansini, “Per una storia del feudalesimo nel granducato di Toscana durante il periodo Mediceo,” Quaderni storici 19 (1972): 131–186. 40. Concerning this Marchetti, Lucia Sacchetti Lelli, ed., Hinc priscae redeunt artes: Giovan Matteo Marchetti, vescovo di Arezzo, collezionista e mecenate a Pistoia (1647–1704), (Florence: Aska, 2005), 18. 41. MdP 5158, fol. 147v and following contains copies of the documents. For the inclusive view, MdP 5158, fol. 285r. 42. MdP 5158 fol. 298r. 43. MdP 5158, fol. 652r: “Il Ser.mo Gran Duca Ferdinando [I] di gl[oriosa] m[emoria] nel privilegio che fa a’ 10 di ottobre 1606 in Cafaggiuolo a favore del principe don Lorenzo suo figliuolo quartogenito di più capi di beni, et in spetie di quelli che per morte del sig. don Giovanni [de’ Medici] senza figliuoli maschi legittimi venissero all’Altezza sua, o suoi descendenti, prohibisce l’alienazione di ciascun capo di detti beni al princip. d. Lorenzo.” 44. MdP 5158, fol. 217v: “Li dottori considerano che sarebbe vergogna d’un disponente nobile, che la sua casa e facultà veniss’ in mano d’un naturale, e così il legittimo restass’ escluso.” 45. MdP 5159, part 1, fol. 193v. 46. The whole issue is exhaustively analyzed in Giuliano Marchetto, “Primus fuit Lamech. La bigamia tra irregolarità e delitto nella dottrina di diritto comune,” Trasgressioni: seduzione, concubinato, adulterio, bigamia: (XIV– XVIII secolo), ed. Silvana Seidel Menchi and Diego Quaglioni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004), 43–106. 47. Carte Strozziane, ser. 1: 48, fol. 123v, note of the reply of the Florentine ambassador in Rome, dated 10 August 1619, to the letter of the grand duke of 6 August. 48. G. Sommi Picenardi, “Don Giovanni de’ Medici, governatore dell’esercito

notes to pages 233–237 409

veneto in Friuli,” Nuovo archivio veneto, n.s. 7, 26 (1907): 96, citing the diary of Francesco Settimani. Also concerning the abduction, MdP 6355, fol. 622r, Paolo Oddone to Giovanni de’ Medici, 3 August 1619. 49. MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 25r–v. “Baptista Granaria Matthei straponterus Comp.t in Unitoria Constitutus, et denuntiavit accusat Franciscum Bonum alium Genuensem, dicens, Qualmente domenica prossima passata a hore ventiuna in circa mi fu referto che era andata in casa mia il detto Francesco lasciando uno alla guardia in piazza, il qual sin hora non so chi fosse, il qual Francesco discaricò una cassa, la quale havevo nella camera, di noce alla napolitana, della quale io tenevo la chiave, et era serrata, et in essa mi entrò e portò via lire 200 in doppie, e da otto reali, et altra moneta, una simarra di frisato di baeta nera none nun altra di buratto di spagna, et un altra di ciambellotto verde nera, un altra di ciambaellotto nera, una camicietta di ciambellotto rosso e verde, un paro di faldette, con un busto di seta incarnati, un paro di faldette gialle, un paro di faldette bianche con li trinini un reverso giallo di frisato nuovo quattro colleri cinque o sei camicie, tre o quattro revertiche e tanta roba, che valeva più di 600 lire, oltre le lire 200 di sopra, et oltre di ciò mi ha condotto via mia moglie commettendo adulterio furto e rapina.” 50. MdP 6355, fol. 711r, draft of Andrea Cioli response to the bishop of Sarzana, 13 June 1622: “Per rimediare a’ disordini che soprastanno nella litre del Granara non ci è nessuno altro modo che la pronta spedi­ zione.” 51. MdP 6355, fol. 711r, draft of Andrea Cioli response to the bishop of Sarzana, 13 June 1622: “Tra tanto il m.to de’ Pupilli non risponderà ad alcuna lett.ra che scrive il Sanguino senza farne dar parte a V. S. I.” 52. MdP 6355, fol. 728r, Bishop of Sarzana to Andrea Cioli: “Tre giorni sono mentre ero in Arcola, venne da me G. Francesco Vernaza fratello della Livia, esebisce una scrittura.” 53. MdP 6355, fol. 729r, Andrea Cioli to the Bishop of Sarzana. 54. MdP 5159, part 1, fol. 22v: “Non possunt dici veri contumaces nisi fuerint ter citati, quod cum non fuerit adimpletum nullitati propterea remanet subiecta uti adsunt iura voluntaria.” 55. MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 668v, Francesco Renzi’s response to this question: “io non credo che quando un signore raccomanda per giustitia la speditione di qualche causa si possa dire faccia mancamento.” 56. MdP 5159, part 1, fol. 149r, dated 8 March 1622, information presented by: “li Molto Magnifici Signori Offitiali de’ Pupilli et adulti della città di Firenze tutori et per debito tempo curatori del S. Francesco Maria

notes to pages 237–241 410

figliolo dell’Ill.mo et Ecc.mo Sig. don Giovanni Medici et curatori dell’heredità iacente di detto sig. don Giovanni servatis per servandis, et ottenuto il partito secondo gli ordini, sentita l’instantia fatta più volte da’ creditori dell’heredità giacente dell Ecc.mo Sig. don Giovanni Medici et per loro da Giuliano Borghi, Matteo Maffei et Francesco de’ Rossi, come procuratori di detti creditori per la liquidatione di loro crediti, et sentito Cosimo Baroncelli procuratore della heredità iacente et attore del sig. Fr.co Maria figlio del detto Sig. don Giovanni, et per ogni ratione et interesse.” 57. MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 140v, 144r. 58. Ibid., fol. 151r. 59. Ibid., fol. 150r. 60. Ibid., fol. 150v. 61. Ibid., fol. 151v. 62. Ibid., fols. 589r and ff. 63. Miscellanea Medicea 4, ins. 3, fol. 6r. 64. Ibid., fol. 8r. 65. Ibid., fol. 8v. 66. MdP 5159, part 1, fol. 95r. 67. MdP 5159, part 1, fol. 201v, Tassarelli to Livia, 10 May 1619: “Fra essi si sono spesi una grossa partita di scudi nelli testimoni in farli esaminare et ibi sara’ bene che la presente lettere v.s. la potra’ spezzare acciò non potessero far danno alla causa nostra.” 68. MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 158r: “persone honorate degne di fede e d’ogni ­eccettion maggiori.” 69. MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 477r: “Delle persone nominate nell’interrogatorio io conosco la Lazenina di Benetto Raggi, che è donna che è tenuta in mala consideratione in Genova, conosco ancora Michelangelo et Niccolo Turcotti, che sono birri in Genova, il Francesco di Antonio Rolandi credo sia un zio della Sig. Livia. . . . ​quelli che ho nominati sopra . . . ​ non sono tenuti da me per homini e donne da bene et honorati, per che la Larzanina è in mala consideratione come ho detto . . . ​li Turcotti sono birri, et il Fco. di Antonio Rolandi è un povero meschino et infelice.” 70. MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 677v: “Quanto poi che fusse donna di partito avanti havesse l’amicitia del Sr. Don Gio. lo seppi dalla bocca sua stessa, e da chi la conobbe.” 71. MdP 5159, MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 676r: “In generale non posso dir altro, se non che credo che si possa dar poca fede alle parole di quello che si esamina contro chi ha riceuto disgusto.”

notes to pages 241–24 4 411

72. MdP 5159, part 2, fol. 168v. 73. Ibid., fol. 174r. 74. Ibid., fol. 195r–196v. 75. Ibid., fol. 204r. 76. MdP 6355, fol. 715r, Livia to Giovanni Battista, bishop of Sarzana, 12 June 1622: “Non posso fare le mie difese, che per le altre mie le ho scrito, perchè in capo a nove mesi mi ànno datto licenza che io scriva a Genova quando loro l’è parsso, che io non possa fare più niente, e perchè mia fratello mi da aviso che in Genova quelli testimoni che si sono esaminati in favore della parte ce ne che anno preso danari per questo è che lo faranno constare però la supplico Vostra Signoria Illustrissima et Reverendissima a farmi gratia.” 77. MdP 6355, fol. 711, 13 June 1622, Andrea Cioli to Giovanni Battista, bishop of Sarzana: “Per rimediare a’ disordini che soprastanno nella lite del Granara non ci è nessuno altro modo che la pronta spedi­zione, la quale dependendo hora da Vostra Signoria Illustrissima sperano queste Altezze Serenissime che non sia per tardare e mi hanno comandato di farne con lei offizio.” 78. MdP 6355, fol. 712r, 15 June 1622, note of a letter to be written by Andrea Cioli to Giovanni Battista, bishop of Sarzana: “Si spedisce a posta per servizio della lite, nella quale giudicandosi grande interesse di tutte le parti che il Sanguino non persista nel pensiero della ­de­­nunzia.” 79. MdP 6355, fol. 716r, Giovanni Battista, bishop of Sarzana, to Madama Cristina, 21 June 1622. 80. MdP 6355, fol. 716r, Giovanni Battista, bishop of Sarzana, to Madama Cristina, 21 June 1622: “Accompagno con questa l’annessa lettera della Livia sud.a, acciò vedino con quanto licentia ponga in carta, e si lascia trascorrere; e se bene io son sicuro che capitando simili essorbatanza in qualsivoglia mano, mai sarà ammesso da chi havrà senso e contezza della pia mente loro; ne pur vi possa esser vatta sopra reflessione alcuna; tuttavia mi sono parso debito mio di somministrarle questo avviso per soddisfare all’ardentissimo mio desiderio di non lasciar indietro mai cosa che stima di servitio di VAS.” 81. MdP 6355, fol. 716v: “E quando bene havessi lasciato qualche cosa per convenienza di giustizia; che pero’ puo’ esser di poco momento considerato l’oggetto principale.” 82. G. Marchetto, “Primus fuit Lamech,” 94. 83. MdP 5158, fol. 623r–624r, lawyers of Don Lorenzo write: “Non solo l’equità, ma la raggione stratta delle leggi vuole che ogni carico resti al

notes to pages 24 4–246 412

ser.mo herede universale, che ha conseguito un’heredità inestimabile, et all’incontro esso S. Principe, fatti bene li conti, non ha ricevuto il prezzo della sua legitima, poichè tutti li beni donati al tempo della morte del Ser.mo S. Duca effettivamente non erano di annua entrata di circa scudi 25m quando quando gli ser.mi suoi fratelli hanno havuto beni di’assai maggiore entrata.” 84. Concerning the collections of Don Lorenzo and their destinations, I consulted, E. Borea, ed., La Quadreria di Don Lorenzo de’ Medici: Villa Medicea di Poggio a Caiano, 18 Giugno–31 Luglio; 1 Settembre–16 Ottobre 1977, ed. E. Borea (Florence: Centro Di, 1977). 85. ASF, Alessandri 11, ins. 4, a copy of the original testament: “Item il detto testatore lassa alli suoi servitori e famiglia di casa [ . . . ​] tanto in questi paesi come in Italia tutte le sue masserizie, arnesi, ori argenti catene et altre gioie [ . . . ​] paramenti drappi nuovi e vecchi et altre masserizie si trovassero di qualsivoglia sorte, et medemamente li cavalli ronzini e muli et anche li bestiami grossi e minuti che di presente si trovano in su li suoi poderi a repartire il tutto alla volontà e piacere del detto Ser.mo Sig. Gran Duca suo signore.” 86. MdP 6355, fol. 731r, Andrea Cioli to Paolo Oddone, 23 November 1621: “Si scuopre veramente sempre maggiore la temeraria insolenza di cotesti frelli della Livia, ma alla fine sarà ben peggio per loro, poichè sarà anche sempre maggiore la rovina, che caderà sopra di essi; et intorno a questo particolare il sig. Nic dell’Antella scrive, et replica a VS tutto quel che occorre, io mi rimetto a lui, et solamente le confermo, che in questa ser.ma casa si terrà perpetua memoria del suo eccessivo cortesissimo affetto.” 87. An example: MdP 3008, fol. 77r, dated 16 February 1622: “Mi si dice che la Livia stia a Montui in una maniera da potersene anche andare se ella applicasse punto punto a questo pensiero. Chè guardata alla larga fuori d’una città da un solo, ha gran comodità, et molte cose possono nascere.” 88. Cosimo Baroncelli, Il discorso del Sig.re Cosimo Baroncelli fatto a’ suoi figliuoli dove s’intende la vita di don Giovanni Medici, ed. Marina Macchio (Florence: NICOMP, 2009), 90; and G. Sommi Picenardi, “Don Giovanni de’ Medici, governatore dell’esercito veneto in Friuli,” Nuovo archivio veneto, n.s. 7, 26 (1907): 133.

7. Durable Goods 1. The term “strettissima custodia” comes from Livia herself, in MdP 5162, fol. 545r, Livia to the Grand Duke, undated but 1634.

notes to pages 246 –247 413

2. Concerning the layout of the fortress, Amelio Fara, Bernardo Buontalenti (Milan: Electa, 1995), 21. 3. To get a sense of this experience, I attempted to come to terms with the wide-​ranging bibliography on prisons including Giovanni Scarabello, Carcerati e carceri a Venezia nell’età moderna (Roma: Istituto della Enci­ clopedia Italiana, 1979); Francesco Cognasso, L’Italia nel Rinascimento, 2 vols. (Turin: Unione Tipografico-​Editrice Torinese, 1965), 2: 641–649; Marvin E. Wolfgang, “A Florentine Prison: le carceri delle Stinche,” Studies in the Renaissance, 7 (1960): 148–66; and again, Guy Geltner, “Isola non isolata. Le Stinche in the Middle Ages,” Annali di storia di Firenze 3 (2008); Vincenzo Paglia, La Pietà dei carcerati: confraternite e società a Roma nei secoli XVI–XVIII (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1980); Pieter Spierenburg, The Prison Experience: Disciplinary Institutions and Their Inmates in Early Modern Europe (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991); and Marino Berengo, L’Europa delle città: il volto della società urbana europea tra Medioevo ed età moderna (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1999), 629–634. Michel Foucault’s challenging Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), insofar as it deals with actual prisons, focuses on prison reform from the eighteenth century onward. 4. This notice is from Charles Klopp, Sentences: The Memoirs and Letters of Italian Political Prisoners from Benvenuto Cellini to Aldo Moro (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), chap. 1. 5. I drew inspiration here from Guy Geltner, The Medieval Prison: A Social History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 68, 156. A project is currently under way at the Musei Civici Veneziani to catalogue five centuries of graffiti in Venetian prisons. 6. MdP 5162, fol. 545r, Livia to the Grand Duke, undated but 1634: “Livia Vernazza Genovese Humil.ma serva di Vostra Altezza Serenissima con ogni riverenza gli espone come essendo gia stata dodici anni e per la via di 13 fra la fortezza di San Miniato e quella di Belvedere dove di presente si ritrova sempre tenuta in stret.ma custodia come in carcerata senza haver possuto mai ne scriver ne parlare a persona che viva ne tam poco essergli stato permesso di far palese il suo misero stato all’Altezza Vostra Serenissima . . . ​secondamente pur trovandosi essa in estrema afflitione per la poca consolatione spirituale del Anima, che gli è concessa in tanta strettezza, non gli essendo permesso sentier mai che una messa e quella sempre fra le piccole labarde, si può dire, desiderosa d’arrivare una voltra a vivere con quella maggior quiette d’anima che sia possibile, la supplica voglia dare ordine che se così comandi che sia levata da

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questa fortezza e posta nel mon. di Santo Onofrio detto Fulignio, dove si trova un appartamento di stanze fabbricate dalla Beata Memoria della Signora Leonora Albizi madre dell’Eccellentissimo Signor don Giovanni Medici, restato voto per la morte di detta signora.” 7. MdP 5162, fol. 445r, Livia to “Bottega Nardi in via dell’Alloro”: “Io vengo con questa mia a riverire Vostra Signoria Eccellentissima e in siieme per dagli parte come Vincenzio Puccine [e] [Au]gusto suo fratello erano mia contadini e suono di presente per fino augusto li fo a sapere come li mando via per ladri e per distrutori di viti di frutti tagliano vite la note vano a robare quello che li altri cioe viscina è vero che il mio podere iera male aviata ma me lano distrutto affatto.” 8. Estimates are listed in G. Sommi Picenardi, “Don Giovanni de’ Medici, governatore dell’esercito veneto in Friuli,” Nuovo archivio veneto, n.s. 7, 26 (1907): 116. 9. MdP 3007, fol. 222r, from Sacchetti, 19 July 1621: “Hiersiera si portava fuori uno studiolo nel qual si crede che fosser le gioie della Livia, ma io l’avevo già messo buoni ordini per la casa, et fatto serrar le porte si che Aless. delle Rede lo fece tornar di sopra, et si procurò di far quietar quella donna il meglio che fu possible.” 10. MdP 3007, fol. 302r, from Sacchetti, 16 August 1621: “Io dubito che costà parrà cosa strana che trattandosi di recuperare il suo, et da donne consecrate al servitio di Dio, con giustificationi anche tanto chiare come sono le lettere duplicate della Livia, et la procura che hò riceute, si habbino ad haver difficulta’ si grandi, et che sia necessario di espugnar queste monache nel medesimo modo che se fossero persone profane.” 11. MdP 3007, fol. 268r, from Sacchetti to the grand ducal secretary, 3 August 1621: “Presentai all’uno et all’altro monistero le lettere della Livia in virtù delle quali mi si dovevon consegnarmi le predette robbe, ma le monache subito si fecero nuove di tal domanda, et con volto tanto intrepido, che quanto a me restai melzo, scorsi nondimeno essendo venuto con loro a certe domande assai precise, che piu tosto s’intrigavono ma non potei mai farli confessare di haver in mano robbe simili della Livia . . . ​Bisogna supporre che le monache di Venezia sono monache straordinarie, et che per arrivarle ci vorranno diligenze più che ordinarie.” 12. MdP 3007, fol. 268r, from Sacchetti to the grand ducal secretary, 3 August 1621: “Hanno dubitato queste suore che la sottoscrittione non sia della Livia.” 13. Concerning forced vocations in general, I consulted Jutta Gisela Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (Chicago:

notes to pages 251–252 4 15









University of Chicago Press, 1999), esp. 18–71, as well as Mary Laven, Virgins of Venice. Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent (New York: Penguin/Viking, 2002), and for bibliography on the legal and cultural aspects, Silvia Evangelisti, “Wives, Widows, and Brides of Christ: Marriage and the Convent in the Historiography of Early Modern Italy,” The Historical Journal 43, No. 1 (2000): 233–247; as well as Gabriella Zarri, Recinti. Donne, clausura e matrimonio nella prima età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000). For the earlier period, I compared Sharon Strocchia, Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2009). 14. The Galileo episode is recounted in Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love (New York: Walker, 1999). 15. An English translation of a portion of this work using the title “Innocence Undone,” to convey the double-​entendre, is in my Italy in the Baroque: Selected Readings (New York: Garland, 1995), 407–424, where I quote from p. 413. The whole work is translated with intro. by Letizia Panizza as Paternal Tyranny in “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe” series (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). There is a critical edition of the original text, La semplicità ingannata, by Simona Bortot (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2007). Concerning Tarabotti, I consulted the articles in Elissa B. Weaver, ed., Arcangela Tarabotti: A Literary Nun in Baroque Venice (Ravenna: Longo, 2006). 16. The culture of the monastery and women in the Church is the topic of chaps. by Gabriella Zarri, Victoria Primhak, Kate Lowe, and Francesca Medioli in Letizia Panizza, ed., Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, (Oxford: European Humanities Research Center, 2000). On literature in the convents, I take account of Elissa Weaver, Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), focused mostly on Florence and Tuscany, especially chaps. 1 and 2. To this I might add music performances, of which the Milanese examples are studied by Robert L Kendrick, Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 17. MdP 3007, fol. 302r, Sacchetti to the grand ducal secretary, 16 August 1621: “Siamo in Venezia et se questi argenti saranno stati mandati dalle monache in casa di qualche nobile, ci sarà che brigare.” 18. MdP 3007, fol. 302r, Sacchetti to the grand ducal secretary, 16 August 1621: “Domattina ho pensiero di andare a trovare i capi del cons. de 10 per far loro instanza di far metter prigione un Barcarolo, il quale son venuto in luce che dovette andare a pigliare gl’argenti di casa una certa Commare Cornelia, dove gia’ la Livia gli haveva mandati.”

notes to pages 252–255 416

19. MdP 3007, fol. 302r, from Sacchetti, 16 August 1621: “Questa suor B. non è nobile et si ha questo vantaggio perchè con lei il Patriarca potrà proceder senza rispetto veruno.” 20. MdP 3007, fol. 304r, Zaccaria to Sacchetti, 13 August 1621. 21. MdP 3007, fol. 306r, from Sacchetti, 14 August 1621: “Mi creda Vostra Signoria Illustrissima che queste monache sono terribili et fieri al possibile. . . . ​Quella suora Laura di Murano disse hieri al vescovo mille impertinenze che l’ordine et la procura son falsi, o almeno estorte dalla Livia contro sua voglia, et altre simili cose da far perder la patientia; hor veda un poco a che termine siamo.” 22. MdP 3007, fol. 306r, Sacchetti, 14 August 1621: “Giudicai per buono questo espediente per riservare il cimento dell’autorità del principe all’ultimo et credo finalmente che quste monache faranno quel che conviene . . . ​Non fu mai possibile in un contrasto di tre hore, che fece il vescovo seco, di farla precisamente confessare, che cosa ella habbia in mano della Livia, ma solo [suora Laura] disse doppo grande instanze che quando vedrà un inventario scritto di mano della Livia propria, nel qual sia notato precisamente et puntualmente tutte le cose, et tutte le gioie, che la Livia pretende che ella habbia in mano del suo, allora risponderà, ma che in effetto vol questa sodisfatione, sichè bisogna, che la Livia si metta a conto di haverli a scrivere una mezza bibbia.” 23. MdP 3007, fol. 306v, Sacchetti to the grand ducal secretary, 14 August 1621: “si potrebbe facilitare il riaver dalle monache di murano le robbe della Livia, per che se è vero chel che mi si presuppone, che il proc. Cornaro sia uno dei sen.i proposto alla cura di quel monasterio, potrei interessare mons. Primicerio, et darli intentione di farlo interamente pagare del suo credito, quando le monache di murano mi habbiano reso ogni cosa.” 24. MdP 3007, fol. 378r, N. Sacchetti, 11 September 1621: “[Mando uno] zibellino intiero con zampe et testa d’oro massiccio tempestata di diamanti, da portar sopra il braccio conforme a che si usa in Venezia. La Livia se lo fece dare nell’entrare in Barca, per portar seco, come fece, la sera istessa che parti di quà.” 25. MdP 3007, fol. 312r, from Sebastiano Cellesi to the grand ducal secretary, 21 August 1621: “Potrà scrivere VS al Sig. Residente Sacchetti in proposito degli affari della Livia che seli manda l’inventario delle robe che sono nel monasterio di Murano ma non di sua mano, perchè non gli è possuto riuscire per la debolezza, ma l’ha sottoscritto, e si manderà martedì per l’ordinario se li riuscirà.”

notes to pages 256 –259 417

26. The undated document is an inventory of things left in the monastery of Santi Marco e Andrea in Murano, located at MdP 5162, fol. 543r. 27. The probability of mischief is raised in a later appraisal of the object: MdP 5162, fol. 76r, Paolo del Sera to the grand ducal secretary, 6 October 1640: “Veggo palesar qualcosa non contenuta nell’inventario che fu fatto per ordine del Collegio, e particolarmente una delle maggiore sustanze, che e’ il gioiello di diamanti in forma di giglio, che facilmente potevan tacerlo et appropriarselo.” I compared this and other items in Livia’s collection with the inventories studied by Isabella Bigazzi, Dianora e Maddalena. Due donne e il loro corredo nella Firenze del Seicento (Florence: Polistampa, 1995), documents 1–15; and I drew some general inspiration from Yvonne Hackenbroch, Renaissance Jewellery (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1979). 28. MdP 3007, fol. 312r, Cellesi to the grand ducal secretary, 21 August 1621: “Scrive la medesima Livia più lettere che porterà Cecco d’Ubaldo al quale lei medesima l’ha consegnate . . . ​et Cecco d’Ubaldo s’è commesso che tutte le lettere consegnare al Sig Residente e dica quanto havvi commessone dalla Livia e non eseguisca se non quanto dal signor residente sarà approvato.” 29. Alla fine l’inventario si e’ rihauto dalle monache. Lo rimando a V. S. I. soggiungendole che io stimo che esse non si riduranno cosi’ facilmente a sodisfar al desiderio di V. S. I. 30. We find them soliciting a rapid conclusion of negotiations with the Venetian authorities, at MdP 5162, fols. 600r, 602r. 31. I found a sampling of the Medici jewels in: I gioielli dei Medici dal vero e in ritratto. Catalogo della mostra (Firenze, 12 Settembre 2003–2 Febbraio 2004), ed. and curator Maria Sframeli (Florence: Sillabe, 2003). I also took note of Kirsten Aschengreen Piacenti, “Two Jewellers at the Grand Ducal Court of Florence around 1618,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 12 no. 1/2 (1965): 107–124. 32. On possession, apart from the bibliography in Chapter 5 above, I drew from the insights in Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), especially 3, 19, 56; for the cultural resonance of this idea, Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, vol. I: Archaic Greece: The Mind of Athens, tr. Gilbert Highet, reprint of the 2nd Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 12. 33. I draw on the appreciations of the two grand duchesses by Estella Galasso Calderara, La Granduchessa Maria Maddalena D’Austria: un’amazzone tedesca nella Firenze medicea del ’600, preface by Giorgio Spini (Genoa:

notes to page 261 418

34.

35.

36.

37.

Sagep, 1985); as well as Kelley Ann Harness, ‘Amazzoni di Dio’: Florentine Musical Spectacle under Maria Maddalena d’Austria and Cristina di Lorena (1620–30) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). Concern­ ­ing Madama Cristina, the ceremonial has attracted particular attention: James M. Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as Theatrum Mundi (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). On court life during the Regency, I consulted Francesco Martelli, “Padre Arsenio dell’Ascensione. Un agostiniano scalzo alla corte di Cristina di Lorena,” in Giulia Calvi and Riccardo Spinelli, eds., Le donne Medici nel sistema europeo delle corti XVI–XVIII secolo: atti del Convegno internazionale, Firenze, San Domenico di Fiesole, 6–8 Ottobre 2005 (Florence: Polistampa, 2008), 1: 75; as well as Xenia von Tippelskirch, “Letture e conversazioni a corte durante la reggenza di Maria Maddalena d’Austria e di Cristina di Lorena,” Ibid., 1: 131–143; Elisabetta Stumpo, “Rapporti familiari e modelli educativi: il caso di Cristina di Lorena,” Ibid., 1: 257–268; and considering the structure of the Regency government in general, Francesco Bigazzi, “Orso d’Elci. Due granduchesse e un segretario,” Ibid., 1: 383–404. Jerome’s comments are in Patrologia Latina, ed. Jacques-​Paul Migne (Paris: Migne, 1844–64), vol. 22, col. 618. For the medieval tradition, I relied on Valérie Gontero, “Un syncrétisme pagano-​chrétien: la glose du Pectoral d’Aaron dans le Lapidaire chrétien,” Revue d’histoire des religions 4 (2006): 417–437. I found useful here and below, Joan Evans, Magical Jewels of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Particularly in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), chap. 7. Concerning books of secrets in general, William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), but not referring to gem magic per se. Pliny, Natural History, 37: 11, 54, 59. For the debates about Pliny, I considered Andrea Bacci, Le XII Pietre Pretiose, Le Quali Per Ordine Di Dio Nella santa legge, adornauano i vestimenti del sommo Sacerdote. Aggivntevi Il Diamante, Le Margarite e l’Oro . . . ​Discorso Dell’Alicorno . . . ​Et della gran Bestia detta Alce da gli Antichi (Rome: 1587), and the commentary and translation by Wolfgang Gabelchover of the same work, as De gemmis et lapidibus pretiosis (Frankfurt: 1603), especially 230–231. Concerning Camillo Leonardi, I refer to Carla de Bellis, “Astri, Gemme e Arti Medico-​magiche nello ‘Speculum Lapidum’ di Camillo Leonardi,” Il Mago, il cosmi, il Teatro degli Astri: Saggi sulla Letteratura Esoterica del Rinascimento, Gianfranco Formichetti, ed. (Rome, 1985), 67–114;

notes to pages 261–264 4 19

and more recently, Maurice Saß, “Gemalte Korallenamulette Zur Vorstellung eigenwirksamer Bilder bei Piero della Francesca, Andrea Mantegna und Camillo Leonardi,” Kunsttexte.de, E-​Journal für Kunst-​und Bildgeschichte 1 (2012). Concerning the translation by Dolce, Ronnie H. Terpening, Lodovico Dolce, Renaissance Man of Letters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 130. The prohibition is noted in Jesús Martínez de Bujanda, Marcella Richter, Index des livres interdits, vol. 11 (Paris: Librairie Droz, 2002), 297. 38. I found this in Girolamo Cardano, Liber unus de gemmis et coloribus, in his Oper omnia (Leiden: Huguetan, 1663), 2: 553. 39. The doge’s biography is in Emmanuele Antonio Cicogna, Storia dei Dogi di Venezia, 2 vols. (Venice: Stab. Nazionale di Grimaldo, 1867), 2: 94; and Andrea Da Mosto, I Dogi di Venezia (Milan: Aldo Martello, 1960), 347. 40. There is a reference to this painting in Giandomenico Romanelli, Il museo Correr (Milan: Electa, 1994), 30. 41. MdP 3007, fol. 370r, dated 4 September 1621, from Sacchetti. 42. MdP 3007, fol. 414r, dated 25 September 1621. 43. MdP 3007, fol. 473r, from Sacchetti, 23 October 1621, to the grand ducal secretary. 44. These issues do come up, for instance, in MdP 3007, fol. 349r, in a letter from Sacchetti, 21 August 1621. For the political context, Gaetano Cozzi, Il doge Nicolò Contarini; richerche sul patriziato veneziano agli inizi del Seicento (Venice: Istituto per la Collaborazione Culturale, 1958), 173–174; J.  H. Elliott, Richelieu and Olivares (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), chaps. 2 and 3. I was also informed by an exhaustive entry by Gino Benzoni on “Angelo Contarini,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 28 (1983). 45. MdP 3007, fol. 435r, from Sacchetti, 9 October 1621: “Bisogna ricordarsi, che qui non siamo in Toscana, o in altri stati che siano retti dall’arbitrio di un Principe solo, ma che si ha da negotiare con una repubblica, la quale essendo per l’ordinario necessariamente tarda in tutte le sue resolutioni, per la forma del governo, è poi tardissima in quei negotii che non sono nè politici nè appartenenti a i suoi proprii interessi, come questo.” 46. MdP 3007, fol. 449r, from Sacchetti, 12 October 1621: “In somma, in Pregadi entrano 200 cervelli, et tutti diversi, se bene in questo particolare devono esser pur troppo d’accordo, et quando tutti gli altri la sentono bene, un solo che si rizzi li fa subito rivoltare.” 47. MdP 3007, fol. 435r, from Sacchetti, 9 October 1621: “Questo governo come ho detto è dissimilissimo, come ella sa, da quel degli altri stati

notes to pages 264–267 420

d’Italia, nei quali la volontà di un sol Principe determina et esseguisce in un subito, ma qui nelle cose che non premono al pubblico, bisogna guadagnarseli a uno a uno con una estrema patienza, et poi anche si corre risico, che rizzandosi su qualcheduno a dir quattro parole in contrario, si rivolti quanto si è fatto, et si habbi a ricominciar da capo.” 48. MdP 3007, fol. 370v, from Sacchetti, 4 September 1621: “Questo è negotio da arrivarlo con la flemma, et io non mancherò d’usarla et d’accom­ pagnarla con tutta la diligenza possibile.” I interpret the unnecessary insistence as a subtle admission of frailty. 49. The phrase is in Scipione Ammirato, Discorsi sopra Cornelio Tacito (Florence: Giunti, 1594), Proemio. Concerning Ammirato, my analysis draws upon Eric W. Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527– 1800: A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), book 2. 50. Ammirato, Ibid., respectively, book 3 chap.  8 (money), 2: 1 (hunt), 4: 3 (counsellors). 51. For what follows, Ammirato, Ibid., respectively, book 12: 4 (captains), 5: 6 (marriages), 3: 10 (religion); 3: 7 (rumors). 52. Della segretezza, all’Illustrissimo et Eccellentissimo Signore Il Signor Don Giovanni de’ Medici (Venice: Giunti, 1599). 53. Paruta, Della perfettione della vita politica libri tre (Venice: Nicolini, 1599), 446. Concerning Paruta I used Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 32–33; as well as Angelo Baiocchi, “Paolo Paruta: Ideologia e politica nel cinquecento veneziano,” Studi Veneziani 17–18 (1975–76): 157–233; and Gino Benzoni, Gino Benzoni, “Dalla ‘perfezione’ alla ‘sovranità’ da Paruta a Sarpi,” Studi Veneziani n.s. 55 (2008): 167–203. 54. Paruta, Della perfettione della vita politica libri tre (Venice: Nicolini, 1599), 447. 55. MdP 3007, fol. 370v, from Sacchetti, 4 September 1621. 56. MdP 3007, fol. 449r, from Sacchetti, 12 October 1621: “Quelli che di costà sono tornati quà hanno detto per le botteghe mille impertinenze, et hanno rovinato ogni cosa, et Dio voglia che non ci sia per esser da far assai, et anco cotesto Residente non deve haver scritto poco.” 57. MdP 3007, fol. 414r, from Sacchetti, 25 September 1621. 58. Information about this inventory is contained in a letter by Livia to the Avvogaria del comun, bound in MdP 5162, fol. 8r, dated 29 March 1638, referring to “l’inventario che con la presente produco, fatto di ordine dell’Ecc.mo Colleggio alla presenza delli Ill.mi S.ri sopra li monasterii di Monsignor Vicario Episcopale, et delli Ill.mi Sig.ri Cancellier Grande

notes to pages 268–269 421

Patavino, all’hora Secretario dell’Ecc.mo Cons. de X, de di 16 aprile 1624 nella cella di essa abbadessa con la sua assistenza et di altre monache.” 59. On the preconditions of pestilence, I used D. Sardi Bucci, “La peste del 1630 a Firenze,” Ricerche storiche 10 (1980): 49–92; as well as Daniela Lombardi, “1629–31: Crisi e peste a Firenze,” Archivio storico italiano 136 (1979): 3–50. The political conjuncture was explained long ago by Romolo Quazza in Mantova e Monferrato nella politica europea alla vigilia della guerra per la successione (1624–7) (Mantua: 1922), now updated in C. M. Belfanti and M. A. Romani, “Il Monferrato: una frontiera scomoda fra Mantova e Torino (1536–1707),” in C. Ossola et al., eds., La frontiera da stato a nazione. Il caso Piemonte (Rome: 1987), 113–145; as well as Daniela Frigo, “   ‘Small States’ and Diplomacy: Mantua and Modena,” in Daniela Frigo, ed., Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy: The Structure of Diplomatic Practice, 1450–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 160–161. 60. The biological origins of this plague are still debated. I compared S. Cohn and G. Alfani, “Households and Plague in Early Modern Italy,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 38 no. 2 (2007): 177–205; Mark Achtman et al., “Yersinia pestis, the cause of plague, is a recently emerged clone of Yersinia pseudotuberculosis,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96 no. 24 (23 November, 1999): 14043–14048. Other insight for this paragraph came from John Henderson, “   ‘La schifezza, madre di corruzione’: Peste e società a Firenze nella prima epoca moderna,” Medicina e Storia 2 (2001): 23–56; Idem, “Historians and Plagues in Pre-​Industrial Italy Over the Longue Durée,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences (2004), 481–499; and for the larger picture, William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1976). Plague measures are the subject of two entire books by Carlo M. Cipolla, Fighting the Plague in Seventeenth-​Century Italy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), and Faith, Reason, and the Plague in Seventeenth-​Century Tuscany, tr. Muriel Kittel (New York: Norton, 1981). 61. A good account of the “untori” episode is Carlo Cordero, La fabbrica della peste (Bari: Laterza, 1985), chaps. 1–2. 62. On which, Giulia Calvi, Storie di un anno di peste. Comportamenti sociali e immaginario nella Firenze barocca (Milan: Bompiani, 1984), part 2, chap. 3. In addition, Giovanni Baldinucci, Quaderno: peste, guerra e carestia nell’Italia del Seicento, ed. Brendan Dooley with notes by Barbara Marti Dooley (Florence: Polistampa, 2001), 190. 63. Baldinucci, Quaderno, 98. I also saw Roberta Menicucci, “Il viaggio di Maria Maddalena a Vienna: Politica e cerimoniale,” in Le donne Medici

notes to pages 270 –272 422

nel sistema europeo delle corti XVI–XVIII secolo: atti del Convegno internazionale, Firenze, San Domenico di Fiesole, 6–8 Ottobre 2005, Giulia Calvi and Riccardo Spinelli, eds., (Florence: Polistampa, 2008) I: 269–282. 64. Baldinucci, Quaderno, 87. 65. William R. Shea and Mariano Artigas, Galileo in Rome: The Rise and Fall of a Troublesome Genius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 163, and relevant bibliography. In addition, Michael H. Shank, “Setting the Stage: Galileo in Tuscany, the Veneto and Rome,” in Ernan McMullin, ed., The Church and Galileo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), chap. 3. 66. There is no thorough treatment of the grand duchy under Ferdinando II. Partial ones include the somewhat positive evaluation by Marcello Fantoni, La corte del granduca. Forma e simboli del potere mediceo fra Cinque e Seicento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1995), and the wholly negative one of Furio Diaz, Il Granducato di Toscana (Turin: UTET, 1976), 363–464; focused on stability is Jean-​Claude Waquet, “Le gouvernement des grands-​ducs (1609–1737),” in Florence et la Toscane, XIVe–XIXe siècles: Les dynamiques d’un état italien, eds. Jean Boutier, Sandro Landi, and Olivier Rouchon (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004), 91–104; a balanced view of the possibilities and obstacles, from a political and military standpoint, Niccolò Capponi, “Le Palle di Marte: Military Strategy and Diplomacy in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany under Ferdinand II de’ Medici (1621–1670),” The Journal of Military History, 68, no. 4 (2004): 1105–1141. 67. For here and below: MdP 5162, fol. 545r–v: “Si è ridotta quasi a non haver da viver, poi che essendoli bisogniato pagar di molti debiti e per non poter fare i fatti suoi da per se stessa gli è stato necessario stare alla mercede di quelli che hanno manggiato le sue entreate e robbe portate di Venezia.” 68. Some of the correspondence is in ASF, Misc. Med. 48, ins. 12, 17 January 1636, Celio da Seravezza to the Grand Duke. 69. Mentioned in the anonymous chronicle of Florence edited by Carlo Morbio, Storie dei municipii Italiani illustrate con documenti inediti (Milan: Onobono Manini, 1838), 4: 91. Evidence of his Galileism is in Le opere di Galileo Galilei. Edizione nazionale, 20 vols. (Florence: Barbera, 1890–1909), 17: 363, Fulgenzio Micanzio to Galileo, 31 July 1638: “È qui in Venetia il P.  F. Celio da Seravezza Capucino, persona che ho havuto gratia di conoscere con mio supremo gusto, perchè, oltre l’esser huomo di una bontà prudente, non superstitiosa, lui si scuopre grand’amico di V.  S. La quale pregando di riamarmi, come io le prego di tutto cuore

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c­ onsolatione, si conservi con l’allegrezza che può prendere dalla cognitione delle cose humane; e le bacio le mani.” 70. MdP 5162, fol. 3r, Fra Celio to the Grand Duke, 31 July 1638: “In vero Ser.mo Gran Duca credo che alla poverella li saranno usciti li mali humori del capo, et io mi obbligo per quello mi scrive lei del continuo, a farla fare tutto quello sarà di gusto a VAS e perche so quanto sia compassionevole e amorevole la suplico quanto di sopra assicurandola di certo, che sia per protarsi bene.” 71. MdP 5162, fol. 6r, Fra Celio to the Grand Duke, 7 August 1638: “Ricorro a lei e la prego a ottenere quanto di sopra per la povera sig.a Livia che spero di certo le cose passeranno bene, e quando Sua Altezza Serenissima mandasse alle volte la detta povera sig.a Livia in sua villa credo le sarebbe di grandissimo sollevamento.” 72. MdP 5162, fol. 3r, Fra Celio to the Grand Duke, 31 July 1638. 73. MdP 5162, fol. 4r, Fra Celio to the Grand Duke, 10 July 1638. 74. MdP 5162, fol. 7r, from Livia, dated “Fortezza Belvedere” 19 August 1638, possibly directed to the grand ducal secretary Giovanni Battista Gondi: “Desidero sapere da Vostra Signoria Illustrissima come mi ci ho a condure costà giù e in che maniera perche il padre mi scrive che io scriva a Vostra Signoria Illustrissima e si dica che mi mandi la carroza la qual cosa io come io non devo usare tale presuntione però la prego avisarmi.” 75. MdP 5162, fol. 61, from Francesco Pozzo, avvocato nel veneto foro: “Le monache di S. Marco et S. Andrea si scusano et presentano . . . ​doi fondamenti, l’uno di merito e l’altro di ordine. Il primo versa circa la quantità, poichè negano haver havuto quanto afferma essa Ill.ma Sig.ra con sue note et inventarii. Il secondo dell’ordine è che il monastero non sia tenuto a restituire quello ha stato fidato a monache private.” 76. I found Suor Laura mentioned in Flaminio Cornaro, Ecclesiae torcellanae antiquis monumentis nunc etiam primum editis illustratae (Venice: Pasquali, 1749), 3 parts, part 2, 212. 77. ASV, Coll., Not., reg. 96, fol. 135r, dated 7 January 1639. For this and the other indications from the relevant filze in the Notatorio section of the Collegio in Venice, I am indebted to Dr. Alessandra Sambo at the Archivio di Stato. 78. ASV, Coll., Not., reg. 96, c. 135r, 27 August, 1638: “Il povero monastero delle monache di S. Marco et S. Andrea di Murano, della cui strettezza e miseria n’ha gran parte Vostra Serenità facendollo ben spesso sovenire con le sue pie elemosine, vede al presente un total esterminio.” 79. MdP 5162, fol. 76r, Paolo del Sera, Venice, 6 October 1640.

notes to pages 277–281 424

80. MdP 1484, fol. 11r, Paolo del Sera to the grand ducal secretary Giovanni Battista Gondi: “Essendosi dopo penetrato, che l’aversario impruden­ tissimo ha operato senza commissario de superiori, e che perciò adesso si trova in grandissime afflizioni, credo che Dio Benedetto habbi operato così per il nostro meglio, poichè non solo e dalla nobiltà veneta e dalli ministri de principi e dal popolo tutto, viene esagerato che il residente Zati si sia in tutto governato prudentissimamente.” 81. MdP 5162, fol. 158r–159v, dated 18 October 1646. 82. MdP 5162, fol. 168r, Paolo del Sera, dated 1 February 1647. 83. MdP 5162, fol. 168v. 84. MdP 1484, fol. 13r, Del Sera to Gondi, 6 April 1647: “Basta solo che V.S.Ill. ma mi dica come doverò contenermi nel mandar costà le Gioie et ori recuperati; che subito l’esseguirò, et allora essa sig.ra me ne farà ricevuta.” 85. A rare example, evidently intercepted by Medici officials: MdP 5162, fol. 446r, Livia to don Antonio Montalvo, 8 November 1644: “Presento come Vostra Signoria Illustrissima è di partenza in breve per Napoli in sieme con la Ill.ma Sig.a sua moglie ma che detta Sig.a non paserà Roma mi pensai che avanti la sua partenza che Vostra Signoria Illustrissima mi favorise qua della sua presentia.” 86. Here Sommi Picenardi, “Don Giovanni de’ Medici,” Nuovo archivio veneto, n.s. 7, 25 (1907): 135, cites ASF, Comp. Relig. Soppresse da P. Leopoldo, 110, fols. 35r–38r. 87. MdP 5162, fol. 449r, mentioned in her last will, dated 20 November 1652: “Confesso e chiamo in testimonio il sig. Iddio che con grandissima mia mortificazione sono forzata a palesare qualmente dal sig. Francesco Maria Medici mio figlio sono stata malissimo trattata e ancora ingiuriata e insidiata nella vita, avendomi pubblicamente più volte chiamata con nome di strega e fattucchiera, per tale pubblicamente e calunniosamente per questo denunziata alla Santa Inquisizione, e sempre in ogni luogo pubblico e pubblicamente trattandomi con parole d’infamia e che solo a donne pubblicamente infami si convengono, quale lungo sarebbe il dire a parte, et è giunta a tale la perfidia di detto mio figliuolo verso di me che fino per privarmi di vita ha tentato con atto prossimo spararmi un’archibugiata, ecc.” 88. Donatella Lippi, Illacrimate sepolture: curiosità e ricerca scientifica nella storia delle riesumazioni dei Medici (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2006), 63.

notes to pages 282–287 4 25

8. Time and Memory 1. I rely here on the bibliography in Michael Bohr, “Die Villa del Poggio Imperiale und die Skizzenbücher des Architekten Diacinto Maria Marmi: Zur Bautypologie und Innenraumgestaltung Mediceischer Profanbauten um die Wende vom 17. zum 18. Jahrhundert,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 38 (1994): 337–418. 2. Il discorso del Sig.re Cosimo Baroncelli fatto a’ suoi figliuli dove s’intende la vita di Don Giovanni Medici figlio naturale del Gran Duca Cosimo Primo con la morte di Concino Concini e Dianora sua mogle e della Sig.ra Livia Vernazzi moglie del suddetto Don Giovanni de’ Medici, ed. Marina Macchio (Florence: Nicomp, 2009), chap. 7. Concerning Baroncelli, apart from M. Macchio’s introduction and notes, there is the entry by Roberto Cantagalli in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani 6 (1964): 435–436. 3. Il discorso del Sig.re Cosimo Baroncelli, 90. 4. I used: Il dispregio della corte e lode della villa del Reverendiss. Monsig. Antonio di Guevara (Brescia: 1602), “A’ lettori” (no pagination). I also consulted the dissertation on this work by L. A. Babilas, “Antonio de Guevara und sein Übersetzer Cosimo Baroncelli. Ein Stilvergleich,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Munich, 1963). 5. Concerning the genre, Mercanti scrittori: ricordi nella Firenze tra Medioevo e Rinascimento ed. Vittore Branca (Milan: Rusconi, 1986). 6. Il discorso del Sig.re Cosimo Baroncelli, 14. 7. Ibid., 86. 8. Ibid., 88. 9. Copies exist in: ASF, Miscellanea Medicea, 458 ins. 10; Miscellanea Medicea, 833bis, insert no. 20; Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Codice Capponi ms. 313, fols. 180–211; Florence, Biblioteca Moreniana, Moreni, ms. 22; Florence, Biblioteca Marucelliana, ms. C 372.9. 10. Cristoforo Finotti, In Funere Ioannis Medices ducis venetarum copiarum maximi oratio habita iussu principis et senatus in augustissimis dd Pauli et Ioannis aedibus iii cal sept 1621 (Venice: Pinelli, 1621), no pagination, but A4. 11. Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, codici Magl. cl. ix cod. 124, fols. 108r–110v. 12. Ibid., fols. 55r–61v. Concerning Strozzi as an academician, I consulted Silvio Adrasto Barbi, Un accademico mecenate e poeta, Giovan Battista Strozzi il giovane (Florence: Sansoni, 1900); and for his poetical work, Franco Fido, “L’America, primo canto di un poema inedito di Giovan Battista Strozzi il Giovane,” Studi secenteschi 23 (1962): 277–310.

notes to pages 288–291 426

13. Fausto Moisesso, Historia dell’ultima guerra del Friuli (Venice: Barezzi 1623), dedication, n.p. 14. Moisesso, Historia dell’ultima guerra, part 1, p. 1. 15. Biagio Rith di Colenberg, Commentari della guerra moderna passata nel Friuli e ne’ confini dell’Istria e di Dalmatia divisi in otto libri (Trieste: Antonio Turrini, 1629), 239. 16. “Venezia non e’ da guerra,” chapter by Francesca Tamburlini, 401. Paolo Sarpi’s views on “Emigliani” are discussed in Gaetano Cozzi, Venezia barocca. Conflitti di uomini e idee nella crisi del Seicento veneziano (Venice: Il Cardo, 1995), 164n. 17. Biagio Rith di Colenberg, Commentari, 156. 18. Ibid., 195. 19. Andrea Gamberini and Francesco Somaini, L’età dei Visconti e degli Sforza 1277–1535 (Skira, 2001), 21. Concerning the genre, Roberto Bizzocchi, Genealogie incredibili. Scritti di storia nell’Europa moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995). 20. Eugenio Gamurrini, Istoria genealogica delle famiglie nobili toscane et umbre, 1 (Florence: Nella Stamperia di Francesco Onofri, 1668), 158 et seq. 21. Gamurrini, Istoria genealogica, 189. 22. Opere di Filippo Baldinucci (Milan: Società tipografica de’Classici italiani, 1808–12), vol. 11, p. 346. Concerning the career and work of Baldinucci, I learned from Edward L. Goldberg, After Vasari. History, Art and Patronage in Late Medici Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 48–183, as well as from Baldinucci’s son, Francesco Saverio Baldinucci, whose biography is included in Filippo’s Vita di Gian Lorenzo Bernini, ed. Sergio Samek Ludovici (Milan: Edizioni del Milione, 1948), 31–64. Concerning seventeenth-​century historiographical trends, Caroline Callard, Le prince et la république: histoire, pouvoir et société dans la Florence des Médicis au XVIIe siècle, Collection Centre Roland Mousnier (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-​Sorbonne, 2007). 23. Opere di Filippo Baldinucci, vol. 10, 191. 24. Battista Nani, Historia della Repubblica Veneta (Bologna: 1680), pp.  55, 64–66, etc. On the tradition of public historiography, the classic is Gaetano Cozzi, “Cultura politica e religione nella ‘pubblica storiografia’ veneziana del Cinquecento,” Bollettino dell’Istituto di storia della società e dello stato veneziano 5–6 (1963–64): 215–294. With particular reference to Nani, Gino Benzoni, and Tiziano Zanato, eds., Storici e politici veneti del Cinquecento e del Seicento (Milan-​Naples: Ricciardi, 1982), 443–490; as well as the detailed entry by Dorit Raines in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 77 (2012).

notes to pages 291–295 427

25. Battista Nani, Historia, 66. 26. Vittorio Siri, Memorie recondite dall’anno 1601. Sino al 1640, Volume 5 (Lyons: Appresso Anisson e Posuel, 1679), 539. I discussed this and other similar works in The Social History of Skepticism. Experience and Doubt in Early Modern Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1999), 114–144. 27. Istoria civile del Regno di Napoli, ed. Antonio Marongiu, 7 vols. (Milan: Marzorati, 1970), 1: 25. For background to this interpretation and bibliography concerning enlightenment historiography, I refer to my entries, “Enlightenment Historiography” and “Pietro Giannone,” in D. R. Woolf et al., eds., The Encyclopedia of Historiography, 2 vols. (New York: Garland 1998), 284–86, 365–66. In addition, Chantal Grell, L’histoire entre erudition et philosophie: étude sur la connaissance historique à l’age des Lumi­­ ères (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), Joseph M. Levine, Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), and J.  G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, now in 5 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999– 2010), especially vol. 2, entitled Narratives of Civil Government, 21–162 and 369–402. 28. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 8 vols. (London: G. Cowie and Co., etc., 1825), vol. 8, chap 66. On the myth, James Hankins, “The Myth of the Platonic Academy of Florence,” Renaissance Quarterly 44 (1991): 429–475. 29. Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs, ed. René Pomeau, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1963), chap. 105. 30. On Galluzzi’s career, I consulted the entry by O. Gori Pasta, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani 51 (1998): 766–69 as well as A. M. Rao, Esuli. L’emigrazione politica italiana in Francia (1792–1802) (Naples: Guida, 1992). For the context, I read Jean-​Claude Waquet, Le Grand-​Duché de Toscane sous les derniers Médicis: essai sur le système des finances et la stabilité des institutions dans les anciens Etats Italiens (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1990). 31. For Galluzzi’s practices I consulted Silvia Baggio and Piero Marchi, Miscellanea medicea: Inventario, vol. 1: 1–200, Pubblicazioni degli archivi di stato, Strumenti 155 (Rome: Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, 2002), 3–32. 32. Riguccio Galluzzi, Istoria del Granducato di Toscana, vol. 5 (Capolago: Tipografia Helvetica, 1841), book 6, chap. 4, 152. 33. Ibid., book 6, chap. 6, 201–202. 34. Ibid., book 6, chap. 6, 208. 35. Ibid., book 6, chap. 6, 210.

notes to pages 296 –302 428

36. Mario Marcazzan, Le origini lombarde del Romanticismo Italiano (Milan: La Goliardica, 1967), chaps. 2–3. Also of interest concerning literary taste and cultural change, I found Gary Tomlinson, “Italian Romanticism and Italian Opera: An Essay in Their Affinities,” 19th-​Century Music 10, no. 1 (1986): 43–60. 37. Giovanni Rosini, La monaca di Monza: Storia del secolo XVII, 2 vols. (Paris: Baudry, 1935), 2: 191. 38. Ibid., 2: 192. 39. Ibid., 2: 197. 40. The Foreign Quarterly Review 4 (April–August 1829): 658. Some insight on Rosini is in Sergio Romagnoli, Manzoni e i suoi colleghi (Florence: Sansoni, 1984), part 2. 41. Domenico Maria Manni, Le veglie piacevoli: ovvero notizie de’ più bizzari e giocondi, vol. 1 (Florence: a spese di Gaspero Ricci da S. Trinita, 1815), 105. 42. Concerning the authorship, I consulted Giambattista Marchesi, Per la storia della novella italiana nel secolo XVII (Rome: Loescher, 1897), p. 136; and I manoscritti della Biblioteca moreniana, Vol. 1 (Florence: Galletti e Crocci, 1903), 505. 43. Manni, Le veglie piacevoli, 1: 106. 44. Elizabeth Fries Ellet, Poems: Translated and Original (Philadelphia: Key and Biddle, 1835), 13. For the literary aspects I defer to Oreste Macrì, Semantica e metrica dei Sepolcri del Foscolo, 2nd ed. (Rome: Bulzoni, 1995). Concerning the figure, Walter Binni, Ugo Foscolo: storia e poesia (Turin: Einaudi, 1982). 45. Domenico Moreni, Pompe funebri celebrate nell’Imperiale e Reale Basilica di S. Lorenzo dal secolo XIII (Florence: Nella Stamperia Magheri, 1827), from the unpaginated dedication to Pompeo Litta. 46. Moreni, Pompe funebri, iv. 47. Moreni, Serie d’autori di opere risguardanti la celebre famiglia Medici (Florence: Magheri, 1826), viii. 48. Moreni, Pompe funebri, vi. 49. Donatella Lippi, Illacrimate sepolture: curiosità e ricerca scientifica nella storia delle riesumazioni dei Medici (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2006), 36. 50. Antonio Zobi, Memorie economico-​politiche, o sia De’ danni arrecati dall’ Austria alla Toscana (Florence: Presso Grazzini, Giannini e c., 1860), pp.  161ff. For the context, Franz Pesendorfer, Zwischen Trikolor und Doppeladler: Leopold II. Grossherzog von Toskana, 1824–1859 (Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1987), as well as Harry Hearder, Italy in the Age of the Risorgimento (New York: Longman, 1983), chap. 3.

notes to pages 303–308 429

Donatella Lippi, Illacrimate sepolture, 35 Ibid., 35. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 65. G. Sommi Picenardi, “Esumazione e ricognizione delle ceneri dei Principi Medicei fatta nell’anno 1857,” Archivio storico italiano ser. 5, vols. 1–2 (1888): 335. 56. I have in mind such productions as La famiglia Sommi. Memorie e documenti di storia cremonese (Cremona: 1893); and Del Gran Priorato dell’ordine Gerosolimitano in Venezia (Venice: Tip. Visentini, 1892). 57. Guglielmo Enrico Saltini, Tragedie Medicee domestiche, 1557–87. Narrate sui documenti premessavi una introduzione sul governo di Cosimo I (Firenze: G. Barbèra, 1898), 194. 58. A. Gherardi in Archivio storico Italiano ser. 5, vol. 21 (1898): 218. More positive was the brief notice in Nuova antologia, 4th series, vol. 73 (157 of whole series) (1898): 759–760. 59. G. Sommi Picenardi, “Don Giovanni de’ Medici, governatore dell’esercito veneto in Friuli,” Nuovo archivio veneto, n.s. 7, 25 (1907): 133. 60. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Vite di uomini illustri e di uomini oscuri: la vita di Cola di Rienzo (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1927). 61. The interpretation here is influenced by John Woodhouse, Gabriele D’Annunzio: Defiant Archangel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 315–352. 62. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Prose di ricerca, ed. Annamaria Andreoli and Giorgio Zanetti (Milan: A. Mondadori, 2005), 2: 1415. Regarding the criticism, I consulted Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti, Invito alla lettura di Gabriele D’Annunzio (Milan: Mursia, 1982). 63. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Prose di ricerca, 2: 1416. 64. Apart from the sources below, concerning Pieraccini, Francesco Carnevale et al., eds., Gaetano Pieraccini: l’uomo, il medico, il politico (1864–1957), (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 2003). 65. The preliminary study was: A. Banchi and G. Pieraccini, Le leggi della eredità biologica ricercate nella stirpe de’ Medici; nota preventiva (Florence: L. Niccolai, 1914). 66. Francesco Carnevale and Alberto Baldasseroni, “Gaetano Pieraccini e la nascita della moderna medicina del lavoro in Italia,” Gaetano Pieraccini medico del lavoro: la salute dei lavoratori in Toscana all’inizio del XX secolo, ed. Francesco Carnevale and Gian Bruno Ravenni (Florence: Tosca, 1993), 43–67. 67. Ruth Ben-​Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 18–19, as well as, for this whole section, 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

notes to pages 308–313 430

Donatella Lippi, Illacrimate sepolture, chap. 3. For the background, also George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987). 68. On this aspect of his work, Roberto Maiocchi, Scienza italiana e razzismo fascista (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1999), chap.  7; as well as Francesco Cassata, Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-​Century Italy (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011), 111–113. 69. Here and below, Gaetano Pieraccini, La stirpe de’Medici di Cafaggiolo: saggio di ricerche sulla trasmissione ereditaria dei caratteri biologici, 3 vols. (Florence: Vallechi, 1924–1925), vol. 3, chap. 9. 70. Pieraccini, La stirpe de’Medici di Cafaggiolo, vol. 3, chap. 9. Concerning the influence of Lamarckian theory in Italy, Giuliano Pancaldi, Darwin in Italy: Science across Cultural Frontiers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 28, 65, 66. 71. Pieraccini, La stirpe de’Medici di Cafaggiolo, 3: 443. 72. Ibid. 73. On Pieraccini’s socialism, Giorgio Spini and Antonio Casali, Firenze (Rome: Laterza, 1986), 100–101, 117, 141. 74. William Alan Chapple, The Fertility of the Unfit (Melbourne: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1904), p. xiv. Pieraccini, La stirpe de’Medici di Cafaggiolo, 3: 458. 75. Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman, eds., The Bell Curve Debate: History, Documents, Opinions (New York: Random House/Times Books, 1995). 76. Pieraccini, La stirpe de’Medici di Cafaggiolo, 3: 461. 77. Ibid., 3: 462. 78. Ibid., 2: 229. 79. Ibid., 1: 13. 80. Lippi, Illacrimate sepolture, 112. 81. Ibid., 119. 82. Ibid., 127. 83. “Uccisi con l’arsenico: risolto il giallo dei Medici,” Corriere della Sera, 28 December 2006. 84. G. Fornaciari and R. Bianucci, “Francesco e Bianca: non fu arsenico— Ecco le prove!” Archeologia Viva 28 (2009): 78–81; G. Fornaciari, V. Giuffra, E. Ferroglio, and R. Bianucci, “Malaria Was ‘The Killer’ of Francesco I de’ Medici (1531–1587),” The American Journal of Medicine, 123 (2010): 568–569. 85. G. Fornaciari, A. Vitiello, S. Giusiani, and V. Giuffra, “The ‘Medici Project’: First Results of the Explorations of the Medici Tombs in Florence (16th–18th Centuries),” Paleopathology Newsletter 133 (2006): 22.

notes to pages 313–314 431

86. Guglielmo Enrico Saltini, Tragedie Medicee domestiche, 1557–87. Narrate sui documenti premessavi una introduzione sul governo di Cosimo I (Florence: G. Barbèra, 1898), 159–177. 87. Donatella Lippi and Gino Fornaciari, “Progetto di studio delle deposi­ zioni funerarie della famiglia Medici nella basilica di San Lorenzo in Firenze,” Pianeta Galileo: Atti (2004): 227–231.

Acknowledgments

The research and writing occurred during several employments, in widely diverse locations, thus increasing not only the enjoyment of the itinerary but also the time involved. From Florence, where I coordinated data gathering at the Medici Archive Project (MAP) and collected much of my original material, I voyaged northward to Bremen to help build the new Jacobs University. Years went by amid commitments of various kinds, and the Don Giovanni project looked to become my Moby Dick. Shortly after appointment to the faculty at University College in Cork (UCC), Ireland, with a wide array of Giovanni material already sent forth in journal articles, conference papers, and a source book, I welcomed the invitation to spend a semester in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Virginia (UVA). In the fine Virginia sun, not far from the library built by one of the freest spirits of American history, I realized that the book I had to write must combine the personal and the political, the mental and the physical, the emotional and the intellectual, the eye and the hand; and I discovered that my protagonist (like Fawn Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson) was not just one. With Livia now moving to the center, a first draft of A Mattress Maker’s Daughter took shape in just three months. The project on Giovanni the warlord, whatever that might be, would have to wait. I thank the staff and colleagues at all of these and several other institutions for providing support of all kinds, although I would like to single out

acknowledgments 434

the following, due to memories of special kindnesses: Edward Goldberg, Lisa Goldenberg Stoppato, Nick Capponi, Kelly Helmstuttler, Antonio Ricci, Fabrizio Nevola, Susanne Kubersky Piredda, Alessio Assonitis, Maurizio Arfaioli, Lisa Kaborycha, and Elena Brizio, all at the MAP; Ursula Frohne, Adalbert Wilhelm, and Max Kaase at Jacobs; Adrienne Ward at UVA; and David Cox, James Knowles, Dave Edwards, Melanie Marshall, and Pierre Hsieh at UCC. I have had the good fortune to enjoy the courtesy and support of friends and associates within major cultural institutions, including Francesco Martelli at the State Archives in Florence, Maria Mannelli at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, and Alessandra Sambo at the State Archives in Venice. Elsewhere I have received boons of various kinds from Elena Taddia of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Mario Infelise at the University of Venice, Ivan Gaskell at the Bard Graduate Center, and others too numerous to mention. Draft chapters were presented to audiences at the Renaissance Society of America, conferences in Venice and in Washington, at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, at the University of California in Merced, at the European University Institute in Florence, at Hughes Hall in Cambridge, at the Museo Bellini in Florence, and at UCC. In this last connection, to three successive generations of graduate students in the course on European Cultural History, I would like to offer my thanks for their comments and criticisms on the chapters assigned to them as suggested reading. For enthusiasm and generosity, I wish to thank Ed Muir editor of the I Tatti series, and, in various connections, Jim Hankins, Tony Grafton, and Gail Grant. Perhaps a few apologies are in order, especially in the Postscript. Of those who might justly take offense, in some cases precluded by time, I will only mention Natalie Davis, Carlo Ginzburg, Paul Ricoeur, Allan Megill, Hayden White, Lynn Hunt, Niall Ferguson, Barbara Rosenwein, Martha Nussbaum, Stanley Fish, Lauro Martines, Bruno Latour, Erving Goffman, James J. Dowd, Nicole R. Pallotta, Werner Heisenberg, Friedrich Nietzsche, Eduard Norden, Karl Marx, Walt Whitman, Mark Strand, Leopold von Ranke, R. G. Colling­wood, and the tradition of narrative history writing in German, French, English, and Italian. Writing historical prose is not a solitary act, despite the mythology that has grown up around it and the author’s name it eventually bears. Under the present editorial regime, publishers exercise a key function of providing that mirror whereby authors may view their productions from a more distant prospect in order to imagine the effect their words will have on those not compassionately predisposed to sanction what they write. In this connection I express my gratitude for an extraordinarily incisive and ultimately crucial anonymous reading from Harvard University Press, which, in the best style of academic publishing, provided a note of encouragement while reprehending the faults in an earlier version; I only hope this one is better.

Index

Accademia del Disegno, 20, 49 Achtman, Mark, 421 Acidini Luchinat, Cristina, 333 Acquaviva d’ Aragona, Andrea Matteo, 2º principe di Caserta, 47 Addington, Larry H., 362 Adrasto Barbi, Silvio, 425 Agnadello, 102, 114 Agostina Morosini, Suor, 250, 252 Ajmar-Wollheim, Marta, 352, 390, 394 Alberighi, Domenico, 198 Alberti, Leon Battista, 81 Albertus Magnus, 193 Albizi, Eleonora degli, 17, 19, 119, 218, 304, 305 Albo, Ascanio, 241 Albrecht of Austria, Archduke, 46, 76 Aldobrandini, Cardinal Pietro, 42 Aldrovandi, Ulisse, 24 Alessandri, Giovanni degli, 229 Alessio, Carlo, 380 Alfani, Guido, 347, 421 Alfieri, Vittorio, 388 Allegra, Luciano, 348

Allegrini, Francesco, 401 Allerston, Patricia, 401 Allori, Alessandro, 49 Allori, Cristofano, 196 Alterati, Academy of the, 36, 287 Altoviti family, 188 Amabile, Luigi, 336 Ambrose, Saint, 196 Ambrosoli, Federica, 346 Aminta, drama by Tasso, 36, 65 Ammanati, Bartolomeo, 20, 24 Ammirato, Scipione, 109, 264, 291, 365, 420 Amsterdam, 192 Andreas Cappellanus, 161 Andrews, James Bruyn, 352 Angiolini, Franco, 387, 405, 407 Antinori family, 9, 11 Antonazzi, Giovanni, 349 Antonelli, G., 383 Antonini, Francesco, 136 Antwerp, 6, 31, 38, 105, 108, 109 Apollonius of Rhodes, 55 Appadurai, Arjun, 386

index 436

Aragona, Tullia d’, 166 Aretino, Pietro, 159 Ariès, Philippe, 351, 369, 381 Ariosto, Lodovico, 36, 161 Aristotelians, 7, 60 Aristotle, 22, 37, 158, 166, 178, 214 Armada, Spanish, 29, 31, 109 Arno, river, 1, 13, 18, 55, 60, 185, 193 Arnolfo di Cambio, 34 Aronne, Mattia, 197 Artigas, Mariano, 422 Artimino, Medici villa in, 60, 187, 191, 192, 200 Ascension Day Ceremony, 103 Aschengreen Piacenti, Kirsten, 400, 417 Assereta, Margherita, 85 astrology, 58 Augustine, Saint, 176, 196 Avery, Charles, 343 Azzi Visentini, Margherita, 395 Babilas, Lydia Antonia Hiller, 425 Bacci, Andrea, 418 Badoer, Angelo, 341 Baernstein, Prudence Renée, 350 Baggio, Silvia, 427 Baglione, Michelangelo, 202 Baglioni, Orazio, 134, 135, 137, 138 Bagno a Ripoli, 187 Baiocchi, Angelo, 420 Baldacci, Antonio, 331 Baldasseroni, Alberto, 429 Baldini, Baccio, 19 Baldinucci, Filippo, 290, 356 Baldinucci, Francesco Saverio, 426 Baldinucci, Giovanni, 405, 421 Baldosa, Guglielmo della, 195 Baldus, 231 Balmas, Enea, 384 Banchero, Giuseppe, 350 Banchi, A., 429 Bandello, Matteo, 379 Barbaro, Francesco, 179

Barbary pirates, 114 Bàrberi Squarotti, Giorgio, 429 Barbieri, Bartolomeo de’, 179, 231 Barbolani di Montauto, Asdrubale, 341 Bargagli, Girolamo, 32 Barnes, Susan J., 351 Barocchi, Paola, 329, 339, 356, 393, 394 Baroncelli, Cosimo, 6, 51, 52, 108, 122, 144, 145, 154, 168, 213, 220, 234, 244, 282, 283, 285, 286, 311, 412 Barozzi, Nicolò, 341 Barroll, J. Leeds, 341 Barthes, Roland, 382, 402 Battaglia, Salvatore, 379 Battistella, Antonio, 367 Bauer, Oswald, 332 Becagli, Vieri, 407 Beccaria, Cesare, 388 Becchi, Egle, 351 Bedmar, Alfonso de la Cueva, Marquis of, 149–150 Behringer, Wolfgang, 347 Belfanti, C. M., 421 Bell, Quentin, 402 Bell, Rudolph M., 379 Bellavitis, Anna, 390 Bellinazzi, Anna, 408 Belvedere Fortress, 245, 246, 268 Bencini, Raffaele, 333 Benedetta Benedetti, Suor, 250, 252 Benedetto Blanis, 119, 142, 193, 240 Benedict, Philip, 337 Benes, Mirka, 395 Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, 429 Benigni, Paola, 407 Bennett, Judith M., 355 Benzoni, Gino, 344, 380, 419, 420, 426 Berchet, Guglielmo, 341 Berengo, Marino, 413 Berenson, Bernard, 389 Bergen op-Zoom, 31, 192 Berlan, Francesco, 373 Bernardi, Marco, 379

index 437

Bertelli, Pietro, 400 Bertelli, Sergio, 328, 331, 408 Berti, Luciano, 330 Bertini, Ferruccio, 379 Bertol, Elisabetta, 332 Besançon, 75 Bettarini, Rosanna, 339 Betti, Amalia, 329 Bettini, Pier, 274 Biagioli, Mario, 342–343 Bianucci, Raffaella, 430 Bigazzi, Francesco, 345 Bigazzi, Isabella, 401, 417 Binni, Walter, 428 Bisenzio river, 185 Bitossi, Carlo, 347, 351 Bizzocchi, Roberto, 426 Black, Christopher F., 353 Black, Jeremy, 362 Black, Robert, 348 Blair, Ann, 330 Blois, 32 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 5, 78, 213, 352 Boccazzi, Gaudenzio, 384 Bocskay Rebellion, 104, 137 Bohr, Michael, 425 Bollea, Luigi Cesare, 366 Bonfadio, Giacomo, 69, 347 Borea, E., 412 Borghese, Marcantonio, 98 Borghi, Giuliano, 236 Borghini, Raffaello, 187, 202, 389 Borsi, Franco, 331 Bortot, Simona, 415 Botero, Giovanni, 186, 365 Bottigheimer, Ruth B., 352 Bourdieu, Pierre, 386 Boutier, Jean, 328, 396, 422 Bouwsma, William J., 326, 362, 375, 376 Boyd, Barbara Weiden, 381 Boyle, Marjorie O’Rourke, 381 Bozzo Dufour, Colette, 347 Brackett, John K., 356, 406

Bragato, Giuseppe, 367 Branca, Vittore, 425 Braunfels, Wolfgang, 370 Briffa, Keith R., 347 Bril, Paul, 200 Bronzino, Agnolo di Cosimo, called, 195, 208, 210 Brown, Alison, 326 Brown, Howard Mayer, 329 Brown, Judith C., 360 Brown, Patricia Fortini, 390 Brown, Peter, 329 Bruni, Alessandro, 241 Bruni, Roberto, 367 Bucciantini, Massimo, 330, 342 Buda, 40, 46, 104 Buggiano, 302 Bujanda, Jesús Martínez de, 380, 419 Buonarroti, Michelangelo il giovane, 337 Buono, Francesco del, 84, 233 Buonsignori, Stefano, 59 Buontalenti, Bernardo, 5, 6, 7, 9, 20, 24, 25, 32, 34, 38, 42, 49, 59, 188, 190, 191, 197, 268 Burano, 207 Burattelli, Claudia, 345, 354, 356 Burckhardt, Jacob, 384 Burke, Peter, 347, 353, 389 Burr Litchfield, R., 390 Busdraghi, Paola, 379 Busignani, Alberto, 333 Butters, Suzanne B., 337, 395 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 350 Cabala, 7 Caccini, Giulio, 21, 43 Caimmi, Riccardo, 366, 367, 372, 373, 375 Callard, Caroline, 326, 328, 426 Callot, Jacques, 143 Calvi, Giulia, 331, 345, 351, 355, 360, 381, 389, 418, 421, 422 Camaldoli (San Salvatore, Florence), 224 Camerota, Michele, 330

index 438

Campanella, Tommaso, 39, 40 Campanini, Antonella, 389, 401 Campo di Rivalta, Genoa, 71 Campo San Giovanni e Paolo, Venezia, 52 Camporesi, Piero, 352 Canale (Kanal), 127, 128, 129 Canale, Giovanni, 241 Caneva, Caterina, 329, 337 Canissa (Nagykanisza), 45 Cantagalli, Roberto, 425 Canto dei Carnesecchi, Florence, 87 Canto del Pino, Florence, 87 Capellanus, Andreas, 379 Cappella dei Principi, Florence, 50, 290, 304 Cappello, Bianca. 11, 12, 23, 25, 29, 53, 197, 303, 313 Capponi, Captain Piero, 91 Capponi, Niccolò, 422 Capponi family, 9 Caravaggio, Michelangelo da, 200 Cardano, Girolamo, 22, Girolamo, 419 Carinthia, 113 Carlo Emmanuele, Duke of Savoy, 137 Carnevale, Francesco, 429 Carniola, 113 Caro, Annibale, 383 Caroso, Fabritio, 208, Fabritio, 400 Carroll, Andrew, 361 Casale, 63, 111 Casali, Antonio, 430 Casalini, Eugenio M., 394 Casini, Matteo, 328 Casino di San Marco, Florence, 58, 190 Cassata, Francesco, 430 Cassegliano, 132 Castanisci, Giovanni, 95 Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome, 247 Castello, Medici villa in, 17 Castello Sforzesco, Milan, 206 Castiglione, 38 Castiglione, Baldassarre, 189, 190, 390 Castiglione, Sabba da, 179 Cateau-Cambrésis, Peace of, 28

Caterina de’ Medici-Gonzaga, 57, 63, 91, 92, 103 Catherine of Genoa, 74 Catherine of Siena, 196 Catholic League, 41 Cato the Elder, 399 Cavallo, Sandra, 355 Cavriani, Filippo, 328 Ceccherelli, Antonio, 183, 184, 197, 240, 241 Celega, Laura, Suor, 252, 254 Celio da Seravezza, Fra, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 278 Cellesi, Sebastiano, 255 Cellini, Benvenuto, 247 Celsus, 22 Cerretani, via de’, Florence, 2 Cerreto, 185 Cervantes, Miguel de, 161, 380 Cesalpino, Andrea, 22 Cesare d’Este, Duke of Modena, 28, 111 Cesari, Paolo, 324 Chabot, Isabelle, 355, 390 Chappell, Miles L., 329 Chapple, William Alan, 309, 430 Chapron, Emmanuelle, 407 Charles Emmanuel I, Duke of Savoy, 103, 111, 112, 131 Charles IV, Duke of Lorraine, 270 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 76, 113 Chartier, Roger, 380 Chastel, André, 367 Chateau d’If, 40, 48 Chauvineau, Hélène, 331 Chemello, Adriana, 349, 376 Chiabrera, Gabriello, 43, 145, 374 Chiarini, Marco, 389 Chieppio, Annibale, 93 Chimenti, Jacopo, 42, 210 Chittolini, Giorgio, 404 Chojnacka, Monica, 355 Chojnacki, Stanley, 354, 381 Choné, Paulette, 374 Cicero, 161

index 439

Cicogna, Emmanuele Antonio, 419 Cigoli, Lodovico Cardi, called il, 20, 49 Cimabue, 21 Cinchona bark, 31 Cinelli Calvoli, Giovanni, 356 Cini, Francesco, 55 Cinque Terre, 84 Cioli, Andrea, 243, 245, 272 Cipolla, Carlo M., 405, 421 Ciriacono, Salvatore, 399 Clancomare (Kiskomárom), 45 Clement VIII, 45 Clunas, Craig, 386 Cochrane, Eric, 326, 329, 334, 420 Coeckelberghe-Duetzele, Karl Heinrich Joseph Ritter von, 336 Cognasso, Francesco, 413 Cola di Rienzo, 305 Colleone, Bartolomeo, 52 Colombe, Lodovico delle, 60 Colombo, Cristoforo, 75 Colonna, Francesco, Prince of Palestrina, 47 Concini, Concino, 6, 51, 52, 425 Confidenti, theater company, 64, 90, 204 Coniglio, Giuseppe, 375 Connell, William J., 384 Contarini, Nicolò, 125, 131, 139 Conti, Ferdinando, 199 Contini, Alessandra, 325, 360, 405, 408 Continisio, Chiara, 365 Cooper, Donald, 394 Cooper, John M., 384 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 22 Corazzini, Giuseppe Odoardo, 333 Cordero, Carlo, 421 Cornaro, Primicerio, 255 Corpus Domini procession, Genoa, 68 Correr Museum, Venice, 147, 262 Corsica, 20 Coryat, Thomas, 208, 400 Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 24, 49, 53, 55, 57, 58, 60, 63, 65,

90, 91, 92, 93, 96, 108, 114, 118, 127, 144, 145, 154, 157, 166, 168, 182, 185, 192, 199, 202, 208, 211, 218, 223, 228, 229, 230, 234, 237, 244, 261, 282, 283, 285, 303, 304, 305, 308, 313 Cosimo II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 53, 55, 57, 63, 65, 87, 91, 98, 106, 110, 112, 114, 118, 120, 202, 211, 223, 226, 229, 240, 247, 295, 301 Cotta, Irene, 331 Council of Ten, Venice, 150, 252 Council of Trent, 82, 83, 93 Court of Wards, 206, 224, 229, 234, 235, 244, 283 Cozzi, Gaetano, 362, 367, 372, 373, 419, 426 Cozzi, Luisa, 367, 373 Crawford, Katherine, 379 Cresti, Carlo, 340 Cristina of Lorraine, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, 8, 32, 41, 54, 97, 165, 217, 245, 248, 258, 260, 264, 271, 295 Croatia, 115, 117, 148 Croll, Oswald, 194 Crombie, Alistair C., 330 Crouzet, Denis, 337 Crusca Academy, 36, 298 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 390 Cunningham, Andrew, 382 Cunningham, Hugh, 351 Curtis-Wendlandt, Lisa, 383 Custos, Dominicus, 401 Cybo, Marzia, 85 D’Addario, Arnaldo, 383, 387 D’Amelia, Marina, 376 D’Ancona, Alessandro, 352 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 305, 307, 429 D’Elia, Anthony, 381 Da Lezze, Benedetto, 115 Da Molin, Giovanna, 354 Da Mosto, Andrea, 419 Dagnino, A., 346 Dal Ponte, Leandro, 262

index 440

Dampierre, Henri du Val de, 123 Dandelet, Thomas J., 347, 363, 388 Daru, Pierre Antoine, 375 Darwin, Charles, 308 Daston, Lorraine, 330 Davanzato Poli, Doretta, 402 Davidson, N. S., 347 Davies, Timothy, 347 Davignon, René, 380 Davin, Anna, 389 Day of the Dupes, 270 De Bellis, Carla, 418 De Bellis, Daniela, 388 De Carlo, Salvatore, 331 De Caro, Raffaele, 382 De Ceglia, Francesco Paolo, 343 De Roover, Raymond, 387 De Rosa, Salvatore, 331 De Vries, Jan, 347 Dean, Trevor, 406 Debus, Allen, 353 Defenestration of Prague, 150 Del Buono, Francesco, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88 Del Negro, Piero, 362 Del Piazzo, Marcello, 383 Del Sera, Paolo, 275, 276, 277, 278 Del Turco Giovanni, 397 Delaney, Carol, 351 Delfino, Giuseppe, 353 Della Rovere, Francesco, 270 Delle Colombe, Lodovico, 60 Dennis, Flora, 352, 390, 394 Dewald, Jonathan, 347, 380 Di Vittorio, Antonio, 367 Diaz, Furio, 326, 330, 422 Dionisio da Piacenza, Don, 350 Dionisotti, Carlo, 381 Dioscorides, 22, 261 Discourse on Floating Bodies, by Galileo Galilei, 61 Distelberger, Rudolf, 330 Doberdò, 137 Docciolini, Marco, 332

Doglioni, Giovanni Nicolo, 292 Dolce, Lodovico, 73, 171, 261 Donati, Claudio, 380 Doni, Antonfrancesco, 162, 380 Dooley, Brendan, 324, 332, 342, 343, 349, 353, 357, 361, 370, 376, 379, 380, 392, 405, 415, 421, 427 Douglas, Mary, 386 Drake, Stillman, 335, 342 Dubost, Jean-François, 341 Ducal Palace, Venice, 93, 120, 136 Duchesne, Andre, 382 Duffy, Christopher, 364 Dumas, Alexandre, 40 Dinant, 51 Dunkirk, 46 Dutch Republic, 28, 104, 121 Dutch, 28, 46, 103, 104, 107, 114, 121, 126, 130, 132, 134, 137, 143, 144, 150, 215, 291 Eamon, William, 418 Earle, Rebecca, 376 Edict of Nantes, 41 Edict of St. Cloud, 300 Eisenbichler, Konrad, 329 Ejrnaes, Mette, 406 Eleonora de’ Medici, duchess of Mantua, 62 Eleonora de Toledo, 208, 303, 313 Elias, Norbert, 386 Elisabeth of Lorraine, Duchess of Bavaria 196 Ellet, Elizabeth F., 299, 428 Elliott, J. H., 419 Ellis, Lloyd H., 389 Emigliani, Pomponio, 142, 289, 373 Empoli, 185 England, 28, 51 English Channel, 104 Enrico Saltini, Guglielmo, 429, 431 Erasmus, Desiderius, 52, 105, 109, 363 Erasmus of Narnia, 52

index 441

Erizzo, Francesco, 116, 122, 123, 131, 139, 288 Ertz, Klaus, 397 Essen, Léon van der, 333 Este, Don Luigi d’, 141 Este wedding in 1608, 61 Esztergom, 76 Evangelisti, Pompilio, 209 Evangelisti, Silvia, 415 Evans, Joan, 418 Evans, Peter, 407 Evans, R. J. W., 330 Faa di Bruno, Camilla, 62, 63, 92 Fabbri, Paolo, 345 Fabbruzzi, Lazzaro, 129 Fabiani Giannetto, Raffaella, 396 Fabricius ab Aquapendente (Girolamo Fabrizi d’Acquapendente), 165 Fabris, Dinko, 329 Fanfani, Pietro, 337 Fantini, Maria Pia, 376 Fantoni, Marcello, 326, 422 Fara (Farra d’Isonzo), 117, 132, 138, 144, 162, 167, 172, 173, 175, 177 Fara, Amelio, 333, 336, 390, 413 Faranda, Franco, 329 Farnese, Alessandro, 28, 104 Fasano Guarini, Elena, 328, 340, 406, 407 Fatovic, Clement, 407 Favaro, Antonio, 335, 342 Felloni, Giuseppe, 347 Ferdinand, Archduke of Inner Austria, Holy Roman Emperor, 62, 112, 113, 114, 131, 148, 150, 289 Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor, 76 Ferdinand Karl, Archduke of Austria, 53 Ferdinando I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 11, 12, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 42, 47, 49, 52, 57, 61, 63, 87, 93, 110, 187, 191, 192, 193, 195, 210, 211, 223, 228, 230, 236, 268, 269, 271, 285, 294, 301, 313

Ferdinando II de’ Medici, Grand Duke, 210, 222, 246, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 280, 284 Ferdinando I Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua and Montferrat, 62, 63, 64, 91, 92, 103, 111, 231 Ferdinando III of Habsburg-Lorraine, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 301 Ferguson, Margaret W., 360 Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, 332, 351 Ferrante, Lucia, 357 Ferraro, Joanne, 349, 358 Ferroglio, E., 430 Ferrone, Siro, 344, 345 Ficino, Marsilio, 165, 187, 261 Fido, Franco, 425 Filangieri, Gaetano, 388 Filippini, Nadia Maria, 352 Findlen, Paula, 330, 331, 386, 417 Finotti, Cristoforo, 286, 425 Finucci, Valeria, 344 Fiorin, Alberto, 352 Firpo, Luigi, 336, 388 Fiume, 148 Fiume, Silvana, 353 Flanders, 2, 6, 7, 28, 29, 31, 32, 46, 47, 51, 76, 88, 104, 108, 111, 140, 145, 192, 263, 270, 285, 291 Flandrin, John-Louis, 370 Flavio. See Scala, Flaminio Florence, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 17, 18, 20, 22, 23, 26, 29, 32, 34, 38, 42, 49, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 81, 87, 90, 91, 92, 97, 98, 109, 110, 112, 119, 142, 143, 153, 161, 165, 171, 172, 174, 179, 183, 184, 185, 186, 190, 191, 192, 196, 198, 199, 202, 204, 205, 213, 214, 216, 217, 218, 219, 222, 223, 224, 226, 227, 230, 232, 234, 240, 245, 246, 247, 251, 254, 255, 262, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 275, 278, 282, 283, 284, 287, 290, 291, 293, 294, 296, 297, 299, 300, 302, 304, 306, 309, 311, 312, 315, 317

index 442

Florentine Academy, 36 Florentine Camerata, 21, 43, 55 Florimondo, Galeazzo, 178, 384 Follini, Vincenzo, 332 Fonte, Moderata, 73, 349 Fonte Moroso, 68 Formichetti, Gianfranco, 418 Formiconi, Pietro, 229 Forniciari, Gino, 313, 430 Forte del Bosco, 127 Fortezza da Basso, Florence, 32 Fortezza Nuova in Leghorn, 38 Fortress of San Miniato, 245 Foscolo, Ugo, 299 Foucault, Michel, 366, 413 Fragnito, Gigliola, 380 France, 6, 9, 37, 41, 51, 52, 57, 111, 139, 228, 265, 270, 285, 290, 293, 295, 300 Francesca Priuli, Suor, 276 Francesco di Vieri, 24 Francesco I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 11–14, 19, 20, 23–26, 28, 29, 34, 41, 42, 51, 53, 75, 190, 193, 197, 226, 294, 303, 313 Francesco IV Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, 53, 103, 111 Francesco Negri Bassanese, 352 Francesco Vendramin, Cardinal, Patriarch of Venice, 179, 231 Francis of Assisi, Saint, 188 François, Jean, 349 Frankopan, Wolfgang, Count of Trsat, 115, 116, 144 Frantz, David O., 378 Frati, Ludovico, 331 Fravega, Marietta, 85 French, Roger, 382 Frezza, Girolamo, 349 Frick, Carole Collier, 401 Frigo, Daniela, 421 Friuli, 4, 61, 62, 63, 90, 100, 112, 116, 118, 120, 124, 125, 131, 135, 137, 140, 141, 143, 147, 149, 150, 151, 169, 171, 172, 203, 238, 261, 287, 288, 290, 291, 305, 318

Froide, Amy M., 355 Fucecchio, 185 Fuc  ˇíková, Elisha, 330 Füssel, Marian, 363 Futurists, 306 Gabelchover, Wolfgang, 418 Gabriella Zarri, 405, 415 Gaddi, Mauro, 367, 368 Gaeta Bertelà, Giovanna, 356, 393, 394 Gagliano, Marco da, 61 Galasso Calderara, Estella, 342, 345, 406, 417 Galen, 22 Galetti, Giovanni, 170 Galigai, Leonora, 51 Galilei, Galileo, 7, 9, 21, 22, 37, 38, 39, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 107, 130, 157, 231, 251, 270, 272, 286, 300 Galilei, Vincenzo, 21 Gallo, Agostino, 205 Galluzzi, Jacopo Riguccio, 293 Galluzzi, Paolo, 343, 390 Galluzzi, Riguccio, 427 Gambuti, Alessandro, 333 Gamurrini, Eugenio, 289, 426 Garber, Daniel, 330 Garbero Zorzi Elvira, 333 Gargani, Gargano, 331 Garzoni, Tommaso, 346 Gaskell, Ivan, 403 Gasparo, Sandra, 387 Gauchat, Patritius, 404 Gavazzeni, Franco, 336 Geber, 194 Gebhardt, Carl, 382 Geiger, Angelika, 372 Geltner, Guy, 413 Genna, Giuseppe Enrico, 311 Genoa, 4, 56, 67, 69, 72, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 86, 87, 89, 94, 164, 196, 232, 233, 234, 235, 239, 240, 242

index 4 43

Gentilcore, David, 353 George, Saint, 196 Gherardi, A., 429 Gherardini, Niccolo, 38, 335 Gherardo Silvani, 290 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 188 Giacomini Tebalducci, Lorenzo, 334 Giambologna (Jean de Boulogne), 20, 87, 192 Giambologna, 87 Gian Gastone de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 313 Giannone, Pietro, 292 Giavarino (Gyór), 40 Gibbon, Edward, 292, 293, 427 Ginzburg, Carlo, 353, 389 Gioffredi Superbi, Fiorella, 334 Giorgione, 180, 200 Giovan Battista Strozzi, 13, 14, 287 Giovanna d’Austria, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, 25 Giovannozzi, Delfina, 382 Giuffra, Valentina, 430 Giunti printing firm, 36 Giusiani, Sara, 430 Giusti, Renato, 362 Giustiniani, Francesco, 127 Giustiniani, Giovanni Agostino, Doge of Genoa, 69 Giustiniani, Pompeo, 106, 110, 112, 116, 117, 119, 121, 123, 126 Glauberman, Naomi, 430 Gnirs, Anton, 370–372 Godart, Louis, 393 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 296, 311 Goffman, Erving, 390 Goldberg, Edward L., 344, 373, 399, 405, 426 Goldstein, Joshua S., 368 Goldthwaite, Richard, 386, 388 Gontero, Valérie, 418 Gonzaga, Maria, Princess, 111 Gordon, Donald J., 407 Gori Pasta, Orsola, 427

Gorizia, 113, 114, 117, 121, 122, 127, 131, 132, 134, 135, 143, 289 Gouk Penelope, 330 Gradisca, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 121, 126, 127, 128, 131, 132, 134, 137, 138, 139, 140, 143, 145, 166 Granara, Battista, 66, 70, 81, 84, 94, 95, 96, 98, 231, 232, 235, 237, 241 Grand Canal, Venice, 61, 202, 203 Grassina, 187 Gratian, 244 Gratz, 97 Grave in North Brabant, 192 Grayson, Cecil, 354 Graziosi, Elisabetta, 350 Graziosi, Marina, 349 Greco, Giovanni, 404 Greenblatt, Stephen, 390 Gregori, Mina, 338 Grell, Chantal, 427 Grendi, Edoardo, 346, 347 Grendler, Paul F., 348 Grimaldi, Girolamo, Prince of Gerace, 94 Grimaldi family, 68 Grimani, Antonio, 219 Gritti, Piero, 139 Gross, Daniel M., 379 Grossetto, 38 Grotius, Hugo, 338 Gualbert, John, St., 196 Gualdo, Count Nicola, 127, 129 Guarini, Giovanni Battista, 42, 45 Guasti, Cesare, 334 Guevara, Antonio de, 284 Guicciardini, Francesco, 9, 105, 288, 293, 298 Guicciardini, Piero, 98 Guise family, 41 Habsburgs of Graz, 113 Hackenbroch, Yvonne, 417 Hahlweg, Johann, 371 Hale, John Rigby, 326, 362, 367 Hallwich, Hermann, 369

index 444

Hämmerle, Christa, 376 Hammer-Purgstall, Joseph Freiherr von, 336 Hankins, James, 382, 427 Hanlon, Gregory, 332 Hanseatic ports, 69 Harness, Kelley Ann, 418 Harrach, Karl von, 149 Harris, Dianne, 395 Haskell, Francis, 389 Haugen, Kristine Louise, 384 Haywood, Eric, 390 Hearder, Harry, 428 Hedges, Chris, 362 Helbing, Mario, 330 Henderson, John, 421 Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, 57 Henry II, King of France, 32 Henry IV, King of France, 37, 40, 41, 51, 111, 192 Hercules and the Centaur, sculpture by Giambologna, 87 Hermes Trismegistus, 194 Hippocrates, 22, 261 Hocquet, Jean-Claude, 367 Hoeven, Marco van der, 371 Holland, 69 Homer, 105 Hoppe, Ilaria, 345, 360 Horace, 37 Howard, Deborah, 348 Howarth, David, 332 Hufton, Olwen, 346 Hughes, Aaron W., 382 Huguenots, 41 Hungary, 40, 48, 114, 117, 123, 137, 148, 192, 285 Hunt, Dixon, 395 Ilarione of Genoa, 74, 349 Imhof, Kurt, 363 Impey, Oliver R., 330 Insel, Thomas R., 382

Isherwood, Baron, 386 Isonzo, river, 127, 133 Ivetic, Egidio, 367 Jacob de Gheyn, 126 Jacoby, Russell, 430 Jacopo Peri, 42, 61 Jaeger, Werner, 417 Jardine, Lisa, 386 Jean de Boulogne. See Giambologna Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, 308 John the Baptist, St., 196 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 352, 400, 401 Joppi, Vincenzo, 372 Julia, Dominique, 351 Kamen, Henry, 340 Kann, Robert A., 336, 363, 367 Karst, 116 Keizer, Pieter, 407 Kendrick, Robert L., 415 Kent, Dale V., 379, 387 Kent, Francis W., 387 Kepler, Johannes, 137 Killerby, Catherine Kovesi, 388, 401 King, Donald, 393 King, Margaret L., 369, 385 Kingery, W. David, 386 Kirk, Thomas, 347 Kirshner, Julius, 326, 328, 408 Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, 355 Klopp, Charles, 413 Knights of St. John in Malta, 114 Kuehn, Thomas, 346 Kunzle, David, 391 Lafrery map of Genoa, 72 Lagerlöf, Margaretha Rossholm, 396 Lampeggio, 187 Landi, Sandro, 422 Lando, Antonio, 130, 134, 139 Landolfi, Domenica, 327, 333, 334, 344, 345, 354, 356

index 4 45

Langedijk, Karla, 401 Langheri, Luigi, 328, 331, 333 Laven, Mary, 415 Lawrance, Jeremy, 365 Le Macine. See Villa “Le Macine” Le Selve, Salviati villa, 60 Lecco, Margherita, 379 Leghorn, 34, 38, 45, 272 Lehmann, Hartmut, 347 Lensi Orlandi, Giulio, 330 Leonardi, Camillo, 261 Leonardo da Vinci, 117, 185, 187, 191, 206 Leone Ebreo, 164, 382 Leopardi, Giacomo, 296 Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 302 Lepanto, battle of 13, 261 Levi Pisetzky, Rosita, 402 Levine, Joseph M., 427 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 353 Ligozzi, Jacopo, 20 Lippi, Donatella, 313, 332, 424, 429, 430 Lippi, Lorenzo, 323 Lipsius, Justus, 109, 126 Litchfield, R. Burr, 328, 387, 388, 407, 408 Lombardi, Daniela, 406, 421 Lombardy, 46, 102 Lombroso, Cesare, 307 Lomellini family, 68 Long War, 104 Lonie, I. M., 382 Lord, Carnes, 389 Loriga, Sabrina, 353 Lorini, Buonaiuto, 122, 370 Lorraine, 143, 186, 229, 301, 303 Low Countries, 46, 51, 104, 109, 195 Lowe, Kate J. P., 406, 415 Lucca, 87 Lucinico (Lucinis), 117, 121, 123, 127, 129, 132 Luhmann, Niklaus, 382

Luti, Filippo, 327, 390 Lynch, Christopher, 370 Macchio, Marina, 325, 341, 412, 425 MacDougall, Elisabeth Blair, 396 MacGregor, Arthur, 330 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 19, 102, 109, 124, 125, 264, 293, 300, 370 Mack-Andrick, Jessica, 392 Mackenney, Richard, 346, 375 Madonna of Impruneta, 269 Maffei, Matteo, 236, 237 Magalotti, Antonio, 237 Magnani, Lauro, 351 Mahon, Denis, 389 Maiocchi, Roberto, 430 Malacarne, Giancarlo, 344 Malanima, Paolo, 347, 387, 388, 406 Malaspina, Alessandro, 107 Malespini, Celio, 25 Mallett, Michael, 326, 362 Mamone, Sara, 338 Mancini, Franco, 400 Mancini, Sandra, 384 Mann, Golo, 372 Mann, Nicholas, 326 Manni, Domenico Maria, 298, 356, 428 Mannori, Luca, 328, 407 Mansfield, Harvey, 370 Mantua, 28, 36, 40, 53, 64, 65, 92, 97, 103, 111, 137, 140, 228, 231 Mantua Succession War, 110 Manzoni, Alessandro, 99, 268, 297 Marabotto, Cattaneo, 350 Marcazzan, Mario, 428 Marcenaro, Marco, 347 Marchesi, Giambattista, 428 Marchetti, Pandolfo, 229, 243 Marchetto, Giuliano, 408, 411 Marchi, Piero, 427 Margaret of Austria, Queen of Spain, 3, 76, 104

index 446

Margaret of Savoy, Duchess of Mantua and Montferrat, 53, 111 Mari, Francesco, 332 Maria de’ Medici, Queen of France, 6, 41, 51, 52, 111, 196, 210, 270 Maria Maddalena of Austria, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, 8, 53, 65, 88, 95, 96, 97, 114, 144, 145, 210, 211, 217, 248, 258, 259, 269, 282, 295, 303 Maria of Austria, Empress, 75 Maria Raugei, Anna, 384 Mariano, 116, 123, 124, 158, 160, 166, 178 Marienetta, Barbara, 85 Marina, 144 Marini, Domenico, Bishop of Genoa, 95 Marino, Giambattista, 159, 378 Marino, John A., 347, 363, 388 Marongiu, Antonio, 427 Marradas, don Balthasar de, 121, 135, 137, 138 Marri, G., 336 Marseilles, 41, 45 Martelli, Camilla, 17, 18 Martelli, Francesco, 360, 405, 418 Martelli, Mario, 399 Martelli, Vincenzo, 2 Marti Dooley, Barbara, 421 Martignone, Vercingetorige, 336 Martin, John, 363, 375, 384 Martinengo, Giovanni, 132 Martines, Lauro, 386 Marx, Karl, 106, 364 Marzano, Captain Marc Antonio, 127, 128 Masini, Sergio, 367 Massa, 38, 87 Massa, Angelo, 348 Massimi, Cav. Lodovico 106 Mastellone, Salvo, 341 Mateo di Giorgio, 21 Mathiesen, Thomas J., 329 Matthews, John A., 347

Matthias, Archduke of Austria and later Holy Roman Emperor, 40, 45, 113, 118, 131 Mattingly, Garrett, 332 mattress making, 71 Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, 107, 125 Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor, 113 Maylender, Michele, 334 Mazzoldi, Leonardo, 362 McCants, Anne E., 347 McLaren, Angus, 379 McMullin, Ernan, 422 McNeill, William H., 421 Medea, 116 Medici, Cardinal Leopoldo de’, 303 Medici, Cosimo de’, the Elder, 9, 10, 292 Medici, Don Antonio de’, 11, 29, 40, 42, 53, 58, 61, 190, 226, 292 Medici, Don Carlo de’ 165 Medici, Don Francesco de’, 110, 111 Medici, Don Lorenzo de’, 228, 230, 236, 244, 258, 269, 284 Medici, Don Pietro de’, 4, 11, 230 Medici, Eleonora de’, daughter of Ferdinando I, 110 Medici, Francesco de’, Prince, 269 Medici, Garzia de’, 305, 313 Medici, Gian Carlo de’, Prince, Cardinal, 269 Medici, Giovanni de’ (delle Bande Nere), 10, 14, 102, 308 Medici, Giovanni Francesco Maria de’, 206, 219, 229, 230, 234, 279, 280, 283, 284, 303, 317 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 165, 204, 292, 308, 311 Medici, Prince Leopoldo de’, 269 Medici family, 8–10, 18, 20, 54, 65, 92, 94, 98, 180, 181, 203, 215, 218, 227, 228, 230, 248, 272, 274, 279, 282, 286, 292, 294, 301, 307, 309 Medioli, Francesca, 415

index 4 47

Meek, Christine, 349 Mei, Girolamo, 21 Melzi, Lodovico, 108 Menchini, Carmen, 326, 328 Mendoza y Velasco, Juan de, 112 Menicucci, Roberta, 345, 421 Merkel, Ingrid, 353 Merlin, Pierpaolo, 362 Merna, 135 Merola, Alberto, 366 Mews, Constant J., 382 Miccoli, Giovanni, 404 Michael of Wallachia, 104 Michelangelo Buonarroti, 20, 21, 32, 36, 95, 187, 196, 198, 202, 227, 228, 247, 300, 301, 302, 306, 311 Milan, 270 Millen, Ronald Forsyth, 338 Miller, Daniel, 386 Millocca, Francesco, 351 Millon, Henry A., 333 Minucci, Paolo, 323 Misericordia, Arciconfraternita della, Florence, 5 Moisesso, Faustino, 124, 126, 127, 128, 133, 134, 147, 148, 223, 288, 289, 366, 375 Molà, Luca, 394, 401 Molho, Anthony, 350, 354, 408 Molmenti, Pompeo, 401 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 371 Momper, Joos de, 200 Monfalcone, 115, 116, 132, 144 Montaigne, Michel de, 24, 176, 177 Montalvo, Don Garzia di, 2, 4, 5, 96, 214, 217, 219, 220, 221, 234, 248, 316 Montanari, Massimo, 370 Monte, Guidobaldo del, 38 Montero Reguera, José, 380 Monterosso, 84 Montferrat, 62, 63, 64, 111 Montughi, 67, 90, 184, 199, 202, 215, 234, 242, 245, 247, 255, 269, 272, 273, 279, 280, 297, 299, 306

Morabito, Raffaele, 352 Morandi, Orazio, 58 Morbio, Carlo, 422 Morelli, Giovanni di Pagolo, 285 Morelli di Schönfeld, Carlo, 367 Moreni, Domenico, 300, 301, 323, 340, 428 Morienus, 194 Moronato, Stefania, 402 Morrogh, Andrew, 333 Moschenizza (Mošc  ´enice), 117 Motley, John Lathrop, 364 Mout, Nicolette, 330 Muchembled, Robert, 381 Muir, Edward, 353, 367, 370, 372, 420 Mulryne, J. R., 351 Murano, 148, 182, 204, 205, 206, 208, 216, 217, 238, 239, 245, 248, 250, 253, 255, 262, 267, 273 Muraro, Maria Teresa, 400 Muratori, Ludovico Antonio, 389 Murrin, Michael, 379 Musacchio, Jacqueline, 400 Mussolini, Benito, 311 Muzio, Girolamo, 184, 186 Muzzarelli, Maria Giuseppina, 389, 401 Nadasti (Nádasd), 45 Nagler, Alois Maria, 337, 342 Najemy, John M., 406 Nani, Battista, 291, 426 Napoleon Bonaparte, 299 Napolitano, Michele, 329 Nassau, William Louis of, 126 Nassau-Siegen, Jan VII of, 126, 130 Nassau-Siegen, Johan Ernst of, 126, 130, 132, 134, 291 Negri, Giulio, 328 Negri of Bassano, 77 Nelson, James W., 382 Niccoli, Ottavia, 348, 349 Niceforo, Alfredo, 310 Nico Ottaviani, Grazia, 377

index 448

Nicoll, Allardyce, 352 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 307 Nieuport, battle of 125 Nizza della Paglia, 112 Nunhes, Dr., 31 Nuovo, Isabella, 390 Nussbaum, Martha C., 384 Nys, Ernest, 365 O’Malley, Michelle, 386, 403 Óbuda, 40 Oettinger, Edouard-Marie, 405 Ogilvie, Brian W., 330 Ograješek, Suzana, 329 Olmi, Giuseppe, 330 Oresko, Roberto, 362 Orsini, Don Virginio, 42 Ossola, Carlo, 421 Ostend, siege of, 7, 46, 51, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 112, 125, 190, 192 Osuna, Pedro Téllez-Girón, 3rd Duke of, 149 Ottoman Turks, 40 Otway, Thomas, 150 Ovid, 37, 163 Ozment, Steven, 381 Pacini, Arturo, 347 Pacini, Piero, 329 Padavino, Giovanni Battista, 219 Paganini, Angelo, 348 Pagden, Anthony, 365 Pagel, Walter, 393 Paglia, Vincenzo, 413 Pagliai, Ilaria, 360 Paiter, M., 341 Palazzo Belimbau, Genoa, 75 Palazzo Cappello, Venice, 182, 205 Palazzo Cavriani, Mantua, 93 Palazzo Moro, Venice, 203 Palazzo Pitti, 14, 18, 20, 22, 24, 25, 27, 32, 42, 176, 180, 188, 189, 210, 229, 245, 261 Palazzo Ricasoli, Florence, 188

Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, 18, 23, 42, 191, 192, 193 Palisca, Claude V., 329 Pallavicino, Sforza, 52, 53, 68 Palma il Giovane, 227 Palmanova, 62, 113, 114, 116, 117, 122, 136, 154, 155, 156, 195, 204, 288 Paluzzi, Caterina, 349 Pancaccia, 5 Pancaldi, Giuliano, 430 Panciatichi, Bartolomeo, 19 Panciatichi, Carlo, 17 Pancino, Claudia, 369 Pandiani, Emilio, 348 Panizza, Letizia, 349, 354, 388, 415, 415 Pansini, Guido, 406, 408 Paoli, Maria Pia, 328, 389 Paolozzi Strozzi, Beatrice, 356 Paracelsus, 193 Parigino, Giuseppe Vittorio, 327, 386, 406, 407 Parione, 1, 58, 59, 61, 67, 90, 183, 184, 186, 188, 197, 205, 244 Park, Katharine, 330 Parker, Geoffrey, 333, 338, 347, 362, 363, 371 Parma Armani, Elena, 347 Parri, Maria Grazia, 360, 405 Paruta, Paolo, 265, 420 Passignano, Domenico Cresti, known as Il, 13, 49 Pasta, Renato, 328, 331 Pastor, Ludwig, 360 Patai, Raphael, 349 Paul V, Pope, 98, 103, 112, 118, 130, 232, 253 Pavan, Gino, 370 Pazzi conspiracy, 20 Pedretti, Carlo, 367 Pedro de Toledo, Marqués de Villafranca, Governor of Milan, 131, 196 Pellestrina, 149 Pelman, Carl, 309

index 4 49

Penny, Nicholas, 389 Penuti, Carla, 326, 407 Persson, Karl Gunnar, 406 Peru, 31 Pescatori, Rossella, 382 Pesendorfer, Franz, 428 Pest, 40 Petrarch, 37, 48, 158, 164, 305, 378 Pfister, Christian, 347 Philip II, King of Spain, 11, 28, 104 Philip III, King of Spain, 41, 46, 76, 104, 192 Pianigiani, Ottorino, 401 Piazza della Signoria, Florence, 188, 192 Piazza San Domenico, Genoa, 68 Piazza San Marco, Venice, 25 Piazza Santa Croce, Florence, 53, 91 Piccardino, Rustico, 26 Picchena, Curzio, 8, 91, 99, 221, 223, 272 Pieraccini, Gaetano, 11, 307, 312, 313, 326, 327, 373, 385, 430 Pillod, Elizabeth, 329 Pinchera, Valeria, 387 Pinelli family, 94 Pisa, 14, 38, 39, 185, 298 Pitigliano, 34, 38 Pitti, Buonaccorso, 285 Placcius, Vincent, 373 plague, 46, 77, 217, 224, 246, 268, 269, 270, 297 Plaisance, Michel, 334 Plakolm-Forsthuber, Sabine, 350 Plato, 22, 158, 165, 187 Plebani, Tiziana, 352, 376 Pliny, 261, 418 Pocock, J. G. A., 427 Podestà, Francesco, 348 Podgora, 121, 127, 129 Polano, Sergio, 367 Poleggi, Ennio, 346 Polettini, Aldo, 332 Polišenský, Josef V., 370 Politi, Giorgio, 348

Polletti brothers, 195, 197 Pollock, Linda, 351 Pommier Vincelli, Federico, 365 Pompeo Litta, 302 Ponte alla Carraia, 55, 185, 188, 198 Ponte de Rialto, 25, 150 Ponte Santa Trìnita, Florence, 55 Poor Office, Genoa, 70 Porta Soprana, 72 Post, Stephen G., 382 Povoledo, Elena, 401 Prato, 111, 185 Pratolino, villa at, 26 pre-Socratics, 22 Preyer, Brenda, 397 Price, A. W., 382 Primhak, Victoria, 415 Priuli, Antonio, Provveditore, later Doge, 123, 129, 231, 261 Priuli, Michele, 231 Prodi, Paolo, 326, 348, 407 Ptolemy, 22 Pucci, Orazio, 19 Pucci Conspiracy, 19 Pullan, Brian, 362 Pult Quaglia, A. M., 405 Pulzone, Scipione, 33 Puncuh, Dino, 347 Quaglioni, Diego, 358 Quattrocchi, Alberto, 222 Quazza, Romolo, 363, 366, 372, 421 Quintillian, 161 Quondam, Amedeo, 380, 401 Rabb, Theodore K., 347 Radicofani, 38 Ragazzi, Franco, 347, 351 Raines, Dorit, 426 Ramazzini, Bernardino, 71, 348 Rao, A. M., 427 Rastrelli, Modesto, 332 Rat, Maurice, 331

index 45 0

Ravenni, Gian Bruno, 429 Rawson, Judy, 352 Renzi, Francesco, 198, 199, 213, 214 Restani, Donatella, 329 Riccardi family, 186 Richa, Giuseppe, 333 Richardson, Brian, 354 Richelieu, Cardinal, 270 Riddle, John M., 383 Rinuccini, Camillo, 342 Rinuccini, Ottavio, 61, 42 Rith di Colenberg, Biagio, 369, 372, 426 Rivas, Don Juan de, 108 Robert, Jacques, 150 Rochberg-Halton, Eugene, 391 Roche, Daniel, 402 Roggero, Anastasio, 350 Rolandi, Antonio, 240 Rolandi, Francesco, 240 Romanelli, Giandomenico, 419 Romani, M. A., 421 Romanin, Samuele, 331, 366, 375 Romano, Dennis, 375 Romano, Giulio, 159 Romano, Ruggiero, 406 Romans, 2, 116, 126, 130 Rosenwein, Barbara H., 376 Rosi, Michele, 353 Rosini, Giovanni, 296, 361, 428 Rossi, Francesco de’, 236 Rossi, Massimiliano, 328, 334 Rossi di San Secondo, Ferrante de’, 39, 40 Rossignano, 38 Rosso, Claudio, 362 Rothenberg, Gunther Erich, 338 Rouchon, Olivier, 422 Rua, Giuseppe, 352 Rubbia, 127, 129, 132, 135 Rubens, Pieter Paul, 42, 45, 190, 191, 210 Rucellai family, 19 Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, 23, 40, 52, 104, 58, 104 Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, 407

Ruggiero, Guido, 353, 386 Russo, Emilio, 341 S. Maria Soprarno, church of, 18 S. Onofrio, convent of, 271 Sacchetti, Cardinal Giulio, 222 Sacchetti, Niccolo, 206, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 227, 234, 245, 248, 249, 250, 252, 253, 254, 255, 257, 258, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 274, 276, 277 Sacchetti Lelli, Lucia, 408 Sack of Mantua, 268 Sagra, 116 Sagrado, 118 Salone del Cinquecento, 192 Saltini, Enrico, 313 Salvadori, Rinaldo, 362 Salviati, Filippo, 12, 327 Salviati, Vincenzo, 213 Samek Ludovici, Sergio, 426 Samuels, Richard S., 382 San Floriano (Števerjan), 127 San Geremia, church of, Venice, 61, 202 San Giovanni Decollato, church of, Venice, 179, 231 San Giovanni Evangelista, Scuola di, Venice, 209 San Giusto a Monterantoli, 187 San Marco, monastery of, Florence, 269 San Marco, Scuola di, Venice, 209 San Martino, 132 San Michele, 132, 134, 280 San Pier Maggiore, Florence, 87 San Pietro, 132, 204 San Rocco, Scuola di, Venice, 209 San Servolo (Schloss Sankt Serff), 115 Sanguinetti, Girolamo, 234 Sansovino, Francesco, 162, 380, 381 Sansovino, Jacopo, 25, 71, 227, 348 Sant’Andrea: church of, Genoa, 70; parish, Genoa, 72 Sant’Anna, convent of, Venice, 251 Santa Lucia, church of, Venice, 301

index 45 1

Santa Maria del Fiore, Cathedral of, Florence, 35, 34, 269 Santa Maria delle Grazie, convent of, Genoa, 74 Santi di Tito, 20, 26, 27, 49, 259, 260, 401 Santi Francesco e Chiara, monastery and church of, Montughi, 272 Santi Gervasio e Protasio, church of, Venice, 206, 231 Santi Giovanni e Paolo, monastery of, Venice, 138, 227 Santi Marco e Andrea, convent of, Murano, 248, 250, 252, 253, 267, 275, 277, 278 Santo Spirito, convent of, Murano, 248, 250, 274 Santo Stefano, Order of, 34, 11 Santon, Vania, 368 Sanudo, Marino, 117, 367 Sardi, Lodovico, 358 Sardi Bucci, Diana, 421 Sardo, Alessandro, 186, 388 Sarpi, Paolo, 139, 142, 366 Sarti, Raffaella, 390 Sarzana, 233, 234, 242, 283 Saslow, James M., 333, 418 Saß, Maurice, 419 Sasse, Barbara, 352 Satta, Fiamma, 344 Saurer, Edith, 376 Savage, Roger, 329 Savelli, Rodolfo, 351 Savonarola, Girolamo, 10 Savorgnan, Giulio, 122 Savorgnano, Mario, 124, 368, 370 Scala, Flaminio, known as “Flavio,” 64, 90 Scarabello, Giovanni, 413 Schama, Simon, 403 Schmitt, Charles B., 330 Schmuckher, Aidano, 353 Schock, Flemming, 363 Schulz, Peter, 363

Schutte, Anne Jacobson, 346 Schuurman, A., 391 Schwender, Clemens, 361 Sciameroni, Filippo, 223 Scott, Hamish M., 380 Sdraussina, 118, 121, 132, 138 Secchi Tarugi, Luisa, 390 Seidel Menchi, Silvana, 346, 358 Seifert, Manfred, 362 Sella, Domenico, 380 Selvaggi, Giovanni Battista, Bishop of Sarzana, 233, 238, 243, 244 Semeria, Giovanni Battista, 355 Senate, Venetian, 25, 53, 62, 103, 117, 119, 125, 131, 139, 143, 218, 219, 253, 263, 264, 266, 267, 275, 276 Seneca, 385 Senj, 113 Sera, Paolo del, 275 Serguidi, Antonio, 14 Setton, Kenneth, 341 Shank, Michael H., 422 Shea, William R., 422 Siena War, 188 Signorotto, Gianvittorio, 361 Simmel, Georg, 401 Simon, Ruth, 366 Simoni, Anna E. C., 338, 363 Simonin, Michel, 384 Simons, Patricia, 387 Siri, Vittorio, 292, 427 Skocpol, Theda, 407 Snider, Frederick, 370 Sobel, Dava, 415 Sodini, Carla, 338 Solerti, Angelo, 334, 337, 343 Solfaroli Camillocci, Daniela, 350 Solinas, Francesco, 329, 337 Solinas Donghi, Beatrice, 352 Sommi Picenardi, Guido, 304, 328, 336, 367, 370, 385, 396, 399, 405, 408, 414, 429 Sönke, Friedrich, 362

index 45 2

Sorano, 34, 38 Sorbelli Bonfà, Fernanda, 344 Soto, Domingo de, 349 Sovana, 34, 38 Spain, 4, 9, 11, 24, 29, 41, 46, 49, 52, 61, 63, 69, 75, 76, 103, 104, 109, 114, 118, 120, 121, 131, 139, 149, 150, 230, 263, 285 Spanish Netherlands, 28, 75, 104 Spanish Road, 46, 75 Sperling, Gisela, 414 Speroni, Sperone, 161, 177, 380 Spierenburg, Pieter, 413 Spinelli, Gaspare, 149 Spinelli, Riccardo, 331, 345, 360, 418, 422 Spini, Giorgio, 326, 340, 375, 407, 430 Spinola, Ambrogio, 46 Spinola, Andrea, 76, 351 Spinola, Gaston, 107 Staccoli, Raffaello, 231 Stallybrass, Peter, 352, 401 Stanek, Ela, 380 Stocking, George W., 430 Stone, Lawrence, 351, 381 Storrs, Christopher, 380 Strada Nuova, Genoa, 68 Straparola, Giovanni Francesco, 79 Strassoldo, Francesco, 132, 133 Strassoldo, Orfeo di, 367 Strigonia (Esztergom), 40, 192 Strocchia, Sharon, 415 Strozzi, Giovan Battista, 13, 14, 335 Strozzi family, 186 Stumpo, Elisabetta, 418 Stumpo, Enrico, 328, 387 Styria, 113 Succarelli, Antonio, 179 Suganami, Hidemi, 362 Suttermans, 210, 211 Suttermans, Giusto, 259 Sylvester, David, 393 sympathetic magic, 79 Szonyi, Gyorgy E., 330

Tacca, Pietro, 192, 301 Talvacchia, Bette, 378 Tametsi, 82, 83, 94, 231 Tarabotti, Arcangela, 251 Targone, Pompeo, 106 Tassarelli, Bartolomeo, 94, 241 Tasso, Torquato, 25, 36, 37, 39, 65, 157, 161, 187, 247, 298 Tatarkiewicz, Wladyslaw, 389 Tavarone, Lazzaro, 75 Teicher, Anna, 387 Tenenti, Alberto, 362, 367 Teresa of Avila, Saint, 403 Terpening, Ronnie H., 419 Testaverde, Anna Maria, 196, 217, 393 Thevet, André, 194 Thirty Years War, 101, 113, 121, 137, 150, 263 Thornton, Dora, 392 Tilly, Charles, 407 Tinghi, Cesare, 61, 343 Tintoretto, 195 Tippelskirch, Xenia von, 345, 418 Titian, 195, 212 Todini, Lorenzo, 127, 128 Tomlinson, Gary, 428 Tor di Nona, Rome, 247 Tozzi, Pietro, 145 Trafton, Dain A., 389 Trautmannsdorf, Adam von, 117, 121, 123, 134, 135 Trevisan, Camillo, 127, 129, 132 Trevisan family, 203 Trevor-Roper, H. R., 330 Trexler, Richard, 328 Trieste, 113, 115, 117, 132, 133, 149 Trifone, Romualdo, 387 Triora, 80 Trivulzio, Count Giangiacomo Teodoro, 47 Tuck, Richard, 366 Turcotti, Michelangelo, 240 Turcotti, Niccolò, 240

index 45 3

Udine, 62, 91, 116, 136, 141, 166, 168, 169, 171, 204 Uffizi, Florence, 24, 33, 43, 89, 208, 210, 211, 229, 306 Ughi, Gabriele, 171 Uguccioni, Giovanni, 230 University of Padua, 9, 137 University of Pisa, 37 Urban VIII, Pope, 58, 60, 270 Urbani, sig., 154 Usimbardi, Lorenzo, 39 Uskok pirates, 112, 113, 114, 115, 148 Uskok War, 103 Utens, Giusto, 191 Vaga Loggia, la, Florence, 185 Vaiani, Viaiano, 298 Valerius Flaccus, 55 Vallombrosan Monastery, Florence, 58 Valori, Bartolomeo, 230 Van der Woude, A., 391 Vannucci, Marcello, 327, 389 Varchi, Benedetto, 36, 166 Vasari, Giorgio, 20, 21, 24, 49, 188, 229, 329, 339 Veblen, Thorstein, 386, 402 Vecchia, Zaccaria della, Bishop of Torcello, 253 Vecchietti, Bernardo, 187 Vecellio, Cesare, 402 Veen, Henk Th. van, 329 Veglia, 115, 148 Venetians, 52, 58, 62, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 123, 124, 126, 127, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 204, 208, 291 Venice, 12, 13, 25, 26, 53, 57, 58, 61, 62, 64, 65, 69, 71, 79, 81, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 98, 102, 103, 104, 110, 114, 115, 118, 120, 122, 128, 130, 131, 136, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 149, 150, 153, 157, 167, 171, 174, 179, 181, 182, 184, 192, 195, 196, 198, 202,

203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 222, 224, 231, 234, 238, 240, 242, 244, 245, 248, 249, 252, 253, 254, 255, 257, 262, 263, 265, 266, 267, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 277, 278, 283, 285, 286, 287, 291, 301 Venier, Lorenzo, 116 Ventura, Angelo, 372 Venturi, Francesco, 338 Venturi, Giovanni, 230 Vercelli, 131, 137 Vercellio, Cesare, 212 Verga, Marcello, 407 Vernazza, Battista, 350 Vernazza, Battistina, 74 Vernazza, Bernardo, 68, 80, 83 Vernazza, Caterina, 71, 81 Vernazza, Ettore, 85 Vernazza, Giovanni Francesco, 71, 234, 235 Vernazza, Giovanni Gerolamo, 71, 94 Verrocchio, Andrea del, 302 Vesco, Clotilde, 397 Vester, Matthew, 386 Vettori, Alessandro, 230 Via de’ Banchi, Florence, 87 Via di Mezzo, Florence, 87 Via Rondinelli, Florence, 87 Via Tornabuoni, 2 Via XX Settembre, Genoa, 72 Vickers, Brian, 353 Vico della Celsa, Genoa, 84 Vicopisano, 185 Vienna, 76 Vigato, Mauro, 371–373 Villa “Le Macine,” 90, 199, 202, 247, 272, 279 Villa Poggio Imperiale, 97 Villa Torniello, Paluello, 180, 181 Villey, Pierre, 331 Vincenzo I Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua and Montferrat, 40, 45

index 45 4

Vincenzo II Gonzaga, Cardinal, later Duke of Mantua and Montferrat, 93 Vinta, Belisario, 8, 223 Vipava, 135 Virginia de’ Medici, Duchess of Ferrara, Modena, Reggio, 28 Viroli, Maurizio, 365, 406 Visceglia, Maria Antonietta, 360, 361 Visegrad, 40 Vitiello, A., 430 Vitoria, Francisco de, 109, 365 Vitruvius, 37 Vittoria della Rovere, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, 270 Vivanti, Corrado, 365 Vives, Juan Luis, 73 Viviani, Vincenzo, 38, 335 Voltaire, 292, 293, 294, 427

Weil, Phoebe Dent, 397 Weinberg, Bernard, 335 Weintraub, Karl, 384 Weise, Georg, 379 Welch, Evelyn, 386, 402, 403 West, William N., 376 Whitehead, Bertrand T., 332 Wiesner, Merry E., 346, 355 Wilke, Jürgen, 363 Wilkinson-Zerner, Catherine, 340 Wilson, Katharina M., 344 Wilson, Peter H., 367 Wöfflin, Heinrich, 307 Wohl, Hellmut, 389 Wolfgang, Marvin E., 413 Woodhouse, John, 429 Woolf, Virginia, 310 Wright, Edward, 396

Wallace, William A., 330 Wallenstein, Albrecht von, 137 Walloons, 108 Walter, Ingeborg, 388 Walzer, Michael, 362 Waquet, Jean-Claude, 422, 427 Warner, Lyndan, 355 Warnke, Frank J., 344 Watson, Katharine, 343 Wear, Andrew, 382 Weaver, Elissa B., 415

Zambelli, Paola, 353 Zanato, Tiziano, 426 Zanchin, G., 382 Zannini, Andrea, 367–368 Zanotto, Francesco, 349 Zarri, Gabriella, 346, 350, 354 Zatti, Francesco Maria, 277 Zinanni, Anna, 345, 354, 356 Zobi, Antonio, 428 Zosimus, 194 Zuanelli, Antonio, 231