Art, Gender and Religious Devotion in Grand Ducal Tuscany 1409400794, 9781409400790

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Art, Gender and Religious Devotion in Grand Ducal Tuscany Art, Gender and Religious Devotion in Grand Ducal Tuscany focuses on the intersection of the visual and the sacred at the Medici court of the later sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries in relation to issues of gender. Through a series of case studies carefully chosen to highlight key roles and key interventions of Medici women, this book embraces the diversity of their activities, from their public appearances at the centre of processionals such as the bridal entrata, to the commissioning and collecting of art objects and the overseeing of architectural projects, to an array of other activities to which these women applied themselves with particular force and vigour: regular and special devotions, visits to churches and convents, pilgrimages and relic collecting. Positing Medici women’s patronage as a network of devotional, entrepreneurial and cultural activities that depended on seeing and being seen, this book examines the specific religious context in which the Medici grand duchesses operated, arguing that these patrons’ cultural interests responded not only to aesthetic concerns and the demands of personal faith, but also to dynastic interests, issues of leadership and authority, and the needs of Catholic reform. By examining the religious dimensions of the grand duchesses’ art patronage and collecting activities alongside their visually resonant devotional and public acts, a new dimension is added to the current scholarship on Medici women’s patronage. Alice E. Sanger The Open University

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series Editors: Allyson Poska, The University of Mary Washington, USA Abby Zanger The study of women and gender offers some of the most vital and innovative challenges to current scholarship on the early modern period. For more than a decade now, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World has served as a forum for presenting fresh ideas and original approaches to the field. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in scope, this Ashgate book series strives to reach beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. We welcome proposals for both single-author volumes and edited collections which expand and develop this continually evolving field of study. Titles in the series Isabella d’Este and Francesco Gonzaga Power Sharing at the Italian Renaissance Court Sarah D.P. Cockram Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua Matrons, Mystics and Monasteries Sally Anne Hickson Caterina Sforza and the Art of Appearances Gender, Art and Culture in Early Modern Italy Joyce de Vries Women, Art, and Architecture in Northern Italy, 1520–1580 Negotiating Power Katherine A. McIver Dominican Women and Renaissance Art The Convent of San Domenico of Pisa Ann Roberts The Medici Women Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence Natalie R. Tomas

Art, Gender and Religious Devotion in Grand Ducal Tuscany

Alice E. Sanger

First published 2014 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Taylor & Francis 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2014 Alice E. Sanger Alice E. Sanger has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retri eval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Sanger, Alice E. Art, Gender and Religious Devotion in Grand Ducal Tuscany / By Alice Sanger. pages cm. -- (Women and gender in the early modern world) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-0079-0 (hardcover) 1. Art and religion--Italy--Tuscany--History-16th century. 2. Art and religion--Italy--Tuscany--History--17th century. 3. Women-Religious life--Italy--Tuscany--History--16th century. 4. Women--Religious life--Italy-Tuscany--History--17th century. 5. Art and society--Italy--Tuscany--History--16th century. 6. Art and society--Italy--Tuscany--History--17th century. 7. Women art patrons--Italy--Tuscany--History--16th century. 8. Women art patrons--Italy--Tuscany-History--17th century. 9. Medici, House of--Art patronage. I. Title. N72.R4.S255 2013 704’.0420945509033--dc23 2013005987 ISBN 9781409400790 (hbk)

Contents List of Illustrations   Acknowledgements   Introduction  

vii ix 1

Chapter 1 Dynasty  

13

Chapter 2 Display  

35

Chapter 3 Rituals  

57

Chapter 4 Relics  

71

Chapter 5

93

Pilgrimages  

Chapter 6 Images  

113

Afterword  

139

Bibliography  

143

Index161

List of Illustrations Cover image: Justus Sustermans, Grand Duchess Maria Maddalena d’Austria as St Mary Magdalen (detail), 1620s. Oil on canvas. Florence, Palazzo Pitti. The Bridgeman Art Library Alessandro Allori, Giovanna d’Austria, 1570. Oil on panel. Florence, Palazzo Pitti/The Bridgeman Art Library 2 Scipione Pulzone, Portrait of Cristina di Lorena, 1590. Oil on canvas. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi/The Bridgeman Art Library 3 Tiberio Titi, Portrait of Cristina di Lorena, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, after 1609. Oil on canvas. Florence, Palazzo Pitti/The Bridgeman Art Library 4 Justus Sustermans, Portrait of Maria Maddalena d’Austria with Her Son Ferdinando, c.1623. Oil on canvas. Florence, Galleria Palatina. © 2012. Photo Scala, Florence – courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali 1

Matteo Florimi ‘FIORENZA’. (Bird’s Eye View of the City of Florence), 1595. Copper engraving. Photo: akg-images/Orsi Battaglini 1.2 Orazio Scarabelli, The first entry arch for the Medici wedding, the Porta al Prato in Florence, 1589. Etching. London, British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum 1.3 Orazio Scarabelli, The second entry arch for the Medici wedding, the Ponte alla Carraia, 1589. Etching. London, British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum 1.1

2.1 2.2

2.3 2.4

Giovanni Balducci, called Il Cosci, Cristina di Lorena taking leave of Caterina de’ Medici, 1589. Drawing. London, British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum Jacques Callot, after Jacopo da Empoli, Marriage of Ferdinando I and Cristina di Lorena, from Callot’s Life of Ferdinando series, 1614–20. Engraving. London, British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum Alessandro Allori, The Vision of St Hyacinth, c.1594. Oil on panel. Florence, Basilica di Santa Maria Novella/The Bridgeman Art Library Jacques Callot, Festa delle doti, from Callot’s Life of Ferdinando series, 1614–20. Engraving. London, British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum

viii

3.1 3.2

4.1 4.2 5.1

5.2

5.3

Art, Gender and Religious Devotion in Grand Ducal Tuscany

Giovanni Maggi, Bridal Entrata of Maria Maddalena d’Austria, 1608. Etching and engraving. London, British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum Peter Paul Rubens, The Birth of Louis XIII, from the Life of Maria de’ Medici, 1622. Oil on canvas. Paris, Musée du Louvre/The Bridgeman Art Library Justus Sustermans, Grand Duchess Maria Maddalena d’Austria as St Mary Magdalen, c.1620s. Oil on canvas. Florence, Palazzo Pitti. The Bridgeman Art Library Chapel of Relics. Florence, Palazzo Pitti. © 2012. Photo Scala, Florence – courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali Jacques Callot, after Matteo Rosselli, Title page of Scelta d’alcuni miracoli e grazie della santissima nunziata di Firenze (Florence: Pietro Cecconcelli, 1619). Engraving. London, British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum Hubert Vincent, Representation des murailles et ornements qui environnent la St Maison, north side, showing the Birth of the Virgin (left), and the Marriage of the Virgin (right), and stemma of Leo X at either side of the pediments over the doors, 1686. Etching. London, British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum Hubert Vincent, Representation des murailles et ornements qui environnent la St Maison, east side, showing, in the upper register, the Dormition of the Virgin, and the Translation of the Holy House in the lower register, 1686. Etching. London, British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum

6.1 Stefano della Bella (attr.), View of the Villa del Poggio Imperiale, 1620s. Etching. London, British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum 6.2 Artemisia Gentileschi, The Penitent Magdalen, 1617–20. Oil on canvas. Florence, Galleria Palatina. © 2012. Photo Scala, Florence – courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali 6.3 The Audience Room, frescoes painted by Matteo Rosselli and others, 1623. Villa del Poggio Imperiale, Florence, Italy/The Bridgeman Art Library 6.4 Francesco Curradi, Artemisia drinks the ashes of Mausolus, 1625. Oil on canvas. Florence, Villa della Petraia/The Bridgeman Art Library 6.5 Domenico Pugliani, Saint Helena, c.1622–4. Fresco. Florence, Villa del Poggio Imperiale/The Bridgeman Art Library

Acknowledgements Initial research for this book was made possible by a studentship from the British Academy. A travel grant from the Society for Renaissance Studies helped to facilitate further research in Florence. Bringing this long project to completion has involved the support of numerous individuals to whom I owe an enormous debt of gratitude. My special thanks to Professor Suzanne B. Butters and Professor Helen Hills, for their immense generosity with ideas and time throughout the process of research and writing. Research for this book has relied on the considerate assistance of personnel from the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, British Library and the Warburg Institute Library, and on the expertise of those involved in the Medici Archive Project. To the editors responsible for the production of the book, including Erika Gaffney, Publishing Editor, Kevin Selmes, Production Editor, and Helen Fairlie, copy editor, I am extremely grateful. My thanks also to the helpful staff at the Bridgeman Art Library, akg-images and Scala for their work on the illustrations. Above all, I am deeply indebted to my family and friends, without whom this project would not have been possible, and, to Richard, whose enthusiasm, kindnesses and love have enriched the process of writing immeasurably. This book is dedicated to my mother with grateful thanks for her wisdom and help in innumerable ways.

Introduction This book takes as its principal focus the intersection of the visual and the sacred at the Medici court of the later sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries, specifically in relation to issues of gender. Its protagonists, three grand duchesses – Giovanna d’Austria (1547–78), Cristina di Lorena (1565–1636) and Maria Maddalena d’Austria (1587–1631) – were all born outside Italy, were connected by birth to Europe’s most illustrious dynasties, and arrived in Florence as young – and ‘foreign’ – (grand) ducal brides. All were women of enormous religious, social and political significance. While recent scholarship has brought the grand duchesses’ political and cultural lives more clearly into focus, their religious practices have not been the focus of sustained investigation. This book examines aspects of these women’s roles as grand ducal brides and wives, mothers of grand ducal heirs, and in the cases of Cristina di Lorena and Maria Maddalena d’Austria, widows and regents, specifically in relation to religious devotion. Reflecting at the beginning of the century on the state of research into the lives and experience of female religious in the early modern period, Gianna Pomata asserted that ‘[t]he sphere of the sacred has turned out to be ... the main area where Renaissance women could acquire prominence and self-expression’.1 The significance of the sphere of the sacred for secular women is surely also implicated in this statement. In the case of the Tuscan grand duchesses, as other elite and non-elite secular women of the early modern period, the practice of religion was integral to their experiences. From attendance at regular and special services in palazzo and outside of it, to pilgrimages and the veneration of relics, to religiously themed art and architectural projects, devotion framed a body of patronage activities that produced powerful visual articulations. This book examines how the grand duchesses’ acts of piety and munificence, their peregrinations local and far-flung, made them visible as devout and charitable figures. It interrogates their roles as patrons and collectors, and as viewers and consumers of an array of sacred art and artefacts. In recent years, women’s art patronage has proven to be one of the most fruitful areas in the field of early modern art historical studies.2 The Medici, one of the 1   Gianna Pomata, ‘Knowledge-Freshening Wind: Gender and the Renewal of Renaissance Studies’, in Allen J. Grieco, Michael Rocke and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi (eds), The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, (Florence, 2002), p. 189. 2   The richness of women’s art patronage scholarship is exemplified in the work of Sheila ffolliott, Geraldine Johnson, Catherine King and Carolyn Valone, amongst others. Recent studies focusing on female patrons in Renaissance Italy include Sheryl E. Reiss and David G. Wilkins (eds), Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance

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Art, Gender and Religious Devotion in Grand Ducal Tuscany

most studied Renaissance families, figure prominently in this exciting wave of scholarship. Eleonora di Toledo, duchess of Florence, and Caterina and Maria de’ Medici, queens of France, in particular, are now more fully understood in respect of the variety and scope of their cultural interests and in terms of the relationships between art patronage and identity, thanks to ground-breaking scholarship.3 A clearer picture is also emerging of aspects of Medici women’s patronage in Florence during the regency of 1621–8, for example, of the art, architectural and theatrical projects of grand duchess Maria Maddalena d’Austria, particularly through the lens of self fashioning.4 Yet by far the most significant realm for the grand duchesses’ cultural choices was that of the devotional. Diaries and letters, inventories and account books produce lively glimpses into the grand duchesses’ practice of religion, as Catholics operating in the era of Catholic reform, or Counter-Reformation. These women were devotees of the sacred image at Santissima Annunziata in Florence, each made a pilgrimage to the Holy House at Loreto, and they shared an enthusiasm for relics articulated in acts of venerating, collecting, display and gifting. That range of activities opened the devotional as a comparatively accessible arena to them, and to it they applied themselves with particular force and vigour, albeit with different emphases and motivations. Cristina di Lorena, for example, was Italy (Kirksville, MO, 2001); Katherine McIver, Women, Art, and Architecture in Northern Italy, 1520–1580: Negotiating Power (Aldershot, 2006); McIver (ed.), Wives, Widows, Mistresses and Nuns in Early Modern Italy: Making the Invisible Visible through Art and Patronage (Farnham, 2012); and Sally Anne Hickson, Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua: Matrons, Mystics and Monasteries (Farnham, 2012). 3   Of particular interest on Eleonora di Toledo is Konrad Eisenbichler (ed.), The Cultural World of Eleonora of Toledo, Duchess of Florence and Siena (Aldershot, 2004). Studies on the art patronage of the Medici queens of France include Sheila ffolliott, ‘The Ideal Queenly Patron of the Renaissance: Catherine de’ Medici Defining Herself or Defined by Others?’ in Cynthia Lawrence (ed.), Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors, and Connoisseurs (University Park, PA, 1997): 99–109, and Geraldine Johnson, ‘Pictures fit for a Queen: Peter Paul Rubens and the Marie de’ Medici Cycle’, in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (eds), Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History in the Postmodern Era (Berkeley, 2005), pp. 100–19. 4   See Elisa Acanfora, ‘La Villa del Poggio Imperiale’, in Mina Gregori (ed.), Fasto di corte. La decorazione murale nelle residenze dei Medici e dei Lorena (Florence, 2005), vol. 1, pp. 143–56; Kelley Harness, Echoes of Women’s Voices: Music, Art, and Female Patronage in Early Modern Florence (Chicago, 2006), esp. pp. 40–61; Riccardo Spinelli, ‘Simbologia dinastica e legittimazione del potere: Maria Maddalena d’Austria e gli affreschi del Poggio Imperiale’, and Janie Cole, ‘Self-Fashioning in Early Seventeenth-Century Florence: Music-Theatre under the Medici Women’, in Giulia Calvi and Riccardo Spinelli (eds), Le donne Medici nel sistema europeo delle corte, XVI–XVIII secolo, (Florence, 2008), vol. 2, pp. 645–79 and pp. 691–708; and Ilaria Hoppe, Die Räume der Regentin. Die Villa Poggio Imperiale zu Florenz (Berlin, 2012). Also see Maria Galli Stampino, ʻA Regent and her Court: Towards a Study of Maria Maddalena dʼAustriaʼs Patronageʼ, Forum Italicum, 40/1 (2006), pp. 22–35.

Introduction

3

instrumental in driving forward an array of new projects, including initiating the annual dowry festival in Florence with her husband, Ferdinando I; commissioning art, reliquaries and liturgical items for key Florentine churches; and overseeing a building programme at the convent of La Crocetta, adjacent to Santissima Annunziata. Maria Maddalena took a prominent role in rituals with sacred resonance during her husband’s lifetime, and, after his death, when her political role was still further enhanced, she pushed forward with a magisterial project of refurbishment at her suburban villa, Poggio Imperiale, surrounding herself there with images of heroic and saintly women. I will shed light on these and other projects in the pages within this book. Religious devotion remains an aspect of women’s patronage that has received relatively little attention, but this is changing fast. 5 Moreover, the study of religious devotion in relation to patronage poses a number of fascinating challenges. Devotional activities are not easy to assess in conventional art historical terms, because gendered and apparently intangible, and the agency of the patron is sometimes difficult to determine precisely. This introduction explains how these activities might be explored within art history and the study of patronage. First, I present this book’s dramatis personae and offer an explanation of its organization. Later, I determine a framework for the examination of devout activities and the scope for developing an inclusive model for their investigation within women’s patronage studies. Dramatis Personae The chronological range of the book spans 1565 to the 1630s, from the wedding of Giovanna d’Austria to Francesco de’ Medici, then prince regent and heir to the dukedom of Florence, to the deaths of both Cristina di Lorena and Maria Maddalena d’Austria. Giovanna d’Austria In 1565, the dynastic claims on Giovanna d’Austria (Johanna von Habsburg) by the Medici family were visually articulated at the moment of her arrival in Florence with the complex emblems and allegories of the spectacular bridal entrata decorations that celebrated lineage above all.6 Giovanna was the youngest daughter of Habsburg emperor Ferdinand I and Anna Jagiellonka, queen of 5   On devotion in convents, for example, see Helen Hills, Invisible City: the Architecture of Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Neapolitan Convents (Oxford, 2004). 6   Giovanna was born in Prague on 24 January 1547. A summary of her life is provided by Stefano Tabacchi, ‘Giovanna d’Austria’, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani (vol. 55, Rome, 2000), pp. 489–91. Also see Lisa Kaborycha, ‘Expressing a Habsburg Sensibility in the Medici Court: The Grand Duchess Giovanna d’Austria’s Patronage and Public Image in

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Art, Gender and Religious Devotion in Grand Ducal Tuscany

Bohemia and Hungary (daughter of Ladislao II), and her marriage to Francesco was of immense political value to the Medici. But the marriage was a difficult one, not least because Giovanna’s position was undermined by Francesco’s devotion to his long-term mistress, the Venetian Bianca Cappello. That her first six children were daughters must also have put her under intense pressure. Only two of her daughters survived into adulthood: Eleonora (later duchess of Mantua) and Maria (later queen of France). She gave birth to a son, Filippo (1577–83), in the year before she died. Giovanna was much loved by the people of Florence, as contemporary diarists make plain in their detailing of the public response to her death in childbirth in 1578. Giovanna’s young son did not survive infancy, and Francesco I’s second marriage, to Bianca Cappello, whom he made grand duchess, did not produce an heir. The couple died of malaria on the same day in 1587 and Francesco was succeeded by his younger brother, Ferdinando.7 Ferdinando had already showed himself to be particularly adaptable to changing circumstances and creative in his use of them to address his own idiosyncratic political and dynastic ends. The sudden death of his older brother, cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, in 1562, had left the ruling family without a son as their representative in Rome and Ferdinando began an ecclesiastical career.8 He was quickly promoted and, although he would never take final vows, he became a cardinal. Francesco’s sudden death signalled Ferdinando’s return to secular life. Cristina di Lorena Ferdinando married Cristina di Lorena (Christine de Lorraine) in 1589. Cristina was the daughter of Charles III, Duke of Lorraine, and Claude of France, the daughter of Henri II of France and Caterina de’ Medici.9 Therefore, through her maternal grandmother, Cristina was connected to the line of Alessandro de’ Florence’, in Christina Strunck (ed.), Artful Allies. Medici Women as Cultural Mediators, 1533–1743 (Milan, 2012), pp. 89–109. 7   On Ferdinando’s succession, the memory of Bianca seems to have been all but erased, even though her son, Antonio, was a fixture at his uncle Ferdinando I’s court. Fragmentary documentary material relating to Bianca means that she appears only at the margins of this study. 8   Suzanne B. Butters, ‘Le Cardinal Ferdinand de Médici’, in André Chastel and Philippe Morel (eds), La Villa Médicis (Rome, 1991) vol. 2, p. 172. On Ferdinando’s life also see, Monica Bietti and Annamaria Giusti, Ferdinando I de’ Medici, 1549–1609. MAIESTATE TANTUM, exh. cat. (Florence, 2009). 9   A biography of Cristina di Lorena is given in Gaetano Pieraccini, La stirpe de’ Medici di Cafaggiolo (Florence, 1986), vol. 2, pp. 305–22. Also see Luisa Bertoni, ‘Cristina di Lorena’, Dizionario biografico degli italiani (vol. 31, Rome), pp. 37–40. Christina Strunck, ‘How Chrestienne Became Cristina: Political and Cultural Encounters between Tuscany and Lorraine’, in Christina Strunck (ed.), Artful Allies. Medici Women as Cultural Mediators, 1533–1743 (Milan: Silvana, 2012), pp. 140–81.

Introduction

5

Medici, first duke of Florence, and related to Lorenzo the Magnificent, who shares his tomb in Michelangelo’s New Sacristy at the former Medici parish church of San Lorenzo in Florence with Caterina’s father, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino. Cristina brought to Florence the wealth of the French queen’s legacy, as her dowry/inheritance included valuable gifts from Caterina and the celebrated Valois tapestries, now in the Uffizi. She was always called ‘Madama’ during her Florentine career, in reference to her French ancestry. When Ferdinando died in 1609 Cristina remained at the centre of the court of her son Cosimo II. Maria Maddalena d’Austria Maria Maddalena d’Austria (Maria Magdalena von Habsburg), wife of Cosimo II de’ Medici, was the granddaughter and niece of emperors, and daughter of archduke Karl II of Styria and Maria Anna von Wittelsbach (of Bavaria). Maria Maddalena was nineteen when she arrived in Florence in 1608.10 An archduchess by birth, Maria Maddalena was always known in Italy by that title. Her political role in Florence was a significant one; within five months of her arrival in that city as bride of Cosimo de’ Medici, she became Tuscany’s grand duchess. The mother of eight children, her eldest son, later grand duke Ferdinando II, was born in 1610. In February 1621, Cosimo II died, and Cristina di Lorena and Maria Maddalena d’Austria became regents for Ferdinando II during his minority. For the grand duchesses the seven-year regency was a period of unusual political power and responsibility, and greater freedom to make cultural choices. From 1621, Maria Maddalena’s art patronage focused on a programme of renovation and refurbishment at her villa on the outskirts of Florence, which she renamed the Villa del Poggio Imperiale.11 Looking Womenward This book interrogates the concept of patronage itself in terms of its gendered dimensions. It argues that the process of disentangling the complex relationships between visual culture, gender, power and devotion at the Medici court of the period requires the radical redefinition of women’s art patronage in early modern Italy.   Archduchess Maria Maddalena was born in Graz on 7 October 1589. For a biography, see, Pieraccini, La stirpe, vol. 2, pp. 345–54, and, Estella Galasso Calderara, La Granduchessa Maria Maddalena d’Austria. Un’amazzone tedesca nella Firenze medicea del ‘600 (Genoa, 1985). 11   Maria Maddalena d’Austria died in 1631. In September that year she began an ambitious journey with her sons Mattias and Francesco to visit her brother, emperor Ferdinand, in Bavaria, but fell ill en route and died before reaching Vienna; Pieraccini, La stirpe, vol. 2, p. 354. 10

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Through patronage, individuals and groups represented themselves by means of the choices they made (whether in choosing an artist or architect, or in visiting a particular church) and the ways in which they were made visible (in a portrait, for example, or in a religious procession). Simply to identify religious practice as fundamental to the lives and experience of the Medici grand duchesses is hardly to break new ground in the study of early modern women. They would have been atypical amongst aristocratic women had they not been ‘pious’. But describing them as ‘pious’ without defining what piety means in context is to flatten and simplify the issues at stake. Rather, we need to ask: what do we mean by ‘piety’? How might we recognize it and differentiate between its various forms? How was piety manifested and produced visually and materially and what ends did it serve? How were art and architecture implicated in piety and vice versa? This brings me to devotion. The ways that piety in grand ducal Tuscany was formulated, mobilized and enacted are central to the issue of devotion. Thus, devotion is not an abstract expression of piety, but instead the practice of religion in terms of its specific articulation in recognized forms, including regular attendance at mass and the witnessing of (other) religious ceremonies in public contexts, as well as the less tangible realm of prayer and contemplation undertaken in seclusion. Ritual is necessarily at the heart of this project. The bibliography on early modern ritual and display is an extensive one which offers many dynamic models; in general terms, Peter Burke’s identification of rituals as actions which are ‘at once collective, repetitive and symbolic’ and ‘performed in public’ is useful.12 By ‘in public’ I mean in streets and piazzas, and also churches, which involved journeys to and from. Each chapter is concerned, to a greater or lesser extent, with rituals in which Medici women participated, encompassing regular devotional activities, observance of particular feast days, veneration of relics, major processionals including those organized for bridal entrate and funerals, and the grand duchesses’ pilgrimages. Not only are major acts of dramatic art and architectural patronage of concern to the matrix of ritual/devotion/piety, but also the everyday, the diminutive, and the apparently prosaic. Thus rituals performed spectacularly or practised daily emerge as acts of self-fashioning alongside more tangible or long-lasting cultural activities, exemplified in the relic collection Maria Maddalena d’Austria assembled in her chapel at Palazzo Pitti, Florence. Visuality and the social are at the heart of this model of patronage and its devotional aspects in relation to the formation of gendered identities. Thus the devotional arena emerges as active and gendered, one which was useful to the grand duchesses as powerful wives, widows and regents, as pious and dedicated leaders. We necessarily have to bear in mind that all instances of public visibility through ritual carry with them a certain ambiguity. Gender, and social and political issues, shape and define the possibilities and the limits of public visibility. While 12   Peter Burke, ‘Cities, Spaces and Rituals in the Early Modern World’, in Heidi de Mare and Anna Vos (eds), Urban Rituals in Italy and the Netherlands (Assen, 1993), p. 29.

Introduction

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studies of early modern Florentine festivals and rituals have revealed how events enacted in public space could express the interests of different groups – allegiances to family networks, neighbourhoods or quartieri, to religious confraternities and political factions – it has also been shown that the interests of all groups were not expressible in this way, and that some groups were favoured over others.13 Men of higher social rank had more access to public space than women of the same rank. In conjunction with an acknowledgement of the possibilities for unity or allegiance – which rituals conducted in urban space can actuate – urban space must be viewed as a site in which disunities and conflict are also expressed and effected. Publicly enacted celebrations evoke deceptively stark distinctions between those who watch and those who participate.14 Such events depend on the goodwill of the audience; if greeted unfavourably, differences are exposed between rival groups, between those who support and those who resist. I explore below how Medici grand duchesses were made publicly visible as participants in ritual – even leading the way with striking innovations – and the consequences of this. Underpinning this book’s unravelling of relationships between women’s visibility and strategies of self-fashioning is the work of Judith Butler. Butler’s undermining of the category ‘woman’ has brought more clearly into focus that gender is not an articulation of an existing reality but a constantly iterated social performance. ‘As in other ritual social dramas’, Butler argues, ‘the action of gender requires a performance that is repeated ... [G]ender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.’15 It is a position that seems especially relevant to the study of gender in terms of its ritualized aspects, and in the gendered dimensions of ritual. Moreover, it provides a way to address some of the aspects of ‘ritual’ currently taken for granted. Of central importance to this book is the city – and specifically Florence (Figure 1.1) – as the locale in which the Medici grand duchesses were most

  See, for example, Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1980); Ronald Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1982); Paola Ventrone (ed.), Le tems revient ‘l tempo si rinuova: feste e spettacoli nella Firenze di Lorenzo il Magnifico (Florence, 1992); and Roger J. Crum and John T. Paoletti (eds), Renaissance Florence: A Social History (Cambridge, 2006). 14   Randolph Starn and Loren Partridge, ‘Triumphalism: The Sala Grande in Florence and the 1565 Entry’, in Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300–1600 (Berkeley, 1992), p. 163. 15   Butler continues: ‘The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.’ Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London, 1990), p. 140. 13

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Art, Gender and Religious Devotion in Grand Ducal Tuscany

consistently made visible,16 and as such the theorization of urban space and its impact on identity formation must be embedded in the study of their activities. Elizabeth Grosz’s conceptualization of the city as ‘one of the crucial factors in the social production of (sexed) corporeality’, prompts an urgent reconsideration of the relationship between the city, ritual and gender.17 Thinking spatially and urbanistically about Medici women’s appearances in public means valuing the journeys made by women as much as the places that they visited, given the relation between bodies and the production of space, that is, the becoming of spaces through movement.18 Adrian Randolph has argued that, in early modern Florence, women’s regular trips to church afforded rare opportunities for licit public visibility in the city, to the extent that access to public space depended on this ‘religious sanctioning’.19 Attendance at church services, and limited access to other public places, he argues, meant that ‘the patterns left by women were far more consistent and dense’ than men’s.20 In the case of the Medici grand duchesses I posit that frequently iterated devotional journeys – from palace to church and back again – were cultural interventions that played a part in constructing a coherent identity for the key worshipper, in terms of a pious public persona. In the case of Medicean rituals, the grand duchess wore special clothes and was transported in ways that promoted her visibility, making her a target for the gaze of the spectator. Grosz’s analysis of corporeal inscription is particularly valuable in elucidating the meanings of the presentation of the grand duchess as the central focus of publicly enacted devotions and processions, such as the bridal entrata of Giovanna d’Austria in 1565 and her funeral in 1578, or the dowry festivals in which Cristina di Lorena

16   This book concentrates particularly on Florence, though the Medici women who are the focus of the is study also spent significant amounts of their time in other Tuscan cities (Pisa, Livorno) and in the countryside, at one or other of the Medici villas. On Cristina di Lorena and the countryside see, Suzanne B. Butters, ‘Christine of Lorraine and Cultural Exchanges in the Countryside: International Customs in Local Settings’, in Christina Strunck (ed.), Artful Allies. Medici Women as Cultural Mediators, 1533–1743 (Milan, 2012), pp. 111–47, and on the grand duchesses’ non-urban devotional activities see Chapter 5: Pilgrimages. 17   Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York, 1995), p. 104. 18   Grosz explains, ‘It is our positioning within space … that gives the subject a coherent identity and an ability to manipulate things … in space. However, space does not become comprehensible to the subject by its being the space of movement; rather it becomes space through movement.’ Ibid, p. 92. 19   Adrian Randolph, ‘Regarding Women in Sacred Space’, in Geraldine A. Johnson and Sara F. Matthews Grieco (eds), Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (Cambridge, 1997), 17–41. 20   Ibid, p. 17.

Introduction

9

and Maria Maddalena d’Austria participated in the early seventeenth century.21 We might perceive in these instances and others that social inscriptions activated through ritual transformed the body of the grand duchess into a ‘text’, producing, through visibility, wider dynastic, patriarchal and patrilineal meanings. In certain rites in which Maria Maddalena was the central focus, such as purification rituals after childbirth, new visual articulations made her role more prominent and her agency more evident. My core argument develops from the principle that the worldly concerns of the grand duchesses were always implicated in their devout activities, while the devotional realm offered sanctioned spaces for political manoeuvring. The term ‘sacred space’ has undergone significant revisions in recent years, and a definition that privileges the instability of the relationship between sacred and profane is pertinent here.22 In the experience of the Medici grand duchesses, the embeddedness of the devotional meant an obscuring of boundaries between those spaces we might identify as sacred (church interiors and palace chapels) and those we might identify as domestic (including audience chambers and bedrooms), a spillage, that is, of the devotional into apparently non-devotional contexts or vice versa.23 By adopting a characterization of the sacred as ‘in flux’ it becomes possible to address the range of Medici women’s devout practices. And, given the roles of specific locations (Santissima Annunziata, the Holy House at Loreto, for example) in the grand duchesses’ processes of self-fashioning, it is more useful to address the implications of place (rather than sacred space) in relation to gender and the image of devoutness or holiness.24 Helen Hills has argued for the significance of place in respect of images of (gendered) sanctity – specifically, female patronal saints – in relation to the early modern city. Place needs to be interrogated ‘as part of a relationship with holiness rather than simply its location’, Hills explains.25   On corporeal inscription see particularly, Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Inscriptions and Body Maps: Representations and the Corporeal,’ in Linda McDowell and Joanne P. Sharp (eds), Space, Gender, Knowledge: Feminist Readings (London, 1997), pp. 236–61. 22   As Coster and Spicer explain of medieval and early modern sacrality, ‘the division or relationship between profane and sacred space was constantly in flux; sacred objects and sacred places tended to become surrounded by other zones of sanctity that could be different in their character and intensity’, Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (eds), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005), p. 9. 23   Helen Hills,’The Housing of Institutional Architecture: Searching for a Domestic Holy in Post-Tridentine Italian convents’, in Sandra Cavallo and Silvia Evangelisti (eds), Domestic Institutional Interiors in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2009), pp. 119–52. 24   On the significance of place, see, for example, Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley, 1997). 25   Helen Hills, ‘How to Look like a Counter-Reformation Saint’, in M. Calaresu, F. De Vivo, J.P. Rubiés (eds), Exploring Cultural Histories: Essays in Honour of Peter Burke (Farnham, 2010), p. 209. 21

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Place is relevant to my examination of Medici women’s devotions in two ways: on the one hand, in the literal sense of the significances attached to certain places in the shaping of these women’s devout personae and, on the other, in terms of the part played by the grand duchesses in producing a particular sacred topography for Florence and its territories. The Structure of This Book Chapter 1 focuses on religious devotion at the Tuscan court through an examination of the devotional role of Giovanna d’Austria, Tuscany’s first grand duchess. It begins by introducing the major sacred sites and zones of Florence in which the impact of the (grand) dukes was principally felt. This was the terrain that Giovanna had to traverse from her arrival in Florence in 1565. Thus this chapter is concerned with devotion and with place in relation to gender. Giovanna’s experiences in Florence were framed by two major public events that were staged for her and made her their focus – her bridal entrata and her funeral. In the space between these events Giovanna came to be seen in Florence as an exemplarily devout figure, a point made explicit in the public response to her death. I use the two extraordinary events that mark the beginning and end of Giovanna’s thirteen years in Florence – an entrance and an exit played out publicly – to shed light on the ordinary and ostensibly hidden, that is, on the grand duchess’s religious practice, in order to evaluate the meanings attached to her devout persona, in terms of gender and visibility. In Chapter 2 I turn attention to issues of devout display in relation to grand duchess Cristina di Lorena, with the aim of bringing to the fore the significance of Cristina’s pious practice. In 1600, Cesare Tinghi, aiutante di camera of Ferdinando I, began a diary aimed at chronicling the daily activities of the grand duke, which he continued to write for over twenty-five years.26 A fundamental part of Tinghi’s rationale was to record all of the religious services that Ferdinando attended, which makes it possible to develop a clear picture of the practice of religion at the Medici court as a collection of habits of devotion. By showing first how Ferdinando commandeered sacred space for dynastic ends, I examine how Cristina managed her comparatively limited access to public space differently but often assertively, to shed light on the part devotional practice played in shaping her identity as grand duchess. In Chapter 3, I focus on Maria Maddalena d’Austria and the theme of visibility through ritual, characterizing the grand duchess’s early career as a struggle for visibility. I am specifically concerned, then, with the visual articulations of her   The diary is made up of three volumes: vol. 1: BNCF, Gino Capponi 261/I: 22 July 1600 to 12 September 1615; vol. 2: BNCF, Gino Capponi 261/II: 13 September 1614 to 9 November 1623; and vol. 3: ASF, Miscellanea Medicea 11: 11 November 1623 to 30 January 1635. 26

Introduction

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role in those rituals staged around the female life cycle – her wedding, the births and baptisms of her children, the annual dowry festival – to show how Maria Maddalena managed public and sacred space assertively during her early career, in order to express, negotiate and fashion a politically charged role, as bride, mother, and as a devout and charitable grand duchess. Turning to the gender politics of objects alongside spaces, Chapters 4 and 5 are concerned with the grand duchesses’ strategies of engaging with relics and sacred images. The primary focus of Chapter 4 is the fabulous collection of relics and reliquaries that Maria Maddalena brought together during the 1610s in her chapel at Palazzo Pitti, a space that was redecorated on her order and which she used as a setting for special services during which her relic collection was put on display. In contrast to this project of a patron drawing relics to her through relic collecting, in Chapter 5 I turn to the grand duchesses’ acts of reaching out to sacred foci by visiting shrines, from the regularly staged journeys to the shrine of the Annunciate Virgin at Santissima Annunziata in Florence, to the ambitiously stage-managed pilgrimages to the Holy House of the Virgin at Loreto. The final chapter of this book addresses the relationship between Maria Maddalena’s art patronage and increased political power afforded her in the 1620s, following the death of Cosimo II in February 1621. I interrogate in particular the embellishment Maria Maddalena undertook at her suburban residence on the outskirts of Florence, the Villa del Poggio Imperiale, a project that marked a crucial transition in her status from wife to widow-regent – Maria Maddalena chose for her own apartment a decorative scheme celebrating heroic and saintly women of the past. The representation of female exemplars in the villa’s decorative programme is clearly an assertive statement of self, but what meanings might have been produced by the specific choices made? The grand duchess surrounded herself with images of illustrious female exemplars; what, then, was the particular significance of the programme to the patron as a widow-regent? In this study the programme at Poggio Imperiale – its frescoes and its images on panel and canvas – are viewed primarily in terms of the ambiguities around the grand duchess’s status as a widow, in order to shed light on the ways in which those ambiguities were resolved – or presented as resolved.27

27   On the ‘precarious’ identity of the widow see, Allison Levy (ed.), Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2003), especially Chapter 1.

Chapter 1

Dynasty Giovanna d’Austria arrived in Florence from her home city of Innsbruck in December 1565, as bride of Francesco, heir to the Medici dukedom, and was immediately made the focus of a spectacular bridal entrata. She died in Florence, as Tuscany’s grand duchess, in April 1578, the result of horrendous complications in childbirth. During the thirteen years of her residence there, Giovanna became particularly known for her piety. She was not, however, renowned as a patron of the arts and did not articulate her devoutness in conspicuous and tangible forms of art or architectural patronage. But Giovanna was active in Florence’s cultural and religious life. She supported religious causes with letters and visits and was a devotee of sacred sites, even making a pilgrimage to the Holy House of the Virgin at Loreto – the first secular member of the Medici family to do so. Public opinion about Giovanna is revealed in the accounts of contemporary commentators who, writing in the wake of her death, paid special attention to her deathbed suffering, her devout persona and the impact of her passing in and on Florence. They described a public sense of loss so great that it shook the very fabric of the city.1 But how did this heart-rending summation of Giovanna’s effect on Florence come about? How was Giovanna’s devout persona formulated? And how, given limited visual evidence, can we evaluate the part played by the visual in its articulation? My particular concern in this chapter is with Giovanna’s practice of religion specifically in relation to issues of visibility, power and place. I am not, however, suggesting that Giovanna somehow imprinted her identity onto the city through conspicuous patronage projects – rather that her activities took forms and produced effects that warrant a different type of analysis. Giovanna’s life was marked by two extraordinary events that made her (body) the focus of intense public scrutiny: her bridal entrance and her funeral. I frame this analysis of Giovanna’s role in Florence around those two major public events. I begin, however, by exploring the city itself and its sacred geography – its key churches and shrines – and the ways that certain sacred places were commandeered by the Medici dukes to dynastic needs. Florence emerges, then, as the terrain that Giovanna as an outsider had to learn to traverse.

  I return to this theme later (p. 30).

1

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Devotion in the City Duke Cosimo I carefully managed the public observance of religious festivals in Florence so that new emphases favouring the Medici came to the fore, but only gradually.2 In a proclamation issued on 15 October 1547, almost twenty years before Giovanna’s arrival, the duke stipulated as obligatory holidays for the Tuscan populace every Sunday and a range of festivals, including all those pertaining to the twelve apostles, the birth of St John the Baptist, the feasts of the Virgin, Christmas, Epiphany, the Circumcision and Ascension of Christ, Spirito Santo, Corpus Christi, All Saints, Michaelmas, the feast days of St Lawrence and St Stephen, and Holy Thursday, and ordered that the feast day of St Zenobius would also be observed in Florence.3 The proclamation also stipulated that the botteghe were to stay open on other holy days, and reserved the right for Cosimo to order their closure on any days he saw fit.4 Celebration of feast days and special events with the (grand) duke in attendance tended to focus on one or other of three key churches: the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore or Duomo (centre of Figure 1.1), Santissima Annunziata (to the north east) and San Lorenzo (to the north west). The Duomo was a natural focus for devotions connected with the identity of the city, and its prestige enhanced by the preservation there of the relics of Florence’s second patron saint, the fourth century bishop Zenobius. As the Gonzaga of Mantua came to appropriate the church of Sant’Andrea, which preserves the precious relic of the saint’s blood, and the ducal family of Savoy in seventeenth-century Turin came to exert control over Christ’s Shroud preserved in the Cathedral of San Giovanni, Medicean devotions at the Duomo of Florence articulated privileged, even proprietorial, access to the relics of Zenobius.5 John Beldon Scott has called the reliquary chapel at Turin Cathedral, commissioned by the dukes of Savoy ‘a stage of dynastic self-representation’.6 Through ritual venerations in this space, which the dukes permitted and in which they and their families participated, Lombardy’s ruling family contributed to the fashioning of the spiritual identity of Turin, to which they also bound themselves. In Florence, Medicean devotions and visibility in the Duomo and in Tuscany’s   Matteo Casini, I gesti del principe: la festa politica a Firenze e Venezia in età rinascimentale (Venezia, 1996), esp. pp. 216–17. 3   Luciano Artusi and Silvano Gabbrielli, Feste e giochi a Firenze (Florence, 1976), pp. 6–7. 4   ‘Tutte le altre feste dell’anno si può stare a bottega, salvo sè l’illustrissimo Principe ne comandassi alcuna.’ Ibid., p. 7. 5   On the devotional activity of the Gonzaga family, see Elisabeth Swain, ‘Faith in the Family: the Practice of Religion by the Gonzaga’, Journal of Family History, 8 (1983): pp. 177–89. On the Holy Shroud and the dukes of Savoy see John Beldon Scott, ‘Seeing the Shroud: Guarini’s Reliquary Chapel in Turin and the Ostension of a Dynastic Relic’, Art Bulletin, 77 (1995): pp. 609–38. 6   Scott, ‘Seeing the Shroud’, p. 609. 2

Figure 1.1

Matteo Florimi, ‘FIORENZA’. (Bird’s Eye View of the City of Florence), 1595.

Art, Gender and Religious Devotion in Grand Ducal Tuscany

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other key sacred locales articulated grand ducal claims to the territory’s most sacred possessions, and metaphorically inscribed and naturalized wider dynastic entitlements. A visit to the Duomo of Florence by Medici leaders of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries might bring to mind the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478, an outcome of which was the murder of Giuliano de’ Medici, brother of Lorenzo the Magnificent, during mass at the cathedral. In the era of Cosimo I, however, the Duomo had been co-opted as setting for many of the duchy’s principal ceremonials. In August 1546, for example, Cosimo I received the chain of the Order of the Golden Fleece in a ceremony there with a mass of the Spirito Santo.7 The complex demands of Medicean devotional lives and the themes of possession and ownership of devotional acts and sacred objects and spaces that can be read in them, were explicitly realized in grand ducal associations with the church of Santissima Annunziata, a Servite foundation with particularly strong ideological ties both with Florence’s spiritual and civic identity.8 Founded in the mid-thirteenth century, the church quickly began to attract pilgrims to the shrine of the Annunciate Virgin, whose cult focuses on a fresco of the Annunciation believed to have been completed miraculously.9 From the fifteenth century the Medici developed emphatic associations there, not least by commissioning in 1448 the elaborate marble tabernacle at the shrine, traditionally attributed to Michelozzo, and by naming themselves as the shrine’s protectors.10 In 1512, when the Medici returned to Florence after almost twenty years of exile, diarist Luca Landucci noted that they ‘repainted their arms on their palace, on [Santissima] Annunziata and in many places’, an act suggestive of the family’s almost proprietorial claim to this church.11

  ASF, Mediceo del Principato 7, fol. 258, Medici Archive Project (accessed 25/5/12).   The first community of the Servite Order was established in the hills at Montesenario

7 8

in 1233 by seven Florentine merchants despairing of the worldliness of the city and seeking a retreat. In terms of the civic identity of Florence, it is of course also significant that the Florentine year began on the feast of the Annunciation (25 March). Celebration of this festival was institutionalized by the Republic in 1416, and magistrati presided over that year’s service; Francesca Petrucci, Santissima Annunziata (Rome, 1992), p. 6. 9   The extensive literature on Santissima Annunziata includes Giuseppe Richa, Notizie istoriche delle chiese fiorentine (Rome, 1972), vol. 8, pp. 1–113; Eugenio Casalini, La SS. Annunziata di Firenze: guida storica artistica (Florence, 1957); Louisa Bulman, Artistic Patronage at SS. Annunziata, 1440–1520 (University of London, 1971); Beverley Brown, The Tribuna of SS. Annunziata in Florence (Ann Arbor, 1982); Eugenio Casalini et al. (eds), Tesori d’Arte della Annunziata di Firenze (Florence, 1987); Petrucci, Santissima Annunziata; Timothy Verdon (ed.), Santissima Annunziata (Florence, 2005). 10   Richa, Notizie, vol. 8, p. 6; Brown, The Tribuna of SS. Annunziata, pp. 21–4. 11   ‘[i] Medici feciono ridipingere l’arme loro al Palagio loro, alla Nunziata e in molti luoghi’, Luca Landucci, Diario fiorentino dal 1450 al 1516 (Florence, 1969), p. 330.

Dynasty

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As John Eade and Michael Sallnow have shown, secular leaders use the sacred to seek ‘the infusion of the divine which will make them unique’.12 During the era of the principate the Medici used Santissima Annunziata, it seems, to persuade themselves and their audiences of the ruling family’s special status or uniqueness.13 Repeated visits there by duke Cosimo I exploited opportunities for privileged access to the sacred realm designated by privileged status, especially as the sacred image, which was generally hidden behind a screen, was only made visible in honour of elite visitors.14 His visits helped to convert the shrine into a ‘dynastic cult’ and a symbol and instrument of power – to use Marcello Fantoni’s terms – as if to demonstrate the status of the dynasty as divinely chosen.15 The first trip Ferdinando I made beyond his palace after being appointed grand duke in 1587 was to Santissima Annunziata, while his subsequent patronage – including a silver altar frontal for the shrine – and frequent attendance there for mass played a part in deepening the wider popularity of the cult of the sacred image.16 But sacred space is not neutral territory and strategies of visibility can backfire, sometimes spectacularly. An incident of April 1577, involving Francesco I, offered a sober warning to the leader keen to be seen to be pious. During the visit to Florence of cardinal Andreas, nephew of Giovanna d’Austria, Francesco accompanied his guest to the church of Santissima Annunziata. The positive political impact of a display of family piety was, however, thwarted when the duke, exasperated at being jostled by the crowd, struck his groom’s face with the pommel of his dagger.17 Francesco’s lapse, compounded by it being committed in the special devotional context of Florence’s favourite shrine, was widely viewed and reported, and the church had to be reconsecrated the following day. The incident offered fodder for the anti-Medicean faction, giving rise to the claim Francesco had cut the groom’s throat.18 If Medici display in the devotional setting was to be politically efficacious, it had to be able to withstand public scrutiny and not be self-evidently hypocritical. But, if handled astutely, devotional practice had its part to play in cultivating the public persona of the Medici ruler.

12   John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow (eds), Contesting the Sacred. The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (London 1991), p. 7. 13   On the significance of Santissima Annunziata to the (men of the) Medici family, see particularly, Marcello Fantoni, ‘Il culto dell’Annunziata e la sacralità del potere mediceo’, Archivio Storico Italiano, vol. 147 (1987): 771–93, and La corte del granduca. Forme e simboli del potere mediceo fra Cinque e Seicento (Rome, 1994), pp. 171–99. 14   Fantoni, ‘The Grand Duchy of Tuscany’, p. 269. 15   Fantoni, La corte del granduca, pp. 174–5. 16   Fantoni, La corte del granduca, p. 181; pp. 186–7. 17   Bastiano Arditi, Diario di Firenze e altri parti della cristianità, edited by Roberto Cantagalli (Florence, 1970), (fol. 104), pp. 148–9 and note 2. 18   Ibid., p. 148, note 2.

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Visibility Alessandro Allori’s portrait of Giovanna d’Austria shows the subject richly dressed in an overgown of silver gauze with gold and silver embroidered trimmings over a sottana in a complementary fabric.19 Resting on her bodice is a necklace comprising several strings of pearls and an immense emerald and ruby pendant. Her fine earring is shaped like an ornate urn, a design that suggests it contained fragrance or scented paste.20 Giovanna’s elaborate attire, that suggests a multilayered appeal to the senses, locates the wearer firmly within contemporary Florentine fashion trends. However, the princess’s high neckline – with bodice fastened up to the neck and, underneath it, a white smock with a simple collar – are details more characteristic of women’s dress at the Habsburg than the Medici court.21 The portrait shows Giovanna adapting to the customs of her new environment, though retaining something of her own practice. Significantly, Allori’s image depicts Giovanna wearing in her hair an opulent gold collare adorned with numerous pearls and emeralds. This precious item, made in the grand ducal workshops in spring 1567, a little over a year after Giovanna’s arrival Florence, was commissioned by Cosimo I.22 Adorning Giovanna with jewels gifted by her father-in-law distils in one image the dynastic appropriation of Giovanna’s identity, signalled by her marriage to Cosimo’s son and heir Francesco in 1565. While playing its part in the elaborate culture of display of the Medici court, the image is suggestive too of the delicate balancing of interests that Giovanna had to manage during her years as Francesco’s wife. It took Giovanna a little over a month to travel from Innsbruck to Florence to begin life as the wife of Francesco, then heir to the dukedom of Florence. Her first glimpses of Florence would have been misleading ones, with the streets lavishly decorated for her entrata with ephemeral monuments.23 The entrata can be analysed in many ways: as a theatrical event in which street became stage; as   Roberta Orsi Landini and Bruna Niccoli, Moda a Firenze, 1540–1580: lo stile di Eleonora di Toledo e la sua influenza (Florence, 2005), pp. 115–16. 20   Ibid., p. 116; Maria Sframeli (ed.), I gioielli dei Medici dal vero e in ritratto (Florence, 2003), pp. 90–91. 21   Orsi Landini and Niccoli, Moda a Firenze, pp. 40–3; p. 116. 22   The collare was the work of the Netherlandish jeweller, Hans Domes, who arrived in Florence in 1563; Sframeli (ed.), I gioielli dei Medici, p. 90. 23   On the apparati for the 1565 entrata see, G.B. Cini, Descrizione dell’apparato fatto in Firenze per le Nozze dell’Illustrissimo ed Eccellentissimo Don Francesco de’ Medici principe di Firenze e di Siena e della Serenissima Regina Giovanna d’Austria, in Gaetano Milanesi (ed.), Le opera di Giorgio Vasari (9 vols, Florence, 1878–85), vol. 8 (1882), pp. 517–622; Pietro Ginori Conti, L’apparato per le nozze di Francesco de’ Medici e di Giovanna d’Austria nelle narrazioni del tempo e da lettere inedite di Vincenzo Borghini e di Giorgio Vasari (Florence, 1936); and Randolph Starn and Loren Partridge, ‘Triumphalism: The Sala Grande in Florence and the 1565 Entry’, in Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300–1600 (Berkeley, 1992), pp. 168–78 and figs 64–8, 70–6 and 78. 19

Dynasty

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a highly orchestrated manifestation of grand ducal magnificence; as a ritual that aestheticized the long-fought political and dynastic ambitions of the bride’s fatherin-law, duke Cosimo, and as the spectacularization of a rite of passage which, by focusing on Giovanna, visually articulated her transition from bride to wife.24 The entrata was indeed all of these things. As part of Cosimo’s complex strategy to consolidate his position in Florence, it marked and made possible a point of transition in the evolving history of the Florentine dukedom.25 Cosimo’s twentyeight years as duke had been turbulent, but he secured the Medicean position at home, and expanded Florence’s territories with the conquest of Siena in 1555. However, he had not yet been able to attain for himself the title of king of Tuscany to which he aspired – and would not be elevated from duke of Florence to grand duke of Tuscany until 1569.26 The match between Cosimo’s heir Francesco and Giovanna d’Austria was thus designed to be useful to the Medici in enhancing their position internationally. The route of the entrata, selected by Cosimo I, was an adaptation of that traditionally used for religious processions.27 By presenting Giovanna within a staged entrance she would implicitly be compared to a religious relic or image publicly on view. This would surely have encouraged the devotion of the audience, as in the traditional, mobile display of the sacred image of the Virgin of Impruneta when strategically delivered into Florence to invoke divine intervention.28 The resonances of the entrata take on a secular, even pagan aspect, however, as Giovanna’s route traced the circle of walls which had once delineated the ancient Roman settlement of Florentia. Renaissance entrate were modelled on conceptions of Roman triumphs, but this one sought to evoke and surpass ancient models, a point noted in Palla Rucellai’s propagandizing funerary oration for Giovanna, which recalled the event over a dozen years later, indicating that she was received by the Medici ‘with so much joy, and with so much pomp, that it can be compared rather to the ancient triumphs of the Romans than to modern festivals’.29

24   On the political dimensions of the entrata see especially Starn and Partridge, ‘Triumphalism’. 25   Ibid., p. 155. 26   Furio Diaz, Il Granducato di Toscana: I Medici (Turin, 1982), p. 121. 27   On this route in the fifteenth century for religious processions see Ilaria Ciseri, ‘Cerimonie, riti e feste religiose’, in Gianfranco Rolfi, Ludovica Sebregondi and Paolo Viti (eds), La chiesa e la città a Firenze nel XV secolo (Florence, 1992), p. 121. 28   See Richard C. Trexler, ‘Florentine Religious Experience: the Sacred Image’, Studies in the Renaissance, 19 (1972): pp. 7–41. 29   ‘[Giovanna] fu ricevuta da questi nostri Ser[enissi]mi Pri[n]cipi con tanta allegrezza, et con tanta pompa, ch[e] piu[t]tosto alli antichi trionfi de Romani, ch[e] alle moderne feste si poteste paragonare.’ Biblioteca Estense, Fondo Campori, gamma N 8.5.1: Palla Rucellai, Oratione nella morte della Serenissima Giovanna d’Austria gran duchessa di Toscana (1578), fol. 3 verso.

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In emulating Roman precedents Cosimo sought to affirm the prestige of Florence’s ruling family – and Florence itself – in relation to the imperial family and the Habsburg empire. A sense of the impact of the ephemeral monuments that decorated the principal stages of the route can be gained from engravings made of the arches dating from the Medici wedding of 1589 (Figures 1.2 and 1.3). They were embellished with allegorical configurations and images of triumph, mottoes and coats of arms, which celebrated the perceived status and achievements of Tuscany and Austria, and the Medici and Habsburg families. The monuments were designed to exploit possibilities for display in a visual campaign to assert dynastic strengths and naturalize authoritarianism. The iconography emphasized and legitimized Medicean rule by evoking and constructing links and comparisons between Florence’s ruling family and the imperial dynasty. Effigies of members of Giovanna’s family, including her brother Maximilian II, and uncle Charles V, surmounted the Arch of Austria at Canto de’ Tornaquinci; the entrance arch to the ‘Theatre of the Medici’ monument at Canto de’ Carnesecchi featured images of Cosimo I and illustrious men of both branches of the Medici family, and Caterina de’ Medici.30 At the entrance to Borgo Ognissanti, an arch was adorned with statues

Figure 1.2 Orazio Scarabelli, The first entry arch for the Medici wedding, the Porta al Prato in Florence, 1589. London, British Museum.   Starn and Partridge, ‘Triumphalism’, p. 222, pp. 281–5.

30

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Figure 1.3 Orazio Scarabelli, The second entry arch for the Medici wedding, the Ponte alla Carraia, 1589. London, British Museum. personifying Tuscany (a priestess) and Austria (a warrior); Vasari explained that passing through the structure evoked the unity of ‘the spiritual and the temporal’ realms, represented by Tuscany and Austria respectively.31 The iconography of the ephemeral decorations defined the bride in terms of her status as a member of the Habsburg family, and the ritual, which placed Giovanna at its centre, identified her as a powerful figure in her own right. Yet Giovanna’s possession of power was in many ways illusory, given that her marriage signalled Medicean appropriation of the prestige associated with her name and identity. Negotiating New Terrain The difficulties for Giovanna of negotiating her position of power in Florence would soon become evident. Her marriage was a troubled one, not least because throughout it Francesco maintained a relationship with Bianca Cappello, the lover whom he eventually married on Giovanna’s death in 1578. The relationship undermined Giovanna’s position as grand ducal consort, and at different points in   Starn and Partridge, ‘Triumphalism’, p. 171.

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her career, she sought advice and intervention from various relatives, including her brother emperor Maximilian (d.1576).32 A letter from her sister Eleonora d’Austria, duchess of Mantua, dating from the mid-1570s, sheds light on Giovanna’s uneasy position, and the measures she needed to take to manage it.33 The letter offers Giovanna reassurance and comfort on the issue of Francesco’s infidelity, but it begins with Eleonora indicating her pleasure on learning that an agreement has been reached between the grand ducal couple. She continues: I beg you once again Your Highness, as my most dear sister, if you want to govern and rule yourself, like a wise princess, trust in God, he who does not abandon those who turn to him. Your Highness, confess and take communion often, whence you will see how much comfort and consolation may be gained in your difficulties.34

Eleonora’s references to the grand duchess’s marriage are evocative of women’s political experience in early modern Italy, in that their roles were underpinned by patriarchal and dynastic exigencies which identified aristocratic daughters as commodities to be manoeuvred into politically advantageous, but often difficult, marriage alliances. As a communication from a powerful woman to her sister and counterpart it also offers evidence of the possibilities for women’s responsiveness to each other’s experience. Yet Eleonora’s words of spiritual guidance are particularly revealing for their suggestion of the complex relationships between women’s political identities as rulers or consorts and the structures, patterns and commitments of their devotional lives and wider familial ties. While she uses the language of civic authority to encourage Giovanna to preserve her selfcontrol, Eleonora asks that her sister renew her commitment to God with frequent confession and communion because she perceives that in gaining strength from spiritual solace Giovanna will be able to maintain her position of (worldly) power. Her counsel affirms religious devotion as an accessible forum for aristocratic women’s self expression and indicates that the grand duchess’s opportunities to negotiate her political identity (as wife of Francesco de’ Medici) were confined, in her sister’s eyes, to the devotional domain. It is difficult to determine Giovanna’s attitude to her life in Florence with certainty, but it is clear that she responded to her new environment, and to the   Maria Luisa Mariotti Masi, Bianca Cappello: una veneziana alla Corte dei Medici (Milan, 1986), p. 140. 33   ASF, Mediceo del Principato 5094, fol. 97, letter dated 8 February 1576, contemporary Italian translation from the original German. 34   ‘prego un’ altra volta la C[elsitudine] V[ostra] come mia car[issi]ma sorella si voglia governare et regger’ se stessa, come una savia Principessa, et haver’ tutta la sua fidanza in Dio, il quale no[n] abandona nissuno ch[e] ricorre da lui: V[ostra] C[elsitudine] si confessa et si co[m]munica spesso, onde ella vedrà quanto conforto et consolatione la sia per ricevere nelle sue tribolationi’, ASF, Mediceo del Principato 5094, fol. 97. 32

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challenges that came with it, with a carefully managed practice of piety and devotion. During her thirteen years in Florence she supported numerous pious causes. She gave voice to her devout concerns early on. Less than five months after her arrival in Florence, Giovanna wrote to pope Pius V: ‘Since having come to this city I have visited a good many monasteries and pious places.’35 Her familiarity with Florence’s religious institutions establishes a context in which to beg a favour from the pope on behalf of Florence’s Jesuit college, and this is the letter’s real purpose. Giovanna asks that the college be transferred from its contemporary location to new, more ample, accommodation. The plan was a complicated one, in which she requested that the Jesuits move to the Monastery of San Pancrazio, and that the monks of the Order of Vallombrosa, who would be displaced by the transfer, should themselves transfer to the Monastery of Santa Trinita, which she considered too large for the small community in residence. This complicated proposal was just one of her acts in favour of the Jesuits in Tuscany, whom she supported by making donations, and, in the later 1560s, by intervening on the Society’s behalf in Siena, in its ultimately successful bid to cede the parish church of San Vigilio to the Jesuit college.36 Giovanna’s sympathy with the Jesuits, developed as a young woman in Innsbruck, was a sentiment in common with duchess Eleonora di Toledo (d.1562), wife of Cosimo I.37 Eleonora promoted the Jesuits by helping found the college that Giovanna later sought to assist, and included a donation to the Compagnia in her will.38 Eleonora had forged personal, though not entirely trouble-free, relationships with leading Jesuits including Diego Laínez and Diego de Guzmán.39 In February 1553, at the duchess’s request, Laínez comforted her father, Don Pedro de Toledo, on his deathbed in Naples, and Guzmán visited Eleonora when her own health failed in the late 1550s.40 Aristocratic women were among the most fervent and active early supporters of the Jesuits, and Giovanna could draw on the 35   ‘Da poi son venuto (sic) in questa città; io ho visitato bona parte de monasterij et luoghi pij’, ASF, Mediceo del Principato 5927a, fol. 61, letter dated 27 February 1565 (stile fiorentino). Also see Lisa Kaborycha, ‘Expressing a Habsburg Sensibility in the Medici Court: The Grand Duchess Giovanna d’Austria Patronage and Public Image in Florence’, in Christina Strunck (ed.), Artful Allies. Medici Women as Cultural Mediators, 1533–1743 (Milan, 2012), pp. 96–7. 36   Kaborycha, ‘Giovanna d’Austria’s Patronage’, p. 98. 37   The Jesuits are cited in Palla Rucellai’s funeral oration amongst those who benefited from Giovanna’s generosity and patronage, Oratione, fol. 5 verso. 38   Giuseppe Richa, Notizie istoriche delle chiese fiorentine (Rome, 1972), vol. 1, p. 275. Eleonora left the Compagnia the annual sum of 200 scudi on her death, Mario Scaduto, L’Epoca di Giacomo Laínez: Il Governo (Rome, 1964), p. 584. Also see, Chiara Franceschini, ‘Los scholares son cosa de su excelentia, como lo es toda la Compañia: Eleonora di Toledo and the Jesuits’, in Konrad Eisenbichler (ed.), The Cultural World of Eleonora of Toledo, Duchess of Florence and Siena (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 181–206. 39   See Franceschini, ‘Eleonora di Toledo and the Jesuits’, esp. pp. 189–97. 40   Laínez first visited Florence in June 1547, returning several times over the following years. Guzmán visited Eleonora in Pisa and at the Villa del Poggio a Caiano; she

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examples set by certain of her Habsburg relatives. Her cousin Juana of Austria (1535–73), daughter of emperor Charles V and princess of Portugal, was deeply influenced by Francisco de Borja, duke of Gandia, and general of the Society of Jesus from 1565.41 In Mantua Giovanna’s sister, Eleonora d’Austria, favoured the Jesuit movement. Eleonora had encouraged the admittance of the Jesuits into her city in the face of opposition from her consort, duke Guglielmo Gonzaga, and subsequently supported their church and the school they founded; she was buried, in accordance with her wishes, at the Jesuit church of Santissima Trinità, near the high altar.42 The fact that in Rome too the Society of Jesus benefited from the financial support of women such as Marchesa Vittoria della Tolfa, suggests the special appeal to women of the Jesuits and reforming orders more generally.43 Their reasons – beyond the personal and the pious – are difficult to judge, but a powerful motivation must surely have been that the emerging reforming orders were comparatively accessible to them and the impact of their interventions more likely to be felt than in other sacred arenas with already established patterns of sponsorship. But it is the brief reference that Giovanna’s letter of 1566 makes to a sustained practice of religious visiting that is of particular interest here. In just five months she had been to ‘a good many’ of Florence’s ‘monasteries and pious places’.44 Giovanna would probably have regarded it as her duty as Florence’s future duchess to make herself familiar with the city’s churches and monasteries, and that was not unusual. Margarita of Austria (1584–1611), queen of Spain, occupied herself in much the same way, by visiting all of the city’s numerous convents, when the Spanish court moved from Madrid to Valladolid.45 Religious visiting, it seems, offered opportunities for public perception of such women’s pious acts. But what part did visibility play in Giovanna’s religious practice, and what was the significance of this visibility? In fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Tuscany, devotional practice afforded women rare opportunities for licit public visibility, as Adrian Randolph has was a consumptive, but recovered her strength temporarily after this period of ill health in the 1550s; Scaduto, Giacomo Laínez, pp. 578–9, p. 581. 41   Marcel Bataillon, ‘Jeanne d’Austriche, princesse de Portugal’, Etudes sur le Portugal au temps de l’humanisme (CoimbraParis, 1952), pp. 261–5. 42   David Chambers and Jane Martineau (eds), Splendours of the Gonzaga (London, 1981), p. 7, p. 210; Paul F. Grendler, The University of Mantua, the Gonzaga & the Jesuits, 1584–1630 (Baltimore, 2009), p. 39. 43   Marchesa Vittoria della Tolfa, niece of pope Paul IV Carafa, was involved in founding of the Collegio Romano, see Carolyn Valone, ‘Piety and Patronage: Women and the Early Jesuits’, in E. Ann Matter and John Coakley, Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance (Philadelphia, 1994), pp. 157–63. 44   ASF, Mediceo del Principato 5927a, fol. 61. 45   María Jesús Peréz Martín, Margarita de Austria, reina de España (Madrid, 1961), p. 130.

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shown.46 For Giovanna d’Austria, probably more so than Florence’s female citizens of this and earlier periods, access to public space depended on ‘religious sanctioning’ and was conditioned by the gendered possibilities and restrictions of devotional space.47 In 1578, writing in the immediate aftermath of Giovanna’s death in childbirth, contemporary chronicler Giuliano de’ Ricci noted that the grand duchess had been a frequent visitor to Santissima Annunziata.48 While her pregnancy probably provided a motivation to visit the shrine, she very likely visited there often anyway, and the journey from the grand ducal residence would have given her a certain public visibility.49 The fact that Ricci noticed at all testifies to this. It was the sort of appearance that would have contrasted sharply with the practice of Eleonora di Toledo, who was known not to worship outside the ducal palaces, and was criticised for her secluded practice.50 For Giovanna, financial constraints meant limited opportunities for art patronage. Despite her position and status, she was short of her own funds, let down in her financial affairs by the men of her family. Her brother Maximilian paid only a proportion of her dowry, thus giving the Medici an excuse not to pay Giovanna all of the allowance to which she should have been entitled under the terms in the marriage contract.51 Even though this meant that some patronage opportunities were blocked to her, Giovanna involved herself in driving forward her religious projects in Florence and its territories.52 She not only visited churches but took an interest in them beyond the strictly devotional and personal, such as her interventions on behalf of the accommodation of the Jesuits in Florence and Siena. Ahead of a visit to Pisa during Lent in 1575, Giovanna was updated on the renovation of the church of San Paolo a Ripa d’Arno in anticipation of a trip to the church. A new sacristy had been built and two ‘very ancient’ altars restored, a process that had revealed relics in each, the grand duchess was informed.53 46   Adrian Randolph, ‘Regarding Women in Sacred Space’, in Geraldine A. Johnson and Sara F. Matthews Grieco (eds), Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (Cambridge, 1997), p. 17. 47   Ibid. 48   ‘... dove per sua divozione andava continovamente’, Giuliano de’ Ricci, Cronaca (1532–1606), ed. Giulia Sapori (Milan, 1972), (1, fol. 429 verso) p. 242. 49   The Medici lived principally at the Palazzo Ducale (Palazzo della Signoria) at this period. 50   See Carolyn Smyth, ‘An Instance of Feminine Patronage in the Medici Court of Sixteenth-Century Florence: The Chapel of Eleonora da Toledo in the Palazzo Vecchio’, in Cynthia Lawrence (ed.), Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors and Connoisseurs (University Park, PA, 1997), p. 89 note 27. 51   Kaborycha, ‘Giovanna d’Austria’s Patronage’, p. 96. 52   On the scope of Giovanna’s patronage, see Kaborycha, ‘Giovanna d’Austria’s Patronage’, pp. 96–9. 53   ASF, Mediceo del Principato 5923: letter from Ugolino Grifoni to Giovanna d’Austria, dated 9 January 1575; Medici Archive Project (accessed 26/5/12).

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Giovanna forged relationships with female religious. She was, for example, devoted to the Florentine mystic Caterina de’ Ricci. As prioress of the convent of San Vincenzo near Prato, Ricci had previously been befriended by Eleonora di Toledo.54 Years later, Giovanna d’Austria followed Eleonora’s example and visited Caterina at San Vincenzo. In the funeral oration dedicated to Giovanna, Palla Rucellai used the grand duchess’s relationship with Suor Caterina as a way of quantifying Giovanna’s devoutness, praising the grand duchess’s humility by encouraging his listeners to believe that her ‘reverence and humanity’ in the presence of the santa viva eroded the boundaries that traditionally divided subject and sovereign.55 Interactions between female leaders and devotional exemplars, it would seem, offered women of power an acceptable space to be humble. Special devotional practice also provided spaces for the representation of self in more overtly public ways. In the spring of 1573 Giovanna made a pilgrimage to the Santa Casa at Loreto. By this time Loreto’s popularity as a pilgrimage destination was well established, with supplicants travelling great distances to visit the Holy House of the Virgin and venerate the wooden statue of the Virgin and Child, reputedly by the hand of St Luke, housed within it.56 The shrine’s legend claims that a simple structure on a hill in the Marches was the birthplace and home of Mary and childhood home of Christ, miraculously transported there from the Holy Land in the late thirteenth century. In 1469, the bishop of Recanati proposed a new basilica at Loreto to accommodate the ever-increasing number of devotees to the shrine. The project was subsequently sponsored by pope Paul II, who, in February 1470, confirmed the site as miraculously founded.57 In the sixteenth century, the elaborate sculpted rivestimento was built over the house (see Figures 5.2 and 5.3). Papal support of the shrine, including indulgences granted by Paul II, helped to ensure the cult’s appeal, but the numbers and status of the pilgrims to the Holy House also played their own part in developing the shrine’s reputation.58 Giovanna followed in the footsteps of illustrious devotees, including Margherita, duchess of Parma and Piacenza, and Medici pope Leo X, but as the first secular Medici, male or female, to make the journey, she established an important precedent. She travelled to the Papal States with such an extensive entourage that the operation   Smyth, ‘The Chapel of Eleonora da Toledo’, p. 89 note 27.   Rucellai, Oratione, fol. 5 recto. 56   The literature on Loreto is extensive. For a recent treatment of the history of the 54 55

cult, see Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York, 2010), pp. 195–215, esp. pp. 195–7. For a summary and for the significance of the cult to later sixteenth and early seventeenth-century devotees, see Pamela M. Jones, Altarpieces and Their Viewers in the Churches of Rome from Caravaggio to Guido Reni (Farnham, 2008), pp. 84–91. 57   Floriano Grimaldi, Il sacello della Santa Casa. Storia e devozione (Loreto, 1991), pp. 41–2; 50; Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, p. 203. 58   Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, p. 202.

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seems to have been designed to spectacularize her devoutness, rather than promote an image of humility. Over four hundred horses and eighty carriages, liveried guards, a dozen pages and a group of gentlewomen dressed in black accompanied her along a route that took in key centres including Cortona, Perugia and Foligno.59 Officials and well-wishers greeted the pilgrims at each of the major stopping points. Once at Loreto itself, Giovanna spent most of her time praying inside the Holy House, according to her correspondence home.60 Orazio Torsellini, the early seventeenth-century historian of the shrine, reflected on Giovanna’s extreme piety, signified by her refusal to kneel on cushions in the Holy House so that she could conduct her devotions on the bare floor.61 On this trip Giovanna would donate 500 scudi for the pavimento in the shrine, and promise a further 500.62 While her experience of the relic was a rapturous one, her requests were grounded in personal and dynastic concerns, according to Torsellini: with flowing tears [she] besought pardon for herself and her husband, and by praier intreated peaceable wedlocke and issue-male. Soone after devoutly receiving the sacred Mysteries, she spent all of the following night in praier, in humble supplication before the B[lessed] Virgin, doing also the like the two daies and nights that followed.63

Giovanna presented a silver crucifix by Giambologna to the shrine, versions of which the sculptor produced for pope Pius V, Philip II and Giovanna’s husband, Francesco.64 The work is remarkable not only for Christ’s highly naturalistic body and head crowned with thorns, but the exquisitely carved ebony base for the cross, which records Giovanna’s name as its donor on the underside. This is surely the ‘silver [representation] of Christ Crucified’ to which Torsellini is referring in an account of Giovanna’s impressive donations to the Holy House, a list that also included: a great Crosse of Ebony, foure curious Candlestickes of silver, ... ornaments for the Bishop, Priest, Ministers, and the Altar, made of gold and silver, double 59   Gabrielle Langdon, Medici Women: Portraits of Power, Love, and Betrayal from the Court of Cosimo I (Toronto, 2006), p. 308 note 175. 60   ASF, Mediceo del Principato 5926, letter to Francesco I de’ Medici from Giovanna d’Austria, dated 27 April 1573. 61   Orazio Torsellini, Our B. Lady of Loreto (St Omer, 1608), p. 411. 62   Floriano Grimaldi, Pellegrini e pellegrinaggi a Loreto nei secoli XIV–XVIII (2001), p. 651. 63   Torsellini, Loreto, p. 411. 64   Stefano Papetti, Devozioni lauretane della famiglia Medici (Florence 1991), pp. 10–13, figs 4–8; Charles Avery, Giambologna: The Complete Sculpture (London, 1987), p. 199, p. 202.

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curled and imbrodered, a golden garment for the B[lessed] Virgin made with mervailous art; also other furniture for the Altar and the holy Chalices, beautified with imbrodery, jewells, gold, and silver.65

According to Torsellini, Giovanna sought to invoke the assistance of the Virgin in her marital difficulties, with the presentation of a further gift: [S]he hung up two h[e]arts of gold in golden chaines, to be a monument, that she was either most deare to her and her husband, or els that the B[lessed] Virgin, the author of concord, would make her husband’s h[e]art such a one unto her, as she knew hers to be unto him.66

Despite Torsellini’s interpretation of the personal significance of the two hearts, hearts as gifts at Loreto were suggestive of the profound sense of a corporeal engagement with the shrine that devotees experienced, and so were considered especially meaningful as ex-votos.67 Giovanna sought to personalize her attachment there in other evocative ways. In March 1574, almost a year after her pilgrimage, she was sent word from a minister at the basilica that gifts that she had bestowed to the shrine had adorned it for a mass attended by the archbishop of Nazareth, and, in accordance with her wishes, her portrait had been hung up there for the occasion, functioning as her surrogate to become a witness to the service.68 Pilgrimage, it seems, afforded Giovanna a range of opportunities to manage or manipulate her image. The journey’s elaborate processes made her devout persona highly visible, while gifting (of the disembodied golden heart and of her likeness) simulated a continued bodily presence at the Holy House after the journey was concluded. Giovanna’s pilgrimage set her apart as an exemplar and made her the object of praise. The poet Felice Faciuta even reflected that two other notable women at court, Isabella de’ Medici (Francesco’s sister) and Eleonora di Piero di Toledo (his cousin), were likely to be more inclined to entertainments such as dancing or hunting than going on a pilgrimage.69 The format of this pilgrimage provided the

  Torsellini, Loreto, p. 411.   Ibid. 67   Angelo Turchini, ‘Pellegrinagii e voti, itinerari di disciplina e di devozione’, 65

66

in Ferdinando Citterio and Luciano Vaccaro (eds), Loreto: crocevia religioso tra Italia, Europa e Oriente (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1997), p. 548. 68   ‘questo s[an]to luogo ... parato tutto di suoi doni, et appeso il suo ritratto com’ella comanda’, ASF, Mediceo del Principato 5094, letter from R. Sassatello to Giovanna d’Austria, dated 26 March 1574. 69   Langdon, Medici Women, p. 177.

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model for subsequent Medicean journeys there, as well as playing a role in further popularizing the shrine.70 Imagining Giovanna: the Impact of Her Death and Funeral On 11 April 1578 Giovanna d’Austria died in childbirth and diarist Giuliano de’ Ricci, amongst others, recorded her last days and hours.71 Having received holy communion, Giovanna made her deathbed appeals, which were, apparently, conventional ones. She prioritized concerns for the fate of soul, and her familial, devotional and charitable responsibilities. She asked God for mercy, appealed to her matrone for the care of her children, to her husband for the care of their subjects, her servants, the poor and wretched amongst Florence’s citizens and for the city’s monasteries, and to all present for the care of her son Filippo, born in May 1577.72 The Florentine response to Giovanna’s death was dramatic as commentators, including Giuliano de’ Ricci and Bastiano Arditi, who were very likely eyewitnesses to the funeral at least, reflected on the grand duchess’s passing and its impact in extraordinarily powerful terms.73 Prompted to rationalize the tragic circumstances of the grand duchess’s death and contemplate her qualities, Ricci and Arditi’s comments, as well as those of other commentators, suggest a range of meanings produced by public perception of Giovanna’s corporeal, imagined or simulated presence. An outpouring of praise for Giovanna characterizes Ricci’s account: ‘She was most chaste, charitable, pious, diligent in the care of her family, prudent in raising her daughters, loving to her husband, kind towards the populace, not haughty but humble, not confrontational but peaceful’.74 Giovanna’s ‘saintliness’ made her   Papetti, Devozioni lauretane, p. 10. Also see Alice E. Sanger, ‘Maria Maddalena d’Austria’s Pilgrimage to Loreto: Visuality, Liminality and Exchange’, in Christina Strunck (ed.), Artful Allies. Medici Women as Cultural Mediators, 1533–1743 (Milan, 2012). pp. 253–65, and pp. 104–108. 71   Ricci, Cronaca (1, fol. 429 verso–430 recto) pp. 242–3. Accounts of Giovanna’s death are also provided in Gaetano Pieraccini, La Stirpe de’ Medici di Cafaggiolo (Florence) vol. 2, pp. 130–31. 72   Ibid., p. 243. Filippo’s baptism in September 1577 was a spectacular event in which the grand duke took a prominent role by processing from the Palazzo Ducale to the Baptistry, but Giovanna did not. Bianca Cappello’s daughter, Pellegrina, however, led a procession of ladies of the court; Eve Borsook, ‘Art and Politics at the Medici Court II: The Baptism of Filippo de’ Medici in 1577’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 13 (1967–8), p. 107. 73   Ricci, Cronaca (1, fol. 429 verso) p. 244; Arditi, Diario di Firenze, p. 178. 74   ‘Ella fu castissima, caritativa, pietosa, diligente nel custodire la sua famiglia, prudente in allevare le figliuole, amorevole al marito, benigna verso i popoli, non altiera ma humile, non contentiosa ma pacifica’, Ricci, Cronaca (1, fol. 430 verso) p. 244. 70

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an exemplar for her female subjects, he opined.75 Ricci’s comments anticipate the eulogies published in the wake of her funeral that dwelt on the tragedy of Giovanna’s agonizing death in childbirth and compared her suffering to that of a saint and holy martyr.76 These are reminiscent only up to a point of the orations produced on the death of Eleonora di Toledo, for example, which praised the duchess’s piety and other qualities but identified fertility as her defining attribute.77 Different emphases were required for Giovanna. Ricci’s assertions about popularity, humility and peacefulness seem designed to throw into negative relief distinctions between the late grand duchess and her despised rival, Bianca Cappello – a marginal figure, as such less easy to police than Giovanna, and thus representing a threat to patriarchal authority. Yet consistent emphasis on Giovanna’s qualities, including her devoutness, suggests the overpoweringly positive image that the grand duchess projected as a model of feminine virtue. In this regard, reflections on the impact of her death on the very fabric of Florence are particularly suggestive. The city and the whole state felt an ‘infinite pain’ at her loss, claimed Ricci,78 while another commentator proposed that Florence was ‘overcome with ... grief’, as much as if the city had been ‘shaken from its foundations’.79 Bastiano Arditi imagined the grand duchess’s devoutness as a potent force, which, on her passing, produced a brief transformation of the city itself: In these last days since [Giovanna’s death] we have had a spell of bad weather: it has snowed, and there have been extraordinary cold, icy winds and hailstones; the sky is showing us that the warm love of God has gone, and has left the city full of ice: it was cold due to the spirit of God.80

Giovanna’s death seemed to rob Florence of the power of her piety. Piety, then, is dependent on life for potency. The grand duchess was not quite transformed into a 75   ‘la bontà et santità di questa donna è stata tale, tale è stato lo exemplo che lei ha dato alle sue cittadine’, ibid., p. 243. 76   Kaborycha, ‘Giovanna d’Austria’s Patronage’, p. 102. 77   Janet Cox-Rearick, ‘La Ill.ma Sig.ra Duchessa felice memoria: The Posthumous Eleonora di Toledo’, in K. Eisenbichler (ed.), The Cultural World of Eleonora of Toledo (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 232–3. 78   ‘... a tutto lo Stato et a tutta la città infinitamente è doluto la perdita di questa nostra serenissima duchessa et patrona’, Ricci, Cronaca (1, fol. 430 verso) p. 243. 79   Giovan Battista Adriani, Essequie della Sereniss. Giovanna d’Austria Gran Duchessa di Toscana fatto in Latino e tradotto in volgare (Florence 1578), quoted in Kaborycha, ‘Giovanna d’Austria’s Patronage’, p. 101, p. 105 note 68. 80   ‘in questi giorni e principio dello accidente si fece una stagione di tempo che nevicò a lo’ntorno e con venti freddi e diacciosi, con brine, istraordinari, mostrando il cielo che si partiva della città lo spirito caldo d’amore di Dio e lasciava la città tutta piena di diaccio: era freddato dello spirito di Dio.’ Arditi, Diario di Firenze, (fol. 121) p. 178.

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saint, for whom death produces sacred power, but the rituals staged for her funeral would transform her into an object of devotion that made her body its focus. In an evolving tradition of Medici funerals, Giovanna’s obsequies, carried out over several days, temporarily monopolized the city’s key processional and devotional spaces in a carefully organized state occasion.81 Two days after her death, the grand duchess’s body lay in state in the Sala del Consiglio (Sala Grande) in the Palazzo Ducale.82 Formerly the council hall of the post-1494 republican government, the Sala Grande had been taken over by Cosimo I for use as his audience chamber. In 1565, to coincide with the celebrations for Giovanna’s entrata, the ceiling of this huge room had been decorated by Giorgio Vasari with a decorative programme glorifying Cosimo’s rule and his ambition. On Cosimo’s death in 1574, his body was also laid in state in the Sala Grande. Giovanna’s presence there in 1578 therefore recalled this precedent. It also linked her visually to the dynastic ambitions expressed in the decorative scheme, the attainment of which she, as a Habsburg princess and mother of the grand ducal heir (her shortlived son, Filippo), had been an integral part. According to Ricci, the whole city came to the Sala Grande to pay its respects.83 Giovanna’s coffin rested on a painted catafalque under an opulent white baldachin. The grand duchess’s body was dressed ‘as a queen’ (‘a uso di regina’), according to Arditi.84 A crown recalled Giovanna’s honorary title, conferred on her and her sisters in infancy, because their mother had brought her title of Queen of Bohemia with her to Innsbruck on her marriage.85 Ricci records that she wore a richly worked white gown, and jewels at her throat and on her fingers, as well as the crown, claiming the phenomenal sum of ‘over 800,000 scudi’ as the value of the jewels.86 In the funerals of powerful women, the clothing of the cadaver was meaningful: whereas the body of the fifteenth-century duchess of Ferrara, Eleonora of Aragon, had been clothed as a penitent for her funeral in that city in 1493, in Florence in 1578 it seems that the opportunity had been seized to celebrate Giovanna’s status by richly adorning her body, rather than commemorating her piety by not doing so.87 This contrast is made more resonant if we consider the   The elaborately stage-managed funeral of Cosimo I in 1574 seems to have offered the model for this event, in that the same series of rituals underlie the proceedings, though expressed in Cosimo’s case on a grander scale. These obsequies had, in turn, reworked the idioms deployed for the funeral of Charles V in Brussels; see Borsook, ‘Art and Politics at the Medici Court I’, pp. 31–54. 82   Ricci, Cronaca (1, fol. 430 verso) p. 244. 83   Ibid. 84   Arditi, Diario di Firenze (fol. 121) pp. 177–8. 85   Kaborycha, ‘Giovanna d’Austria’s Patronage’, p.97. 86   Ricci, Cronaca (1, fol. 430 verso) p. 244. 87   Werner L. Gundersheimer, ‘Women, Learning, and Power: Eleonora of Aragon and the Court of Ferrara’, in Patricia H. Labalme (ed.), Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past (New York, 1984), p. 43. 81

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funeral of another Habsburg woman of the period. The body of Juana of Austria, Charles V’s daughter, who died at the Escorial in 1573 and was buried in the church of the convent of Las Descalzas Reales which she founded, was dressed for interment, in accordance with her wishes, in a habit of the Franciscan order.88 On the evening of 12 April 1578, Giovanna’s body was carried at the head of a procession of courtiers, clergy and monks to the church of San Lorenzo, site of the Medici tombs. Ricci records that monks from three orders joined the procession, while Arditi reports that the body was accompanied by the clerics of Santa Maria del Fiore, canons of San Lorenzo and the monks of the churches of Santissima Annunziata and Santa Croce.89 The interior of San Lorenzo was illuminated by many torches and candles, symbols of everlasting life. From then on a wax effigy would be used in the ceremonies relating to the funeral. On the day of Giovanna’s funeral – Friday 18 April – her effigy, luxuriously dressed and bejewelled, lay on a bier in the courtyard of the ducal palace, which had been hung with black fabric.90 For the second time in the course of six days public attention was intensely focused on the figure of the grand duchess, this time on her simulated body which was delivered from the political centre of Florence to the Medici devotional focus of San Lorenzo. Ricci records that the funeral procession was led by a party of monks, followed by clergy and ninety canons dressed in mourning attire; they were followed by courtiers carrying the bier under a baldachin, which was in turn carried by pages and surrounded by torches. Grand duke Francesco and his court followed the bier and government officials ordered by rank completed the entourage.91 The procession passed first from the piazza in front of the ducal palace along the Via Vacchereccia to the Mercato Nuovo, and on to Via Porta Rossa, then joined the Via Tornabuoni at Piazza Santa Trinita. At this point the route traced a section of the ancient city boundary, part of the route used traditionally for religious processionals that had also been followed for Giovanna’s entrata. The cortège moved on past the Canto de’ Carnesecchi, by the Baptistry and Duomo, up Via Martelli which leads to Via Larga, turning left at the Medici palace towards San Lorenzo.92 The procession visually united civic, commercial and devotional foci, and linked these with residential sites of particular Medicean resonance: the Palazzo Ducale in the city centre with the Medici palace on Via Larga. Services and apparati for the funeral of Cosimo I in 1574 established the model for Medicean obsequies of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, and the visual language of funereal spectacle which marked Giovanna’s funeral – the lying in state, processions, and special services and decorations at San Lorenzo 88   Fernando Checa Cremades, ‘Monasterio de Las Descalzas Reales: Origenes de su colección artistica’, Reales Sitios, 102 (1989), p. 23. 89   Ricci, Cronaca (1, fol. 430 verso) p. 244; Arditi, Diario di Firenze (fol. 121) p. 178. 90   Ricci, Cronaca (1, fol. 431 recto) p. 245. 91   Ibid.; Arditi, Diario di Firenze (fol. 121) p. 178. 92   Ricci, Cronaca (1, fol. 431 recto) p. 245.

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– had similarly been undertaken for Cosimo. In 1578, the façade of San Lorenzo was draped with black fabric, which had also been a feature of Cosimo’s funeral, and became characteristic of major funerals celebrated in Florence.93 On both occasions the church interior was hung with swathes of black cloth and was decorated with images of skeletons painted in chiaroscuro.94 It is not inconceivable that the skeletons of the 1578 funeral were, in fact, the same objects reused, as was probably the case with other ephemeral decorations. Swathes of drapery and chiaroscuro skeletons would again feature on the façade of the San Lorenzo at obsequies conducted in 1612 to honour Margarita of Austria, queen of Spain, linked to the Florentine court through her sister, grand duchess Maria Maddalena d’Austria.95 Obsequies for Margarita, queen of Spain, at San Lorenzo, as those for Philip II of Spain in 1598, had a diplomatic rather than practical function and were used by Florence’s ruling family to link Habsburg glory with the Medicean aspirations that Giovanna’s marriage to Francesco had made more tangible. In 1578 the catafalque inside San Lorenzo containing Giovanna’s body was canopied and surrounded by candles. The interior of the church was decorated with Latin mottoes embellished with the arms of Austria, and her funeral oration, written by Giovanbatista Adriani, honoured Giovanna by naming her illustrious relatives: the men of the Habsburg family, her mother and sisters, and the Medici. In this period the deceased of the Medici family were interred in the crypt at San Lorenzo. These bodies awaited transferral to a new chapel at the church, the Cappella de’ Principi, the sumptuous and outrageously expensive grand ducal mausoleum, initiated by Ferdinando I, but already proposed in the era of Cosimo I.96 This would be the final phase in the Medicean appropriation of Giovanna’s identity. Conclusion The visual and literary rhetoric of Giovanna’s funeral in 1578 – as her entrata in 1565 – articulated the Medici family’s co-opting of the Habsburg connection she embodied by underscoring her role in terms of the requirements of two dynasties. Yet Giovanna’s dynastic marriage and experience in Florence produced some different, unanticipated, outcomes. While the spectacle of the extraordinary – specifically the entrata and funeral – is well documented, the ordinary – Giovanna’s quotidian practice of religion – is less well documented and therefore comparatively hidden from (our) view. Nevertheless it has been possible to   Borsook, ‘Art and Politics at the Medici Court I’, p. 39.   Ibid., p. 40. 95   On the funeral of Margarita of Austria see, Monica Bietti (ed.), La morte e la 93 94

gloria: apparati funebri medicei per Filippo II di Spagna e Margarita d’Austria, exh. cat. (Livorno, 1999). 96   Borsook, ‘Art and Politics at the Medici Court I’, p. 54.

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delineate traces of a visual language of piety and power that were harnessed on behalf of Giovanna by others and even by Giovanna herself during her time in Florence. The grand duchess’s pious persona, visually articulated in a range of religious and cultural endeavours including devotional visits and pilgrimages, had the effect of setting her apart – from her husband, from other women – and establishing her as an exemplar. Accounts of the response to Giovanna’s death by eyewitness commentators suggest a different kind of appropriation of her identity than that orchestrated by men of the Habsburg and Medici families, one that briefly made her body an object of devotion.

Chapter 2

Display Scipione Pulzone’s portrait of Cristina di Lorena, dating from 1590, shapes and projects the subject’s identity as Tuscany’s grand duchess by deploying striking references to Cristina’s husband, Ferdinando I and to the wealth of the Medici (Plate 2). When she arrived in Florence in 1589 as Ferdinando’s bride, Cristina represented both the past and the future of the Medici family. She was the granddaughter of Caterina de’ Medici, queen of France, of the line of Cosimo the Elder and Lorenzo the Magnificent. Her marriage to the cardinal-turned-grand duke would ensure the continuation of the Medici line. Pulzone’s portrayal is a pendant to a portrait of the grand duke so was always designed to be seen in relation to Ferdinando’s image. Cristina is shown next to a table on which stands the grand ducal crown made for grand duke Francesco between 1577 and 1583 by Jacques Bylivelt.1 The crown had seventeen rays, corresponding with the number of cities under Medicean dominion, with Florence itself represented by a stylized lily encrusted with rubies.2 Cristina’s hand rests near the crown, without touching it. An excess of jewels and iridescent fabrics adorn her body. She wears a shimmering gown of watered taffeta,3 decorated with goldwork and dozens of tiny, shining pink enamelled flowers, each with a pearl at its centre. Her jewellery includes three strings of perfect pearls and a magnificently ornate collare incorporating twenty-two large diamonds and seven rubies.4 Both belonged to Ferdinando. The collare, originally purchased in 1572 by Cosimo I, passed to Ferdinando on his father’s death. In 1621 it was recorded amongst the most precious jewels belonging to the Medici.5 This glittering portrait produces an image of Cristina that is dependent on Ferdinando’s status. 1   C. Willemijn Fock, ‘Francesco I e Ferdinando I mecenati di orefici e intagliatori di pietre dure’, in Le arti del Principato Mediceo (Florence, 1980), pp. 326–7; The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence (New Haven, 2002), pp. 309–10. 2   Henk Th. Van Veen, ‘Circles of Sovereignty: The Tondi of the Sala Grande in Palazzo Vecchio and the Medici Crown’, in Philip Jacks (ed.), Vasari’s Florence: Artists and Literati at the Medicean Court (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 218–9. 3   Elizabeth Currie explains that the gown shown in this portrait is more modest and in tune with Florentine taste than those Cristina would have brought with her from France, ‘Clothing and a Florentine Style, 1550–1620’, Renaissance Studies, 23 (February 2009), p. 36. 4   Maria Sframeli (ed.), I gioielli dei Medici dal vero e in ritratto (Florence, 2003), p. 108. 5   Ibid.

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Some twenty years or more later, a portrait of Cristina painted by Tiberio Titi, and perhaps commissioned by the grand duchess, shows her somewhat differently than Pulzone’s early portrayal (Plate 3). Dressed in black, with her hair covered by a widow’s hood, Cristina kneels at a low table. She rests loosely clasped hands on the table in front of an open prayerbook, the pages of which show prayers to the Virgin and an image depicting the Annunciation. The book is propped against a crown.6 On the far right of the scene a balcony opens onto a view of Florence, producing a clear sense of place. While Pulzone’s image emphasizes Cristina’s identity in relation to Medicean display in terms of dynasty and opulence, Titi’s portrait subverts these in favour of other values. The work produces a powerful image of Cristina as Ferdinando’s widow; indeed, apart from her wedding ring, her only jewellery is a portrait miniature of her deceased husband attached to her gown.7 Scattered flowers around the kneeling figure, as well as the atmosphere of mourning, refer to the transitory nature of life and faith in redemption, as Karla Langedijk explains.8 Yet the portrait seems to resonate too with the subject’s sense of her own identity. While displaying Cristina’s devoutness, particularly in terms of Marian devotion, it also suggests the strategic use of a pious self-image.9 This chapter focuses on the years that separate these two portraits, and specifically the period in which Cristina di Lorena was the wife of Ferdinando I. My concern lies in unravelling the devout persona of Cristina in relation to issues of display. During his reign, Ferdinando figured strikingly in a range of rituals, but so did Cristina. For the new grand duchess, as for Giovanna d’Austria before her, the terrain of the devotional had to be negotiated, and it is this process that is of particular interest to me. My first concern, however, is to establish the context in which Cristina operated during her first two decades in Florence, by exploring the patterns of devotional practice that characterized Ferdinando’s reign.

  On this portrait, of which there are three versions in the Florentine collections, see, Karla Langedijk, The Portraits of the Medici, 15th – 18th Centuries (Florence, 1981), vol. I, pp. 666–67 (no. 25), and Dora Liscia Bemporad and G. Carla Romby (eds), Il paesaggio dei miracoli: Devozione e mecenatismo nella Toscana Medicea da Ferdinando I a Cosimo II (Ospedaletto (Pisa), 2002), catalogue entry by Ornella Casazza, pp. 100–101. 7   On the portrait miniature of Ferdinando see Langedijk, Portraits of the Medici, vol. 1, p. 176 and vol. 2, p. 736 (no. 42). 8   Ibid., vol. 1, p. 176. 9   The inclusion of an image of the Annunciation in this portrait may be suggestive the subject’s links with local Marian sites: the shrine of the Annunciate Virgin at Santissima Annunziata and the shrine at Monsummano, which are discussed later in this chapter. 6

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The Practice of Religion During Ferdinando’s reign a new emphasis on religiously themed court ceremonial came into play,10 as processions and spectacles produced spaces for the dynasty’s leading members to be made visible. Ferdinando’s experience as a former cardinal at the papal court would necessarily have engendered a keen familiarity with religious observance, even though political expediency rather than a vocation had forged his ecclesiastical career, and his career in Rome had not been characterized by personal devoutness.11 When he returned to Florence as grand duke, Ferdinando forged a high profile in the religious life of the city. It was a vital part of his political role. As he participated in the spiritual forms and values of Florence and its territories he implicitly strengthened his claim to them. If Ferdinando’s ‘mode of behaviour set the prevailing tone, [and] determined to a substantial degree the modes of conduct to be emulated’, as Samuel Berner has indicated, it must also be true that systems of devotion exercised by the grand duke – and the grand ducal group – provided examplars and could be used to enhance their power.12 In 1600, Ferdinando’s aiutante di camera, Cesare Tinghi, began a diary of the Medici court. In it he recorded all of the religious services that the grand duke attended, among a host of other activities involving Ferdinando. It is this record, in tandem with letters emanating from the court, that makes it possible to track in a meaningful way the ‘habits of devotion’ of the grand duke and the court’s leading figures. Indeed, his earliest entries concentrate almost exclusively on following the movements of the most important men at court – the grand duke, his male relatives and the court’s highest officials, principally the papal nuncio and ambassadors – across both sacred and secular realms. For the purposes of this study, Tinghi’s descriptions produce a clear picture of the grand duke and an entourage comprising the leading male figures at court, regularly criss-crossing Florence to and from and between churches in patterns of regular devotion, activities which must have offered a certain level of public spectacle.13 But visibility was not always a factor. During   Marcello Fantoni, ‘The Grand Duchy of Tuscany. The Courts of the Medici 1532– 1727’, in John Adamson (ed.), The Princely Courts of Europe (London, 2000), pp. 268–9. 11   Fantoni, ‘The Grand Duchy of Tuscany’, p. 268. On Ferdinando’s early life and cardinalate, see Suzanne B. Butters, ‘Le Cardinal Ferdinand de Médicis’, in André Chastel and Philippe Morel (eds), La Villa Médicis (Rome, 1991) vol. 2, pp. 170–96, and, on his Roman career, see, Elena Fasano Guarini, ‘‘Rome, Workshop of all the Practices of the World’: From the Letters of Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici to Cosimo I and Francesco I’, in Gianvittorio Signorotto and Maria Antonietta Visceglia (eds), Court and Politics in Papal Rome, 1492–1700 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 53–77. 12   Samuel Berner, ‘Florentine Society in the Late-sixteenth and Early-seventeenth Centuries’, Studies in the Renaissance, 18 (1971): p. 211. 13   Ferdinando and his court celebrated many of the major festivals of the Christian calendar in public devotional settings, including the Annunciation (25 March), Resurrection Sunday, Trinity Sunday, the feast day of Saint Zenobius, Corpus Christi, the Assumption of 10

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the month of August 1601, for example, Ferdinando heard mass twice at the church of Santa Felicita, reached from Palazzo Pitti (the Medici palace south of the Arno) via the corridoio, the passageway commissioned by Ferdinando’s father Cosimo I from Vasari in 1565 to link the Uffizi with the Pitti.14 Where it passes in front of the façade of Santa Felicita an interior window opens onto the nave of the church to give the Medici private access to services within it, so that the church came to be appropriated by the family as a kind of palace chapel. But on Sundays Ferdinando attended mass with his ambassadors and the papal nuncio at the major churches of Florence. In August 1601, he worshipped on two Sundays at the Cathedral, once at the great Franciscan church of Santa Croce, and once at Santa Maria Novella, Florence’s principal Dominican foundation.15 In the same month he heard mass with his ambassadors and the nuncio at the former Medici parish church of San Lorenzo, including a service on 15 August (the feast of Assumption of the Virgin) that was also attended by thirty-six knights of Santo Stefano, the Medicean naval order established by his father. On the feast day of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (20 August), the grand duke went to mass and then a service in commemoration of Saint Bernard at the church of the monastery of Cestello in Florence.16 During the course of August, he made several visits to Santissima Annunziata, including one (on Thursday 23 August) with his nephew, don Antonio de’ Medici. Ferdinando I was well known to be devoted to the sacred image of Santissima Annunziata. He worshipped at this church regularly throughout his reign, generally weekly, processing to the church with his court from Palazzo Pitti.17 Thus the proprietorial dimension of the grand duke’s practice of religion operated centrifugally – outwards from the palace – with Ferdinando and his court celebrating some masses, and observing particular festivals, at a range of Florentine churches. The Cathedral of Florence also figured significantly in the grand duke’s devotional repertory, as we might imagine, and it was Ferdinando’s practice to take a lead role in the celebration there of the festivals of Saint Zenobius (25 May) and Corpus the Virgin (15 August), Purification Sunday, All Souls, the Nativity of Christ and Epiphany. Observance of holy days by members of the extended grand ducal party, the ‘governing class’, was an obligation enshrined in law, with fines imposed by the Magistrato Supremo for non-attendance. 14   BNCF, Gino Capponi 261, Cesare Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fols 13 verso – 14 recto. On the corridoio see, Claudia Conforti, Vasari architetto (Milan, 1993), pp. 181–3, and Leon Satkowki, Giorgio Vasari: Architect and Courtier (Princeton, 1993), pp. 56–9. On the use of the corridoio by the grand ducal family see, Marcella Marongiu, ‘Storia e cronaca nel Corridoio vasariano’, in Caterina Caneva (ed.), Il Corridoio vasariano agli Uffizi (Milan, 2002), esp. pp. 91–7. 15   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fols 13 verso – 14 recto. 16   St Bernard had a special relevance to Ferdinando, as patron saint of the Chapel of the Priors, the main chapel at the ducal palace (Palazzo Vecchio), and hence the whole palace was deemed to be under his protection. 17   Fantoni, ‘The Grand Duchy of Tuscany’, p. 269.

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Christi. In 1603, Trinity Sunday coincided with the feast day of Saint Zenobius, and the day provided opportunities for conspicuous devotional activity for grand duke Ferdinando. On the morning of the festival, accompanied by the nuncio and ambassadors, Ferdinando heard mass at the church of Santa Trinita followed by mass at the Duomo, where he lead the (secular) veneration of the relic of Zenobius’s head, preserved in a silver reliquary bust and displayed on the altar of the chapel dedicated to this saint.18 Four days later, on Thursday 29 May, Ferdinando was again at the Duomo, to celebrate the festival of Corpus Christi, another ritual revolving around the display of a holy body (the sacramental body of Christ). Celebrated in Florence from the thirteenth century, descriptions from the fifteenth century record how clergy and confraternities, government officials and representatives of the merchant class processed across the city in the wake of the sacrament.19 By the sixteenth century, it was customary for secular male leaders in Catholic Europe to participate in Corpus Christi processions, and this was the case for the Gonzaga dukes in Mantua, and Philip II in Spain.20 In Florence, the grand duke similarly took on a conspicuous role. For this event in 1603, Ferdinando travelled from Palazzo Pitti by coach to Santa Maria Novella in the company of the papal nuncio and ambassadors, to see the procession of the host: from the platform under the baldachin, in the usual place, they saw the procession of the Corpus Domini with the Sacrament pass, and His Highness, with each of the companions cited ... accompanied the sacrament on foot up to the door of the Baptistry. They got into the coach and followed the procession up to the ducal palace in the Piazza [della Signoria].21

Such processions between devotional sites changed urban spaces – streets and piazzas were implicitly marked out and redefined as sacred, as extensions of church space. This event provided an opportunity for the populace to observe Tuscany’s leader, uncharacteristically humble, on foot in the wake of the sacrament for the short procession at the city’s symbolic devotional centre from the Duomo to the Baptistry, and, restored to his coach, as a reverential figure of power, crossing the city to the ducal palace. It was an act which linked the body of Christ, the body of the grand duke, and the body of citizenry.   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 63 recto.   On the development and significances of the festival of Corpus Christi see, Miri

18 19

Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991), particularly pp. 164–212 and pp. 243–71. 20   Elisabeth Swain, ‘Faith in the Family: the Practice of Religion by the Gonzaga’, Journal of Family History, 8 (1983): p. 179. 21   ‘inringhiera sotto il Baldachino alla solita residenza avedere pasare lapricisione del Corpusdomine et pasato il sacramento et ogniuno SA con esudetti avendo a conpagniato il sacramento p[er] fino fuori della porta di San giovanni apiedi [;] entrati tutti in cochio seghuirno la strada delle pricisioni p fino al palazo di piaza.’ Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 63 recto.

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Defining Cristina di Lorena’s Devotional and Public Roles Cristina’s regular devotions are not easy to map during Ferdinando’s lifetime. Even Tinghi’s diary does little to illuminate the grand duchess’s patterns of worship for the earliest years of the seventeenth century. Tinghi launched the diary, it seems, with no particular agenda for recording the life of the grand duchess and responds, at first, only in a vague and incomplete way to her activities, suggesting that he was not as committed to her as to the grand duke, or was not asked or expected to be. Thus Tinghi’s lack of interest in Cristina would seem to indicate that the grand duchess’s position of power and visibility as a devout figure was not conceded on her from the outset but was hard won. Nevertheless, Cristina used both public and secluded religious spaces assertively for her devotions from the early years of her Florentine career, and even from those earliest years her activities in these arenas challenged the tone of exclusive masculine power at the Medici court under Ferdinando. Cristina di Lorena’s marriage to Ferdinando in 1589 not only brought to Florence the wealth of Caterina de’ Medici’s legacy and the distinction of the double association of the house of Valois and the French queen’s glorious Medici ancestors.22 Cristina arrived in Florence on 30 April 1589 as the focus of a spectacular bridal entrata, in the manner of that staged for Giovanna d’Austria almost twenty-five years previously.23 Caterina’s significance to Cristina and the Medici was celebrated in the iconography of the entrata, particularly on the arch at the Ponte alla Carraia, whose central image showed Caterina enthoned.24 The image to its right, the design of which is also preserved in a preparatory drawing by Giovanni Balducci, theatricalized a scene of leave-taking between grandmother and granddaughter (Figure 2.1). The event is fictitious, given that Caterina had died some weeks before Cristina departed France.25 Over twenty years later, during the reign of Cristina’s son Cosimo II, the 1589 wedding was commemorated in Jacques Callot’s Life of Ferdinando series of engravings (Figure 2.2). Callot based his composition on a canvas by Jacopo da Empoli produced to celebrate another dynastic marriage, that of Maria de’ Medici and Henry IV of France in 1600, which Cristina was instrumental in organizing.26   For a summary of Cristina’s life see, Luisa Bertoni, ‘Cristina di Lorena’, Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome, 1931), vol. 31, pp. 37–40. 23   On the 1589 wedding and its implications see, James M. Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as Theatrum Mundi (New Haven, 1996). 24   Saslow, Medici Wedding of 1589, p. 141, pp. 190–1. 25   Saslow, Medici Wedding of 1589, pp. 24–5; Julian Brooks, Graceful and True: Drawing in Florence c.1600 (Oxford, 2003), p. 49. 26   In 1600, Jacopo da Empoli produced paintings of the weddings of Caterina and Maria de’ Medici as part of the temporary decoration of the Salone dei Cinquecento of Palazzo Ducale where a banquet was staged on the evening of 5 October in honour of the wedding of Maria de’ Medici by proxy in the Duomo of Florence earlier in the day; Deborah Marrow, The Art Patronage of Maria de’ Medici (Ann Arbor, 1982), p. 7. 22

Figure 2.1

Giovanni Balducci, called Il Cosci, Cristina di Lorena taking leave of Caterina de’ Medici, 1589. London, British Museum.

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Figure 2.2

Jacques Callot, after Jacopo da Empoli, Marriage of Ferdinando I and Cristina di Lorena, from Callot’s Life of Ferdinando series, 1614–20. London, British Museum.

Cristina remained in Florence for almost fifty years, but spent only the first twenty years there as wife of Ferdinando. As a widow she would become established as a symbol of female responsibility and continuity at the Medici court. She gained political responsibility during Ferdinando’s lifetime as his close confidante, but this role was not conceded to her immediately and her position of authority in Florence and Tuscany was achieved only over time. Her role during her earliest years in Florence was inevitably contained by her identity as mother to the grand duke’s children – between 1589 and 1604 she endured ten pregnancies, including one that ended in miscarriage.27 Looking back on these years in a letter of 1610, Cristina reflected that she had been granted involvement in political responsibilities (consulte di governo) only after the births of four of her children. The letter was written to Orso d’Elci, Medici ambassador to Spain, and intended   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 2, fols 2 recto – 2 verso, and Gaetano Pieraccini, La stirpe de’ Medici di Cafaggiolo (Florence, 1986), vol. 2, pp. 313–18. Tinghi lists nine children by name in his introduction to vol. 2 of the Medici court diary; Pieraccini cites eight births and the miscarriage. The dates of birth and names of Cristina’s children are as follows: May 1590, Cosimo; November 1591, Eleonora; May 1593, Caterina; May 1594, Francesco; March 1596, Carlo; April 1598, Filippo; August 1599, Lorenzo; June 1600, Maria Maddalena; June 1604, Claudia. Also see Medici Archive Project (online). 27

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for Margarita, queen of Spain, the sister of Cristina’s daughter-in-law, Maria Maddalena d’Austria, making all the more significant Cristina’s comment (or, perhaps, assurance) that she would/will involve Maria Maddalena, who arrived in Florence in 1608, in political matters from the outset.28 Cristina’s situation echoes that of many other aristocratic women of the period. Conventional opportunities to accrue authority were limited and defined by others. In contrast, the devotional realm offered a comparatively accessible sphere for their interventions. While Cristina would generally have sought the grand duke’s permission to make even religiously themed visits, a comment in a spirited letter of November 1604 to her secretary Curzio Picchena, published by Suzanne Cusick, demonstrates that Ferdinando approved of such activities: ʻhe has never denied me going to devotions’, Cristina wrote.29 Private devotions were a part of the daily rituals of aristocratic women – as for men – and private chapels were an integral component of women’s apartments in palaces and villas in this period.30 During the first years of Cristina di Lorena’s marriage, while the grand duke divided his time between Florence, Pisa and Livorno, the grand duchess was restricted from travel by successive pregnancies, and tended to remain in Florence or at one or other of the Medici villas, which suggests some degree of seclusion in her devotional practice. As Cusick notes, it seems that outings of various sorts, including devotional ones, appealed to her personality: ʻMy nature, and the way in which I was raised make it so that I cannot stay put’, she admitted in her correspondence with Picchena, while detailing trips to shrines local to the Villa Ambrogiana.31 In the same letter Cristina explained that these trips were for ʻpleasure, and pastimeʼ and without personal spiritual ʻobligation’,32 but their significance in projecting a public image of devoutness for the grand duchess must also be considered. Yet even private devotions – those entirely hidden from public view – can perhaps be seen to have had a degree of political significance. Private devotions must have played a part in moulding an image of the grand duchess within palace walls that conformed to the image projected beyond it, one that adhered to the highest ideals of feminine behaviour (virtue, piety, modesty). Her private appeals to God doubtless incorporated politically resonant dimensions. Although her prayers for the birth of male children to secure the future of the dynasty were not 28   ASF, Mediceo del Principato 6038, fols 111 verso – 112 recto, quoted in Sframeli (ed.), I gioielli dei Medici, p. 106. 29   ASF, Mediceo del Principato 1325, fol. 187, quoted in English in Suzanne G. Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power (Chicago, 2009), p. 44. 30   Patricia Waddy, ‘Inside the Palace: People and Furnishings’, in Frederick Hammond and Stefanie Walker (eds), Life and the Arts in the Baroque Palaces of Rome: Ambiente barocco (New Haven, 1999), pp. 29–31 31   Quoted in Cusick, Francesca Caccini, p. 44. 32   Ibid., and p. 355, note 14.

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always answered, the safe delivery of a boy – Cosimo – in May 1590, just over a year after her arrival in Florence, must have been greeted with immense relief. Perhaps, in the final weeks before her confinement, Cristina had followed advice sent to her by pope Gregory XIV. He had despatched a gift of a small crucifix that had once belonged to Pius V with instructions that she use this precious item as a focus for prayer, and appeal to it daily for the well-being of herself and the Medici house.33 When in Florence, Cristina often heard mass at home in Palazzo Pitti or at the church of Santa Felicita, participating in services from Vasari’s corridor, in relative isolation from the wider congregation. Ferdinando heard mass there on occasion, as we have seen, but the facility was probably more useful to Cristina, at least in the early years of her Florentine career. In Modena, the Este family appropriated the church of San Domenico in much the same way when, in 1620, duke Cesare d’Este had a covered passageway built between the Castello and this church.34 As with Vasari’s corridor, this allowed direct access for the family to a discrete space within a local church and particularly facilitated women’s devotional practice. The Estense corridor was designed primarily for the use of Cesare’s sister, Eleonora, princess of Venosa (1551–1637), and led out of the castle from her apartments to San Domenico’s Chapel of the Rosary.35 While the Este princesses were accustomed to conducting their devotions in private Isabella of Savoy (1591–1626), wife of duke Cesare’s son and heir, Alfonso, broke from this pattern by asking her fatherin-law for permission to join congregations in the churches of Modena, which he granted.36 Isabella thus had to ask for sanction to appear ‘in public’, and while she was allowed to strike out with her own conception of pious activity, the corridor from the Este palace to San Domenico seems in practice to have represented an alternative to conspicuous displays of piety by the ruling family by offering access to worship with a more limited public dimension. Cristina di Lorena’s devotional practice appears to have been much less secluded than that of Modenese Este women of the same period. Indeed, her regular devotions frequently involved trips to Florence churches. During December 1589, for example, presumably in addition to regular visits to Santa Felicita, she heard masses at the churches of Santissima Annunziata and Santa Maria Novella, and on Christmas Day and Saint Stephen’s Day she attended vespers at the church of San Giovanni (the Baptistry) and the church of Santo Stefano.37 We can assume this pattern was repeated at least for other important festivals. Devoted to the shrine   Suzanne B. Butters, ‘The Uses and Abuses of Gifts in the World of Ferdinando de’ Medici (1549–1609)’, I Tatti Studies, 11 (2007): p. 248 and p. 306 (Appendix I, no. 2). 34   Janet Southorn, Power and Display in the Seventeenth Century: The Arts and their Patrons in Modena and Ferrara (Cambridge, 1988) p. 16; Gusmano Soli, Chiese di Modena, ed. Giordano Bertuzzi (Modena, 1974), vol. 1, pp. 380–81. 35   Soli, Chiese di Modena, vol. 1, pp. 380–81. 36   Southorn, Power and Display, p. 23. 37   ASF, Mediceo del Principato 811. 33

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at Santissima Annunziata throughout her years in Florence, Cristina – as other Florentine residents – went there regularly to seek divine assistance. In April 1593, on returning to Florence from Pisa just before her third confinement, she began her devotions before the crucifix at the conventual church of the Carmine in Oltrarno, and continued them at the altar of the Madonna at Santissima Annunziata, praying for a safe delivery and a male child.38 In visiting Florence’s churches, Cristina’s practice also differed from that of Eleonora di Toledo in the mid-sixteenth century, whose appearances were so infrequent that one contemporary observer claimed that she ‘was never seen to visit churches and other holy places’.39 Although Eleonora’s unwillingness to be seen engaged in worship was regarded by this commentator as a sign of pride, sources at court attest to the fact that she was a devout woman who engaged in extensive religious observance in private, as other contemporary observers noted.40 In contrast Cristina, like Giovanna, would have been seen journeying from palace to church and back again – return trips, that is, from Palazzo Pitti or the Palazzo Ducale, accessible via the corridoio – whenever she went to church, other than to Santa Felicita. Each act of devotional visiting articulated anew grand ducal associations with favoured churches and their altars and shrines. Cristina’s responsibilities as Ferdinando I’s consort gave her opportunities for public visibility. She attended major devotional events with her husband, such as on 10 December 1589 when she was present at a public-oriented ceremony at the Duomo to commemorate Ferdinando’s second anniversary as grand duke.41 The issue of a blurred distinction between public and personal devotions emerges in the practice of ‘public’ ritual, as it seems that by attending religious ceremonies outside the palace or villa Cristina was able simultaneously to address the needs of personal piety and display her devoutness. In February 1593, while staying at the Villa Ambrogiana without Ferdinando, the grand duchess visited nearby Empoli 38   ‘pregandola le concedesse felice parto e figliol maschio’, ASF, Mediceo del Principato 811, fol. 281, and Pieraccini, La Stirpe, vol. 2, p. 314. 39   Carolyn Smyth, ‘An Instance of Feminine Patronage in the Medici Court of Sixteenth-Century Florence: The Chapel of Eleonora da Toledo in the Palazzo Vecchio’, in Cynthia Lawrence (ed.), Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors and Connoisseurs (University Park, PA, 1997), p. 89 note 27. A book on the miracles ascribed the shrine, Corona di sessanta tre miracoli della Nunziata di Firenze, written by the Servite friar and doctor of theology Luca Ferrini was published in Florence in 1593. The publisher, Georges Marescot, a Frenchman, dedicated the volume to Cristina, calling attention in his dedication to the ‘great and ardent devotion’ the grand duchess had for the shrine (‘cette Saincte des Sainctes, à laquelle V[ostre] A[ltesse] porte une si grande & ardente devotion’). On Ferrini’s book and its illustrations see, Sara F. Matthews-Grieco, ‘Media, memory and the Miracoli della SS. Annunziata’, Word & Image, 25/3 (2009): pp. 274–6. Also pp. 95–6 in Chapter 5: Pilgrimages. 40   Ibid. 41   ASF, Manoscritti 130: Memorie fiorentine, vol. 5, fols 177 verso – 178 recto.

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to view a procession of the crucifix of the prioria of Montelupo.42 A letter from Cristina to her consort evokes her vivid impressions of the event and its spectators: a great number of people gathered there, and the street of Empoli seemed beautiful because of the people that came there on foot as on horseback, and it has been so ordered that everything went quietly and the Lord God shows that He grants the prayers of these people, as the weather seemed to improve.43

Cristina’s observations suggest at once a sense of both involvement and detachment: she watched the event and was moved by it, and yet as key spectator she had a role within the spectacle. Her letter indicates that she was receptive to the details of this spectacle, and the particular reverence of the crowd. She is a static figure, an observer, positioned apart from the event. She was probably watching from a window, as was the custom for female spectators, and especially likely as she was pregnant at this time (her third child, Caterina, was born in May 1593). In Tinghi’s diary Ferdinando often appears as an active participant in religious events: walking with the Corpus Christi procession or kissing the relic of Saint Zenobius, for example, and as the central figure of the grand ducal group in many, varied devotions. Cristina di Lorena was not entirely excluded from this kind of mobility and visibility, moving through and being seen in city spaces. However, the opportunities for her to participate in this way were more limited and their characteristics differed. Yet in the 1599 celebration of the festival of Epiphany, Cristina played a prominent role with Ferdinando unable to attend the service due to illness. Accompanied by a female retinue comprising her husband’s niece, Maria de’ Medici (daughter of Francesco de’ Medici and Giovanna d’Austria), and Flavia Peretti Orsini, duchess of Bracciano, the wife of Ferdinando’s nephew, Virginio Orsini, Cristina joined a procession to and service at Santissima Annunziata.44 In witnessing the service Cristina and her companions served the function of representing the grand duke and his court, but these illustrious women were at the same time demonstrating the validity and prestige of their presence in its own right. Special circumstances thus allowed for boundaries circumscribing Cristina’s behaviour to be modified, albeit temporarily. A spectacular case in point is Cristina’s pilgrimage to Loreto, made September 1593, some twenty years after Giovanna d’Austria made her visit to the Holy House, to which I return later.45 Beyond the limits of Florence or its territories, assertive pietistic display could be sanctioned.   ASF, Mediceo del Principato 5962, fol. 175.   ‘ci è concorso gran quantità di gente, et la strada d’Empoli è parsa una cosa bella

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per le persone che venivano cosi a pie come à cavallo, et l’ordine è stato tale che tutto, è passato quietam[en]te et mostra il s[igno]re dì esaudire le preci di questi popoli mostrando il tempo di volere gettersi albuono.’ ASF, Mediceo del Principato 5962, fol. 175. 44   ASF, Conventi Soppressi 119/53, fol. 275 verso, and Casalini et al. (eds), Tesori d’arte dell’ Annunziata di Firenze (Florence, 1987), p. 172. 45   For further discussion of Cristina’s 1593 pilgrimage see pp. 101–108.

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Certainly pietistic display was important to the public image of Medici women, as other women of European ruling families. Yet devout activity was, of course, not limited to acts of worship. For the privileged, piety could be expressed in acts of charity, and sponsorship of religious enterprises was a characteristic and an ideal – rather than an oddity – in women’s practice in the medieval and early modern periods more generally. Two Florentine altarpieces dating from the mid1590s, both by Alessandro Allori, testify to Cristina di Lorena’s wish to express her devotion to certain cults in tangible form through art patronage and gifting. St Fiacre Healing the Sick (1596) was part of a commission from the grand duchess to embellish the altar in the Sacristy at Santo Spirito.46 Cristina was using art patronage in this instance to address interests specific to her natal identity given that Fiacre is a French saint, and one – according to the inscription below the altar – to whom Cristina had been devoted in France.47 While a preparatory study shows that Allori had originally intended to depict St Fiacre in rustic guise, in his role as protector of fruit growers, the final, more dramatic and overtly inspirational image shows the saint’s miraculous power to cure the afflicted.48 Representing Fiacre as a healer was presumably deemed more effective in promoting the cult new to Florence, though, given the patron and the prominence of the inscription recording Cristina’s intervention, this theme might also have indirectly invoked a familiar association of the Medici name with the medical profession and thus the curative powers of their rule. As Christina Strunck has noted, the association may have been deemed particularly apt in 1596, a year of poor harvests and widespread disease, in which Ferdinando and Cristina gave charitable donations to the afflicted.49 Around the same time, Allori painted the stirring Counter-Reformation image of mystical experience, The Vision of St Hyacinth, for the Strozzi family chapel in Santa Maria Novella (Figure 2.3). Although the commission did not come directly from Cristina, she nevertheless instigated it. In 1594, the grand duchess acquired a relic of the newly canonised Polish saint Hyacinth, a thirteenth-century Dominican missionary, at her own request from the Bishop of Cracow. In an act that linked the realms of public and private devotion, the grand duchess donated the relic to the Strozzi, while retaining a fragment of it for herself, in her oratory at Palazzo Pitti.50 The Strozzi rededicated their chapel to Hyacinth and commissioned the new altarpiece showing his vision.

  Simona Lecchini Giovannoni, Alessandro Allori (Turin, 1991), pp. 285–6.   Christina Strunck, ‘How Chrestienne Became Cristina: Political and Cultural

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Encounters between Tuscany and Lorraine’, in Christina Strunck (ed.), Artful Allies. Medici Women as Cultural Mediators, 1533–1743 (Milan, 2012), p. 167, p. 174, note 174. 48   Giovannoni, Alessandro Allori, p. 285. 49   Strunck, Artful Allies, p. 167. In 1617, Cristina’s son Cosimo II received relics of St Fiacre from the Cathedral of Meaux, where the saint’s remains are housed. 50   Giovannoni, Alessandro Allori, pp. 285–6. Marcia Hall, Renovation and CounterReformation: Vasari and Duke Cosimo in Santa Maria Novella and Sta Croce 1565–1577

Figure 2.3

Alessandro Allori, The Vision of St Hyacinth, c.1594. Florence, Basilica di Santa Maria Novella.

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Creating New Visibilities The church of San Lorenzo, the former Medici parish church due to its proximity to the Palazzo Medici on Via Larga, was a devotional focus for the grand ducal family in which strategies of Medicean self-commemoration increased in resonance over generations. San Lorenzo’s lengthy history of association particularly with the men of the Medici house was expressed and shaped by the family’s patronage, and this church’s particular role as site of the Medici tombs in the main church, Brunelleschi’s sacristy and Michelangelo’s chapel (the New Sacristy). Ferdinando I sought to articulate dynastic commemoration still more elaborately, and to enhance still further the role of San Lorenzo as Medici mausoleum, with the project for the opulent Cappella dei Principi,51 doubtless inspired by his father’s intention to build a chapel there as well as by ostentatious papal chapel projects in Rome.52 In conjunction with these permanent projects, the family sponsored a sophisticated system of regular and special devotions which sought to honour the Medici dead continually, and, in doing so, their living descendants. Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, patron of Brunelleschi’s sacristy, had endowed funds for services in his memory, which were increased twice in the course of the fifteenth century by his descendants.53 In 1532, pope Clement VII (formerly cardinal Giulio de’ Medici), patron of Michelangelo’s chapel, enhanced the chantry tradition at San Lorenzo with a unique and expensive commission, ordering that a cycle of services should run continuously in this new chapel. Clement issued the Bull outlining these services on 14 November of that year; they comprised three masses daily plus readings of the entire psalter with prayers. Throughout the reigns of Ferdinando I and Cosimo II, and even into the early years of the reign of Ferdinando II, services

(Oxford, 1979), p. 109. Also see Jack Spalding, ‘Alessandro Allori’s Altarpieces in S. Maria Novella’, Storia dellʼArte, 97 (1999): pp. 311–16. 51   See Domenico Moreni, Delle tre sontuose Cappelle Medicee situate nell’Imp. Basilica di S. Lorenzo (Florence, 1813), Umberto Baldini and Bruno Nardini, Il complesso monumentale di S. Lorenzo: la basilica, le sagrestie, le cappelle, la biblioteca (Florence, 1984), esp. pp. 239–43, and Carlo Cresti, ‘La Cappella dei Principi: un panteon foderato di pietre dure’, in Anna Maria Giusti (ed.), Splendori di pietre dure: l’arte di corte nella Firenze dei granduchi, exh. cat. (Florence, 1988), pp. 62–73. 52   Specifically, Gregory XIII’s chapel in St Peter’s and Sixtus V’s in Santa Maria Maggiore; Suzanne B. Butters, ‘Ferdinando de’ Medici and the Art of the Possible’, in The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence, exh. cat. (New Haven, CT: 2002), pp. 70–71. 53   L. Ettlinger, ‘The Liturgical Function of Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 22 (1978): p. 294. Also see Robert Gaston, ‘Liturgy and Patronage in San Lorenzo, Florence, 1350–1650’, in Patricia Simons with J.C. Eade (eds), Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy (Canberra and Oxford, 1987), pp. 111–33.

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were being undertaken in the chapel twenty-four hours a day. It was only in 1629 that the night-time psalter readings were discontinued.54 San Lorenzo was often the venue for the observance of the festival of All Souls (2 November), a service that ostensibly commemorated all the departed. Calling attention to masculine codes of ritual and power, All Souls was celebrated by the grand duke in the company of the knights of Santo Stefano, the chivalric naval order founded by Cosimo I,55 as for example in 1602, when Ferdinando attended mass in the Old Sacristy.56 Ferdinando often celebrated the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin (15 August) at San Lorenzo, again with a company of knights, in a service which identified him as gran maestro of the Order of Santo Stefano.57 Cristina was not entirely excluded from special devotions at San Lorenzo. Indeed, one of her key public appearances in Florence in this period was in connection with a very different type of event, the annual Festa delle doti (Dowry Festival) which involved the gifting of dowries to impoverished girls in a ceremony that began at this church and led to a procession in which Cristina took centre stage. Ferdinando initiated the Festa delle doti in 1592 and its first staging on 4 October set in place the basic form of the festival that would become codified and embellished over successive years. A socially responsive and politically motivated event, the Festa delle doti contributed to patriarchal ideologies that identified unmarried women as financially burdensome and morally threatening to the state. As early as the fifteenth century, concern about a decline in the number of marriages in Florence had motivated new schemes offering investment opportunities to fathers, hoping to encourage them to make early provision for their daughters’ dowries and avoid delaying or forgoing making marriage arrangements for financial reasons.58 Charitable dowry provision to impoverished girls – in the form of the Festa delle doti – represented containment of a potential threat to the social order by directing unattached women towards marriage and motherhood, or the convent for which a dowry was also needed, and securing them from prostitution.59 The grand duke’s inspiration for the festival probably   Ettlinger, ‘Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel’, pp. 294–5.   On the Knights of Santo Stefano see Paul Richelson, Studies in the Personal

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Imagery of Cosimo I de’ Medici Duke of Florence (New York, 1978), pp. 147–63. 56   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 38 verso. 57   The San Lorenzo venue was not fixed, but the exclusive masculine tone always maintained: in 1603, for example, the festival of the Assumption coincided with a grand ducal visit to the villa at Pratolino, and a modified celebration was held in the chapel in the villa’s park in the presence of Ferdinando, Agniolo di Bufalo (gran cancelliere of the Order of Santo Stefano) and a small, representative number of five knights. 58   J. Kirschner and A. Mohlo, ‘The Dowry Fund and the Marriage Market in Early Quattrocento Florence’, Journal of Modern History, 50 (1978): pp. 403–38. 59   See Maria Fubini Leuzzi, ‘Le doti dei granduchi di Toscana: fondazioni pubbliche per l’assistenza femminile’, in ‘Condurre e onore’: Famiglia, matrimonio e assistenza dotale a Firenze in Età Moderna (Florence, 1999), pp. 179–87.

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came from that already in existence in Rome, initiated by pope Gregory XIII. But Cristina took such a prominent role in the Florentine version, and her involvement in it continued long after Ferdinando’s death, that we should also look to the grand duchess as a driving force in establishing the ritual. In 1592, during a service at San Lorenzo, attended by the grand duke and duchess, a group of fifty girls dressed in white were each presented with a satin purse containing the dowry gift. After the presentation Cristina led the group in procession from San Lorenzo to the Hospital of San Paolo in Piazza Santa Maria Novella.60 Feste staged after 1592 generally took place on the feast of Pentecost. On 27 May 1602, Tinghi recounts the event, noting that the grand duke and duchess attended mass celebrated at San Lorenzo by the papal nuncio.61 Following the service and the distribution of dowries, Cristina led a procession of Florentine gentlewomen, each of whom was accompanied by one of 141 fanciulle; the procession left San Lorenzo by the Piazza di Madonna and the group walked the by now familiar route, passing along the side of the Palazzo Medici, then along Via Martelli towards the Baptistry, before turning westwards towards Piazza Santa Maria Novella. The hospital of San Paolo was presumably singled out as the procession’s destination because it had an established history as a charitable institution and in 1592 Ferdinando had become involved in its organization and management.62 San Paolo was founded as a hospice for pilgrims visiting the church of Santa Maria Novella from the twelfth century, and was developed as a hospital by the Franciscans after the plague of 1348; Ferdinando changed it into a convalescent hospital with the function of offering a bed for three days to citizens discharged from hospital. The Festa, then, drew attention to two charitable projects sponsored by the grand duke – the dowry donations and the convalescent hospital – by uniting them through the annual procession in which Cristina played a vital role. Such was the significance of the Festa that a representation of it featured in Jacques Callot’s Life of Ferdinando series of engravings, commissioned by Cosimo II in 1614. The image shows the procession headed by grand duchess Maria Maddalena d’Austria, with Cristina, by then dowager grand duchess, in widow’s weeds, behind her (Figure 2.4).63 Callot’s engraving memorializes Cristina’s foundational role in the venture, but places Maria Maddalena d’Austria more prominently in the composition, and, as part of a series celebrating Ferdinando I’s life, somewhat delimits Cristina agency within the larger project of the grand duke.64   Fubini Leuzzi, ‘Le doti dei granduchi di Toscana’, p. 182.   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 28 verso. 62   On the history of this institution see, Richa, Notizie, vol. 3, pp. 121–31, and R.A. 60 61

Goldthwaite and W.R. Rearick, ‘Michelozzo and the Ospedale di San Paolo in Florence’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorisches Institutes in Florenz, 21 (1977): pp. 222–32. 63   On the Life of Ferdinando series, see Paulette Choné (ed.), Jacques Callot 1592– 1635, exh. cat. (Paris, 1992), pp. 173–9. 64   I return to this point in the next chapter, pp. 61–2.

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Figure 2.4

Jacques Callot, Festa delle doti, from Callot’s Life of Ferdinando series, 1614–20. London, British Museum.

Cristina’s input in the Festa delle doti must have been evident to contemporary spectators. Her contribution was presumably noted too in another new devout practice in Florence in this period, the Quarantore, or Devotion of the Forty Hours. The Quarantore had evolved in Italy from medieval traditions of sustained worship during the forty hours between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday, and first appeared in Milan during the siege of 1527.65 Endorsed by Paul III in the 1530s, and later promoted and supported by spiritual leaders such as Milan’s reforming bishop Carlo Borromeo, and Filippo Neri, founder of the Oratorians, the practice gained increasing popularity in the era of Catholic reform and began appearing throughout Italy. It was adopted officially in Rome by Clement VIII in 1592.66 Throughout the services clerics undertook a constant vigil over a sepulchre containing the sacrament; services varied but began with mass of the pre-sanctified host and ended with communion, and could feature votive masses, processions within the church, and the reading of lessons. Post-Tridentine forms of the Quarantore could be elaborate and extravagant both in the form of   ‘Forty Hours’ Devotion’, in Enciclopedia Cattolica (online), and Mark S. Weil, ‘The Devotion of the Forty Hours and Roman Baroque Illusions’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 37 (1974): pp. 218–21. 66   Frederick J. McGinness, ‘Roma Sancta and the Saint: Eucharist, Chastity, and the Logic of Catholic Reform’, Historical Reflections, 15 (1988): p. 102, note 16. 65

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devotional practices (with worship divided between several churches participating in rotation), and in the decoration of devotional spaces, which might boast costly ornament and apparati. The Quarantore began to gain popularity in Florence in the latter half of the sixteenth century after its first articulation in the Duomo in 1589.67 Established within the devotional framework of Tuscan confraternal practice during this time, its forms were strategically employed in the early seventeenth century by the Medici to suit specific devotional requirements: to commemorate events, petition divine assistance or offer thanks. At times of special (civic) need – from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century – Florentines had been accustomed to addressing their requests and pleas to the Virgin of Impruneta, specifically by bringing the sacred image into the city.68 Impruneta remained a devotional destination – with particular significance to the Medici – but the practice of delivering the Madonna into Florence waned. In Post-Tridentine Florence the intense (and enclosed) devotional forms of the Quarantore as a means of supplication and as a procedure to petition divine assistance seem to have replaced the more public-oriented, public-driven rituals connected with the Madonna of Impruneta which had dynamically transformed public spaces.69 For the Medici, sanctioning and even harnessing the newly evolving rituals of the Quarantore as an alternative within existing public religious ritual, and making it into a component of the court’s carefully organized and orchestrated schedule of devotions, positioned the grand ducal family as spiritually energetic and up to date, and as champions of reform. In Florence, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Quarantore services were implemented in connection with Tuscan campaigns by the knights of Santo Stefano against the Turks.70 Despite the exclusive masculine/monastic tone of religious services involving the grand duke and his knights, Cristina di Lorena forged a role in this context. In May 1604, the grand duchess initiated services to appeal for the victory of Ferdinando’s naval forces, devotions which were conducted in the presence of Ferdinando.71 Devotions continued over the   Ronald Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1982),

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p. 229.

68   Richard C. Trexler, ‘Florentine Religious Experience: the Sacred Image’, Studies in the Renaissance, 19 (1972): p. 9 and p. 12. 69   There were occasional exceptions, for example, during the plague of 1633. 70   In August and September 1601, Devotions of the Forty Hours relating to campaigns against the Turks were held at Santissima Annunziata, Santa Maria del Fiore, the chapel in the park at the Villa of Pratolino, and the Chiesa del Bosco near Cafaggiolo; Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fols 14 recto – 14 verso. 71   ‘[13 May] S(ua) A(ltezza) ando alle quarantore alla Ciesa della Santisima Nutiata fattavele porre da Madama Ser[enissi]ma p[er] ocasione di preghare il sg[no]re Dio p[er] lavitoria che si spera delle galere 7 et nave 3 di S(ua) A(ltezza) cariche di fanteria mandate ... adistrutione de turchi in[i]micj de sangue cristiano et della fede di gesu cristo altisimo Dio sg[no]re et redentore Nostro’; Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 93 recto.

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following days at the altar of the Annunciation at Santissima Annunziata, and then were maintained at the Duomo in a service involving music in honour of the grand duchess’s brother (probably Francis of Lorraine, who married Margherita Gonzaga of Mantua) who was visiting the court and had attended mass with Ferdinando.72 Politically as well as spiritually motivated, the elaborate forms of the Quarantore, conducted in the city’s principal religious spaces, worked to promote and endorse the naval campaign, and to identify the (extended) Medici family as righteous defenders of the faith. In years to come, Cristina and her daughter-in-law Maria Maddalena d’Austria would show themselves to be committed supporters of Quarantore devotions.73 New Visibilities Beyond Florence Systems of devotion deployed by Ferdinando and the wider Medici court in Florence would be transferred to other locations when the grand duke travelled around Tuscany’s territories. Visiting religious sites beyond Florence offered temporary displays of Medicean beneficence, while sponsoring ecclesiastical building, commissioning art or gifting precious items to churches produced permanent reminders of the dynasty’s pious investment on a localized level. On Ferdinando’s death, Tinghi listed the grand duke’s ‘public deeds’ in the Diario di corte, which included building the façade of the Church of the Cavalieri di Santo Stefano in Pisa, founding Livorno Cathedral and developing other Livornese churches, rebuilding the Servite monastery at Montesenario – Florence’s original Servite foundation, north-east of the city near Bivigliano – and founding the church of the Madonna of Monsummano in the Valdinievole between Pistoia and Lucca.74 Of these, the Madonna of Monsummano was a project that explicitly involved the grand duke and his consort, and was one in which Cristina conspicuously maintained an interest after Ferdinando’s death. This rural shrine evolved in popularity in the 1570s, and a series of miracles established the tabernacle at Monsummano in the popular imagination as a site of religious importance and as a pilgrimage destination.75 Prompted by further miraculous occurrences in 1602, the grand ducal family and courtiers made the shrine a focus of their devout patronage in the countryside and in doing so, as Suzanne Butters explains, ‘strengthened the

  Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fols 93 recto – 93 verso.   During November and December 1623, for example, Cristina di Lorena, Maria

72 73

Maddalena d’Austria and her children joined Quarantore masses at Santissima Annunziata, the Jesuit foundation of San Giovannino and San Marco; ASF, Miscellanea Medicea 11, Cesare Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 3, fols 2 verso, 7 recto and 10 recto. 74   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fols 381 recto – 381 verso. 75   See Giuseppe Cantelli and Caterina Zappia, Giovanni da San Giovanni a Monsummano (Empoli, 1987), pp. 31–4.

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cumulative impression of a pious rural Tuscany’.76 Cristina, as Ferdinando, was deeply committed to this Marian shrine, and played a significant part in promoting its cult. Frequent visits there during the autumn and winter of 1602 from the villas of Montevettolini and Poggio a Caiano included one in October in which Cristina, accompanied by a party of noblewomen and an escort provided by two gentlemen and a company of knights and archbusiers, visited the shrine to venerate the image of the Virgin and give donations.77 Their visits culminated in an elegant service on 30 December 1602, in which Cristina (as co-sponsor with Ferdinando) and her eldest son, Cosimo, then aged twelve, laid the first stone of the new church, an event witnessed by a crowd numbering more than three thousand.78 The Medici were responsible for donating to the shrine the corona of the Madonna of Fontenuovo, an extraordinarily opulent ex-voto commissioned by Ferdinando I, which he did not live to present to the shrine himself.79 Cristina’s role as founder is memorialized in a fresco by Giovanni da San Giovanni, one of a series for the church portico, commissioned some thirty years later, which shows Cosimo and the grand duchess at the centre of a group of clergy, officials and spectators. Conclusion During her marriage to Ferdinando I, Cristina di Lorena came to be arrestingly represented in the realm of the devotional. Attending religious special services, undertaking visits to churches and shrines, and commissioning sacred art, can be seen as significant acts in processes of cultural – and political – self-determination that were comparatively accessible to her. While Ferdinando’s devotional repertory seemed to foster and reinterpret anew a Medicean sense of history and continuity with rituals that called particular attention to the exclusivity of male power, Cristina nevertheless developed significant roles in a range of contexts. She appeared in the apparently restrictive environment of San Lorenzo, in her role at the head of the dowry procession – a festival with a specifically feminine and public emphasis. Across generations the Festa delle doti would visually explore some of the charitable, devotional and feminized possibilities and limits of Medici women’s public roles, by forcefully positioning the grand duchesses – and some of their female relatives – in public 76   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fols 44 verso – 45 recto; Suzanne B. Butters, ‘Christine of Lorraine and Cultural Exchanges in the Countryside: International Customs in Local Settings’, in Strunck (ed.), Artful Allies, p. 116. 77   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 38 recto. 78   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fols 44 verso – 45 recto; and Suzanne B. Butters, ‘Christine of Lorraine and Cultural Exchanges in the Countryside’, p. 116. 79   Bemporad and Romby (eds), Il paesaggio dei miracoli, pp. 100–101.On the crown of the Madonna of Fontenuova, attributed to Odoardo Vallet, see pp. 110–11, and Sframeli, I gioielli dei Medici, pp. 87–8.

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spaces among their noble and humble female citizens. As with the Quarantore, the dowry festival involved both Ferdinando and Cristina, but the forms of their participation were quite separate and distinct from each others. It was during this period that Cristina developed and sustained the dynasty’s relationship with Marian shrines with important votive functions for the Medici: Santissima Annunziata and Monsummano, and even the Holy House of the Virgin at Loreto. Her visits to key sacred locales within and outside Florence afforded opportunities to reach beyond the domestic and the familiar, by creating opportunities for display through itineraries that articulated a personalized but necessarily publicly oriented agenda of devotion.

Chapter 3

Rituals An established pattern of ritual awaited archduchess Maria Maddalena d’Austria when she entered Florence for the first time through the Porta al Prato on 18 October 1608.1 Giovanni Maggi’s engraving presents Maria Maddalena’s route from this gateway to Palazzo Pitti as a tiered system in which the archduchess and her entourage progress upwards (Figure 3.1). In this lively visual narrative, the archduchess appears three times. A pair of portrait medallions showing the bride and groom are inset upper right and left. Maria Maddalena is also shown lower left being met by grand duke Ferdinando outside the Porta al Prato to be crowned ‘Principessa di Toscana’, and, at a further stage on the route, she is shown on horseback under a canopy carried by pages, accompanied by her brother, on her way to the Duomo – inset at the centre of the image – where the marriage service was conducted.2 In his account of the entrata, Camillo Rinuccini noted the archduchess’s gown of tela d’argento ‘in the German style’, and in this image the engraver has made an attempt to depict its long, open sleeves that reached ‘to the ground’.3 Maggi’s engraving produces a new layer of theatricality to the highly staged-managed entrata, which worked to make the distinctive figure of the bride visible in relation to the city’s key sites. This chapter focuses on questions about the gendered body in relation to the city, specifically in terms of the public appearances of Maria Maddalena d’Austria, from her arrival in Florence in 1608, through her marriage to Cosimo II de’ Medici, which ended with his death just over a dozen years later. Maria Maddalena’s role can be traced through the major processions in which she was the key participant 1   Nadia Bastogi, ‘L’iconografia celebrativa della sposa negli ingressi trionfale delle principesse straniere a Firenze’, in Giulia Calvi and Riccardo Spinelli (eds), Le donne Medici nel sistema europeo delle corte, XVI–XVIII secolo (Florence, 2008), pp. 608–12. 2   In his description of the ceremony Camillo Rinuccini writes: ‘Allora avvicinatosi il Gran Duca, e presa la Real Corona da Monsig. Borghese Arcivescovo di Siena, gliele pose in testa, e come Principessa di Toscana salutata dalle voci di tutti i circostanti, che le aguraron la fortuna e le glorie delle due case, ch’ella congiungeva, fu messa à cavallo sopra una chinea bianca, coperta di broccato, ricamato di perle e gioie, e s’incamminò verso il Duomo’, Descrizione delle feste fatte nelle reali nozze deʼ Serenissimi Principi di Toscana D. Cosimo deʼ Medici e Maria Maddalena, Arciduchessa dʼAustria (Florence, 1608), p. 7. 3   ‘in abito di tela d’argento alla Tedesca, con grandissimo strascico, e maniche pendenti fino à terra’, Rinuccini, Descrizione, p.7. On the closely-related image of the entrata by Mattias Greuter, see Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà and Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, Feste e apparati medicei da Cosimo I a Cosimo II: Mostra di disegni e incisioni (Florence, 1969), p. 105.

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Figure 3.1

Art, Gender and Religious Devotion in Grand Ducal Tuscany

Giovanni Maggi, Bridal Entrata of Maria Maddalena d’Austria, 1608. London, British Museum.

during this period, the bridal entrata, rituals concerned with birth and purification, and the Festa delle doti. Viewed in this way, her experience, expressed publicly around aspects of the female life cycle – as bride, and as wife and mother – can be characterized as a struggle for visibility. Rituals involved special body adornments, or corporeal inscriptions (special clothes, a specially decorated carriage and so on), that made the grand duchess especially visible.4 As Elizabeth Grosz has shown, corporeal markings or encodings inscribe bodies within circuits of power. The body ‘becomes a text and is fictionalized and positioned within those myths that form a culture’s social narratives and self-representations’, Grosz explains. 5 As we shall see, Maria Maddalena’s participation in rituals to some extent circumscribed her role, in that they positioned her as Medici wife and mother rather than as a powerful figure in her own right. Yet ever more elaborate articulations of rituals concerning those roles, and Maria Maddalena’s status as grand duchess, are 4   ‘Corporeal inscriptions are material, rather than merely ideological, encodings, as diverse as acts of punishment and brutality to the ‘“voluntary” inscriptions’ of daily life: clothing, hairstyle and body adornments’; Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Inscriptions and Body Maps: Representations and the Corporeal’, in Linda McDowell and Joanne P. Sharp (eds), Space, Gender, Knowledge: Feminist Readings (London, 1997), pp. 238–9. 5   Ibid.

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suggestive of the subject’s assertive manipulation of public space which allowed her to exert at least some control over her image. The Bridal Entrata of 1608 Celebrations for the wedding of archduchess Maria Maddalena d’Austria to Cosimo, eldest son of Ferdinando I and Cristina di Lorena, employed and reworked the visual language of spectacle which successive prestigious weddings and ceremonies conducted in Florence for the Medici and their allies had established. This event is significant to my analysis because it expressed and fashioned an initial bonding of the future grand duchess with the city’s major civic and religious sites, and linked the new bride generationally to a succession of Medici brides. The marriage played on established dynastic ties: Giovanna d’Austria was Maria Maddalena’s aunt, the sister of her father, Karl of Styria. The wedding represented Medicean connections with the wider Habsburg dynasty, not least because Maria Maddalena’s sister Margarita was queen of Spain. It also consolidated the alliance of the two dynasties, vital to the Medici who needed the support and approval of the imperial family to retain territorial control of Tuscany.6 As with the Florentine bridal entrances of 1565 and 1589, the entrata of 1608 marked the end of a long journey, this time beginning in Maria Maddalena’s home city of Graz in Inner Austria (Styria). Once in the centre of Florence the 1608 entrata followed a more complex route than those organized for the entrate of Giovanna d’Austria and Cristina di Lorena. These earlier entrances had focused on the very centre of the city, following a route from the Piazza Santa Trinita that looped round the Duomo to end at the Palazzo Ducale.7 Maria Maddalena’s longer route allowed more scope for the public presentation of the bride and linked her more advantageously to sites with particular Medicean associations. From the Borgo Ognissanti, the bride’s coach and entourage turned into Via dei Fossi to Piazza Santa Maria Novella, which, as setting for summer palios, was an established focus for public display in events that often included Medici men and women as key spectators. From this piazza the procession passed along the Via del Giglio to Piazza Madonna at the rear of the Medici parish church of San Lorenzo. Continuing with references to the Medici family, it then passed along the south side of the historic Palazzo Medici, seat of the dynasty from the Quattrocento until Cosimo I moved his family into the Palazzo Ducale in 1540. Turning onto Via 6   Edward L. Goldberg, ‘Artistic Relations between the Medici and Spanish Courts, 1587–1621: Part I’, Burlington Magazine, 138 (1996): p. 105. 7   Cristina’s entrata route was different from that of Giovanna only in the very last stage, as it was organized to allow Cristina to enter the piazza of the Palazzo Ducale to face the side of the palace rather than appearing from behind it; see James M. Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as Theatrum Mundi (New Haven, 1996), pp. 138–47 and pp. 189–97.

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Martelli (the road which Via Larga becomes as it nears the city centre) and moving into the Piazza del Duomo, the visual linkage of the bride with some of Florence’s major devotional sites culminated with her arrival at Santa Maria del Fiore, setting for the wedding ceremony.8 Ephemeral triumphal arches, reminiscent of those produced for the entries of Giovanna d’Austria and Cristina di Lorena, punctuated Maria Maddalena’s course. As with these earlier events, a visual language of spectacle, with imagery that deployed complex historical and dynastic references, was intended to dazzle a wide audience of officials and spectators, as well as the bride and her entourage. Decorated with images and statuary, emblems, arms and devices, the arches and monuments glorified Florence and the Medici, and celebrated the prestigious Habsburg connection that the bride represented. The temporary arch on Borgo Ognissanti (‘B’ on Maggi’s engraving), represented the city of Florence and the rivers Arno and Danube, and was embellished with the Medici and Habsburg arms, reminiscent of the arch in the same location for Giovanna’s entrata.9 Passing through Piazza Santa Maria Novella and moving on towards San Lorenzo, the procession filed under an arch dedicated to the Habsburg emperors (‘C’), represented in statuary and pictures. The arch was surmounted by statues of Maria Maddalena and Cosimo. At the Canto dell’Aglio, Maria Maddalena’s mother’s family was commemorated with statues of the duke and duchess of Bavaria (‘D’). The familial and dynastic significances of the match were shaped, enhanced and exploited in a variety of ways, through the wedding service itself (which was for show only, as the couple had been married by proxy before Maria Maddalena left Graz), the imagery of the temporary monuments, and Medicean association with the spaces through which the procession passed. When the couple and their retinue traversed Florence to Palazzo Pitti after the service, an artillery salute was fired from the Ponte Santa Trinita and the Ponte alla Carraia to mark their crossing of the Arno, and to lend significance to their increasing proximity to the grand ducal family’s principal residence.10 Two further arches awaited them: the first, on Via Maggio, was reminiscent of one that had been placed at the Canto dei Carnesecchi in the 1589 wedding, and was ostensibly dedicated to Cristina di Lorena. It linked, however, spiritual and dynastic resonances with the visual rhetoric of heroic masculinity by presenting depictions of the acts of Lorrainese dukes, including Godfrey of Bouillon, the first crusader king of Jerusalem (‘E’).11 The last monument, which was located outside Palazzo Pitti, celebrated the evolving 8   BNCF, Gino Capponi 261, Cesare Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fols 226 verso – 227 recto. 9   Tinghi claims that the first arch in Borgo Ognissanti depicted scenes from the life of Godfrey of Bouillon, ‘E’ on Maggi’s engraving, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 226 verso. 10   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 227 recto. 11   Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589, pp. 191–3. On the significance of Godfrey of Bouillon to the Medici see Massimiliano Rossi, ‘Emuli di Goffredo: epica granducale e propaganda figurativa’, in Elena Fumagalli, Massimiliano Rossi and Riccardo Spinelli

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Medici dynasty with further statues of the bridal couple (‘F’). As a collection of tributes this public imagery echoed the choral eulogies of the wedding service, which praised saints John the Baptist, Zenobius, and Reparata, the city’s patrons, as well as saints drawn from the illustrious families that the service symbolically joined: Leopold of Austria, Bridget of Bavaria, Orlando of the Medici house and Godfrey of Bouillon.12 As rites of passage, the entrata and wedding marked a transition in status for Maria Maddalena, from unmarried to married and from distinguished outsider to future Medici grand duchess. Ephemeral decoration and the spectacle of procession introduced her into the city and culture of Florence, a process that worked in a variety of ways, but focused on the display of the bride, in person, through her entourage (sign of her presence), and through visual references to her through the imagery deployed in the temporary monuments. However, the decoration forcefully identified and celebrated the bride through kinship ties, both established and newly formed, by references to her own, her husband’s and her mother-in-law’s families. Carefully preserving Maria Maddalena’s status as a Habsburg archduchess, which the Medici prized, the entrata enhanced and celebrated the prestige of the Medicean position. After the entrata Florence witnessed lavish ceremonies and spectacles to celebrate the wedding over the days and weeks which followed, including an equestrian ballet in Piazza Santa Croce and a mock battle on the river in which fully equipped small craft enacted the exploits of Jason and the Argonauts. The battle culminated with the presentation of a golden fleece to the bride, privileging Maria Maddalena’s role as key spectator.13 On the day after the wedding, the new bride participated in a special Festa delle doti. Ferdinando was responsible for the event, according to Tinghi, and gave fifty more dowries than in other years in honour of its special circumstances. ‘His Highness presented the dowries to the said girls, and then the Most Serene bride took the hand of the first [girl] and then Madama followed, and then the gentlewomen’, the diarist recorded.14 As in other years, the 1608 Festa delle doti in Florence made Medicean charity visible, and, as it promoted and facilitated marriage for the fanciulle, it celebrated the ruling family’s sense of investment in the future of Florence within a clearly delineated ideological framework. The procession followed the established route from San Lorenzo to the convalescent hospital in Piazza Santa Maria Novella, and in doing so made publicly visible the new organization of the ruling family’s (eds), L’arme e gli amori. La poesia di Ariosto, Tasso e Guarini nell’arte fiorentina del Seicento, exh. cat. (Livorno, 2001), pp. 32–42. 12   M. Rastrelli (ed.), ‘Descrizione della Magnifica Festa Fatta in Firenze l’anno MDCVIII in occasione degli sponsali del Gran Principe Cosimo De’Medici con l’Arciduchess Maria Maddalena d’Austria’, Notizie Istoriche Italiane, vol. 2 (1781), p. 230. 13   Rastrelli, ‘Descrizione’, pp. 211–22. 14   ‘S[ua] A[ltezza] dato le dote adette fanciulle et poi prese per mano la prima dalla Ser[enissi]ma sposa et poi da Madama seghendo, poi le gentildonne,’ Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 227 recto.

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leading female members. With Cristina displaced as its leader and now occupying the second place in the procession, the event signified a transition of power between Maria Maddalena and her mother-in-law. As we have seen, the annual dowry procession is the subject of one of the scenes depicted in Jacques Callot’s commemorative Vita di Ferdinando series of engravings produced in c.1614 (see Figure 2.4). Maria Maddalena appears at the head of the procession, with Cristina di Lorena following behind her, holding the hand of one of the dowry recipients. As the work appears in a series devoted to Ferdinando’s life, he is determined as the event’s key patron, even though it represents an instance of the Festa after his death. Tinghi account of the dowry festival of 1608 also emphasized Ferdinando’s role by explaining that the event was conducted on His Highness’s order, that he gave the dowries (supplying the funds and presenting them), and it was the grand duke’s decision to increase the number of donations to mark this special occasion. While the dynastic strategies to which the entrata and the Festa refer may have been carried forward by women, they were controlled by men. The Festa, in effect, positioned the grand duke as the beneficent and symbolic ‘father’ of the dowry recipients, and, in 1608, the event figured the new bride as ‘mother’, enshrining the dynastic expectations on her that the entrata had already signified, as future mother of the next grand duke’s children. Birth and Purification Between 1609 and 1617, Maria Maddalena endured eight pregnancies, adequately fulfilling the ruling family’s need for heirs.15 While the burden of responsibility on wives of childbearing age, particularly those in aristocratic families, to produce male children must have meant they faced intense pressures, the birth of a son could enhance the status of the mother, if only temporarily. For Maria de’ Medici, cousin of Maria Maddalena, the birth of her first child, within a year of her marriage to Henri IV of France, was represented as a moment of glory in Rubens’s pictorial cycle commissioned by Maria and dedicated to the dowager French queen’s life and achievements. In The Birth of Louis XIII (Figure 3.2) Rubens chose allegory to celebrate Maria’s role in securing the future of the Bourbon dynasty and of France. He depicts Maria elegantly sitting on a birthing chair-cum-throne, with Cybele, the Great Mother, standing behind her, and close by the figure of Fecundity. Fecundity holds a cornucopia with the heads of five putti in it, representing the five further children Maria would bear. Maria as a new mother resembles an image 15   The dates of birth and names of her children are as follows: August 1609, Maria Cristiana; July 1610, Ferdinando; June 1611, Gian Carlo; May 1612, Margherita; May 1613, Mattias; October 1614, Francesco; July 1616, Anna; November 1617, Leopoldo; Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 2, fols. 3 recto – 3 verso, 44 verso, 45 recto; Gaetano Pieraccini, La stirpe de’ Medici di Cafaggiolo (Florence, 1986), vol. 2, p. 353 ; Medici Archive Project (online).

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Figure 3.2

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Peter Paul Rubens, The Birth of Louis XIII, from the Life of Maria de’ Medici, 1622. Paris, Musée du Louvre.

of the Madonna, who was, of course, her patron saint.16 The Marian reference may be seen to contribute to the mythical quality ascribed by Rubens to this secular queen’s delivery. Here, an intensely female experience, conventionally bound to 16   The similarity between Rubens’s The Birth of the Dauphin and a Nativity or Sacra Conversazione is disputed; see Deborah Marrow, The Art Patronage of Maria de’ Medici (Ann Arbor, 1982), pp. 61–3 and Ronald Forsyth Millen and Robert Eric Wolf, Heroic Deeds and Mystic Figures: A New Reading of Rubens’ Life of Maria de’ Medici (Princeton, 1989), p. 91.

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notions of domesticity and thus constraint, is redeployed as a politically resonant event, specifically to strengthen a claim to power and authority. These themes were also relevant in early seventeenth-century Florence, though visually articulated in profoundly different ways in the ritual acts and public ceremonies in which Maria Maddalena appeared during the reign of Cosimo II. In grand ducal Florence, a collection of ceremonies played out in public functioned socially and dynastically to celebrate the births of the grand duke’s children, and, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly, the role of the grand duchess as mother. This is particularly apparent in the era of Cosimo II and Maria Maddalena as certain rituals enacted in Florence’s streets and churches included the grand duchess more often, or more effectively, than during Ferdinando’s reign, and focused more explicitly on her body. The festival of Corpus Christi on 10 June 1610, for example, generated a more elaborate festival than those staged in Florence during Ferdinando’s reign, and involved both the grand duke and his consort.17 Cosimo II accompanied a procession of the sacrament on foot across the city from the Duomo to the church of Santa Maria Novella, a much greater distance than the few paces between the Duomo and the Baptistry which Ferdinando used to undertake for the same festival. Maria Maddalena, in an advanced state of pregnancy, was present at the mass held at Santa Maria Novella, sitting opposite her husband, who was flanked by the papal nuncio and ambassadors. In this public setting, in which the reverential audience worshipped the body of Christ, Maria Maddalena’s presence suggests the unborn Medici heir was also being celebrated. Celebrations following the births of Medici children in Florence could be ostentatious. On the birth of Cosimo II’s heir, Ferdinando, on 14 July 1610, salvoes were fired from Fortezza da Basso and from San Miniato al Monte on the city’s peripheries.18 Orders from Cosimo that the city’s shops should close and business be suspended for two days following the birth meant the disruption of customary patterns of behaviour for the wider population. A public holiday also allowed for the presence of a large crowd to watch Cosimo and his mother, Cristina di Lorena, accompanied by a great entourage on horseback, make their way in procession across the city to Santissima Annunziata to offer thanks at mass.19 For Maria Maddalena, access to public space was circumscribed in this period, signalled by her absence from the pages of Tinghi’s diary during a month of confinement. Her return to public life following this and each of her other confinements was a relatively private event – the ‘prima visita a letto’, an audience given by the grand duchess from her bed. Official receptions following parturition were customary for the consorts of leaders in early modern Italy, but could take different forms. A late fifteenth-century example from Milan sheds light on the practice: in January 1493, Beatrice d’Este, duchess of Bari, wife of Ludovico Sforza the future duke of Milan, received visitors from her bed just days after giving birth to Ercole (later   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 292 recto.   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 294 verso. 19   Ibid. 17

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Massimiliano) Sforza.20 In a letter to the duchess’s sister Isabella d’Este, a ladyin-waiting described how ‘ambassadors, lords, gentlemen and ladies’ were guided into the birthing chamber from an antechamber adjacent to the great treasury, which was adorned with precious items.21 The birthing chamber was decorated with red brocade and crimson cloth embroidered in gold and Beatrice, attended by her mother and other noblewomen, its central focus, rested on the bed. Following their audience the duchess’s visitors went into the baby’s nursery.22 In Florence over a century later, the emphases were different. Maria Maddalena d’Austria’s prime visite took place a month after the births of her children. On 18 August 1610, following the birth of her first son Ferdinando, for example, Maria Maddalena received her visitors from her bed, in the large chamber next to her chapel. The visitors did not see the new baby, or inspect items from the family treasury, and attention instead focused on the grand duchess herself. The audience was given to a party of women, rather than a mixed group, led by the wife of the Lucchese ambassador to Florence. This woman is not named by Tinghi, but has clearly been assigned her own diplomatic role at this event from which her husband’s participation was prohibited.23 Delicacies were served at the prime visite, and sometimes special entertainments were staged. Customarily, the performers were female, complementing the gendered exclusivity of these gatherings. At receptions held in August 1611 and June 1613, following the births of Maria Maddalena’s sons Gian Carlo and Mattias, respectively, the singer and composer Francesca Caccini entertained Maria Maddalena and her guests.24 However exquisitely organized the Florentine prime visite may have been, they were essentially private events with limited political significance. In contrast, after forty days of confinement, the grand duchess participated in an elaborately publicoriented service when she went to be churched – the blessing of a woman who has given birth – at the Duomo of Florence. The liturgical practice of churching has its origins in the discourses of orthodoxy which prohibited women from attending church during menstruation, following sexual intercourse or childbirth. By the early modern period, churching had evolved into a festival of thanksgiving for a woman’s safe delivery after labour. Women of all classes went to be churched after giving birth, but for the women of noble and ruling families the ritual provided an opportunity for public display. In Milan in 1493 a kind of double churching   Evelyn S. Welch, Art and Authority in Renaissance Milan (New Haven, 1995), pp.

20

225–6.

    23   24   21

Ibid., p. 227, pp. 318–19 note 84. Ibid., p. 226. Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 299 verso – 300 recto. Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fols 340 verso and 501 recto. On the career of Francesca Caccini see Suzanne G. Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power (Chicago, 2009); see Appendix A, Table A2, p. 284 in Cusick for the prime visite of 1611 and 1613. 22

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celebration was enacted at the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie to celebrate the roles of Beatrice d’Este, duchess of Bari, and Isabella of Aragon, duchess of Milan, who had given birth within a matter of days of each other.25 In Florence in the early seventeenth century, churching festivals involving Maria Maddalena honoured her as grand duchess and mother, and signified her return into the public sphere from which childbirth had temporarily excluded her. Conducting a churching ceremony – or Messa in santo – was an established practice amongst Medici women before Maria Maddalena’s arrival, though whether undertaken with an audience in mind is difficult to gauge. Writing to her husband on 22 May 1593, Cristina di Lorena referred to the forty days of bedrest that followed the birth of their daughter, Caterina, which she was more than halfway through, and of her plan to visit Santissima Annunziata immediately this period had elapsed.26 Her tone suggests the authenticity of the sentiment, but the visit may have been understood as a personal, rather than public, act of devotion, and one that did not require an audience. For Maria Maddalena d’Austria, the Messa in santo was one in a collection of ceremonies in which she was the object of the gaze of others. In August 1610, after Ferdinando’s birth, the possibilities for gendered Medicean display were explicitly realized by Maria Maddalena’s self-adornment and self-presentation as she emerged from Palazzo Pitti dressed in black ornamented with jewels.27 Attention became acutely focused on her body, or rather on the body hidden in the apparatus of power and status. She was made more conspicuous by being transported across the city from Palazzo Pitti to the Duomo in a litter which was embellished with crimson velvet embroidered in gold. Maria Maddalena as the focus of the scrutiny of the crowd was masked by clothes and accoutrements that at once set her apart and shaped and defined aspects of her identity as grand duchess, inscribing her body to become part of a wider socio-political system. While Tinghi’s accounts of the rituals in which Maria Maddalena participated are fastidious in their attention to detail, offering descriptions of the appearance of the processionals, the mode of transport of different figures, often the names or number of participants, he rarely refers to the costume of the grand duchess, so his inclusion of a description on this occasion indicates that it is at once special and significant. We have little sense of Maria Maddalena’s taste for clothes and dressing up. When, newly widowed in 1621, she ordered two gowns from her tailor, her sole specification was that they should be light in weight – probably, then, silk rather than heavy brocade, which suggests a taste for both economy and

  Welch, Art and Authority (1995), p. 227.   ‘Io son hoggi al ventiduesimo giorno del mio riposo in letto, che posso dire di

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havere trapassata più che la metà della mia Guardia, la quale, finita, io voglio andare subito alla Chiesa della Santissima Annuntiata’, ASF, Mediceo del Principato 5962, fol. 236. 27   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 300 verso.

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comfort.28 But dressing up was expected, it seems, for an occasion such as the Messa in santo: in Milan in 1493, Beatrice d’Este wore a spectacular embroidered and bejewelled cloth-of-gold garment for her churching service.29 For the churching ritual of 1610, Maria Maddalena was driven on the established processional route to the Duomo – along Via Maggio, over the Arno at the Ponte Santa Trinita. Her litter, drawn by six horses with coachmen dressed in black velvet, led a cavalcade of forty-two coaches carrying groups of noblewomen and their attendants.30 The movement of the grand duchess across the city suggests an inscription in that the body is manoeuvred and made visible. Crossing Florence to the city’s key devotional focus, the ritualized practice of churching was lavishly interpreted as spectacle. At the Duomo a carpet had been laid at the middle door of its west end and gold fabric was draped over this door.31 The churching of women involves a blessing with holy water on the doorstep of the church renewing the purity of the body after childbirth, a further corporeal inscription. As with the prime visite, a public churching ceremony was conducted following each of Maria Maddalena’s confinements. On 26 June 1613, following the birth of her third son, prince Mattias, a contemporary diarist noted, ‘the Most Serene Archduchess ... went to be churched in Santa Maria del Fiore with a cavalcade [made up] of all the court’.32 Maria Maddalena’s litter was preceded by a party of Florentine gentlemen on horseback and followed, in this case, by a somewhat depleted retinue of sixteen carriages carrying the grand duchess’s female attendants and groups of noblewomen.33 While the churching festival symbolically reintroduced the grand duchess back into public devotional space and thus public life, ceremonies of baptism conducted at the Baptistry introduced newborn grand ducal infants into both sacred and public realms.34 The politically complex and artistically important ceremony undertaken for the baptism of Giovanna d’Austria’s son Filippo,

  The gowns, ‘una zimarra da spogliare’ and ‘una vesta’, were ordered in May 1621; Elizabeth Currie, ‘Diversity and Design in the Florentine Tailoring Trade, 1550–1620’, in Michelle O’Malley and Evelyn Welch (eds), The Material Renaissance (Manchester, 2007), p. 161 and p. 172 note 41. 29   Welch, Art and Authority, p. 236. 30   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 300 verso. 31   Ibid. 32   ‘la Ser[enissi]ma Arciduchessa ... andò in santo in Santa Maria del Fiore con Cavalcata di tutta la Corte.’ ASF, Manoscritti 132: Memorie fiorentine, vol. 7, fol. 152 recto. 33   Ibid. 34   Not all grand ducal baptisms were publicly oriented. Maria Maddalena’s chapel at Palazzo Pitti was used for the baptism of Ferdinando (29 July 1610), and this was probably to ensure an early christening of a sickly infant; Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 297 verso. 28

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short-lived heir of Francesco I, provided the key ceremonial model.35 In the early seventeenth-century examples, Maria Maddalena’s roles seem more defined than that of her aunt Giovanna in 1577, but even while she was central to the event, she did not necessarily appear at its centre. In November 1610, for the baptism of her fifteen-month old daughter Maria Cristiana, Maria Maddalena was opulently dressed in white – perhaps in deliberate contrast with the black of the Messa in santo some three months earlier, after Ferdinando’s birth – and adorned with jewels.36 Above the doors of the Duomo and the Baptistry, where the service took place, hung the arms of the Medici family, and the royal houses of Spain and Austria, pertinent reminders of this Medici child’s maternal heritage.37 Spaces were transformed for special occasions as bodies were, and for the baptism of her third child, Gian Carlo the Baptistry was embellished with many candles in silver candlesticks and a special silver altar in addition to the main altar.38 Yet Maria Maddalena was not included in the service as she had been for her daughter’s baptism: confined to the role of spectator, on this occasion she had ceded her position to her baby son.39 Although central to familial interests, the grand duchess was decentred in relation to issues of inheritance. Guardianship of the child for the event was, however, designated to women. As for the procession for the baptism of Giovanna’s son Filippo, the baby was carried by his wet-nurse. He was accompanied to the Baptistry from the Palazzo Ducale in a carriage also bearing his four young aunts, Cristina’s daughters Caterina, Eleonora, Maria (Maddalena) and Claudia.40 The Festa Delle Doti A cycle of confinements and related rituals, signalled by periods of absence and presence in public settings, gave structure to Maria Maddalena’s role during her earliest years in Florence. When possible during these years she joined the annual Festa delle doti, taking up her position at the head of the procession of fanciulle and noblewomen, as she had for the first time in October 1608 shortly after her arrival in the city. In May 1614, grand duchess Maria Maddalena was unable to participate in the festival because the Medici family were in mourning. A matter 35   On the iconography of this event see, Eve Borsook, ‘Art and Politics at the Medici Court II: The Baptism of Filippo de’ Medici in 1577’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 13 (1967–8): pp. 9–114. 36   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 312 recto. 37   Memorie fiorentine, vol. 7, fol. 49 recto. 38   Memorie fiorentine, vol. 7, fol. 121 recto – 122 verso. 39   The anonymous account amongst the Memorie fiorentine places Maria Maddalena in the house of Roberto Strozzi on Via del Proconsolo on the processional route, vol. 7, fol. 122 verso. 40   Memorie fiorentine, vol. 7, fol. 122 recto – 123 recto.

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of weeks earlier, Cristina di Lorena’s twenty-year-old son Francesco had died suddenly. An anonymous diarist’s account of the event begins by acknowledging a break in traditional practice: The procession of the young girls was done in the usual way, but different from all the others, as it was usual for the Most Serene Archduchess to participate in it, as earlier – in the time of Grand Duke Ferdinando – the Most Serene Madama Cristina di Lorena used to participate.41

Linking the contribution of the two grand duchesses, the diarist recognized that these rituals were endowed with particular significance by the continuity of female participation between generations. On this occasion in 1614 a substitute key participant was required for the procession of May 19, and Cristina di Lorena’s great niece, eleven-year-old Camilla Orsini, took the lead role. Camilla was the daughter of Virginio Orsini, duke of Bracciano (son of Cosimo I and Eleonora di Toledo’s daughter Isabella de’ Medici Orsini), already called the princess of Sulmona, because of her betrothal since the age of nine to Marc’ Antonio Borghese, prince of Sulmona, nephew of pope Paul V.42 This child, whose dynastic function had already been mapped out so advantageously for the Medici, Orsini and Borghese families, ably represented the values of marriage and kinship that the festival promoted. As with the 1608 Festa in which Maria Maddalena d’Austria replaced Cristina di Lorena, the festival legitimized the passage of power and authority between generations. For all its female participants, the ceremony worked to inscribe women into a patriarchal system of inheritance. Camilla Orsini’s identification as key participant operated reciprocally, and her selection in the Festa was viewed as a spectacular honour to the extent that, a few days after the event, the papal secretary wrote to nuncio Grimani in Florence of the pope’s pleasure at the honour afforded her by Maria Maddalena in taking her place.43 Continuity in the ritual could be sustained without the grand duchess’s direct participation, but only by a (temporary) transferral of power to her surrogate.

41   ‘Fu fatta la Processione delle fanciulle secondo il solito, ma differente da tutte le altre, nelle quali era stato solito intervenire la Ser[enissi]ma Arciduchessa, come p[ri]ma in tempo del Granduca Ferdinando era intervenuta la Ser[enissi]ma Madama Cristina di Lorena.’ Memorie fiorentine, vol. 7, fol. 189 recto. 42   Ibid. On Camilla Orsini (1603–85) see Marilyn R. Dunn, ‘Spiritual Philanthropists: Women as Convent Patrons in Seicento Rome’, in Cynthia Lawrence (ed.), Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors and Connoisseurs (University Park, PA, 1997), pp. 17–83. 43   ‘Hà con molto suo gusto sentito N[ostro] S[igno]re l’honore che la S[igno]ra Principessa di Sulmona hà ricevuto dalla Ser[enissi]ma Arciduchessa in farla intervenire in suo luogo al maritaggio d[e]lle zitelle.’ ASV, Archivio Nunziatura Apostolica di Firenze 134: Lettere della Segretaria di Stato, 205, fol. 61, dated 24 May 1614.

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Conclusion The meanings of rituals in which the grand duchesses or their representatives participated were multilayered, but always dynastically charged. Maria Maddalena d’Austria’s public and personal life defined her in relation to her powerful male relatives: by her role as consort and her potential as mother of Medici heirs. Rituals inscribed these meanings on her body. Maria Maddalena was also defined in relation to other women, in processions which presented her at the head of cavalcades of noblewomen, or, as with the Festa delle doti, leading a representative number of noblewomen and less privileged females. The Messa in santo, which focused fully on the grand duchess alone, functioned paradoxically by inscribing her back into the routines of court life and ceremony outside which childbirth had temporarily positioned her. The ritual represented a renewal of spiritual wholeness for its key participant, and her return to public duty and visibility. By being viewed in these ways over a number of years, the presence and participation of the grand duchess at ceremonies in public contexts – and in some cases the appearance of her children and other female relatives – worked to emphasize the security and health of the dynasty, to confirm the Medici family’s enduring status and values, and the status of the family in patriarchy. In bearing and raising children Maria Maddalena realized her fundamental function as Cosimo’s wife, however, the fulfilment of her primary role paradoxically offered some room for negotiating its scope. While the grand duchess’s role was circumscribed by public identification of her as consort and mother, it is also true that this identification granted her access to unusual levels of power. In constantly asserting the significance of her role through public appearance, that role was posited as central to the functioning of the dynasty. From this unusual position of power she was, in turn, able to test the boundaries that defined her function. By reworking some traditional ritual acts and introducing new formulations the grand duchess seemed to take control of her own visibility. In the ceremonies in which she figured, Maria Maddalena used special clothing and adornments, and special methods of transportation, that increased her visibility and allowed her to manage assertively, rather than succumb to, the power of the gaze.

Chapter 4

Relics On 22 July 1621, the feast day of Saint Mary Magdalen, cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte sent grand duchess Maria Maddalena d’Austria a gift: As today we have the feast of the glorious Saint Mary Magdalen [the cardinal wrote] these few hairs of hers have come to me; of them I make a present to Your Most Serene Highness and since I do not have the means to send you great things I send you this relic, which I hope will be dear to you, because of carrying her glorious name. These hairs touched the most glorious feet of our Lord, conserve them as sign of my devoted service.1

For Del Monte, whose service to the Medici family dated from the era of Ferdinando’s cardinalate over thirty years before, the gift of a relic of the Magdalen’s hair is rationalized as a token of continued esteem. Yet the cardinal’s disavowal of its value (a small gift rather than a ‘great’ one) is simply a courtesy. While the relic’s significance in the Roman Catholic world, as a tangible point of connection between earthly and heavenly realms, and as a rare sacred fragment closely linked to Christ, was profound, Maria Maddalena would have felt its resonances with particular intensity, as Del Monte realized. The image Del Monte’s description bestows on the Magdalen relic is an enticing one, recalling the intimacy of Mary Magdalen’s contact with Christ in the house of Simon, when she washed the Lord’s feet with her tears and dried them with her hair (Luke 7: 36–8). Hair, sign of the Magdalen’s former vanity and sensuality, becomes not only a sign of her reverence and devotion to Christ, but of her privileged and gendered engagement with him.2 The connotations of sacred hair could be especially evocative, it seems, for men as well as women. Cosimo I de’ Medici always wore a cross holding a

1   ‘Hoggi che habbiamo la festa della gloriosa S. Maria Maddalena, mi sono capitati questi pochi suoi cappelli, de quali ne faccio un presente a V(ostra) S(erenissima) A(ltezza) et poi che no(n) hò forze a inviarle cose grandi le mando questa Reliquia, quale spero che le sarà cara per portare essa il suo glorioso nome quali cappelli toccorono i gloriossiami piedi di Nostro sig(no)re le conservi in segno della mia devota servitu’, ASF, Mediceo del Principato 6078. 2   The significance of the Magdalen’s hair in her devotion to Christ was articulated by Gregory the Great who declared that the tresses which once lured men came to be used to show her humility; Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (London, 1994), p. 153.

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hair of Christ’s, a masculinized equivalent, then, of the Magdalen’s hair for the female devotee.3 For Maria Maddalena, owning a Magdalen relic constituted an aspect of a multifaceted association with her name-saint which she encouraged, publicly and privately. In the 1620s, the Medici court portraitist Justus Sustermans painted Maria Maddalena as Mary Magdalen (Figure 4.1).4 The painting shows the grand duchess kneeling and in prayer, her hair loose. Around her are the saint’s attributes, including, on a nearby ledge, the crucifix, skull, book, ointment jar and whip.5 Perhaps commissioned as a private act of remembrance and commemoration of her dead husband, this work is suggestive of the changing expectations projected onto the body of the widowed grand duchess, of her apparent transformation into a model of penitence and self denial, and of consuming devotion for Christ/Cosimo.6 The relic’s significances to Maria Maddalena as a latter-day Mary Magdalen extended beyond onomastic issues, and beyond satisfying the needs of private devotion. The object must be seen in the context of Maria Maddalena’s wider engagement with relics in the domestic realm. During the 1610s in particular she drew sacred things to her in an elaborate programme of collecting that focused on her private chapel at Palazzo Pitti, which came to be called the cappella delle Reliquie. Maria Maddalena gathered together over two hundred reliquaries crafted from gold and silver, ebony, amber, ivory and rock crystal, embellished with enamelling and silk flowers or studded with precious and semi-precious stones, vessels which held countless fragments derived from the remains of saints.7 Relics are fragments that have the potentiality to be moved around, to change hands and to be displayed in different settings. These activities characterize Maria Maddalena d’Austria’s strategies with them, as we shall see. My aim in this chapter is to shed light on the ways in which the apparently intrinsic (sacred) meanings attached to relics were inflected by the patron’s interventions: the collecting,   Rosemarie Mulcahy, Philip II of Spain, Patron of the Arts (Dublin, 2004), p. 83.   Born in Antwerp in 1597, Justus Sustermans arrived in Florence in c.1619 and

3 4

worked for Cosimo II. He later worked extensively for Maria Maddalena, receiving a monthly salary of 25 scudi from her. Claudio Pizzorusso suggests that a dating of c.1625– 30 fits this portrait on stylistic grounds, see Pizzorusso in Marco Chiarini (ed.), Sustermans. Sessant’anni alla corte dei Medici, exh. cat. (Florence, 1983), p. 35 (no. 14), and Pizzorusso in Marilena Mosco (ed.), La Maddalena tra sacro e profano (Florence, 1986), pp. 235–6 (no. 99). 5   Mosco (ed.), La Maddalena, pp. 235–6, 6   On the Magdalen as exemplum of penitence especially for female devotees and her perceived status as ‘widow’ of Christ, see Marjorie Och, ‘Vittoria Colonna and the Commission of a Mary Magdalene by Titian’, in Sheryl E. Reiss and David G. Wilkins (eds), Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy (Kirksville, MO, 2001), pp. 193–223, esp. p. 200; and Haskins, Mary Magdalen, pp. 63–7. 7  Details of the collection are taken from the chapel inventory: ASF, Guardaroba Medicea 348: Reliquie 1616 (1616–23).

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embellishment, storage, ostension, veneration and even gifting of sacred items. But first this chapter interrogates some of the ways that relic collections might be understood in relation to other forms of collecting which art historical scholarship privileges. In what ways, this chapter asks, do competing patterns and established topoi relate to the practices and actions of this Mediceo-Habsburg example, and how is gender implicated?

Figure 4.1

Justus Sustermans, Grand Duchess Maria Maddalena d’Austria as St Mary Magdalen, 1620s. Florence, Palazzo Pitti.

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Sacred Collections in Context While relic collecting as opposed simply to relic veneration was, in early modern Italy, an activity reserved for the few rather than the many, Maria Maddalena d’Austria’s commitment to collecting sacred things was not uncommon amongst aristocratic secular figures. The Habsburgs avidly collected relics, for example. Philip II of Spain’s zeal for them provided a significant impetus for the basilica at the Escorial, where his relic collection numbered some 7,500 items.8 Philip’s sister Juana of Austria was also a relic enthusiast, establishing at the convent of Las Descalzas Reales in Madrid a relicario behind the high altar of the conventual church. An account of 1569 lists its most prestigious treasures – thirty-three heads of saints, bones of Saint Ursula and Saint Sebastian, and a relic of the habit of Saint Francis. Many of the relics came from Rome and Central Europe, gifts particularly from empress Maria, wife of Maximilian II, which Juana in turn bequeathed to the convent on her death in 1573.9 Prestigious presents were also received from male patrons, including a silver chest containing relics of Saint Inès of Hungary, given by emperor Rudolf II,10 but the conventual collection functioned to allow sacred objects to be maintained within the orbit of female (Habsburg) devotees. In Florence, Maria Maddalena’s collection focused on a palatine chapel which facilitated personal and privileged access and proximity to its (sacred) contents, as well as control over them. She inflected the example of female Habsburg relic devotion perpetuated at Las Descalzas Reales by tailoring her practice to her requirements as a secular female leader and the environment of the grand ducal palace. While a distinction between the conventual collection and the palace collection cannot simply be described in terms of a distinction between the institutional and the domestic, for the purposes of this study placing Maria Maddalena’s relic collection in context means gaining a sense of the use of relics

  On Philip II’s collection see Guy Lazure, ‘Possessing the Sacred: Monarchy and Identity in Philip II’s Relic Collection at the Escorial’, Renaissance Quarterly, 60 (Spring 2007), pp. 58–93. 9   J. Miguel Morán and Fernando Checa Cremades, ‘Relicarios y camarines: la Contrarreforma y el coleccionismo fantastico’, El coleccionismo en Espana: De la cámara de maravillas a la galleria de pinturas (Madrid, 1985), p. 178. Maria’s gifts included a gold reliquary containing a fragment of the True Cross, another also in gold and in the form of an ark, in which fragments of the clothes of Saint John the Baptist were preserved. Maria’s daughter, Ana of Austria, fourth wife of Philip II, presented the convent with many gifts including relics and the famous ark of Saint Victor, a magnificent vessel dated 1570, one of most of the important works of the goldsmith Wentzel Jamnitzer; Fernando Checa Cremades, ‘Monasterio de Las Descalzas Reales: Origenes de su colección artistica’, Reales Sitios, 102 (1989), pp. 21, 23. 10   Checa Cremades, ‘Monasterio de Las Descalzas Reales’, p. 22. 8

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by women operating within palaces,11 as well as of the significances attached to the holy in other types of early modern collection. The appeal of relics for Medici – and other – women can be associated in part with therapeutic needs around childbirth and the infancy of children, times when the sacred efficacy of holy things was particularly sought after. This point is suggested in the promise made to Giovanna d’Austria in February 1578 by a well-wisher in Arezzo, to send the grand duchess a part of the garment of Saint Ambrose, hopefully before the birth of her baby.12 Prior to the birth of her first child, Maria de’ Medici borrowed the relic of the girdle of St Margaret from the church of St Germain des Prés in Paris, which was believed to ease labour.13 Before and after the birth of her son Cosimo, Cristina di Lorena was the recipient of a group of spiritual presents from pope Gregory XIV, items that combined liturgical utility, novelty and blessings. Together with a small crucifix belonging to Pius V dispatched in April 1590, the pope sent his Palm Sunday ‘palma’, and in June following the baby’s arrival he sent a small gold and plasma pace and a brief he had blessed that was designed to be worn by the baby.14 In his letter accompanying the pope’s gift, Tuscan ambassador Niccolini explained that the brief-cum-necklace was valuable not only because it had been sent by the pope, but because it was ‘stuffed with benedictions and spiritual treasures’.15 Cristina placed the item ‘immediately’ around the baby’s neck and deployed the pace in her oratory (‘oratorio nostro’).16 In February 1615 Maria Maddalena received five Agnus Dei, three corone and a rosary, from a Milanese priest, who suggested that one of the Agnus Dei might be passed to her little son (probably Francesco, born the previous October), for protection.17 These types of sacred object – the pace that found its home in the oratory, and some of the precious presents sent to Maria Maddalena that may very well have been deployed in her palace chapel – suggest distinctions in the ways that 11   The domestic/institutional dichotomy suggests distinctions in the levels of access and control afforded sacred collections in palaces and convents by those that used them. On the problems raised by this dichotomy in relation to convents, see Helen Hills, ‘The Housing of Institutional Architecture: Searching for a Domestic Holy in Post-Tridentine Italian Convents’, in Sandra Cavallo and Silvia Evangelisti (eds), Domestic Institutional Interiors in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2009), pp. 119–52. 12   ASF, Mediceo del Principato 5927, letter sent to Giovanna d’Austria by Francesco Carbonati, dated 4 February 1578; Medici Archive Project (accessed 27/5/12). 13   Ronald Forsyth Millen and Robert Eric Wolf, Heroic Deeds and Mystic Figures: A New Reading of Rubens’ Life of Maria de’ Medici (Princeton, 1989), pp. 92–3. 14   Suzanne B. Butters, ‘The Uses and Abuses of Gifts in the World of Ferdinando de’ Medici (1549–1609)’, I Tatti Studies, 11 (2007), p. 248 and pp. 306–07 (Appendix I, no. 3). 15   Ibid., ‘ripieno di benedettioni et di tesori spirituali’ (translated by Butters). 16   Ibid., p. 307. 17   ASF, Mediceo del Principato 6081 fol. 57 (circa), letter dated 12 February 1615, Medici Archive Project (accessed 23/7/12).

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different sacred items were gifted and received. It seems there were those sent with specific liturgical uses or therapeutic potentialities in mind, and those that were more actively collected, in the sense of being sought and received by devotees with the primary purpose of maintaining them together. Maria Maddalena shared an interest in a more active type of relic collecting with her sister Margarita, queen of Spain, who kept relics in her oratories at the royal palace in Valladolid and at the Alcázar,18 and in 1606 the Augustinian father Luis de los Rios was in Florence, charged with the task of acquiring relics for her, presumably for these spaces.19 Yet relics, as other sacred items owned by elite patrons, were not only maintained in chapels. Rather, sacred items might be actively collected for the purpose of joining an expressly sacred collection, or maintained alongside other rare and precious things, both sacred and secular. The distinctions between these categories – sacred and secular – are hardly clear-cut and require some interrogation, even in relation to relics. While Cristina di Lorena gathered sacred things together in her oratory and/or chapels, she also kept religious items in collections she maintained in the secular/domestic spaces of the palace. The Stanza di Madama in the Uffizi was the room designated to house her vast dowry/inheritance of jewels and other valuables from her grandmother, Caterina de’ Medici.20 Situated along the same corridor as the Tribuna, the centrepiece of the grand duke’s spaces of collecting, the Stanza di Madama was strategically placed to offer a rich counterpart to the nearby collection of Ferdinando.21 Both collections affirmed the ruling family’s preoccupation with lineage and self-image: Cristina’s inheritance offered a substantial reminder of Medici success – it was the material reward for two sets of political marriages, that of Caterina and Henri d’Orléans (later Henri II of France), as well as Ferdinando and Cristina’s union. Caterina’s own collections preserved in cabinets (chambers) at the Hotel de la Reine in Paris juxtaposed sacred and non-sacred items. Items in the cabinet privé, for example, complicated (artificial) distinctions between ‘natural’ and ‘devotional’: ‘un rocher di Pierre di mine enrichi de branches di corail où est représenté la Passion’ and ‘ung St. Eustache de terre garny de huict branches de corail et une autre branche de corail.’22 A further chamber, named the Cabinet de Dévotion, contained reliquaries and   Lisa Goldenberg Stoppato, ‘La Cappella delle Reliquie di Palazzo Pitti,’ in Mina Gregori (ed.), Fasto di corte: la decorazione murale nelle residenze dei Medici e dei Lorena (Florence, 2005), vol. 1, p. 138. 19   ASF, Mediceo del Principato 5052, fol. 359, Medici Archive Project (accessed 23/7/12). 20   See Paola Venturelli, Il Tesoro dei Medici al Museo degli Argenti: Oggetti preziosi in cristallo e pietre dure nelle collezioni di Palazzo Pitti (Florence, 2009), pp. 109–12. 21   Scott Schaefer, The Studiolo of Francesco I de’ Medici in Palazzo Vecchio in Florence (Ann Arbor, 1976), pp. 74–5; Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà, La Tribuna di Ferdinando I de’ Medici: inventari 1589–1631 (Modena, 1997), p. xv. 22   Margriet Hoogvliet, ‘Le Cabinet de Curiosité de Catherine de Médicis dans l’Hotel de la Reine à Paris’, in Sabine Frommel and Gerhard Wolf, with Flaminia Bardati (eds), 18

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religious paintings, including an ‘Angelic Salutation’ with relics, a Nativity, which was also a reliquary – and the third an image of Christ in prayer.23 Distinctions between devotional and non-devotional objects could be made by housing them separately, but they were also often seen as compatible in terms of their interest to the collector, even though sacred items were valued more highly. The inventory pertaining to Cristina’s collection at the Uffizi lists over 140 objects, including many silver boxes, crystal vessels and others of alabaster and agate, a chalice of rhinoceros horn with a gold lid and supported on gold feet, portrait cameos of Medici ancestors Alessandro, first duke of Florence, and Pope Leo X, and portrait miniatures of Valois princes and princesses.24 Her collection featured numerous devotional objects, among them a gilded silver statuette of the Madonna and Child, a small crystal oval engraved with an image of the crucified Christ and the three Marys, a silver and crystal box engraved with an image of the Passion of Christ, and bearing the arms of Medici pope Clement VII. There was also a silver and ebony reliquary with six agate columns, embellished with silver figures at the centre representing the Flagellation of Christ.25 Cristina’s collection at the Uffizi suggests the compatibility of sacred and profane elements, but many other early modern collections seem emphatically to explore non-devotional areas, and to be defined in relation to the present rather than the past, to the state of contemporary scientific discovery and technical achievement. In early seventeenth-century Rome the painter Filippo Napoletano – favoured by Cosimo II de’ Medici – amassed a collection of rare and precious objects at his home. This ‘museum’ featured some 450 items, which brought together natural objects such as animal skulls and fossils, with exotica and curiosities, including Far Eastern costumes, Chinese porcelain and a Japanese dictionary.26 Yet the presence of natural objects invokes a spiritual dimension. Of fundamental importance to the processes of self-definition that private (ostensibly secular) collecting of this period explored and articulated, was the perceived relationship between the individual and God, one that encouraged collectors to marvel at collected objects as a reflection of the universe, and invoked a kind of Il mecenatismo di Caterina de’ Medici: poesie, feste, musica, pittura, cultura, architettura (Venice, 2008), p. 208. 23   Edmond Bonnaffé, Inventaire des meubles de Cathérine des Médicis en 1589: Mobilier, tableaux, objects d’art, manuscrits (Paris, 1874), p. 157, Inventory nos: 849–50. 24   The full inventory dating from 1609 to 1634 is published by Gaeta Bertelà, Tribuna, pp. 75–87. On the collection of Cristina di Lorena also see Kerrie-Rue Michahelles, ‘Apprentissage du mécènat et transmission matrilinéaire du pouvoir: Les enseignements de Catherine de Médicis á sa petite-fille Christine de Lorraine’, in Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier (ed.), Patronnes et mécènes en France à la Renaissance (Saint-Étienne, 2007), pp. 557–76, and Venturelli, Il Tesoro, pp. 107–35. 25   Gaeta Bertelà, Tribuna, pp. 77–78, p. 81, p. 87. 26   Jennifer Fletcher, ‘Filippo Napoletano’s Museum’, Burlington Magazine, 121 (1979): pp. 649–50.

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religious awe.27 To Renaissance enthusiasts the mysteries of nature were revealed through the experience of it, to the extent that naturalist-collectors saw themselves as ‘pilgrims’ into the natural (divinely created) world.28 Ulisse Aldovrandi (1522– 1605), the Bolognese naturalist and collector who counted Francesco I de’ Medici amongst his patrons, explained in his Vita that travelling as a pilgrim in his youth addressed a desire to see holy relics and ‘other natural things’.29 To a greater or lesser extent, private, princely collections surveyed and celebrated human interaction with nature, including the Kunstkammer of archduke Karl II in Graz (father of Maria Maddalena d’Austria), which united the collector’s multifaceted interests in the natural world, and in human intervention in it.30 Vincenzo Borghini’s programme for Francesco I’s Studiolo sought to explore relationships between naturalia and artificialia, by placing in the same room a huge variety of small items, including precious and semi-precious stones, ivory, agate and ebony vessels, carved stones and medals, mechanical gadgets and clocks.31 The value-laden paragone between natural and artificial objects was exemplified too in the Medicean Tribuna collection which, amongst other items, placed in the same space paintings by Raphael, Titian and Bronzino, medals and gems, an iron and gold nail reputed to be the product of an alchemical experiment, and a ‘unicorn’s horn’.32 Curious objects not only evoked the macrocosm through the microcosm, but made extraordinary realms accessible.33 Secular artefacts linking the collector to a particular historical moment or person, such as archduke Ferdinand II’s collection of the armour of famous men at Schloss Ambras, suggest, at least superficially, a connection with relic collecting. Yet relics offered rather more than an evocation of the past or the exotic: they made the sanctity of sacred figures accessible. As the Christian cult of saints identified these figures as intercessors, so seeing and touching a relic could signify a symbolic transferral of sanctity, the hope or promise of miraculous intervention, which gave relics their value. Owning relics, and housing them permanently within the confines of one’s own apartment, as   Schaefer explains, ‘[collections] provided a repository for ... rare and precious natural and man-made objects and, as such, acted as a kind of mirror of the universe created by God. They reflected the diversity and beauty of God’s work through nature and through man.’ The Studiolo of Francesco I de’ Medici, pp. 88–9. 28   Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, 1996), pp. 155–93, esp. pp. 160–61. 29   Ibid., p. 161. 30   Alphons Lhotsky, ‘Die Kunstkammer in Graz’, Die Geschichte der Sammlungen (Vienna, 1944–5), pp. 203–12. 31   Schaefer, Studiolo, p. 597. 32   Joy Kenseth, The Age of the Marvelous, exh. cat. (Hanover, NH, 1991), p. 82. 33   On collections and the evocation of invisible worlds, see Kryzsztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1990), Chapter 1, esp. pp. 23–5. 27

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Maria Maddalena did at Palazzo Pitti, opened up diverse possibilities for accruing both sacred and earthly advantages. Relics changed the significance of spaces and blurred boundaries between sacred and domestic. ‘An Affection for Sacred Things’ Assembling a hoard of relics for private consumption required some perseverance on the part of the collector. At least some items in Maria Maddalena’s collection were in the possession of the Medici before her arrival, and some were brought with her from Austria as part of her dowry, but it is absolutely clear that, during the 1610s, the grand duchess was deeply committed to the acquisition of relics, specifically for her own use.34 As early as September 1609, just under a year after her arrival in Florence, Maria Maddalena, now grand duchess, had begun to collect relics for the chapel attached to her apartment at Palazzo Pitti, as a letter from Cardinal Pallavicino suggests: ‘Your Most Serene Highness deigns to command me in something which gives you so much pleasure, that is to adorn that chapel with holy relics, I will procure with diligence the relics that Your Most Serene Highness desires.’35 By 1618, when the majority of the new decoration of the chapel was completed, the collection boasted hundreds of saintly fragments. Maria Maddalena’s collecting strategies were energetic and assertive. She cast the net wide in her appeal for assistance from high-ranking clerics, making her enthusiasm and piety well known. Equating her passion for relics with personal righteousness, cardinal Scipione Borghese wrote to her in October 1609 of her ‘great virtue, and ... devout affection for sacred things’.36 Over the following years, she sought and received ‘sacred things’ from a range of sources. In September 1611, Federico Borromeo sent from Milan relics of his sainted uncle to Maria Maddalena and her eldest daughter Maria Cristiana (Carlo Borromeo had been canonised less than a year earlier, so these gifts had special historical and spiritual resonance).37 A month later, a relic of Saint Catherine of Siena was sent to the 34   The dowry included reliquaries and amber altarini; Marilena Mosco (ed.), Meraviglie: Precious, Rare and Curious Objects from the Medici Treasury, exh. cat. (Florence, 2003), p. 15. 35   ‘V[ostra] A[ltezza] Ser[enissi]masi sia degnata di commandarmi cosa de tanto suo gusto, quanto a adornare quella Cappella con Sante Reliquie, io procurarò con diligenza le Reliquie, che desidera V[ostra] A[ltezza] S[ereniss]ima.’ ASF, Mediceo del Principato 6076, letter to Maria Maddalena d’Austria from cardinal Pallavicino, dated 21 September 1609. 36   ASF, Mediceo del Principato 6076, letter to Maria Maddalena d’Austria from cardinal Del Monte, dated 25 September 1609, and ASF, Mediceo del Principato 6076, letter to Maria Maddalena d’Austria from cardinal Borghese, dated 10 October 1609. 37   ASF, Mediceo del Principato 3137, fol. 413, Medici Archive Project (accessed 18/8/13).

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grand duchess by Siena’s archbishop Camillo Borghese.38 In 1616, she received part of the rib of San Gennaro from the monastery of Monte Vergine, organized on her behalf by the papal nuncio of Naples, Paolo Emilio Fionardi.39 In October 1617, Federico Borromeo entrusted the architect Matteo Nigetti with a relic of Saint Barnabas for Maria Maddalena. In the same year, she was sent a collection in miniature – twelve relics in a box – from the archbishop of Genoa.40 Maria Maddalena’s relic collection was a sign of her independence spiritually, and high-ranking clerics tolerated her zeal and admired it up to a point. Cardinal Borghese’s patience with the grand duchess, it seems, came to be stretched on the subject: called upon specifically to help locate corpi santi for the chapel he wrote at first discouragingly of the ‘dearth’ of remains in the catacombs (due to the fact that they had been taken away in former times).41 In June 1618 Borghese explained to Maria Maddalena that he had already had the catacomb of San Sebastiano searched, but would try again.42 Eventually, in the autumn of 1618, he sent her a relic, having helped the Jesuit father Stefano del Bufalo to obtain the body of Saint Cesonius for her altar.43 In 1619, the grand duchess pursued various lines of attack to obtain relics of William, duke of Aquitaine, who had lived as a hermit in Tuscany in the twelfth century. She sought assistance from the bishop of Grosseto to have the church of San Giovanni Battista at Castiglione della Pescaia give up the relics. At first, the bishop’s negotiations were beset with difficulties as the people of Castiglione were reluctant to let them go, even to the grand duchess. Some further, and more persuasive, negotiations must have swiftly been put into play, as Maria Maddalena soon sent her thanks to the commune of Castiglione for the relics, and commissioned a new reliquary to house them.44 While fervent relic collectors sought to amass (authentic) relics in quantity, certain items seemed to have special appeal.45 Maria Maddalena was especially keen to obtain a relic of the True Cross, which she managed in 1616. In the autumn of that year, while Cosimo was away on a pilgrimage to the Holy House of the Virgin at Loreto, the grand duchess made a trip to the basilica of Santa Maria all’ Impruneta, following a hunting excursion in the environs of the village. There,     40   41   38

Stoppato, ‘La Cappella delle Reliquie’, p. 137. Ibid. Ibid. ASF, Mediceo del Principato 6077, letter to Maria Maddalena d’Austria from cardinal Borghese, dated 26 January 1618. 42   Ibid., letter dated 8 June 1618. 43   Stoppato, ‘La Cappella delle Reliquie’, p. 137. 44   ASF, Mediceo del Principato 6081 fol. 462 circa, letter dated 9 January 1619, and Mediceo del Principato 6101, letters dated 1 February and 1 April 1619; Medici Archive Project (accessed 27/5/12). On the reliquary, see p. 83. 45   I explore this theme in ‘Sensuality, Sacred Remains and Devotion in Baroque Rome’, in Alice E. Sanger and Siv Tove Kulbrandstad Walker (eds), Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice (Farnham, 2012), pp. 199–215. 39

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she ‘fixed her eye’ on a reliquary containing fragments of the True Cross, as she explained in her narration of the event in a letter to her husband.46 Certain of Cosimo’s interest in the discovery of the True Cross relic, she enclosed a simple sketch of it with the correspondence.47 In the same letter, Maria Maddalena talked about the weather, specifically the strong north wind blowing through Florence, so strong ‘that it was enough to carry to Rome Bronzino’s Judith, to which he has finally given the last touches’, she said.48 Bronzino in this case was Cristofano Allori, a favourite of Maria Maddalena. He was engaged at this time on a version of his famous Judith for cardinal Alessandro Orsini, which the cardinal was anxiously awaiting in Rome – and clearly the painter’s tardiness had become well known. The letter thus summarizes the range of the grand duchess’s diverse but compatible interests in which the realms of sacred and secular, of the arts and of devotion, constantly intersect. Maria Maddalena commissioned a new and elaborate reliquary cross from Cosimo Merlini il Vecchio for the True Cross relics, and donated the reliquary, inscribed to link her patronage permanently to it, back to the basilica at Impruneta. This was a powerful, publicly oriented statement of Mediceo-Habsburg piety that capitalized on the significance of this most special of relics.49 Frequent visits to the shrine would mean that the True Cross relic remained within the grand duchess’s ambit.50 Meanwhile, the reliquary chapel at Palazzo Pitti boasted its   On this episode and its implications see Rosella Tarchi, ‘Una lettera di Maria Maddalena d’Austria sualla reliquia della Santa Croce in S. Maria Impruneta’, Rivista d’arte, 41 (1989): pp. 159–63, and Ilaria Hoppe, ‘Maria Maddalena d’Austria e il culto delle reliquie alla corte dei Medici. Scambi di modelli dinastici ed ecclesiastici’, in Christina Strunck (ed.), Artful Allies. Medici Women as Cultural Mediators, 1533–1743 (Milan, 2012), pp. 227–32. 47   The drawing is illustrated in Hoppe, ‘Maria Maddalena d’Austria e il culto delle reliquie’, fig. 1, p. 228. 48   ‘Questa sera si è levata una tramontana così gagliarda che è stata bastante di portar a Roma la Iuditta del Bronzino il qual gli ha dato finalmente la ultima mano.’ ASF, Mediceo del Principato 6071, dated 4 November 1611, quoted in Tarchi, ‘Una Lettera’, pp. 164–5. 49   Elena Fumagalli, Massimiliano Rossi and Riccardo Spinelli (eds), L’Arme e gli amori. La poesia di Ariosto, Tasso e Guarini nell’arte fiorentina del Seicento, exh. cat. (Livorno, 2001), p. 153, cat. no. 29. Also see Massimiliano Rossi, ‘Francesco Bracciolini, Cosimo Merlini e il culto mediceo della Croce: Ricostruzioni genealogiche, figurative, archittoniche’, Studi secenteschi, 42 (2001): pp. 211–76, and Hoppe, ‘Maria Maddalena d’Austria e il culto delle reliquie’, pp. 227–32. 50   In 1633, Cristina di Lorena concretized her devotion to the shrine with another publicly oriented act of patronage when she and her grandson Ferdinando II donated a silver reliquary casket of St Sixtus, the first bishop of Fiesole, to the basilica as a thanksgiving for the delivery of Florence from the plague of that year. The reliquary was a late work of Simone Pignoni (active between 1593 and 1614); The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence, exh. cat. (New Haven, 2002), pp. 269–70, cat. no. 128. The threat of plague of 1633 had prompted the Florentines to reactivate the practice of bringing 46

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own prestigious relics, including several connected with the Passion of Christ: a piece of the True Cross (possibly a fragment from the Impruneta relic) and thorns from the crown of thorns. Alongside these, Maria Maddalena must have counted a fragment of the Virgin’s veil amongst the most important items in her collection. She also owned two heads of martyrs. One, the chapel inventory informs, was that of a companion of Saint Ursula, and the other, the head of a soldier of Saint Maurice’s Theban Legion.51 These would have been especially prized because, like bodies, they suggested a uniqueness that bone fragments alone could not match. Rock crystal vessels made up at least a third of all objects in the collection; crystal was valuable for reliquaries because hard-wearing, which made it difficult to work, and transparent, which allowed for relics to be visible inside crystal shafts and columns. The Renaissance topos of the juxtaposition of naturalia and artificialia is suggested by the relic and its reliquary: the natural or somatic fragment preserved in an exquisitely crafted vessel. The reliquary functions as a metaphor for the spiritual, and as an ornament that helps to constitute its contents it is a type of parergon.52 Like the sante vive who made the divine earthly, the reliquary makes tangible the relic as a heavenly object, as a sign of divinity. Not all repositories for relics are listed as reliquaries on the inventory of the grand duchess’s chapel, others are distinguished according to their forms – tabernacles, boxes of different sizes, and even pictures, some with relics in their frames. The inventory’s careful taxonomies indicate the range of other items contained in the chapel: small sculptures and reliefs, oval-shaped objects, crucifixes large and small, miscellaneous containers of differing types including fiaschette and palli. There were twenty-five rosaries and rosary crowns, candlesticks, diverse liturgical items including chalices and jugs, and altar linen. Certain items on the inventory have evocative, tactile qualities, such as a collection of Agnus Dei, and two ‘hearts of yellow amber’ (‘cuor[i] d’ambra gialla’). Amber objects were well represented in the collection, suggestive of Maria Maddalena’s tastes and influence, nurtured first at the Habsburg court at Graz. While some amber items were brought by the grand duchess from Austria, others were collected by her while in Florence. The latter group included a tabernacle or altar decorated with a relief of the Annunciation, now in the Museo degli Argenti in Florence, which dates from 1614, and is the work of the Königsberg-based master Georg Schreiber.53 Typically for an early modern sacred collection, the vast majority of items on the inventory have been the sacred image of the Madonna of Impruneta into the city and parading it, a custom that waned in the later sixteenth century. 51   Guardaroba Medicea 348, fol. i recto. 52   On the significance of parergon see Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago, 1987), Chapter 1. 53   Rachel King, Baltic Amber in Early Modern Italy (Manchester, 2010), p. 259, and p. 445, fig. 134. (Museo degli Argenti, Inv (1) 1917 n. 75). While Maria Maddalena’s role in bringing amber to Florence is highly significant, as King explains (p. 218) she was not the first to do so, as is often thought.

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lost. Only a small number are traceable to specific, extant objects and to the work of particular jewellers (who were not named on the inventory). Two reliquaries of rock crystal and silver (of Saint William of Aquitaine and of one of Saint Ursula’s company) have been identified as the work of Andrea Tarchiani, and assumed to have been commissioned by Cosimo II for Maria Maddalena.54 The reliquary of Saint William of Aquitaine measures fifty-four centimetres in height and features a rock crystal cylinder on a trapezoidal, gilded silver base, resting on four gilded lion’s paws. Perhaps silver received by Tarchiani, listed in the Memoriale della Guardaroba (1618–20), was intended for this item, especially given that the grand duchess was involved in negotiations to obtain relics of the saint in 1619.55 Four silver putti, or angels, at the base of the reliquary and a silver angel bearing instruments of the Passion surmounting the crystal column were probably acquired by the workshops ready-made, as was the custom. The practice perhaps explains why figures on reliquaries and the relics preserved inside often seem oddly mismatched: the tabernacle holding the fragment of the Virgin’s veil was decorated with a figure of John the Baptist, and relics of Saints ‘Giusto and Podio’ beneath representations of Saints Mary Magdalen and Catherine, which flanked a Virgin and Child.56 Another jeweller in the employ of the Medici, the Scandinavian Jonas Falchi (or Falck) may also have produced reliquaries for the chapel. Best known as one of the sculptors who worked with Cosimo Merlini on the celebrated pietre dure relief ex-voto of Cosimo II in prayer, dating from 1617–24, during the same period he was involved in making a reliquary in the form of a small cross for the grand duchess (‘della Ser[enissi]ma’), to be embellished with small pieces of coral, a pearl and a diamond.57 Between October 1619 and August 1620, Falchi also received supplies to undertake a large reliquary decorated with ornamental leaves and flowers, with a crucifix at its centre. Though not specifically traceable to the reliquary chapel, these examples nevertheless indicate the kind of work on devotional items accomplished in the grand ducal workshops, sometimes at the instigation of female Medici patrons.58 An exquisite reliquary emanating from the grand ducal workshops c.1630, can be connected to Cristina di Lorena. Its casket derives from the frame of a mirror of French manufacture that had come to Florence with Cristina’s dowry, and may even have been made at her behest. The reliquary, some seventy-five centimetres tall and surmounted by a figure of the 54   Elisabetta Nardinocchi, ‘The Reliquaries of San Lorenzo’, in Licia Bertani and Elisabetta Nardinocchi, Treasures from San Lorenzo (Florence and Livorno, 1995), p. 50; Alessandro Conti, ‘The Reliquary Chapel,’ Apollo, 106 (1977): pp. 198–201. 55   ASF, Guardaroba Medicea 360: fols. 8 left and right. Andrea Tarchiani received quantities of silver for two reliquaries, given to the jeweller in February 1618 and March 1620, and gold for a ‘reliquary’ for the Holy Sacrament in March 1619. 56   Guardaroba Medicea 348, No: 7, fol. iii verso. 57   Falck received quantities of gold in December and January 1618 (stile fiorentino) for this item; Guardaroba Medicea 360, fol. 17 right. 58   Guardaroba Medicea 360, fol. 69.

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resurrected Christ, was designed to hold a piece of the True Cross, and was also retained at Palazzo Pitti.59 Within the complex networks of court gifting, relics could make suitable presents between men and between women. In 1583, Francesco I de’ Medici had given a relic of St Lawrence to Philip II, which evoked a shared devotion to this saint by the Medici and the king of Spain, who dedicated the Escorial to Lawrence.60 On rare occasions, Maria Maddalena turned to the reliquary chapel as a resource for gifting. On 1 January 1623 (stile fiorentino) she gave two candlesticks and a reliquary in the form of a picture with silver relief decoration, to her sister-inlaw – Cristina’s daughter princess Maria Maddalena – who was by then living at the Monastero della Crocetta.61 She also sent a moralizing painting, one braccia in height, depicting the Fall of Lucifer, probably with relics in its frame, to her eldest daughter, Maria Cristiana, living at the Monastero Nuovo in Florence.62 The specific destination of these items is unknown – whether they would be displayed in communal areas, or intended to adorn these girls’ private apartments – but the transferral of sacred items from palace chapel to convent suggests a further mode in which an aristocratic, Medicean identity was articulated visually and materially by, and for, these convent inmates through embellishment of their surroundings.63 It seems that the special sacred resonance of these luxury items rendered their gifting acceptable. But she also moved relics further afield, outside the ambit of her family, to address the needs of diplomacy. In June 1622, she gave a gold ball (palla) decorated with blue enamelling and containing relics, and a small picture of Saint John the Baptist in an ebony frame, both from her collection, to the ambassador of Spain.64 Sacred Microcosm Maria Maddalena’s reliquary chapel produced spatially the sacred microcosm that the reliquaries retained there produced visually (Figure 4.2). The octagonally shaped space, built originally in 1560 by Cosimo I de’ Medici as the chapel of his apartment,65 with a stuccoed and frescoed cupola and marble floor that date from the era of Maria Maddalena, creates an impression of the interior of an oversized     61   62   63  

Fumagalli et al., L’arme e gli amori, pp. 152–3, cat. 28. Mulcahy, Philip II of Spain, p. 83. See Chapter 5: Pilgrimages, pp. 96–8. Guardaroba Medicea 348, fols. lxxv recto, lxxxxv recto and lxxxxviii verso. See Chapter 3 above. On ‘dynastically marked patronage’ within (Neapolitan) convents, see Hills, ‘The Housing of Institutional Architecture’, pp. 119–52. 64   Guardaroba Medicea 348, fols. lviii verso and lxxxxv recto. 65   Stoppato, ‘La Cappella delle Reliquie,’ p. 137. Also see Marco Chiarini, ‘La cappella delle Reliquie,’ in Palazzo Pitti: L’arte e la storia, ed. Marco Chiarini (Florence, 2000), pp. 54–6. 59

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Figure 4.2

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Chapel of Relics. Florence, Palazzo Pitti.

and richly adorned reliquary. Most of the decorative elements visible there today, including the marble floor and stuccoed and frescoed cupola, date from the era of the grand duchess. Bernardino Poccetti started work on the chapel’s decoration at least by June 1612, having been commissioned to ornament the vault with ‘pictures and stuccoes and other things’.66 Poccetti’s workshop seems to have been largely responsible for executing the decorative programme, completed for the most part by 16 March 1616, when the chapel was consecrated.67 While the original reliquary cupboards were replaced in the early eighteenth century, the images on canvas Maria Maddalena commissioned to adorn them, Sts Cosmas and Damian by Giovanni Bilivert, St Mary Magdalen and St Francis by Matteo Rosselli, the Baptism of Christ by Filippo Tarchiani and the Annunciation of the

  ‘di pittura e di stucho e altri’, ASF, Guardaroba Medicea 308, fol. 446, quoted in Stoppato, ‘La Cappella delle Reliquie’, p. 140, and note 43. The identification of specific scenes in this paragraph also derives from Stoppato who discusses the scheme in full, pp. 137–43. 67   Ibid., p. 142. 66

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Virgin by Fabrizio Boschi, were transferred to the new cupboard doors and are still in place. Maria Maddalena d’Austria’s patronage during the latter part of the 1610s focused particularly on her chapel, but must be seen in the context of a developing interest in Tuscan artists and the art of Catholic reform in Italy. In a letter to her sister Margarita in 1611, Maria Maddalena described Domenico Passignano and Ludovico Cigoli as Florence’s greatest living painters – ‘i principali pittori di questa città’ – and the following year she commissioned a religious work from each of them.68 Passignano produced a Pentecost which arrived in Florence in April 1613; Cigoli’s Assumption of the Virgin was left unfinished on his death, but was completed for the grand duchess by Giovanni Bilivert, who worked for her on the reliquary chapel. In 1610, Cosimo II, Cristina and Maria Maddalena commissioned leading reform painters including Bilivert, Boschi and Francesco Curradi, to produce a group of thirty devotional works to be sent to Margarita of Spain. She had requested them specifically to decorate the convent of Las Descalzas in Valladolid, which she founded.69 A Last Supper by Jacopo da Empoli, scenes from the life of the Virgin and scenes from Christ’s boyhood by artists including Boschi and Bilivert, and a Holy Family by Curradi, were amongst those despatched to Spain in the summer of 1611.70 At the centre of the vault of the reliquary chapel a frescoed roundel of the Coronation of the Virgin suggests the proximity of heaven. Around the vault eight scenes from the Virgin’s life appear in alternating octagonal and trapezoidal frames: Birth, Presentation at the Temple, Marriage, Annunciation, Visitation, Pentecost, Death and Assumption. The drum of the vault is decorated with the narrative scenes in horizontal format dealing with the life of Maria Maddalena’s name-saint: the story of Martha and Mary, the resurrection of Lazarus, Mary Magdalen at Christ’s feet, the Magdalen in prayer, the Baptism of the Prince of Provence, Mary Magdalen transported by angels, and the saint’s last communion. The presence in this space of a fragment of the Virgin’s veil suggests rich possibilities for the patron to forge imaginative connections between objects and images. The commission for the paintings on panel for the chapel’s reliquary cupboards came later, in 1618, after the chapel had been consecrated. Images of Christ, and the Virgin, Mary Madgalen, and other saints with special significance to the Medici, at once helped to conceal the relics and reliquaries and evoked that which was concealed. Giovanni Bilivert’s panels depict Medici patron saints Cosmas and Damian and maintain the opulent tone that characterized the chapel 68   Joan Nissman, Domenico Cresti (il Passignano), 1559–1638 (Ann Arbor, 1982), pp. 180–81; Edward L. Goldberg, ‘Artistic relations between the Medici and Spanish courts, 1587–1621: Part II’, The Burlington Magazine, 138 (1996): p. 537 note 51. 69   Lisa Goldenberg Stoppato, ‘Dipinti fiorentini per Las Descalzas Reales e altri doni alla Spagna’, in Monica Bietti (ed.), La morte e la gloria: apparati funebri medicei per Filippo II di Spagna e Margarita d’Austria, exh. cat. (Livorno, 1999), pp. 50–51. 70   Ibid., p. 51.

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project as a whole. Bilivert worked extensively for the Medici in this period and as well as the reliquary chapel panels, he had completed Cigoli’s Assumption for the grand duchess. In 1617–18, she commissioned him to produce a version on copper of his Chastity of Joseph (Galleria Palatina), for one of her carriages, the ‘carozzino da campagna.71. The reliquary chapel’s St Mary Magdalen would have been particularly impactful to Maria Maddalena, given the patron’s multifaceted association with her name-saint, which seems reinforced in this image as the hair of Rosselli’s Magdalen is luxuriantly dark, perhaps in emulation of the grand duchess. In the 1620s Maria Maddalena used the reliquary chapel for the staging of performances devoted to the Magdalen and commissioned for performance on her saint’s day. On the evening of 22 July 1622, for example, vespers in the chapel were followed by the reading of a dialogue by Jacopo Cicognini on the active life and contemplative life, as exemplified by Saints Martha and Mary, which was recited by grand ducal pages.72 Rosselli depicted Francis at a moment of divine union, standing with his arms crossed on his chest. This saint in the chapel setting must surely have been lent greater significance by the fact that Maria Maddalena visited La Verna in August 1618, the year in which the panels were undertaken. Later, in the early 1620s, she chose an altarpiece by Jacopo Ligozzi, The Madonna appearing to St Francis, showing the saint in a mountainous setting evocative of La Verna, for the chapel in her newly embellished villa on the outskirts of Florence.73 Fabrizio Boschi’s Annunciation might have evoked Medicean and Florentine devotion to the sacred image at Santissima Annunziata, and the patron might even have used it to recall her 1613 pilgrimage to the Santa Casa, where the Annunciation took place. On 25 March 1620 (the festival of the Annunciation), the chapel was the setting for a sacra rappresentazione devoted to the theme.74 The subject matter of Filippo Tarchiani’s Baptism of Christ may have been seen to have resonance personally and dynastically, as several of Maria Maddalena’s children were baptised in the reliquary chapel, including her eldest son, Ferdinando, in 1610.75

71   Now lost; Il Seicento fiorentino. Arte a Firenze da Ferdinando I a Cosimo III, exh. cat. (Florence, 1986), vol. 1, p. 221. 72   Angelo Solerti, Musica, ballo e drammatica alla Corte Medicea dal 1600 al 1637 (Florence, 1905), p. 163. 73   Marco Chiarini, ‘Cosimo II and Maria Maddalena d’Austria’, in The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence, p. 93. 74   Mark S. Weil, ‘The Devotion of the Forty Hours and Roman Baroque Illusions’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 37 (1974): p. 229 and note 34. 75   BNCF, Gino Capponi 261, Cesare Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 297 verso.

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Heaven on Earth In a sermon of 1609, Federico Borromeo proposed that the presence of relics made sacred space into ‘an earthly heaven’ or ‘a heaven on earth’ (‘un terrestre cielo’ and ‘un cielo terrestre’).76 To Borromeo, relics not only provided conduits between earthly and celestial realms, but had the power to transform earth into a small patch of heaven. The powerful metaphor of heaven that relics gathered together could suggest was one which Maria Maddalena drew on in the reliquary chapel at Palazzo Pitti. But relics have to be activated to produce any kind of effect. While the grand duchess used the chapel frequently for her regular devotions, we have no insights on the way the chapel’s images and relics were used by her - or at all - on these occasions. However, we catch a glimpse of the potential significance of the space and its collection on those occasions when relics were displayed for performances and ritual acts that suggest how the patron maximized the impact of her collection to a wider audience. On Holy Thursday 1618, Giulio Parigi, the Medici court’s artistic director, architect and designer of ephemera and spectacles, decorated the reliquary chapel at Palazzo Pitti for a service attended by Maria Maddalena d’Austria, her husband, other family members and the court. On the chapel’s altar, at the centre of a display of devotional objects, was an image of the Volto Santo, a small picture painted on cloth representing the face of Christ. Not precisely a relic, but an object that replicated one (the Veil of Veronica in St Peter’s), the Volto Santo conflated relic with image. Framed in gold, the whole was adorned with reliefs of the Triumphs of the Passion in silver.77 Particularly revered amongst Maria Maddalena’s treasures, the Volto Santo had been given to the grand duchess by Monsignore Pietro Strozzi just weeks previously, on 14 February 1618.78 To Medici court diarist Cesare Tinghi, the compact space of the chapel offered a breathtaking spectacle. His awe centred on the Volto Santo, Tinghi noted how numerous small lanterns around this object illuminated the cupboards that lined the chapel, and how, with the doors of the cupboards open, the reliquaries stored within them were visible. Also on view was an array of other precious items, aligned with the grand ducal family’s secular wealth – jewels and collari studded with diamonds, rubies and pearls. There were so many treasures crammed into the small space that, to Tinghi, the chapel was   ‘Se questo sacra luogo sia da chiamarsi Cielo o Terra’, I sacri ragionamenti sinodali di Federico Borromeo, cardinale ed arcivescovo di Milano (Milan, 1632), vol. 1, p. 185; quoted in Gianvittorio Signorotto, ‘Cercatori di Reliquie’, Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa, 3 (1985): p. 401. 77   ‘Un quadretto dentro dipinto in panno il Volto SS.mo dintornato co[n] lama d’oro ed ornamento d’argento scol pitovi dentro i trionfi della passione’, Guardaroba Medicea 348, fol. 1 (No: 1). 78   BNCF, Gino Capponi 261; Cesare Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 2, fols 130 and 137 verso. 76

Plate 1

Alessandro Allori, Giovanna d’Austria, 1570. Florence, Palazzo Pitti.

Plate 2

Scipione Pulzone, Portrait of Cristina di Lorena, 1590. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi.

Plate 3

Tiberio Titi, Portrait of Cristina di Lorena, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, after 1609. Florence, Palazzo Pitti.

Plate 4

Justus Sustermans, Portrait of Maria Maddalena d’Austria with Her Son Ferdinando II, c.1623. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi.

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transformed and ‘looked like paradise opened up’.79 Early modern viewers often compared church interiors illuminated to mark special liturgical occasions to visions of heaven.80 In the case of Maria Maddalena’s chapel, a vision of heaven was created by the extraordinary ostension of relics, illuminated in ways which must have enhanced the reflective effects of their shining metal, crystal and gemencrusted containers. The chapel’s images of saints and holy events, including the centrepiece in the vault depicting the coronation of the Virgin as queen of heaven, would surely have added further resonance to the celestial image. Staging sacre rappresentazioni in the chapel and its salotto di cappella provided opportunities for Maria Maddalena to give the space further relevance in court ritual, and on these occasions specially designed scenography must have made the ‘chapel as paradise’ metaphor all the more compelling. In 1619, the set for Easter entertainments there depicted an ocean with a vision of heaven above.81 A performance of Ottavio Rinuccini’s Versi sacri to elite guests including the French ambassador, featured singers portraying an array of saints who appeared amongst painted clouds to sing of the Passion of Christ and the Resurrection.82 The apparato was designed by Giulio Parigi, who also designed the sets for the sacra rappresentazione of 1620 for the feast of the Annunciation. Again Parigi deployed the celestial metaphor of his sets for Easter 1619, contriving that the singer playing Gabriel ‘descend from heaven’.83 But the vision of heaven temporarily created here also works outwardly from the hoard of sacred items within its walls, if we follow Federico Borromeo’s thesis on relics that transform earth into heaven. While the chapel’s heavenly resonances are enhanced by ephemeral spectacle, its contents – the reliquaries – constantly evoke in miniature the metaphor of heaven suggested by the chapel itself. Ephemeral spectacles staged in the chapel could spill out into the surrounding rooms and sometimes further still, suggesting an element of fluidity in the   ‘apariva il paradiso aperto’, Ibid., fol. 137 verso.   Robert Gaston explains, ‘the assumed connection between the liturgy performed in

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church and the celestial liturgy, its model ... provoked witnesses to identify a brilliantly lit church as a “paradise”’; Gaston, ‘Sacred Place and Liturgical Space: Churches’, in Roger J. Crum and John T. Paoletti (eds), Renaissance Florence: A Social History (Cambridge, 2006), p. 349. 81   Weil, ‘The Devotion of the Forty Hours’, p. 229 and note 34; and Maria Galli Stampino, ‘A Regent and Her Court: Towards a Study of Maria Maddalena d’Austria’s Patronage (Florence 1621–8)’, Forum Italicum, 40/1 (2006): pp. 28–9. Tinghi’s descriptions of this event (Diario di Corte, vol. 2, fol. 196 recto) are quoted by Solerti, Musica, p. 144. 82   Ibid.; the performance was memorialised in a publication: Ottavio Rinuccini, Versi sacri cantati nella Cappella Della Serenissima Arciduchessa D’Austria G. Duchessa di Toscana (Florence, 1619). 83   Solerti, Musica, p. 154; Weil, ‘Devotion of the Forty Hours’, p. 229 note 34. For a summary of performances in the chapel in the 1620s see Francesca Fantappiѐ, ‘Sale per lo spettacolo a Pitti (1600–1650)’, in Sergio Bertelli and Renato Pasta (eds), Vivere a Pitti. Una reggia dai Medici ai Savoia (Florence, 2003), p. 166.

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boundaries around sacred space in the domestic setting of the palace. At the very least spectators would have had to watch the spectacle from the adjoining salotto, or peer into the chapel to see the treasures on show, as Tinghi probably did on Holy Thursday 1618. Sometimes, though, religiously themed events spread even further outwards from the chapel as sacred hub. On Holy Thursday 1616, after a sung mass in the chapel, family members, courtiers and guests participated in a procession of the sacrament which began at the chapel and followed a route around Palazzo Pitti.84 Cosimo led the procession dressed as gran maestro of the Order of Santo Stefano, in the company of a party of knights and clerics. Cristina, Maria Maddalena, the grand ducal children and the grand duchess’s female courtiers followed in the wake of the sacrament. The route took participants from the chapel, down one flight of stairs to the palace’s central courtyard, and up the stairs on the opposite side to return to the salotto della cappella in which an altar had been set up. This space had been decorated with a display of jewellery and precious objects, including the crown with which pope Pius V had crowned Cosimo I grand duke of Tuscany in 1570. The circuit, evoking a pilgrimage in miniature compressed within palace walls, obscures boundaries between domestic and sacred, and between devotional and dynastic, that is implicated so consistently in the patronage activities of the grand duchesses. Significantly, the event was staged during a period of Cosimo’s ill health, when services within the reliquary chapel became absorbed into the devotional repertory of the Medici family, as the grand duke was too weak to leave the confines of the palace. Precious items aligned with grand ducal power, specifically the grand ducal crown and Cosimo’s accoutrements at gran maestro of the Order of Santo Stefano, functioned as signs of his authority despite infirmity. The grand duke’s prominence in the ritual staged for Holy Thursday 1616 suggests, on this occasion, the temporary co-opting of the grand duchess’s chapel and its contents for an emphatically politicized purpose. Conclusion The uses of the relics by the Medici were, it seems, embedded with dynastic, as well as devotional, significance. Owning relics within the context of the palace, as much as visiting shrines, connected the grand ducal family to the holy and bolstered an image of the dynasty’s rule as divinely sanctioned. As devout protectors of relics, the Medici positioned themselves advantageously as recipients of the value they manifested. But the significance of relics, as we have seen, was particularly keenly felt by Medici women, and nowhere is that more evident than in Maria Maddalena’s project with her chapel at Palazzo Pitti. This exquisitely decorated and maintained setting for relics produced spatially the sacred microcosm that the reliquaries housed therein produced visually. Maria Maddalena’s sustained commitment to collecting them demonstrated her desire to gather sacred items to   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 2, fol. 95 verso.

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her, and thus to accrue spiritual blessings and prestige. By putting the chapel to a range of uses with activities that were geared towards an audience – embellishment, display, performance – she co-ordinated this resource in the wider interests of the grand ducal family.

Chapter 5

Pilgrimages ‘I will go viewing places of devotion and relics’, Maria Maddalena d’Austria wrote home from Perugia in October 1613 in the midst of a pilgrimage to the Holy House at Loreto.1 Yet the act of viewing sacred sites and objects only begins to describe the processes of engagement with the holy that preoccupied Medici women and lent structure to their journeys beyond Florence. In the last chapter, Maria Maddalena emerged as an avid collector of relics, energetically gathering sacred items and activating their potency by deploying them for display within the environment of her chapel at Palazzo Pitti. But certain relics and sacred objects cannot be moved and, as fixed to certain locations, have to be visited for their potency to be communicated. This chapter focuses especially on the journeys to shrines and churches that the grand duchesses Maria Maddalena and Cristina di Lorena made in the period between the death of Ferdinando I in 1609 and early years of the regency following the death of Cosimo II in 1621, both within Florence and beyond it. The grand duchesses’ publicly enacted visits and venerations dramatized their devoutness and linked them with local and distant sacred sites in visually evocative ways. These activities could be used to promote particular cults, or to exercise concern for certain favoured individuals and groups, and broadly to influence the devotional identity of the places visited. Their visits and journeys were not only performative but also acquisitive processes, in which the devotees collected sacred experiences. Publicly enacted, noted in letters and stored and treasured in the reliquary of the mind, the experiences they accrued could be indefinitely revisited in the realm of the imagination. Sometimes an exchange of gifts – to and from the shrine in question – memorialized their experience and made tangible the reciprocal processes the pilgrimage necessarily involved.2 I   ‘anderò vedendo i luoghi di devozione e le reliquie’, ASF, Mediceo del Principato 6071: Inserto 2, letter from Maria Maddalena d’Austria to Cosimo II, dated 13 October 1613. 2   On pilgrimages and reciprocity, see John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow (eds), Contesting the Sacred. The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (London, 1991). On Loreto and the reciprocity of gifting see Marcia Pointon, ‘Sacred Contagion: Secular Jewellery and Votive Transvaluation at the Santa Casa, Loreto, 1720–1820’, in Caroline van Eck and Edward Winters (eds), Dealing with the Visual. Art History, Aesthetics and Visual Culture (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 127–48, and Alice E. Sanger, ‘Maria Maddalena d’Austria’s Pilgrimage to Loreto: Visuality, Liminality and Exchange’, in Christina Strunck (ed.), Artful Allies. Medici Women as Cultural Mediators, 1533–1743 (Milan, 2012), pp. 253–65. 1

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characterize all of these journeys to sacred destinations, whether to the church of Santissima Annunziata, for example, or to the Holy House of the Virgin at Loreto, as pilgrimages, and aim to determine the devotional character of state visits, and the diplomatic, dynastic and political resonances of sacred peregrinations. Urban Peregrinations Medici women’s devotion to sacred places and sacred things created ‘spaces between’: between domestic and sacred, between centre and periphery, between heaven and earth. Their programmes of sacred visiting were enacted both in the city and the countryside. Regular and special visits to Florentine churches meant that the impact of the grand duchesses’ devotion was felt urbanistically. Patterns of movement across the city from palace to church, iterated over decades, made them visible publicly, and, by repetition, their devout personae were imprinted on sacred sites and on the routes to and from them. At Santissima Annunziata, as we have seen, the men of the Medici family, including Cristina di Lorena’s husband Ferdinando I, had used visits and gifts to activate a dynastic appropriation of the shrine of the Annunciate Virgin.3 But Medici women too played a significant part in these processes. Some of their activities suggest personalized resonances, while in others they took the lead in more overtly politicized activities that called attention to the Medici dynasty’s international status and aspirations. In June of 1617, for example, news reached the court that Habsburg emperor Matthias had selected Maria Maddalena d’Austria’s brother, archduke Ferdinand, as king of Bohemia. Recognizing this event as an opportunity to make political capital from the illustrious dynastic association represented in Florence by Maria Maddalena d’Austria, a public holiday was declared. Three days of bell-tolling from the ducal palace and the Duomo, a mass at the Duomo for city magistrates, three nights of bonfires, fireworks, and salutes from the fortresses of the city followed.4 Cosimo, weakened by tuberculosis, was too ill to go out, so Cristina and Maria Maddalena, joined by the young prince Ferdinando crossed Florence to Santissima Annunziata, to take over the responsibility as key participants at a service of thanksgiving there. In December 1619, during another period of Cosimo II’s incapacitation through illness, Maria Maddalena and younger members of the Medici family (ʻle Principesse e ... tutti i Principiniʼ) walked barefoot from Palazzo Pitti to Santissima Annunziata to appeal to God for the restoration of the grand duke’s health. They were accompanied in this act of supplication by Cristina di Lorena’s daughter Claudia, future duchess of Urbino, who carried a cross.5 When, in August 1620, Cristina reported to her daughter Caterina Gonzaga, duchess of Mantua, that   See p. 17 and p. 38.   BNCF, Gino Capponi 261, Cesare Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 2, fol. 105 recto. 5   ASF, Mediceo del Principato 5147, fol. 489, quoted in Gaetano Pieraccini, La stirpe 3 4

de’ Medici di Cafaggiolo (Florence, 1986), vol. 2, p. 349.

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masses of the Quarantore at Santissima Annunziata had produced an improvement in Cosimo’s health, she also appealed to Caterina and her husband (Ferdinando I Gonzaga) to continue their orations at Sant’Andrea, before the relic of the Holy Blood, a request that suggests reciprocal articulations of devotion centred on sacred locales with special dynastic significance, as well as patterns in devotional practice between elite women/families.6 Gifting to Santissima Annunziata concretized Medici women’s devotion to it and their votive offerings paid back spiritual debts of divine favour. In 1619, Cristina di Lorena commemorated the accession of Ferdinand, king of Bohemia, as holy Roman emperor, by donating a gilded silver tabernacle embellished with rubies to the shrine. The item was so exquisite and valuable, it was deemed to be used for the Quarantore celebrated on Holy Thursday, and ‘for other similar solemn devotions’.7 Some years later, in the early 1630s, Cristina gave away two gilded and engraved silver and crystal boxes (cassette) from her own collection, the first to San Lorenzo and the other to Santissima Annunziata, to be used as repositories for the sacrament.8 Yet Medici women’s visits to Santissima Annunziata were not always explicitly about visuality and gifting, and their devotions could take different forms. Cristina di Lorena’s engagements with the shrine tend to suggest more personalized resonances than those of Maria Maddalena d’Austria. During her long widowhood (1609–36), Cristina visited Santissima Annunziata frequently, going two or three or more times a week when she was staying in the city. She often travelled ‘incognito’, according to Tinghi, though these frequently iterated journeys – even when undertaken without significant entourage – must have been noticed by Florence’s citizenry. In 1619 the Servite historian of the shrine, Giovanni Angelo Lottini, published his important volume Scelta d’alcuni miracoli e grazie della santissima nunziata di Firenze and dedicated it to Cristina. Lottini’s authoritative study was the last of a group of miracle books of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries concerned specifically with the Florentine shrine: that by Ferrini (published in 1593, and also dedicated to Cristina) and a chapbook, La Corona della Vergine fatta di sessanta tre miracoli (1614), composed by Pagolo Baroni, and dedicated to Maria Maddalena d’Austria.9 The dedications are suggestive both of the potency of female Medicean devotion to the shrine and the value for authors and publishers in honouring it. Medicean connections did not end there: Scelta d’alcuni miracoli was illustrated with engravings by the 6   ASF, Mediceo del Principato 6110, fol. 131,Medici Archive Project (accessed 28/06/2011). 7   ‘per simili altre ocurrenze solenni’; ASF, Conventi Soppressi 119, ins. 54, Libro di Ricordanze, fol. 201 recto, 6 September 1619. 8   Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà, La Tribuna di Ferdinando I de’ Medici: inventari 1589– 1631 (Modena, 1997), p. 87, inventory entry dated 16 December 1634. 9   On these publications see Sara F. Matthews-Grieco, ‘Media, memory and the Miracoli della SS. Annunziata‘, Word & Image 25/3, (2009): pp. 272–92.

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Lorrainese artist, and Medici favourite Jacques Callot, whose commissions in the same period included the Life of Ferdinando series (see Figures 2.2 and 2.4). In 1621, Cristina’s daughter, princess Maria Maddalena (1600–33), who was disabled, took up residence at the Dominican convent on the block next to the church of Santissima Annunziata, called La Crocetta. Proposing to live as a

Figure 5.1

Jacques Callot, Title Page of Scelta dei Miracoli e grazie della santissima nunziata di Firenze, 1619. London, British Museum.

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secular individual in a cloistered environment, the princess gained papal licence to build an apartment with a garden at the convent and a passageway which would join the apartment to the church across the street.10 While licence was granted to Cosimo II on behalf of his sister, his death in March 1621 meant that Cristina was, in effect, the driving force behind the project. Giulio Parigi was commissioned to convert two buildings adjoining the monastery into the new palatial apartment. The passageway, completed in December 1620, would run the length of the conventual garden and over the road to terminate in a small room adjoining the exterior wall of the church.11 From this room an internal window secured with a grille affords a partial view of the nave of Santissima Annunziata and the sacred image of the Annunciation. The passageway made the church visually accessible to the princess and her attendants but – in accordance with the rules of clausura – not physically so. The facility offered personalized and privileged access to sacred space – a short, circumscribed pilgrimage (a via crucis, as Massimiliano Rossi has called it) between the domestic–conventual realm and the shrine, which extended the possibilities for exclusive female Medicean devotions in a spiritually imaginative way. 12 Princess Maria Maddalena moved to La Crocetta on 23 May 1621. Accompanied by her mother and female attendants, she joined a service at Santissima Annunziata to mark the occasion, and to inscribe the transition in her status ritually.13 The new apartment at the convent, richly furnished and decorated with frescoes by Giovanni da San Giovanni, would become the setting for religiously themed musical entertainments and plays, often performed in the presence of grand duchesses Maria Maddalena d’Austria and Cristina di Lorena.14 In the following years, Cristina frequently combined devotions at Santissima Annunziata with a

  ASF, Miscellanea Medicea 5, Ins. 1: Lettere ed altre scritture ... concernenti la principessa Maria Maddalena figlia di Ferdinando I de’ Medici. Also see Massimiliano Rossi, ‘I corridoi sopraelevati della Firenze granducale’, in Fabrizio Ricciardelli (ed.), I luoghi del sacro. ll sacro e la città fra Medioevo e prima Età moderna (Florence, 2008), pp. 163–72, and Massimiliano Rossi, ‘Imitatio granducale: Maria Maddalena de’ Medici alla Crocetta, la sua tomba e un progetto dimenticato’, in Giulia Calvi and Riccardo Spinelli (eds), Le donne Medici nel sistema europeo delle corte, XVI–XVIII secolo (Florence, 2008): vol. 1, pp. 117–30; and Kelley Harness, Echoes of Women’s Voices: Music, Art, and Female Patronage in Early Modern Florence (Chicago, 2006), Chapter 8. 11   Rossi, ‘I corridoi’, p. 164 and ‘Imitatio granducale’, p. 118. 12   Ibid., p. 119. 13   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 2, fol. 373 recto. 14   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 2, fol. 350 recto, for example. On patronage of music and dramatic performances at La Crocetta, see Harness, Echoes of Women’s Voices, pp. 209–56; 282–317. 10

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visit to the convent. Occasionally, she accompanied her daughter in the corridor, and heard mass hidden from public view in the small room above the nave.15 Reaching out into Tuscan Territories What is perhaps most remarkable about the grand duchesses’ devotional practice was the opportunities it allowed them to extend their experience beyond palace walls and even beyond Florence, exploiting opportunities for seeing and being seen. Indeed, while their localized, urban peregrinations reinforced and articulated anew personal and familial connections with Florentine churches, they frequently reached out too to relics and shrines in cities, towns and rural locales, in Tuscany’s territories. Diplomatic visits into Tuscan territories – to Pisa and Livorno, Siena and Arezzo – were characterized by numerous trips to sacred sites. Among these journeys were those made to southern Tuscany in 1611 and 1612 when Cristina di Lorena and Maria Maddalena joined the viaggi made by Cosimo II. As Francesco Simoncini has shown, the grand duke’s purpose was to take possession ‘physically’ of his dominions and in so doing to fashion and project to his citizens an image of leadership.16 The impact of the spectacle that these events must have produced becomes clearer when we picture the scale of the grand ducal entourages. On the tour made in autumn 1612, the court in motion numbered some six hundred people who travelled with eighteen litters and seven carriages, five hundred horses, and over one hundred mules.17 For the 1611–12 tours the grand duchesses’ activities were minutely recorded by the court diarist alongside those of Cosimo, suggesting their roles were defined and significant, if subsidiary to his. They attended palios and other entertainments. They participated in processions through streets and piazzas for regular and special masses and conducted devotional visits on their own, activities which must be seen in terms of their gendered dimensions not least because Cosimo and the grand duchesses did not follow the same itineraries. On the grand ducal group’s arrival in Siena on 12 October 1611, for example, Cosimo was entertained in the   Cristina’s involvement with La Crocetta was only one of several interests in Florentine monastic institutions by Medici women. For example, Cristina also supported the discalced Augustinians and left money in her will for their new monastery on Costa San Giorgio, and was a principal benefactor of the new foundation of St Filippo Neri’s Oratorians in Florence; see Francesco Martelli, ‘Padre Arsenio dell’Ascensione. Un agostino scalzo alla corte di Cristina di Lorena’, in Giulia Calvi and Riccardo Spinelli (eds), Le donne Medici nel sistema europeo delle corte, XVI–XVIII secolo (Florence, 2008), pp. 75–103. 16   Francesca Simoncini, ‘Feste Toscane in funzione medicea: il viaggio di Cosimo II’, Medioevo e Rinascimento, 11/8 (1997): pp. 311–59. 17   Ibid., p. 312, note 3. 15

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Piazza del Campo with a display of fist fighting. The suitability of this display of machismo was clearly misjudged by the hosts and was poorly received by its audience. In the meantime, the entertainment offered to – or perhaps requested by – Cristina and Maria Maddalena privileged the public representation of feminine piety, as they visited one of the city’s churches to inspect its relic collection.18 Itineraries could be structured around devotional visits that provided opportunities for dynamic engagement with relics and holy sites that played a part in producing an image of the devout grand ducal family. Shortly after arriving in Arezzo on a visit made in September 1612 the grand ducal family went to mass at the church of San Francesco. The event was a deliberately conspicuous one, organized so as to present the family in a gendered and hierarchical way. The grand duke was accompanied in his carriage by his brother, Francesco, and his second cousin, Paolo Giordano Orsini (son of Virginio, duke of Bracciano).19 Cristina and Maria Maddalena were carried behind the grand duke’s carriage in sedan chairs. Nevertheless, the visibility of the group is significant here, particularly in comparison with the image of the devout grand duke that characterized the rule of Ferdinando I. Yet the division of labour between the grand duke and the grand duchesses during the tour tended to maintain the women in the realm of the devotional rather than allowing for more forceful political positioning. While Cosimo attended to state affairs, Maria Maddalena and Cristina made numerous visits either together or individually to local and outlying churches, convents and shrines, and venerated the relics held at them.20 These visits must be seen to have political value, but they also suggest the extent to which the grand duchesses’ roles were circumscribed here as elsewhere in this period by activities that aligned them with ideals of modesty produced by devoutness rather than more assertively. A ceremonial of March 1616 in Livorno, which centred on Maria Maddalena’s agency – the gift of a relic of the body of Santa Fortunata to the Duomo of Livorno – points to a more prominent role for the grand duchess, and the gradual negotiation of gender thresholds. Maria Maddalena’s acquisition of the relic had emerged in the context of her wider programme of relic collecting for her chapel at Palazzo Pitti. Relics of Saint Fortunata had come to the grand duchess from Rome, having been recently excavated there.21 By gifting the relic to the Duomo – rather than keeping it for her own collection – the grand duchess demonstrated her agency and carried forward existing Medicean associations with the Duomo, which her father-in-law grand duke Ferdinando had founded and endowed with   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 351 verso.   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 413 verso – 414 recto. 20   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 415 recto. For example, Maria Maddalena 18 19

visited the Augustinian church in San Sepolcro to see a fragment of the True Cross and a relic of Saint Cecilia’s foot. On Cristina’s devotions, Tinghi notes: ‘avendo mentre stette in quella cit[t]à visitato tutti i monasterj di monache che verono et visto molte reliquie’, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 415 verso. 21   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 2, fol. 30 recto – 30 verso.

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many gifts, including a number of relics. The ceremony of translation in 1616 was articulated with a procession around Livorno in which male representatives of Medicean authority took lead roles: Cosimo II and his brother cardinal Carlo de’ Medici led a procession on foot of gonfalonieri, members of confraternities, priests and monks, some carrying torches, and some 4,000 citizens of Livorno, on a circuit of the city that took in via Ferdinanda (named for Ferdinando I), the old town and the church of the Madonna di Livorno.22 Maria Maddalena and Cristina waited at the Duomo to participate in the ceremony in which the relic was placed under the high altar (a proviso insisted upon by the donatrix).23 While the ceremony and its reporting crystallized this act of Mediceo-Habsburg benefaction, Maria Maddalena’s agency was somewhat destabilized in the event within the representation of a more generalized image of grand ducal piety. Devotion – and devotion to holy places – provided Medici women with ways to be seen, but within certain boundaries. However, certain connections to outlying shrines created spaces in which their agency became more evident. The grand duchesses made visits to the dramatic landscape of the Franciscan shrine at La Verna, which Eleonora di Toledo had also visited.24 The site produced an image so powerful that Maria Maddalena chose Jacopo Ligozzi’s The Madonna appearing to St Francis (1618), showing the saint’s vision in the mountainous setting of La Verna, as the altarpiece for her chapel at her suburban residence, the Villa del Poggio Imperiale.25 Cristina di Lorena and Maria Maddalena grew attached to the sacred image of the Virgin at the basilica at Impruneta, and gifted relics there, as we have seen.26 Their devotion to Marian shrines is suggestive of the renewed zeal for the cult of the Virgin in the era of Catholic reform. Indeed, devotional itineraries undertaken from one or other of the Medici villas to the west of Florence could include numerous rural Marian shrines, such as Monsummano, which Cristina di Lorena favoured, accessible from the villas of Montevettolini and Poggio a Caiano.27

  Tinghi Diario di corte, vol. 2, fol. 30 verso.   Ibid. 24   Janet Cox-Rearick, Bronzino’s Chapel of Eleonora in the Palazzo Vecchio 22 23

(Berkeley, 1993), pp. 318–19. 25   Giovanna d’Austria set the precedent for these visits: in 1573 she had requested and received permission to visit the shrine at La Verna on her return journey from her pilgrimage to Loreto; ASF, Mediceo del Principato 5094, fol. 90, dated 29 April 1573. 26   See Chapter 4: Relics, pp. 80–81. 27   See Chapter 2: Display, pp. 54–5. On relationships between the Medici grand duke’s rural interests in relation to shrines, see Leonardo Rombai, ‘Il Territorio dei miracoli’, in Dora Liscia Bemporad and G. Carla Romby (eds), Il Paesaggio dei miracoli. Devozione e mecenatismo nella Toscana medicea da Ferdinando I a Cosimo II (Ospedaletto (Pisa), 2002): pp. 31–40. On Cristina di Lorena’s connections with the countryside, including rural peregrinations, see Suzanne B. Butters, ‘Christine of Lorraine and Cultural Exchanges in

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Reliquaries of the Mind The grand duchesses’ relationships with Tuscan shrines were built up gradually and reiterated by frequent visits. In contrast, their pilgrimages to Loreto are characterized by the quality of the extraordinary. It is to these journeys that I now turn. When Maria Maddalena made a sacred journey to the Holy House in October 1613 she was specifically following an established Medicean model. Giovanna d’Austria had made the same journey almost exactly forty years before, in April 1573. Cristina di Lorena travelled to Loreto in 1593. In 1616, Cosimo II made his own pilgrimage there in emulation of his closest female relatives. Early modern pilgrimages were generally rationalized in similar ways – they were undertaken to request divine intervention or fulfil a vow – and the Medicean examples fit these models. Giovanna’s motive in 1573 was to ask God for a male child, and both Cristina and Maria Maddalena ostensibly made their journeys in gratitude for recovery from illness.28 However, these journeys also offered a range of other possibilities. They were not made ‘incognito’, but evocatively staged to make Medici women’s piety (and status) visible. Each travelled with an extensive entourage. Maria Maddalena’s party, for example, included three bishops, the grand duchess’s Jesuit confessor Girolamo Incuria, two chaplains, a party of noblewomen, and a host of courtiers, officials and servants, as well as an impressive escort of soldiers.29 Designed around elaborate itineraries that offered diverse, but highly structured, opportunities for visiting shrines and relics along the route, these journeys facilitated the accumulation of new devotional experiences. The pilgrimage to Loreto offered extraordinary possibilities for engaging with different environments. Maria Maddalena was sensitive to the pleasures as well as the difficulties encountered while travelling, as her letter to her husband from Cortona, detailing the day’s journey, suggests: even though the road ... is somewhat long, nevertheless the serenity of the most beautiful sky made the journey appear to me [to go] very well. I cannot adequately express to Your Highness the delight that I have taken in viewing the countryside, which, for the rain which came in the last few days, is so green again that it looks like the month of May, and the roads are so good, that one cannot desire more [rain], and some is very desirable [as the road] is neither mud

the Countryside: International Customs in Local Settings’, in Strunck (ed.), Artful Allies, pp. 111–47, esp. pp. 116–19. 28   Orazio Torsellini, Our B. Lady of Loreto (St Omer, 1608) p. 411, p. 512, for Giovanna and Cristina’s motives. Tinghi gives Maria Maddalena’s recovery from the ‘very grave illness of 1609’ as the reason for making the pilgrimage as a thanksgiving; Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 612 verso. 29   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 613 verso.

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Art, Gender and Religious Devotion in Grand Ducal Tuscany nor dust. This makes the journey seem to me mostly delightful, after last year, as Your Highness can remember, with the rains we always had to shelter.30

At Perugia, further along the route, Maria Maddalena will complain about her tiredness and the daunting prospect of climbing the many stairs at governor’s palace where she was staying,31 but here she seems to be relishing the journey and its relative comforts. Observation is a major theme in this pilgrimage for its key participant; in this instance the grand duchess observes the countryside, and the mild weather brings to mind the poor weather she and Cosimo experienced when they made their tour of Siena and Arezzo in 1612. Later she will see urban spaces, churches, relics and images. Visiting shrines, churches and convents, and venerating the relics, were established components of Medici women’s journeys within Tuscany, as we have seen, and necessarily part of the wider set of devotional references of the pilgrimage. In 1593, Cristina di Lorena’s pilgrimage was punctuated by close contact with relics that defined the sacred character of their locations. On the journey from San Cerbone a Figline to Montevarchi the party stopped to visit a shrine dedicated to the Madonna in the Castello di San Giovanni.32 She went to see the local church’s sacred collection, where she was particularly moved by the evocative, uniquely feminine, relic of the milk of the Blessed Virgin. Her itinerary at Cortona was framed around venerations of corpi santi: first, the body of Saint Margaret of Cortona at the church of Santa Margherita, and then to Sant’Agostino, where she was shown the body of Saint Lugolino.33 Maria Maddalena arrived so late in Cortona, and left so early, there was no time for visiting churches on the outward journey, but she stopped for a rest day at Perugia, and used the opportunity to visit holy sites. Particularly important to her was the Duomo, which she visited several times, and venerated the relic of Virgin’s wedding ring 30   ‘se bene il cammino ... e alquanto lungo, nondimeno la serenita del cielo bellissima, m’ha fatto parere il viaggio benissimo, non potendo io espremere a V.A. bastantemente il diletto ch’io mi son presa dalla vista della campagna, la quale per la pioggia che venne alli giorni passati e talmente riverdita, che rappresenta il mese di Maggio, et le strade son tanto buone, che no si puo desiderar piu, et qualch’e molto desiderabile, non e ne fango ne polvere. Cosi fatto viaggio mi par maggiormente dilettevole, poiche l’anno passato, come si puo ricordar V.A. havemmo sempre a’ schermire con le pioggie.’ ASF, Mediceo del Principato 6071: Inserto 2, letter from Maria Maddalena d’Austria to Cosimo II, dated 11 October 1613, from Cortona. 31   ASF, Mediceo del Principato 6071: Inserto 2, letter from Maria Maddalena d’Austria to Cosimo II, dated 13 October 1613, from Perugia. 32   ASF, Mediceo del Principato 841, fol. 84, letter from Cristina di Lorena to Ferdinando I. 33   Peregrinazione a Loreto di Cristina di Lorena, granduchessa di Toscana, 1593 settembre 15–ottobre 7, published in Floriano Grimaldi, Pellegrini e pellegrinaggi a Loreto nei secoli XIV–XVIII (Loreto, 2001), p. 428.

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retained there.34 At Assisi, she was shown the frescoes by Cimabue and Giotto, as well as relics. For Cristina, the return journey through the Marches offered new possibilities for visiting the most prestigious shrines in the territory. She venerated the body of Beato Placido at Recanati, the relic of the arm of Saint Nicholas at Tolentino, and the body of Beata Chiara at Montefalco.35 The grand duchesses’ devotional itineraries, which appear to offer scope for personal preferences and tastes, powerfully suggest too the amassing of experiences of encounters with holy sites and relics, that, as with the Ligozzi altarpiece, may be crystallized or commemorated in images or reliquaries that could have meditative potential and connect memory with the imagination. The itinerary of Cosimo’s pilgrimage in 1616, as written up by Tinghi, suggests concerns somewhat different from those of Maria Maddalena in 1613. The grand duchess’s journey – as Cristina’s in 1593 – was characterized by a sustained devotional agenda built around acts of focused looking at sacred things. Tinghi’s account suggests the exclusivity of the grand duchess’s gaze at shrines and relics – even though her own correspondence indicates a wider interest in her surroundings and an awareness of her worldly responsibilities while away from home. In contrast, Cosimo’s journey suggests other emphases, at least in its Tuscan stages. Privileging a more diplomatic and politicized agenda, the duke’s gaze was directed at secular focal points as well as devotional ones. He travelled ‘incognito’, signifying that he travelled with a modest entourage rather than a spectacular one. On leaving Florence via the Porta San Niccolò he left behind the escort of German guards and cavallieri that had accompanied him in procession from Santissima Annunziata. The pilgrimage, then, was an exercise designed to be seen as low key. At the journey’s early stopping places, Cosimo and his party were met by military officials and troops, rather than clerics. Following the route his mother had taken in 1593 through the Valdarno, rather than Maria Maddalena’s more elaborate itinerary that included Siena, Buonconvento, Pienza and Montepulciano, Cosimo made faster progress, calling at Montevarchi and Levane on the second day of the journey and staying at Arezzo that night. Local officials of the Podestà received him at Montevarchi and he went to see (‘ando avedere’) the town’s grain stores.36 At Levane he inspected troops and at Arezzo gave many audiences.37 The next day the journey from Arezzo to Cortona via Castiglione Fiorentino allowed for a similar combination of localized agricultural and military inspections that demonstrated the grand duke’s diligent overseeing of his interests. It was only when the travellers left Tuscany and crossed into the Papal States that they really became pilgrims. At this point the journey took on a more overtly sacred aspect, initiated with a visit to the Duomo at Perugia and devotion to   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fols 620 recto, 622 recto – 623 recto (for visits to the Chapel of the Virgin’s Ring, Perugia Cathedral, and the Church of San Francesco at Assisi, respectively). 35   Grimaldi, Pellegrini, pp. 429–30. 36   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 2, fols 64 verso – 65 recto. 37   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 2, fol. 64 verso. 34

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the relic of the Virgin’s ring.38 From Perugia, Cosimo’s itinerary incorporated many of the same sacred inspections that had characterized the journeys of his female relatives. Records suggest that the same impetus to engage with relics and collect sacred memories had begun to dominate. At the church of San Francesco in Assisi monks showed Cosimo relics that included the hair shirt and habit of St Francis, and at Santa Chiara he saw the crucifix of San Damiano that bid the saint ‘go repair my house, which is falling in ruins’. From Foligno, Cosimo travelled to Montefalco and saw the body of Clare of Montefalco and the relic of her heart. Returning to Foligno later the same day, he heard audiences and visited the convent of Le Contesse and the church of San Francesco to see their sacred treasures, specifically Raphael’s famed altarpiece of the Madonna of Foligno at the convent and four corpi beati at the church.39 The House-shrine While the pilgrims’ acts of devotion conducted at shrines along the route to Loreto formed stages in the processes of transition that the ritual act of pilgrimage constituted, the major rite was enacted at the destination. Before that, as the journey drew to a conclusion, first sight of the destination was an important component of the pilgrimage process, and contemporary accounts of Loretan journeys highlight the point at which the basilica was seen. According to Torsellini, Giovanna d’Austria completed her pilgrimage on foot when confronted with the basilica in the distance: Under the walls of the Recanati, the godly woman beholding the House of Loreto a far off, forthwith came out of her Coach, and kneeling downe, reverently saluted the Mother of God: from whence performing the rest of her journey on foot, all her train followed the example of their Lady, who came into Loreto in a white and a plaine garment, shewing thereby the great purity of her mind.40

In the pilgrimages of Medici women, as in their other devotions, an exemplary piety was fashioned and projected, thus Torsellini’s exaggerated account adds a legendary quality to Giovanna’s acts. However, at Loreto itself, she was greeted by representatives of Pope Gregory XIII, so her presence was not aimed at being inconspicuous.41 Torsellini’s description of Cristina di Lorena’s arrival outside Recanati closely resembles his account of Giovanna’s entrance, both in terms of the rituals undertaken and in the reverential tone of the description. On seeing the basilica, Cristina is said to have dismounted the litter and she and her companions     40   41  

Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 2, fol. 66 recto. Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 2, fols 67 recto – 67 verso. Torsellini, Loreto, p. 411. ASF, Mediceo del Principato 5926, letter to Francesco I de’ Medici from Giovanna d’Austria, dated 27 April 1573. 38

39

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walked to Loreto. Contemporary documentation recalls only that, once outside Recanati, Cristina stopped to pray.42 While the experience of the sacred for female aristocratic pilgrims is framed around exemplary devotion, it is subject to embellishment in the interests of patrons, but also, in this case, in order to accrue status to the shrine by exaggerating the power of its aura. Rituals at the shrine theatricalized Medici women’s devotion to it. When Maria Maddalena first saw the basilica, she dismounted her litter in accordance with customary practice.43 On entering the gate at Loreto, an artillery salvo announced her arrival. Inside the basilica noblewomen from Urbino, Ancona and other neighbouring cities, greeted and attended her. The piety of Medici devotees was inevitably seen to intensify at the shrine itself as the prospect of entering the Holy House drew nearer. Despite elaborate ritual, the commentators stress that the grand duchesses’ approach to the Santa Casa itself was undertaken without ostentation. As Cristina before her, Maria Maddalena knelt before the doorway but refused to enter until after communion the following day.

Figure 5.2

Hubert Vincent, Representation des murailles et ornements qui environnent la St Maison, north side, showing the Birth of the Virgin (left), and the Marriage of the Virgin (right), and stemma of Leo X at either side of the pediments over the doors, 1686. London, British Museum.

  ASF, Mediceo del Principato 841, fol. 215, letter dated 26 September 1593.   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fol. 629 verso – 630 recto.

42 43

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Figure 5.3

Hubert Vincent, Representation des murailles et ornements qui environnent la St Maison, east side, showing, in the upper register, the Dormition of the Virgin, and the Translation of the Holy House in the lower register, 1686. London, British Museum.

The basilica at Loreto is, in effect, an enormous reliquary built around the Holy House, with the shrine positioned at the crossing under an imposing dome. Later, the relic, a humble building of brick, was clothed in a gleaming, sculpted shell adorned with reliefs by Sansovino, Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and others that narrate the story of the Virgin’s life (Figures 5.2 and 5.3).44 Initially designed by Bramante and developed by Andrea Sansovino, the rivestimento took some   On the rivestimento see, Kathleen Weil-Garris, The Santa Casa di Loreto: Problems in Cinquecento Sculpture (New York, 1977), and Floriano Grimaldi and Katy Sordi, L’Ornamento marmoreo della Santa Casa di Loreto (Loreto, 1999). 44

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twenty-five years to complete (1513–38). Pope Julius II initiated the project, but the arms of Pope Leo X (d.1521) appear on the exterior, memorializing his role in driving the project forward, and his special devotion to the shrine.45 If interiors evoke bodies, then the enclosed and feminized space of the Holy House, site of the Annunciation, is highly suggestive of the womb. As such, it may have had special resonance to female Medici devotees, especially perhaps Giovanna d’Austria who used the pilgrimage to seek divine intervention in the birth of a male heir. Writing home from her pilgrimage of 1573, Giovanna described herself as spending most of her time at Loreto praying inside the shrine.46 Torsellini notes the ‘fervour’ of Cristina’s piety – enhanced by her self-imposed delay in entering the devotional space – and notes the long hours over several days that she spent in prayer.47 The rituals express a point of transition, made meaningful in this context, however, by the impact on the individual pilgrim and on wider perception of the rites. Cristina’s acts of piety were reported back to Ferdinando I by Camillo Finali, who asserted that his aim was ‘to relate in summary the most religious and most devout acts that the most Serene Grand Duchess your consort has made in this holy place’.48 Finali’s comments remind us that the significances of the grand duchess’ pilgrimages were claimed for the ruling family, and, by implication, the Tuscan state. The meanings of Medici women’s acts of piety, even those that seem personal and intimate, can never be divorced from the political/dynastic identity of the subject. Signs of Medicean piety at Loreto encompassed both devotional acts and objects. Devotion at the shrine – as at others – was defined by objects, by tangible signs of divinity: in this case, the relic, the rivestimento, and basilica that encases both. Tinghi’s reports of the activities of Maria Maddalena in 1613, and of Cosimo three years later, suggest that they adhered to a deeply inscribed pattern that allowed little room for personal tastes, and the personality of the Medici devotee could be expressed only in the absoluteness of their individual devoutness. Nevertheless these acts enabled participants to penetrate and experience the shrine itself and the basilica’s other most sacred spaces. Elite pilgrims merited the time to visit and revisit the shrine over several days, to look closely at the precious items collected there and at the basilica’s other treasures. Their activities can be seen to be gendered. In 1613, Maria Maddalena was instructed on the gems and gold and silver articles that adorned the statue of the Virgin and received instruction on the subjects of the reliefs of the rivestimento,   Stefano Papetti, Devozioni lauretane della famiglia Medici (Florence, 1991), pp.

45

7–9.

  ASF, Mediceo del Principato 5926, letter to Francesco I de’ Medici from Giovanna d’Austria, dated 27 April 1573. 47   Torsellini, Loreto, pp. 513–14. 48   ‘ragguagliarla summariamente delli atti religiosissimi, et devotissimi, quail hà fatti la Sereniss[im]a Gran Duchessa sua Consorte, in questo santo luogho’, ASF, Mediceo del Principato 841, fol. 215, dated 26 September 1593. 46

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which offer scenes from the life of the Virgin, including her birth and marriage, as well as the translation of the Holy House to Loreto (Figures 5.2 and 5.3). The dynastic significance of patronage at the shrine was specifically highlighted when she was shown the ‘glorious arms’ of the Medici family and Leo X.49 The figure of the Virgin inside the Santa Casa would have such an impact on Maria Maddalena that several years later, in December 1621, she sent a piece of gold brocade decorated with stars to serve as a garment for it.50 On her visit in 1613, the grand duchess was shown the treasures housed in the sacristy. In 1616, Cosimo saw the Medici pope’s arms on arrival at the Santa Casa. The next day after entering the shrine for the first time and hearing mass there, he was conducted around the new sacristy, recently refurbished by order of pope Paul V Borghese. As well as the vault painted by Il Pomerancio, he saw the collection of precious things, including the paramenti left at the basilica by Giovanna, Cristina and Maria Maddalena.51 On the second day at the shrine, however, the rituals moved away from the models provided by his female relatives: Cosimo heard mass inside the Holy House dressed in the uniform of gran maestro of the Order of Santo Stefano and in the company of sixteen of his knights.52 Maria Maddalena Takes the Lead The death of Cosimo II in February 1621 radically altered the status of both his wife and mother. Designated as tutrici (or regents) for the ten-year-old grand duke Ferdinando during his minority, Cristina di Lorena and Maria Maddalena responded to the demands of their new roles in different ways. The festival of Saint Zenobius on 25 May, traditionally commemorated with a journey to the Duomo and veneration of the relics of the saint, offered an early opportunity in the reign of Ferdinando II for the new Medici group to be made publicly visible. The ritual was enacted every year and, traditionally, the grand duke took the primary role.53 On this occasion Maria Maddalena, as co-regent and mother of the grand ducal heir, became the festival’s key participant. She crossed Florence to the Cathedral in the company of her two eldest sons – her carriage led the procession from Palazzo Pitti, and her other children followed in a second carriage.54 After the traditional mass, Maria Maddalena was the first of the group to approach and kiss the relic of the head of Saint Zenobius, followed by each of   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 1, fols 632 recto and 633 recto.   ‘una pezza di broccato d’oro con stelle sopra riccio d’argento ... per fare una vesta

49 50

alla ss.ma imagine’ (Registro di doni, 1598–1625, fol. 84), quoted in Floriano Grimaldi, La historia della chiesa di Santa Maria de Loreto (Loreto, 1993), p. 425 51   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 2, fols 70 recto – 70 verso. 52   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 2, fol. 71 recto. 53   See, pp. 38–9. 54   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 2, fol. 373 recto.

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her children. In this dynastically charged ritual Maria Maddalena appeared both as her children’s guide and as key worshipper in her own right, and her central placing subverted the festival’s traditional associations with masculine Medicean power. Following the feast-day of Saint Zenobius, Maria Maddalena, Cristina and Ferdinando II began a visit to Siena and environs. Tinghi’s record of the trip reveals its profound devotional emphases. This visit would have had, of course, a political purpose but it also fulfilled a spiritually energetic schedule evocative of pilgrimage, one that involved engaging closely with relics and sacred locales. Activities included venerating the relic of St John the Baptist at the Duomo and visiting the house and church of St Catherine.55 Assertive strategies of sacred visiting must surely have fixed in the public mind an image of the devoutness of the new grand ducal group, in which Maria Maddalena figured prominently. Cristina found an evocative way to mark Cosimo II’s passing, which seems to refer directly to pilgrimage. In June 1621, a silver altar frontal sent from Florence by Cristina arrived at the shrine at Loreto. This precious item was designed to serve as a visual reminder of Cosimo’s devout persona and mother and son’s separate but shared experiences of the shrine. Destined for the altar within the Holy House, the lost paliotto depicted Cosimo kneeling in prayer inside the shrine, as a surviving drawing in the Biblioteca Marucelliana, probably by Giulio Parigi, shows.56 Parigi, it seems, designed an altar frontal with three panels, showing Cosimo at the centre and with lateral panels embellished with the Medici arms on one side and the Lorraine arms on the other. This paliotto echoes the famous silver altar frontal from the early seventeenth century for the shrine at Santissima Annunziata, showing the young Cosimo kneeling before the sacred image of the Annunciate Virgin.57 Cosimo is also depicted kneeling in the exquisite pietre dure relief ex-voto now in the Museo degli Argenti, Florence, which was based on a design by Parigi, and made in the grand ducal workshops around 1617–24.58 The image of the grand duke devoutly kneeling was a recurring one on the pilgrimage of 1616, as we would expect, and nuanced by Cosimo who chose to take with him on the journey to Loreto the inginocchiatoio he had used at Santissima Annunziata at the mass that inaugurated the pilgrimage. Tinghi   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 2, fols. 375 recto – 378 verso.   Stefano Papetti, Devozioni laurentane, pp. 16–17, figs 12 and 13; The Medici,

55 56

Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence (New Haven, 2002), p. 260, cat. no. 117 (entry by Annamaria Giusti), illustrated. 57   Dora Liscia Bemporad, ‘L’arredo della Santissima Annunziata’, in Timothy Verdon (ed.), Santissima Annunziata (Florence, 2005), pp. 41–5. 58   Maria Sframeli (ed.), I gioielli dei Medici dal vero e in ritratto (Florence, 2003), p. 143, cat. no. 72; The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence, pp. 258–60, cat. no. 116 (entry by Annamaria Giusti); and Kirsten (Cristina) Aschengreen Piacenti, ‘Two Jewellers at the Grand Ducal Court of Florence Around 1618’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 12 (1965), pp. 115–6.

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duly recounted that the grand duke used his own inginocchiatoio on occasion during this trip (at Perugia, for example), and at Assisi the diarist recorded how Cosimo had knelt at the altar under which the body of St Francis was buried.59 With the paliotto commission for Loreto Cristina assertively took control of this image. Her commemoration of masculine Medicean devoutness was not limited to objects, however, as through her subsequent and regular pilgrimages to Santissima Annunziata, Cristina effectively made herself into a vehicle of devout commemoration. These journeys and devotions, enacted as widowdowager-regent, expressed her own religious commitment to the shrine of the Annunciate Virgin while also memorializing the devotion to it she had shared with her husband and son. Conclusion For Medici women, privileged access to holy places offered privileged opportunities for invoking the assistance of saints and for making piety visible. Processionals to and from Florentine churches, even as part of regular devotions, can be seen as pilgrimages in miniature that staged female Medicean devotion. In particular, pilgrimages to Loreto were co-ordinated in ways that explicitly advertised the key participants’ devoutness. The powerful model supplied by Giovanna d’Austria provided Cristina di Lorena and Maria Maddalena d’Austria with opportunities for advantageous self-positioning in the public realm that each inflected with her own meanings, but which Maria Maddalena developed in particular in strikingly visual ways. In sum, for the grand duchesses, the pilgrimage to the Santa Casa expressed the desire to reach out to encounter relics and sacred sites through carefully stagemanaged journeys and venerations. During the early seventeenth century the Medici grand duchesses had increasingly significant roles to play in public contexts: made visible in Tuscany, they forcefully positioned themselves as part of the grand ducal group and as Tuscany’s leading female figures in their own right. Visits to holy places played a part in these strategies. More broadly, the grand duchesses used visits to holy places and the viewing of relics to connect their bodies and experiences with the bodies and experiences of holy figures. Adapting Helen Hills’s centripetal–centrifugal model in connection with relics, it seems that the grand duchesses were engaged in drawing sacred items ever closer with programmes of private consumption, but also in reaching out to relics or with relics in diverse ways – through visits and venerations and gifting.60 The grand duchesses’ engagement with shrines produced relationships that were mutually beneficial, even interdependent: they gained   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 2, fol. 66 verso.   Helen Hills, ‘Nuns and Relics: Spiritual Authority in Post-Tridentine Southern

59 60

Italy’, in Cordula van Wyhe (ed.), Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 11–39.

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spiritual power from connections with holy objects and places, and their selfadvertising devotions enhanced perceptions of the power and prestige surrounding the sacred sites they visited and the sacred things they saw at them.

Chapter 6

Images In Justus Sustermans’s portrait of Maria Maddalena d’Austria and Ferdinando II, dated February 1623, the grand duchess wears a black gown suggestive of widowhood (her husband had died two years previously), but its blackness is enlivened with small pearls and its open sleeves reveal ivory satin embroidered with gold thread (Plate 4). She wears a delicate ruff and cuffs, and around her neck are three strings of pearls, one of which is secured to her breast with a small red bow.1 Maria Maddalena’s pose emulates that of her mother-in-law, Cristina di Lorena, in the 1590 portrait by Scipione Pulzone (see Plate 2). As in the earlier image, the subject’s right hand rests on a table, next to the grand ducal crown of Tuscany. Her left hand is lightly placed on the shoulder of her young son, now grand duke. On the death of Cosimo II in March 1621, Maria Maddalena and Cristina were named as regents for Ferdinando II during his minority. The portrait makes Maria Maddalena’s role clear: she is the conduit between grand ducal power and the grand duke himself. She is a resolute, stable and protective figure, who looks at the viewer assertively. As Allison Levy has shown, however, the widow’s identity is always a precarious one.2 Despite the freedoms that Maria Maddalena’s new position as widow-regent might suggest, her new state was more powerful and less easy to police and therefore more threatening than that of wife. This chapter focuses on the particular questions surrounding issues of gender, power, art and devotion generated in the era of the regency and the ways that Maria Maddalena managed them. It is concerned in particular with aspects of Maria Maddalena’s project at the Villa del Poggio Imperiale, her new residence just outside Florence at which she launched a programme of renovation and decoration after Cosimo’s death. My aim is to show how the iconography of piety developed in the villa’s decorative programme, and in the grand duchess’s projects of collecting and display at the villa, are suggestive of the carefully negotiated balance between power and threat that her new role produced. I begin by establishing a context for this narrative of self-fashioning, with an examination of the significance of the concept of female regency in the period and its implications for Cristina di Lorena and Maria Maddalena d’Austria.  See Maria Sframeli (ed.), I gioielli dei Medici dal vero e in ritratto (Florence, 2003), pp. 139–41, for a full discussion of this portrait. 2   Allison Levy, ‘The Widow’s Peek: Looking at Ritual and Representation’, in Allison Levy (ed.), Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 1–15. 1

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The Exercise of Power By the time of Cosimo II’s death, the concept of Medici women as regents for sons still in their minority was firmly established, in France at least. Both Caterina and Maria de’ Medici had successfully circumvented the Salic Law preventing female accession in order to become regents for their sons.3 However, while illustrious precedents had been set within the Medici family, these examples had not been entirely successful. In 1621, the memory of Maria de’ Medici’s forced resignation and exile to Blois would have still been very fresh. Florence’s grand ducal family had given thanks at the Duomo of Siena less than two years earlier when the news reached them during a state visit to that city that Maria and Louis XIII had reconciled, and that ‘she was free and no longer a fugitive’.4 There is little to compare politically between the regencies in France and Tuscany of this period. During Maria de’ Medici’s regency, Louis XIII and his supporters came to believe that Maria was using her power to undermine her son and to address her own political aspirations. In Florence, the motives of Maria Maddalena d’Austria and Cristina di Lorena were not subject to this type of intrigue. Cosimo II had left the Tutrici a prosperous and politically stable regime, the legacy of the reigns of Cosimo I, Francesco I and Ferdinando I, and their positions were secure.5 Additionally, conditions in Cosimo’s will specified the breadth and the limits of the new regents’ authority: although they were ostensibly granted full exercise of power, a council of four leading male figures at court was established to advise them and share their responsibilities, who were in turn advised by two secretaries of the regency.6 In 1620s France, Maria de’ Medici had ostensibly resolved differences with the king, yet her role at the French court was a diminished one, and her position precarious. Denied a high-profile political role, she was advised to turn to the 3   On the Salic Law see Ralph Giesey, ‘The Juristic Basis of Dynastic Right to the French Throne’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 51/5 (1961): pp. 17–22, and Ian McLean, Woman Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature, 1610–1652 (Oxford, 1977), pp. 5–62. 4   ‘e che lei era libera et non piu fugitiva’, BNCF, Gino Capponi 261, Cesare Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 2, fol. 205 recto, 23 May 1619. 5   In a letter sent by Maria Maddalena to her brother-in-law, cardinal Carlo de’ Medici, on the day of Cosimo’s death, the grand duchess outlined her commitment to her new role, first to protecting the interests of her children, and second to her governmental responsibilities: ‘to do whatever is necessary for the good government of the [Medici] house and of the [Tuscan] States’ (‘quelche convenga fare per il buon governo della Casa et delli Stati’), ASF, Mediceo del Principato 5183, fol. 293. 6   The council comprised Giuliano de’ Medici, archbishop of Pisa, count Orso d’Elci, former ambassador to Spain, Niccolò dell’Antella, knight of the Order of Santo Stefano, and marchese Fabbrizio Colloredo, commander of the Tuscan army; Jacopo Riguccio Galluzzi, Istoria del Granducato di Toscana sotto il governo della casa Medici [1781] (Milan, 1974), p. 396; Furio Diaz, Il Granducato di Toscana: I Medici (Turin, 1982), pp. 365–6.

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practice of religion. An anonymous publication of 1620, Advis à la Royne Mère du Roy sur les presents occurrences, offered the former regent some counsel on this matter: [S]he would do no better than ... to exercise piety with little entourage, to visit churches, to give alms generously, to search carefully those who are in need (of them), to help and assist the afflicted poor. In conclusion, to make believe that she is totally resigned to devotion, that she detests business ... that her rest and her dreams are made up only in the glory of God and the happiness of the King.7

In line with early modern treatises on widowhood, which called upon the widow to practise piety, alongside modesty in dress and comportment, the widow is encouraged to disguise or subdue any worldly aspirations with the performance of exemplary devoutness.8 Maria’s devotions, while acknowledged as a show, should not be seen as showy. Such prescriptions indicate the tensions that the widow’s ambiguous status produced, especially around her sexuality.9 The threat of Maria’s power/sexuality would be contained by her absorption in displays of piety and charity, as devout behaviour should indicate subservience and the rejection of worldliness. For the female leader of this period, the balance of power and piety had to be carefully managed and even the most devout female regents were subject to criticism. Anne of Austria, queen of France, the niece of Maria Maddalena (Anne was the daughter of Philip III of Spain and Margarita of Austria, and wife and widow of Maria de’ Medici’s son Louis XIII), was known for exemplary piety and her particular devotion to the convent of Val-du-Grâce in Paris. When Anne acted as regent for her son Louis XIV after her husband’s death, however, she was criticized for being too pious by her minister Mazarin, who argued that the queen spent too much time engaged in private devotions and that these religious observances kept her from affairs of state.10 In contrast, Cristina and Maria Maddalena were respected during their lifetimes for the strength of their devotional commitments,   ‘[E]lle ne sçauroit mieux faire que ... exercer seulement à la pieté avec peu de suitte, visiter les Eglises, faire grandes aumosnes, rechercher soigneusement ceux qui en ont besoing, secourir & assister les pauvres affligez. Conclusion, faire croire par effect qu’elle est du tout resignée à la devotion, qu’elle deteste les affaires ... & que son repos & ses souhaits consitent seulement en la gloire de Dieu, & au contentement du Roy.’ Advis à la Royne Mère du Roy sur les presents occurrences (1620), p. 7, quoted in English in Elaine Rhea Rubin, The Heroic Image: Women and Power in Early Seventeenth-Century France, 1610–1661 (George Washington University, 1977). 8   On treatises on widowhood see Catherine E. King, Renaissance Women Patrons: Wives and Widows in Italy c.1300–1550, (Manchester, 1998), pp. 29–39, and Levy, ‘The Widow’s Peek’, p. 79. 9   Levy, ‘The Widow’s Peek’, p. 79. 10   Ruth Kleinman, Anne of Austria: Queen of France (Columbus, OH, 1985), pp. 185–6. 7

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and the expression of piety was a fundamental constituent of their identities as grand duchesses. Mazarin’s concern that the obligations of Anne of Austria’s role were at odds with her practice of religion perhaps tells us more about his own concerns for his political future than about perceived inadequacies in Anne’s execution of the duties of a regent. But the minister’s comments are of interest here because they imply that Anne’s devotions were conducted in seclusion, apart from her duties as regent, and did not, therefore, have the potential to be politically advantageous, revealing perhaps a fundamental difference between the way piety was expressed by Maria Maddalena d’Austria and her niece in France. In Florence, as we have seen, profound spiritual imperatives underscored the cultural choices made by the grand duchesses and, in turn, political positioning was managed with close reference to a sacred agenda. Nowhere is this clearer in the era of the regency than in the programme of decoration and display undertaken by Maria Maddalena at the Villa Baroncelli, the suburban palace, located on the outskirts of Florence south of the Porta Romana (Porta San Pier Gattolini on Florimi’s map, Figure 1.1), that she purchased and renamed the Villa del Poggio Imperiale.11 The grand duchess commissioned the architect Giulio Parigi to renovate the palace for her. She adorned this new residence with images, including numerous representations of illustrious queens and empresses, and of female saints, in fresco and on canvas specifically in her main apartment on the villa’s ground floor. These images should be seen as part of the visual repertory of pious display that characterized Maria Maddalena’s wider cultural activities, the investigation of which requires approaches tailored to their particular forms. In order to bring their significances to the patron as grand duchess, widow and regent more clearly into focus, this group of works needs to be located within the larger project of Poggio Imperiale, and its themes of power and devotion. Art and devotional themes at Poggio Imperiale In May 1624, Medici court diarist Cesare Tinghi visited Maria Maddalena’s villa and marvelled at the programme of embellishment that had just been completed there: [T]he Most Serene Archduchess, having bought ... the Villa Baroncelli near Florence ... has had it very well restored and there added new building with many rooms with many beautiful paintings and with new gardens and many beautiful hangings ... with a great quantity of pictures and ancient figures of marble.12

  For an overview of the project and the villa’s functions during and after Maria Maddalena d’Austria’s lifetime see Ornella Panichi, ‘Due stanze della Villa del Poggio Imperiale’, Antichità viva, 12/5 (1973): pp. 32–43. 12   ‘ave[n]do la S[erenissi]ma Arciduchessa conprato ... la villa di Baro[n]celli vicino a Firenze ... la fece molto bene rest[a]urare et ag[g]iu[n]gervi nuova fabrica et con molte 11

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Tinghi was keenly aware of the transformation expedited by the patron, of the grand duchess’s hand in altering the villa through construction, by laying out gardens and decorating rooms. Expenditure had been made conspicuous by these adornments and the passage recalls the patron’s role as collector, of her desire to own special things with special value – paintings, hangings, furnishings and statuary. Tinghi’s role as observer and commentator reminds us too of the villa’s potential for display and performance, for presenting and representing the patron’s wealth and social position and, at the same time, fashioning and shaping her identity as patron, collector and grand duchess. Villa del Poggio Imperiale was conceived, then, as a space of display, the ‘luogo teatrale’ of Maria Maddalena, as Elisa Acanfora has called it.13 The villa became an alternative locus for court activities, and, on occasion, even functioned as a literal stage-set when the grand duchess deployed its ample forecourt for theatrical productions and entertainments, of which she was an enthusiastic patron in the 1620s. Stefano della Bella’s view of the villa, framed by two imposing Imperial eagles, gives a sense of these activities. It shows a ball game (gara di pallamaglio) staged in the broad expanse of the semi-circular forecourt, against the backdrop of the villa’s symmetrical facade (Figure 6.1). An event from 1625, timed to coincide with the visit to Florence of prince Władysław of Poland, a nephew of Maria Maddalena, stands out as particularly spectacular. La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina combined an opera, dancing and an equestrian ballet and was performed in the prince’s honour at Poggio Imperiale on 3 February, 1625.14 Its composer was Francesca Caccini, and, as such, La liberazione di Ruggiero is the first opera by a woman. Its scenography was probably the work of Poggio Imperiale’s architect, Giulio Parigi, and his son Alfonso. After the performance, the horsemen of the equestrian ballet served at a banquet in the apartments of Maria Maddalena d’Austria and Cristina di Lorena.15 The opera, derived from stanze et con molte belle pit[t]ure et con nuovi gia[r]dini et fatto molti belli parame[n]ti... con gran qua[n]tita di quadri et fighure di marmo antiche’, ASF, Miscellanea Medicea 11, Cesare Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 3, fol. 39 recto. 13   Elisa Acanfora, ‘La Villa del Poggio Imperiale’, in Mina Gregori (ed.), Fasto di corte. La decorazione murale nelle residenze dei Medici e dei Lorena (Florence, 2005): vol. 1, p. 143. 14   On this performance see Angelo Solerti, Musica, ballo e dramatica alla Corte Medicea dal 1600 al 1637 (Florence, 1905), pp. 180–2; Arthur R. Blumenthal, Theatre Art of the Medici (Hanover, NH, 1980), pp. 323–4; Kelley Harness, ‘Habsburgs, Heretics, and Horses: Equestrian Ballets and Other Staged Battles in Florence during the First Decade of the Thirty Years War’, in Massimiliano Rossi and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi (eds), L’arme e gli amori. Ariosto, Tasso and Guarini in Late Renaissance Florence (Florence, 2004), vol. 2, pp. 255–83, Kelley Harness, Echoes of Women’s Voices: Music, Art, and Female Patronage in Early Modern Florence (Chicago, 2006), pp. 152–62, and Suzanne G. Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power (Chicago, 2009), pp. 191–246. 15   Solerti, Musica, ballo e dramatica, p. 182.

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Figure 6.1 Stefano della Bella (attr.), View of the Villa del Poggio Imperiale, 1620s. London, British Museum. Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso but echoing aspects of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, has a marriage alliance as a central theme, and may have been chosen with a political purpose in mind: to underscore the grand duchess’s dynastic ambition that focused on a marriage between her daughter Margherita and the prince, which would crystallize a union with Poland and Austria in a Catholic league to counter Protestantism and the Ottoman Empire.16 Religious concerns were embedded in many aspects of Maria Maddalena’s patronage at Poggio Imperiale and devout display was not confined to those spaces conventionally designated as sacred. On Sunday 9 June 1624, within the Ottava of Corpus Christi, celebration of the festival united worshippers from the local parish church of San Felice a Ema in Arcetri with those at the villa. Tapestries, paintings and garlands adorned the villa’s façade and in the courtyard there was a canopy of silver cloth and crimson velvet over an altar laden with gold and silver   Harness, Echoes of Women’s Voices, pp. 161–2, and Janie Cole, ‘Self-Fashioning in Early Seventeenth-Century Florence: Music-Theatre under the Medici Women’, in Giulia Calvi and Riccardo Spinelli (eds), Le donne Medici nel sistema europeo delle corte, XVI– XVIII secolo (Florence, 2008), vol. 2, p. 698. 16

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vessels, candlesticks and flowers.17 A special fountain in the grounds spouted jets of wine. A party of sixteen tedeschi delle guardia (Landsknechts, or the ‘Lanzi’ in Florence), twelve grooms and eight pages was dispatched to accompany the sacrament from San Felice a Ema to the villa in procession that included men and, significantly, women from a local confraternity. A salute was sounded when the procession arrived at the villa’s grounds, and the sacrament was delivered to the altar where Maria Maddalena and Cristina, with their courts, were kneeling. After a service with music and a further salute, the sacrament was carried back to San Felice a Ema in a procession which the grand ducal group joined.18 Undertaken more than once in the 1620s this ritual, orchestrated by Maria Maddalena, represented an audacious reworking of the devotional norms of Corpus Christi that blurred boundaries between sacred and secular/domestic spaces.19 If theatrical – and theatricalized – events at the villa del Poggio Imperiale were exercises in self-fashioning, so too were the programmes of art patronage and display that Maria Maddalena co-ordinated there. The grand duchess transferred numerous works of art in the Medici collections to the villa but she also initiated an ambitious programme of collecting, as well as commissioning new works to adorn the space. She asked her brother-in-law cardinal Carlo de’ Medici, who was in Rome from 1623–4, to obtain paintings, statuary and furniture for her from collections that were being dispersed there.20 Later, Maria Maddalena’s secretary wrote to the duke of Urbino to request a gift for the grand duchess from the duke’s

  Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol.3, fol. 47 verso – 48 recto; Ilaria Hoppe, ‘Uno spazio di potere femminile. Villa del Poggio Imperiale, residenza di Maria Maddalena d’Austria’, in Giulia Calvi and Riccardo Spinelli (eds), Le donne Medici nel sistema europeo delle corte, XVI–XVIII secolo (Florence, 2008), p. 686. 18   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 3, fol. 48 recto. 19   During the period of the regency Maria Maddalena also took other opportunities to develop new levels of visibility for herself and her female relatives, suggestive of the grand duchess’s new levels of responsibility. In May 1621, for example, she visited the Fortezza di Basso accompanied by Cristina di Lorena’s daughter Claudia, ‘to see [the] arsenals and other things that are in that fortress’, Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 2, fol. 370 verso. The festa delle doti of 1624 is another case in point. Conducted while the duke of Mantua was visiting Florence, the festa began in the more elaborate setting of the Duomo rather than with the traditional service at San Lorenzo. Maria Maddalena’s daughter princess Margherita, dressed in silk taffeta and adorned with jewels, led the procession of noblewomen and girls, while her mother led her female courtiers in procession to the convalescent hospital; Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 3, fol. 43 recto. 20   Elena Fumagalli, ‘Pittori senesi del Seicento e commitenza medicea: nuove date per Francesco Rustici’, Paragone, 479–480 (1991) p. 71, p. 79 note 19, and ‘Maria Maddalena d’Austria (1587–1631) e Cristina di Lorena (1565–1636)’, in Marco Chiarini (ed.), Il giardino del Granduca: natura morta nelle collezioni medicee (Turin, 1997), p. 59. 17

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collection, specifically for Poggio Imperiale: ‘It is very important to Her Highness to have beautiful old pictures, by famous artists’, the secretary explained.21 By 1624 the villa housed an array of art objects. Its spacious cortile with its wide internal loggie was adorned with antique sculptures and paintings of a variety of subjects, religious works, mythologies, still life and landscapes.22 One of the largest statues (at some one-and-a-half metres in height) was an allegory of ‘Dovizia’ (plenty, wealth or abundance), which seems fitting given that Poggio Imperiale was at the centre of a functioning estate. The theme might also have referred more generally to prosperity under the rule of the Medici.23 Eight marble busts ‘d’homini i[l]lustri’ (‘of illustrious men’) were placed in niches around the walls, and must have offered an interesting counterpoint to the images of illustrious women from early Christianity to modern history represented in Maria Maddalena’s audience room, which could be reached directly from the courtyard. There was a statue of St Mary Magdalen (three braccia in height) in the cortile. Amongst the paintings was just one of a mythical subject – a Venus and Cupid – and two scenes from the Old Testament. The rest were landscapes, hunting scenes, still lifes and animal pictures, subjects that appear throughout the villa. Among a total of seventeen landscapes and cityscapes in this space alone, there were two views of Siena, one showing the Piazza del Campo and the other the Palazzo Pubblico, sites that Maria Maddalena knew well. A canvas measuring three braccia by two-and-a-quarter braccia depicted a hare-coursing scene, an activity in which Maria Maddalena was able to participate in the hills of Arcetri around the villa. The large-scale natura viva paintings on the sheltered walls of the cortile included two showing still life with a female figure, a combination suggesting northern European traditions that first appeared in Italy in the late sixteenth century.24 This subject matter, while emanating from the north, was probably reinterpreted by a   ‘La Ser[enissi]ma Archiduchessa ... ha fatto bella quella Villa vicina qui alle mura di Fior[en]za ... et l’hà addobbata, et ornata riccamente d’ogni cosa[;] preme S[ua] A[ltezza] molto in havere belle Pitture Antiche, et di mani celebrate.’ ASF, Mediceo del Principato, 6136, Ins. 2, fol. 833 verso, letter dated 2 January 1626 (stile fiorentino), quoted in part by Gaetano Pieraccini, La stirpe de’ Medici di Cafaggiolo (Florence, 1986), vol. 2, p. 351. 22   ASF, Guardaroba Medicea 479, Inventario della Reale Villa del Poggio Imperiale (1624 stile fiorentino). A transcription of the inventory can be found in Ilaria Hoppe, Die Räume der Regentin. Die Villa Poggio Imperiale zu Florenz (Berlin, 2012), pp. 290–330. 23   As Bruce Edelstein has shown, the ceiling of Eleonora di Toledo’s Scrittoio in the Palazzo Ducale, decorated for her by Francesco Salviati, has an allegory of Dovizia at its centre, a reference both to the wealth acquired by the duchess’s agricultural enterprise and to her fertility; see ‘La fecundissima Signora Duchessa: The Courtly Persona of Eleonora di Toledo and the Iconography of Abundance’, in Konrad Eisenbichler (ed.), The Cultural World of Eleonora of Toledo, Duchess of Florence and Siena (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 71–97. 24   ‘piu sorte [di] pesci con una femmina figurata [per] una cuoca’ (‘many sorts of fish with a woman depicted as a cook’) and ‘un vaso di fiori con una fonte e una femmina figurata p[er] una giardiniera’, (‘a vase of flowers with a spring and a woman depicted as a gardener’); Guardaroba Medicea 479, fol. 1. 21

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Tuscan such as Jacopo da Empoli, demonstrating Maria Maddalena’s enduring support for local artists.25 Maria Maddalena’s collection at Poggio Imperiale featured many family portraits, a convention particularly favoured by Habsburg collectors, such as Margaret of Austria maintained at Malines and Philip II of Spain at El Pardo in the environs of Madrid. At Poggio Imperiale, portraits commemorating the imperial line were displayed in a ground-floor apartment designated ‘de’ forestieri’ as well as in other rooms at the villa. Such images were necessarily the product of exchange between courts, and Maria Maddalena was particularly active in this arena. It was in the realm of portraiture in particular that she often looked beyond Tuscany for the most skilled practitioners. In 1621 she organized Jan Sustermans, brother of Justus, to go to Mantua to paint portraits of Cristina di Lorena’s daughter Caterina de’ Medici Gonzaga and of Eleonora Gonzaga.26 Portraits of emperor Ferdinand II and family members by the brothers Sustermans were produced during a year-long stay in Vienna (November 1623–October 1624) for display at Poggio Imperiale,27 and Maria Maddalena received a group of portraits of the Spanish Habsburgs, again for the villa, during the reign of Philip II from the workshop of Bartolomé González.28 Numerous paintings in the ‘modern manner’ at the villa attest to the grand duchess’s taste for the work of Caravaggio’s followers, nuancing the common assumption that Maria Maddalena was only interested in local artists (Sustermans is also a notable exception in this regard).29 One moderately large painting,   Elena Fumagalli, ‘Il granducato di Cosimo II (1609–1621) e La Reggenza (1621– 1628)’, in Marco Chiarini (ed.), Il giardino del Granduca. Natura morta nelle collezioni mediceee (Turin, 1997), p. 60. The large collection of landscapes at Poggio Imperiale attests to Maria Maddalena’s taste for at least some non-Tuscan artists. Some were thought to be the work of Paul Bril (1554–1626), and many others were by his contemporary Filippo Napoletano, including nineteen small tondi depicting ‘paesini e altro’ (‘landscapes and other [subjects]’) in a galleria on the villa’s ground floor. Filippo Napoletano had settled in Rome in the second decade of the seventeenth century and there came under the protection of cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, patron of Caravaggio, whose connections with the Medici family were long established. The landscapist came to Florence in 1617, however, leaving on the death of Cosimo II in 1621; Marco Chiarini (ed.), La natura morta a palazzo e in villa. Le collezioni dei Medici e dei Lorena (Livorno, 1998), p. 185. 26   In 1619 Cristina di Lorena had sent Tiberio Titi from Florence to Mantua to paint Caterina’s portrait, but the result disappointed the sitter; Barbara Marx, ‘Politica culturale al femminile e identità medicea’, in Giulia Calvi and Riccardo Spinelli (eds), Le donne Medici nel sistema europeo delle corti, XVI–XVIII secolo (Florence, 2008), vol. 1, p. 159 and p. 160. 27   Lisa Goldenberg Stoppato, Un granduca e il suo ritrattista: Cosimo III de’ Medici e la “stanza deʼ quadri” di Giusto Suttermans (Livorno, 2006), pp. 33–5; Marx, ‘Politica culturale al femminile’, p. 161. 28   Rosemarie Mulcahy, Philip II of Spain, Patron of the Arts (Dublin, 2004), p. 296. 29   A view expressed by, for example, Marco Chiarini, Artisti alla corte granducale, exh. cat. (Florence, 1969), p. 5. 25

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measuring three-and-three-quarter braccia by two-and-three-quarters, of Saint Peter ‘dipinto al naturale’ is cited in the 1624 inventory as by Caravaggio himself.30 A still life displayed in a first floor room of the villa called the galleria, depicts with a disconcerting Caravaggesque naturalism and a surreal flavour, fruits precariously and impossibly balanced on shelves, arranged on plates, in piles or suspended at different heights. That the painting is likely to have been produced in a Roman workshop specializing in the genre suggests the breadth of Maria Maddalena’s artistic interests.31 In a room on the ground floor of the villa, a small painting on copper measuring about half a metre in height and depicting Saint Appollonia is identified as the work of Caravaggio’s only female follower, Artemisia Gentileschi.32 In 1613, Gentileschi arrived in Florence from Rome, seeking refuge of sorts in Tuscany following her gruelling experiences in Rome: her rape by her teacher, the painter Agostino Tassi, and his subsequent trial.33 At least by 1618, Gentileschi was working on commissions for the Medici, and her Penitent Magdalen dates from the era of Cosimo II (Figure 6.2).34 The saint’s shimmering yellow gown not only indicates the vanity of the Magdalen’s past life, but showcases Gentileschi’s technical skill and shows her adapting her work to the contemporary Florentine taste for the representation of luxurious textiles. Maria Maddalena would surely have found this image deeply appealing, not least in view of her other associations with her sainted namesake, which might point to her agency in the commission,. The presence of Caravaggesque works of secular subjects at Poggio Imperiale suggests that stylistic concerns were also part of their appeal to her, adding further weight to this contention – that is that she admired the Caravaggesque style, not only the subject matter. Indeed, Maria Maddalena also favoured Tuscan Caravaggisti. The collection at Poggio Imperiale included a number of works by the Sienese Francesco Rustici, of   Guardaroba Medicea 479, fol. 20.   ‘un quadro grande ... entrovi dipinto piu frutte della state di piu sorte, con degli

30 31

ovoli.’ The painting is now in Palazzo Pitti (depositi). See Elena Fumagalli, ‘Maria Maddalena d’Austria (1587–1631) e Cristina di Lorena (1565–1636)’, p. 61 note 24, and Chiarini, La natura morta a palazzo e in villa, p. 54 (reproduced). 32   ‘di mano di Artemisia Lomi’, Guardaroba Medicea 479, fol. 19. Artemisia used Lomi, the original surname of her father Orazio, who was born in Florence, during her Florentine sojourn. 33   Tassi was well connected to the Medici court, working in Rome as agent for Cosimo II and supplying the grand duke with his own works and paintings by Adam Elsheimer and Cornelis Van Poelenburgh which Cosimo collected. In 1612, a few months before the trial, Artemisia’s father, the painter Orazio Gentileschi, wrote to Cristina di Lorena explaining his daughter’s circumstances and asking for the dowager grand duchess to use her influence to prevent Tassi’s release from prison. On Artemisia’s Florentine career see particularly Mary Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton, 1989), pp. 34–53, and Elizabeth Cropper, ‘New Documents for Artemisia Gentileschi’s Life in Florence’, Burlington Magazine, 135 (1993): pp. 760–61. 34   Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, p. 36.

Figure 6.2

Artemisia Gentileschi, The Penitent Magdalen, 1617–20. Florence, Galleria Palatina.

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genre subjects – a youth holding a quail-pipe, three women singing – and sacred ones – a Saint Jerome, and a highly emotive Dying Magdalen. In the latter Rustici deployed his characteristic tenebrism with particularly atmospheric results. The obscurity of the scene is alleviated by pool of light from a candle at the centre of the composition, held by one of the two kneeling angels who comfort the haggard figure of the dying saint.35 The work was presumably a favourite of Maria Maddalena’s, as she had it moved into her bedroom from another part of the villa.36 Amongst the paintings produced specifically for Poggio Imperiale, the grand duchess commissioned a large canvas for her audience chamber in the main ground-floor apartment each from Rustici and another Sienese Caravaggisto, Rutilio Manetti.37 The ground-floor apartment formed the nucleus of Maria Maddalena’s collection and was adorned with religious works. Between the end of the 1610s and early 1620s one of her favourite artists, Jacopo Ligozzi, produced a series of canvases on the Passion of Christ, some of which were displayed in Maria Maddalena’s main apartment at Poggio Imperiale. They were commissioned by Cristina di Lorena.38 These works – Christ Carrying the Cross, the Flagellation and the Crowning with Thorns – use uncompromising naturalism to emphasize the physical suffering of Christ and draw in the viewer.39 Amongst the other paintings in the ground-floor apartment were a Madonna and Child by Ghirlandaio, and a Madonna and Child with Saint John ‘di mano di Micherino sanese’, that is, Domenico Beccafumi (c.1486–1551).40 Beccafumi’s charming tondo must have appealed particularly to Maria Maddalena because a marginal note in the inventory indicates that it was moved from Ferdinando’s room into one of the grand duchess’s. The most prestigious works in the collection, then – those ‘beautiful old works, by famous artists’ to which Maria Maddalena’s secretary referred in his letter to the duke of Urbino – were mainly of religious subjects. The grand duchess’s assertive   Guardaroba Medicea 479, fol. 10; also see Evelina Borea, Caravaggio e Caravaggeschi nelle Gallerie di Firenze(Florence, 1970) pp. 56–7 (cat. no. 34), and Gianni Papi (ed.), Caravaggio e caravaggeschi a Firenze, exh. cat. (Florence and Livorno, 2010), pp. 248–9 (cat. no. 66). Maria Maddalena also owned two notable paintings by the Caravaggisto Bartolomeo Manfredi (c.1587–1620): The Concert and Card Players, both now in the Uffizi, which her son Ferdinando had acquired from Rome in 1620 and subsequently presented to his mother at New Year 1625–6; Maria Cristiana Poma (ed.), Dopo Caravaggio. Bartolomeo Manfredi e la manfrediana methodus (Milan, 1987), p. 68. 36   Guardaroba Medicea 479, fol. 10. 37   Silvia Meloni Trkulja, ‘Appendice: I quadri della Sala d’Udienza’, Antichità viva, 12/5 (1973), p. 44; Fumagalli, ‘Pittori senesi del Seicento’, p. 71. Also see Chapter 6, p. 127. 38   Lucilla Conigliello (ed.), Jacopo Ligozzi. Le vedute del Sacro Monte della Verna. I dipinti di Poppi e Bibbiena (Poppi, 1992), pp. 38–9; Serena Padovani, ‘Precisazioni su Jacopo Ligozzi nelle Gallerie fiorentine’, Arte Cristiana, 803 (2001): pp. 133–402. 39   Ibid. 40   Guardaroba Medicea 479, fol. 4; Piero Torriti (ed.), Beccafumi (Milan, 1998), p. 8. 35

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collecting practice, and taste for the work of celebrated artists, is also underlined in her acquisition of Perugino’s Deposition, now in the Uffizi. She had it removed from its original location in a side chapel in the Florentine church of San Giusto in Oltrarno, for display at Poggio Imperiale.41 Developing a Personal Iconography At the heart of Maria Maddalena’s project with Poggio Imperiale, then, was the decorative programme of the villa’s ground-floor apartment. This principal apartment comprises the audience chamber, and four rooms leading from and contiguous to it. Two of these rooms were allocated to Ferdinando II’s use and the rest to Maria Maddalena. Each room is decorated with frescoed lunettes produced by a team of notable Tuscan artists.42 The decorative scheme corresponds to the gendered uses of the spaces in that the frescoes in Ferdinando’s rooms depict historical battle scenes, and those in Maria Maddalena’s rooms are of exemplary women. Despite the masculinist resonances of the battle imagery, however, the scenes represent specifically conflicts in which Habsburg emperors participated and feature Maximilian I, Charles V, Rudolf II and Ferdinand II, so offer powerful allusions to the grand duke’s maternal heritage.43 The audience chamber is the principal room of the main apartment and the centrepiece of the villa. Its decorative scheme celebrates exemplary femininity that is developed in the three rooms expressly for the grand duchess’s use (Figure 6.3).44 At the centre of the ceiling scheme by the workshop of Michelangelo Cinganelli is an allegory of spiritual and temporal power by Filippo Tarchiani.45 Around the upper walls in ten frescoed lunettes are images of sainted and saintly Christian queens and empresses and comprise representations of St Ursula, Clotilda (both by Ottavio Vannini) (see Figure 6.3), St Catherine of Alexandria (by Niccodemo Ferrucci), St Cunegonda (by Domenico Veli), St Elizabeth of Portugal, Matilda 41   A copy was commissioned for the church from Ottavio Vannini; Giuseppe Richa, Notizie istoriche delle chiese fiorentine (Rome, 1972), vol. 9, p. 103; also see Pietro Scarpellini, Perugino (Milan, 1984), p. 82, no. 43. 42   On the frescoes at Poggio Imperiale see Acanfora, ‘La Villa del Poggio Imperiale’, pp. 143–56, and Riccardo Spinelli, ‘Simbologia dinastica e legittimazione del potere: Maria Maddalena d’Austria e gli affreschi del Poggio Imperiale’, in Giulia Calvi and Riccardo Spinelli (eds), Le donne Medici nel sistema europeo delle corte, XVI–XVIII secolo (Florence, 2008): pp. 645–79. For a comprehensive account of the scheme’s iconography see Hoppe, ‘Das Bildprogramm in den Räumen der Regentin’, in Die Räume der Regentin, pp. 95–225 43   Adam Wandruszka, ‘Ein Freskenzyklus der Pietas Austriaca in Florenz’, Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs, 5 (1962): pp. 495–9. 44   Attributions are from Acanfora, ‘La Villa del Poggio Imperiale’, pp. 145–8; pp. 151–3. 45   Illustrated in Acanfora, ‘La Villa del Poggio Imperiale’, p. 310, plate LXXXV.

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Figure 6.3

Art, Gender and Religious Devotion in Grand Ducal Tuscany

The Audience Room, frescoes painted by Matteo Rosselli and others, 1623. Florence, Villa del Poggio Imperiale.

of Canossa (by Matteo Rosselli), Galla Placidia (by Rosselli, with Domenico Pugliani), Pulcheria (by Rosselli), Costanza of Aragon and Isabella of Castille (both by Filippo Tarchiani). Verses inscribed below each scene which identify the figures are by Medici court poet, Andrea Salvadori, whose works include the libretto of the opera La regina Sant’ Orsola for the grand duchess, performed first in 1624 in the theatre of the Uffizi.46 The subjects’ diversity of origin, encompassing hagiography and Italian, Spanish and Imperial history, suggest and construct analogies between the figures based on their shared status as princesses and Christian exemplars, encouraging the viewer to conceive of their exemplary qualities as spanning boundaries of time and place. To complement the fresco cycle of female Christian exemplars in the lunettes, four large canvases depicting scenes from the lives of four celebrated women from Antiquity – Artemisia, Lucretia, Semiramis and Sophonisba – adorned the walls 46   Tinghi, Diario di corte, vol. 3, fol. 66 recto. On Salvadori’s La regina Sant’Orsola and Maria Maddalena’s role as patron, see Harness, Echoes of Women’s Voices, pp. 79–99.

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of the audience chamber.47 Maria Maddalena had initially sought to locate suitable works in Rome for this chamber, rather than commissioning new paintings, as a letter written in August 1623 on the grand duchess’s behalf by a member of her staff to brother-in-law, Cardinal Carlo de’ Medici, demonstrates. Carlo was asked to seek out four suitable pictures of generous dimensions (‘of length four and a half braccia and width three braccia’) for her. The exact measurements, however, were not the principal consideration, as long as the subject matter was appropriate: ‘the subjects that will be painted in them may not be [of] lascivious or naked women, the lunettes of the said room being painted with religious subjects’.48 Decorum and, indirectly, coherency, in the programme are key issues in the organization of the decorative scheme of this setting. Unable to find suitable works, Maria Maddalena eventually commissioned new works from some of her favourite artists: Semiramis prepares for battle from Matteo Rosselli, Sophonisba drinks poison from Rutilio Manetti, The Death of Lucretia from Francesco Rustici, and Artemisia drinks the ashes of Mausolus from Francesco Curradi (Figure 6.4). 49 In Curradi’s richly coloured painting, Artemisia dominates the scene. She wears a gown of golden cloth embroidered with flowers and adorned with a vivid blue sash. Behind her is the monumental Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, of which she was the patron. The widow is shown in the moments before consuming the drink containing the ashes of her husband, the act that will make her body into his tomb. A symbolic connection is perhaps being made: the absent husband is embodied in the person of Artemisia, as the regent Maria Maddalena takes on the ruler’s role following Cosimo II’s death. In the antechamber adjoining the audience chamber are frescoes of biblical heroines from the Old Testament and the Apocrypha featuring Jael, Judith, Rebecca, Susannah, Deborah, Esther, Sephora (wife of Moses), Mary (Moses’ sister) and the unnamed mother of the seven brothers from the book of Maccabees. The scheme in Maria Maddalena’s bedroom is dedicated to Saint Helena (Figure 6.5) and virgin martyrs Cristina of Bolsena, Margaret of Antioch, Apollonia, Lucy, Barbara, Agatha, Agnes, Cecilia and Dorothy. The audience chamber would have received a wide spectatorship and was doubtless a showpiece for dignitaries and courtiers attending functions enacted

  Meloni Trkulja, ‘I quadri della Sala d’Udienza’, pp. 44–6; Fumagalli, ‘Pittori senesi del Seicento’, pp. 71–2. 48   ‘le storie, che saranno dipintovi dentro non sieno lascive e donne igniude sendo le lunette di detta sala dipente con storie spirituali’, published by Fumagalli, ‘Pittori senesi del Seicento’, pp. 71–2. 49   Meloni Trkulja, ‘I quadri della Sala d’Udienza’, pp. 44–6, reproduces all four works. Also see Il Seicento fiorentino. Arte a Firenze da Ferdinando I a Cosimo III (Florence, 1986) vol. 1, p. 205 (cat. no. 1.89: Semiramis), Gianni Papi (ed.), Caravaggio e caravaggeschi a Firenze (Florence and Livorno, 2010), pp. 201–2, (cat. no. 42: Sophonisba) and pp. 250–1 (cat. no. 67: Lucretia), and Hoppe, Die Räume der Regentin, pp. 95–102. 47

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Figure 6.4

Francesco Curradi, Artemisia drinks the ashes of Mausolus, 1624. Florence, Villa della Petraia.

at the villa.50 Tinghi’s description from 1624 suggests that he had been part of a tour of some sort, and it is likely that the grand duchess’s guests would also have been shown the villa’s various attractions, including its frescoes. The level of accessibility of the bedroom is less clear. As a bedroom it had private uses: the presence of an ‘inginocchiatoio’ or ‘altarino’ there, for example, reminds us of the possibilities of this space for private devotion, but the bedroom was not a ‘private’ room in the modern sense.51 Its decorative scheme was probably quite accessible for viewing, and the room was used for audiences.52 Indeed, the inginocchiatoio itself, dating from 1620–4 and surviving today in the Museo degli Argenti in Florence, is so ornate that it would have encouraged close inspection. Fashioned in ebony, this imposing object is adorned with decoration in pietre dure, including, in the lower part between two columns, an image of a vase of flowers so realistic their   On the use of space at Poggio Imperiale see Hoppe, ‘Uno spazio di potere femminile’, esp. pp. 687–9. 51   ‘Un altarino d’ebano o si vero in ginocchiatoio’, Guardaroba Medicea 479, fol. 6 (see note 48 for the full entry). 52   Hoppe, ‘Uno spazio di potere femminile’, pp. 687–9. 50

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design has been attributed to Jacopo Ligozzi, one of Maria Maddalena’s favourite artists.53 In the upper part of the inginocchiatoio, at or slightly above the kneeling worshipper’s eye level, was, according to the 1625 inventory, an image of Mary Madgalen by Leonardo da Vinci, framed by decorative borders. Surmounting this was a gilded silver reliquary.54 More likely, then, that the decorative scheme of the bedroom was quite accessible for viewing.55 Above all, the villa offered possibilities for women’s spectatorship as the grand duchess, her female relatives and their attendants would have been amongst the most regular viewers of the images and objects in Maria Maddalena’s principal rooms. Cristina di Lorena often dined in the apartment with her daughterin-law, and it is not inconceivable that the dowager grand duchess was amongst Maria Maddalena’s target audience – the decorative programme manifesting, as it were, a sense of rivalry on the younger regent’s part and addressing a need to assert herself within that relationship. While providing images of historical female figures as models of virtue and piety for Maria Maddalena, the scheme must also have produced an image for other spectators of its patron as one in a long line of exemplary women.

53   On this item see Kristen Aschengreen Piacenti, ‘Osservazioni intorno a un inginocchiatoio del Museo degli Argenti’, Antichità Viva, 13 (1974): pp. 44–7; Umberto Baldini, Anna Maria Giusti and Annapaula Pampaloni Martelli (eds), La Cappella dei Principi e le pietre dure a Firenze (Milan, 1979), p. 259 (figs 13–6); Enrico Colle, ‘Inginocchiatoio’,in Il Seicento fiorentino, vol. 2, p. 481, cat. no. 5.13 (plate IL); Enrico Colle (ed.), I mobili di Palazzo Pitti: Il periodo dei Medici 1537–1737 (Florence, 1997), pp. 227–30; Caroline C. Anderson, The Material Culture of Domestic Religion in Early Modern Florence, c.1480–c.1650 (University of York, 2007), pp. 34–5. 54   ‘Un altarino ... con più scompartimenti aovati e tondi commessovi più sorte di pietre tutto filettato dargento con due colonnine con un quadretto nel corpo di paragone or marmo nero entrovi un vaso commesso con fiori al naturale e sul piano tutto con uno ottangolo e due tondi con fiori entrovi tutto di pietre commesso al naturale con un quadro in tavola di una Santa Maria Maddalena fino sotto la cintura di mano di Lionardo da Vinci con un adornamento attorno di cornice doppie debano tutto ondata e nel mezzo tra una cornice e l’altra uno scompartimento d’aovati e ottangoli tondi e quadri entrovi pietre di più diverse sorte filettato tutte d’argenti dorato che regge un reliquiario aovato, che in tutto viѐ nove scompartimenti tutto guarnito dargento e dorato e sopra un vasettino d’agata con un mazzettino di fiori, con sua sopracoperta di corame rosso’, Guardaroba Medicea 479, fol. 6; also reproduced in Baldini, Giusti and Pampaloni Martelli, La Cappella dei Principi, p. 259; Colle, I mobili di Palazzo Pitti, p. 228; and Anderson, The Material Culture of Domestic Religion, p. 35, note 92. The Mary Magdalen image was replaced in the later seventeenth century with a mosaic of the Baptism of Christ by Giovanni Battista Calandra, dating from 1620. 55   Hoppe, ‘Uno spazio di potere femminile’, pp. 687–9.

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Exemplary Femininity and the Widow Exemplary womanhood as a subject of early modern literature, visual culture and debate reaches back to Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus (1355–9), the text that established the ‘defence of women’ treatise as a literary genre that would be sustained through the Renaissance. Christine de Pizan’s The City of Women (1404), reveals that the issue of women’s status was not confined to the debates of men. In visual culture cycles of female exemplars (the ‘female worthies’) paralleled traditions of cycles of famous men. Pictorial series such as those by Andrea del Castagno in the Villa Carducci at Legnaia, which included female exemplars (the Cumaean Sibyl and queens Esther and Tomyris), appealed to a privileged and intellectual – or, at least, educated – spectatorship, whilst prints, such as woodcut illustrations in treatises, reached a wider audience.56 Famous women, however, were not always cited as illustrious precedents: in Renaissance and early modern literary and visual culture traditional cycles of female worthies and exemplary women were frequently satirized in texts and images that addressed a misogynist agenda. Masculine fears of the perceived danger of female power, revealed in European literary and visual traditions, worked to transform women’s heroism and strength into acts of seduction and threat. Female figures could be reinvented in negative, sexualized and comic guises, as in those texts that exploited the moral ambiguities in the stories of the Apocryphal heroine Judith and the Roman matron Lucretia to present these figures as objects of desire and wilful seductresses.57 Negative re-readings of the exploits of famous women, whose acts in other contexts were identified as exemplary, characterized texts including Les Singeries des femmes de ce temps descouvertes (1623) which interpreted women’s assertiveness and power as dangerous.58 Powerful contemporary women, such as Elizabeth I and Maria de’ Medici, bore the brunt of negative comparisons with female figures from the past. Inspired by misogynist political motivations, vitriolic attacks charged Maria de’ Medici, for example, with being another Semiramis, ‘who massacred her husband and son ... in order to rule over men’.59 Yet two texts in praise of women, published in Florence in the early seventeenth century, feature striking references to Medici women. The first volume of Cristofano Bronzini d’Ancona’s lengthy treatise on the heroism and virtue of illustrious   Marita Horster, Andrea del Castagno (Oxford, 1980), pp. 29–32.   See, for example, Frank Capozzi, The Evolution and Transformation of the Judith

56 57

and Holofernes Theme in Italian Drama before 1627 (Ann Arbor, 1976); Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: a Myth and its Transformations (Oxford, 1982); and Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, pp. 278–336 and pp. 216–44. 58   Rubin, The Heroic Image, p. 454. 59   Quoted in Geraldine Johnson, ‘Pictures fit for a Queen: Peter Paul Rubens and the Marie de’ Medici Cycle’, in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (eds), Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History in the Postmodern Era (Berkeley, 2005), p. 453 and p. 468 note 39.

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women, Della dignità e nobilità delle donne, published in 1625, was dedicated to Maria Maddalena d’Austria.60 Chapters devoted to Pulcheria, Clotilda, Matilda, Isabella, Judith and Esther, Semiramis, Sophonisba, and Artemisia (all represented in the grand duchess’s rooms at Poggio Imperiale), amongst others, are juxtaposed with separate entries on Giovanna of Austria, Maria de’ Medici, Maria Maddalena d’Austria, and her sisters Margarita (queen of Spain) and Constance (queen of Poland). Niccolò Lorini del Monte’s earlier yearbook of female saints Elogii delle più principali S. Donne del sacro calendario, from 1617, was also dedicated to grand duchess Maria Maddalena.61 It has entries on all the sainted virgins depicted in the bedroom at Poggio Imperiale, and on Saints Ursula, Catherine of Alexandria and Cunegonda, depicted in the audience chamber. The section on the German queen Cunegonda has a special dedication to Maria Maddalena, and that on Saint Cristina to Cristina di Lorena.62 Presumably, by including St Cristina in the decorative scheme at Poggio Imperiale, Maria Maddalena is paying tribute to Cristina di Lorena, rather as the image of St Margaret also in the bedroom, along with the images of Spanish queens in the audience chamber, must have suggested her sister Margarita (d.1610). Female exemplars were also recalled in orations dedicated to illustrious women, usually composed for their funerary services. Francesco Gualterotti’s Delle lodi della Serenissima Arciduchessa Maria Maddalena d’Austria, was, however, written during the grand duchess’s lifetime, and first delivered on 27 February 1623, the second anniversary of the death of Cosimo II.63 Addressing Maria Maddalena as ‘governor of these states, regent of our natural lord’, Gualterotti’s reflections embraced figures from the recent past and present. Identifying Maria Maddalena’s aunt, Giovanna d’Austria, and sister Margarita, as exemplars, he called the grand duchess one of the ‘heroines’ of the Habsburg house, and compared her to heroic women from the Antiquity.64 Given its date, its themes of exemplary femininity might be connected more specifically with the decorative programme at Poggio Imperiale, and perhaps provided a textual source of inspiration for it.65

  Cristofano Bronzini d’Ancona, Della dignità, e nobilità delle donne (Florence, 1625–32). 61   Niccolò Lorini del Monte, Elogii delle più principali S. Donne del sacro calendario, e martilogia romana, vergini, martiri, et altre (Florence, 1617). 62   Lorini del Monte, Elogii, p. 100, p. 191. 63   Francesco Gualterotti, Delle lodi della Serenissima Arciduchessa Maria Maddalena d’Austria, Gran Duchessa di Toscana (Venice, 1623). 64   Elisa Acanfora, ʽIl governo per immagini: Maria Maddalena d’Austria e il ciclo delle Monarchie antiche e moderne nella Stanza della Stufaʼ, in Sergio Bertelli and Renato Pasta (eds), Vivere a Pitti. Una reggia dai Medici ai Savoia (Florence, 2003), pp. 51–3; Acanfora, ‘La Villa del Poggio Imperiale’, pp. 150–1. 65   Acanfora, ‘Il Governo per immagini’, pp. 52–3; Acanfora, ‘La Villa del Poggio Imperiale’, pp. 150–51. 60

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Maria Maddalena could draw on specific and accessible traditions in the decorative and visual arts which deployed the topos of exemplary women as models for the fresco cycle at Poggio Imperiale. The Graz Landschadenbundbecher belonging to Maria Maddalena’s mother Maria of Bavaria, and still remaining in Graz, perhaps offered one of her earliest points of reference for the representation of illustrious women. This gold-plated silver vessel, measuring over a metre in height, features three reliefs depicting biblical and Apocryphal exemplars: Esther before Ahasuerus, Judith and Holofernes, and the Queen of Sheba and Solomon, surmounted by a figure of Abundance.66 An important Florentine model for Maria Maddalena’s imagery of exemplary femininity must also have been duchess Eleonora di Toledo’s apartment in the Palazzo Ducale decorated by Giorgio Vasari and Giovanni Stradano from 1561–2 with schemes dedicated to Penelope, Esther, Gualdrada and the Sabine women.67 However, while this decorative progamme provided a precedent for Maria Maddalena’s own, the meanings and significances of the imagery reveal quite different purposes. Eleonora’s schemes evoked exemplars which defined the duchess’s role as wife and consort whereas Maria Maddalena’s seventeenth-century project largely transcends the limits of that identification in favour of more assertive representations of women’s heroism. For Caterina and Maria de’ Medici widowhood offered more scope to pursue their major cultural projects, and such projects were used to bolster the uneasy status of the female regent. In the case of Caterina de’ Medici, Sheila ffolliott has shown how Caterina’s claims to the role of regent on the death of her husband were founded on her links to the throne of France through her husband and sons, the imagery she deployed to enhance her position was developed through her status as mother and widow.68 Caterina used a range of literary and visual references to identify herself with Artemisia, wife of Mausolus, who served as regent for their son on Mausolus’s death.69 A series of drawings by Niccolò dell’Abbate 66   Berthold Sutter (ed.), Graz al Residenz: Innerösterreich 1564–1619 (Graz, 1964), p. 80, cat. no. 179. 67   Ettore Allegri and Alessandro Cecchi, Palazzo Vecchio e i Medici: Guida storica (Florence, 1980), pp. 195–212; Pamela J. Benson, ‘Eleonora di Toledo among the Famous Women: Iconographic Innovation after the Conquest of Siena’, in Konrad Eisenbichler (ed.), The Cultural World of Eleonora of Toledo, Duchess of Florence and Siena (Aldershot, 2004). 68   Sheila ffolliott, ‘Catherine de’ Medici as Artemisia: Figuring the Powerful Widow’, in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy Vickers (eds), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 1986), pp. 227–41, esp. p. 230. 69   Ibid.; Sheila ffolliott, ‘“La Florentine” or “La bonne Françoise”: Some SixteenthCentury Commentators on Catherine de Medici and Her Patronageʼ, in Christina Strunck (ed.), Artful Allies. Medici Women as Cultural Mediators, 1533–1743 (Milan, 2012), pp. 22–3; and Ivan Cloulas, ‘La Nouvelle Artémise’, in Cathérine de Médicis (Paris, 1979), pp. 319–69.

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and Antoine Caron was designed to illustrate Nicolas Houel’s Story of Artemisia (1562), written in honour of Caterina.70 The drawings were probably intended as designs for tapestries, and while there is no evidence that Caterina had tapestries made from them, the connection with Artemisia was, for French queens, a potent one, and both Maria de’ Medici and Anne of Austria, widow of Louis XIII, commissioned tapestries depicting Artemisia’s story.71 At Poggio Imperiale this famous widow was one of the heroines of Antiquity represented on canvas in the audience chamber, as we have seen (Figure 6.4). Moreover, through their building projects, Caterina and Maria de’ Medici and Maria Maddalena all emulated Artemisia, the key female prototype in the field of architectural patronage. Caterina’s architectural patronage in the devotional context specifically echoed that of Artemisia, with the plan to build the mausoleum at Saint-Denis for the French royal family.72 However, the secular projects of Poggio Imperiale, as the Tuileries and the Palais du Luxembourg, were not designed to commemorate the patrons’ dead husbands, but were distinctly personalized spaces that commemorated the patrons themselves. In terms of visual culture, the most striking comparison with Maria Maddalena’s art patronage at Poggio Imperiale is with Maria de’ Medici’s contemporary decorative project for the Palais du Luxembourg, beginning with a shared interest in the representation of illustrious women. Among the French queen’s ideas for the embellishment of her palace she proposed statues of famous women surmounting its roof. The choice of subjects was left to advisers and amongst those considered were Artemisia and Semiramis (proposed by Rubens but rejected by Maria’s expert) and famous women including Olympia, Berenice, Livia, Saint Clotilda and Blanche.73 Maria de’ Medici’s main concern with her decorative projects at the Palais du Luxembourg was not focused on famous women of the past, but on projecting an idea of herself as an illustrious woman of the present through Rubens’s series of twenty-four paintings celebrating her life. Maria Maddalena’s motives with the contemporaneous scheme at the Villa del Poggio Imperiale were rather similar in 70   The British Museum Collection online (accessed 1/6/12). Over sixty drawings were produced, only three of which were by Niccolò dell’Abbate. Also see Sylvie Béguin and Francesca Piccinini (eds), Nicolò dell’Abate: storie dipinte nella pittura del Cinquecento tra Modena e Fontainebleau (Milan, 2005). 71   Sheila ffolliott, ‘Catherine de’ Medici as Artemisia’, p. 231. 72   Ibid.; Christoph Luitpold Frommel, ‘Caterina de’ Medici, committente di architettura’, in Sabine Frommel and Gerhard Wolf, with Flaminia Bardati (eds), Il mecenatismo di Caterina de’ Medici: poesie, feste, musica, pittura, cultura, architettura (Venice, 2008), p. 383. 73   Deborah Marrow, The Art Patronage of Maria de’ Medici (Ann Arbor, 1982), p. 22, p. 66. Later, Anne of Austria undertook a similar project with art patronage; in 1655 she commissioned Philippe de Champaigne to produce a series of images of illustrious queens and empresses for her apartment at Val-de-Grâce, her favourite Parisian convent.

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that the decorative project represented a campaign of self-assertion which sought to focus the patron’s interests in visual terms. Yet Rubens’s beguiling works stylistically throw into the shade those for the grand duchess. His images, which represent scenes inspired by historical moments to project Maria de’ Medici’s life and experiences as heroic acts guided and overseen by mythical deities, saturated the figure of Maria in complex allegorical, mythological and emblematic references and devices.74 In all but one painting of the main (large-scale) canvases of the Maria de’ Medici Cycle the patron’s portrait is included, whereas in the frescoes at Poggio Imperiale the patron’s portrait is entirely excluded. While these female patrons may be seen to be united as cousins by blood and marriage, by their widowhood, and by their experience as regents, as well as by aspects of their art patronage, the Parisian and Florentine programmes evolved in the midst of very different political contexts. While Maria Maddalena was enjoying an enhanced role at court in the 1620s, Maria de’ Medici’s position was a suppressed and precarious one. As art patrons they sought imagery that looked distinctly different and produced different effects. The artists employed at Poggio Imperiale produced restrained and poetic visual narratives that evolved from the discipline of the Florentine reform tradition. Their understated style helps to make the images easily read, and works to underscore the piety and humility of the subjects rather than to glorify their power overtly. By avoiding portraiture and allegory the grand duchess and her artists avoided the problem of conflating the subject (the patron) directly with the image. Instead, the frescoes at Poggio Imperiale seem to represent the visual counterpart to contemporary feminist treatises, though Maria Maddalena is not actually represented in the scheme, but glorified indirectly. It is striking that in a collection of images of exemplary women chosen to evoke, or at least connect with, aspects of the grand duchess’s own identity, so many heroic virgins appear in the scheme, rather than wives, mothers or even widows, given her own status. It demonstrates that in Christian hagiography virginity for women was a defining feature of sanctity, but also perhaps that the virginal state was perceived as conducive to a powerful feminine identity. When we recall the importance for early modern moralists of the containment of the widow’s sexuality (in part by urging widows to achieve a higher spiritual state through sexual abstinence), the relevance of heroic virginity as an ideal for Maria Maddalena seems less far-fetched.75 The self-governing of the body might suggest qualities of self-disciplined leadership in the woman called upon to govern. Moreover, Christian theology’s ‘triple hierarchy’ for women ordered the possibilities of female piety, by placing the virgin highest above the widow

  On the complete Cycle see, Ronald Forsyth Millen and Robert Eric Wolf, Heroic Deeds and Mystic Figures: A New Reading of Rubens’ Life of Maria de’ Medici (Princeton, 1989); also see Fanny Cosandey, ‘Représenter une reine de France. Marie de Médicis et le cycle de Rubens au palais du Luxembourg’, Clio, 19 (2004): pp. 63–83. 75   Levy, ‘The Widow’s Peek’, p. 79. 74

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and the wife.76 And while loss of virginity precluded attaining the highest spiritual rewards for women, pious widowhood brought this achievement closer than the married state could. Some discourses encouraged a belief in the possibility for certain women of reclaiming ‘in the mind’ the lost physical state of virginity.77 Amongst female exemplars the experience of St Mary Magdalen was a particularly potent model and especially relevant in the era of Catholic reform: the Magdalen achieved the spiritual wholeness exemplified by the Virgin Mary, but through repentance and self-mortification (and by relinquishing her sexuality). In effect, she was able to cast off her former status as sinner and regress to the virgin’s state of purity. The image of the Magdalen was central to grand duchess Maria Maddalena’s personal iconography, developed in the decorative scheme of the reliquary chapel at Palazzo Pitti and in Sustermans’s portrait of her produced in the 1620s (see Figure 4.1). Magdalen imagery was emphatically deployed at Poggio Imperiale: from the statue of Mary Magdalen in the central cortile, to a series of scenes from the Magdalen’s life by Francesco Curradi for the chapel,78 to Rustici’s Dying Magdalen – significantly moved into the grand duchess’s bedroom from elsewhere in the villa. Moreover, as we have seen, an image of this penitent saint, thought to be by Leonardo, adorned the inginocchiatoio in the same room. This piece of furniture functioned as a personalized altarpiece and the position of the image of the Madgalen more or less at eye level would have facilitated, or rather urged, sustained engagement with it on the part of Maria Maddalena during her devotions.79 The inginocchiatoio’s various decorative elements include the entwined initials of Maria Maddalena and Cosimo in gilded silver, a device that ties the devotee firmly to the past. Seen in relation to the images of virgins there and elsewhere in the scheme, images of St Mary Magdalen suggest that an aspiration for renewed purity and spiritual wholeness was one considered appropriate to Maria Maddalena as a widow, and was possibly an ideal to which she aspired.80

  John Bugge, Virginitas: An Essay in the History of a Medieval Ideal (The Hague, 1975), p. 67. 77   Clarissa W. Atkinson, ‘“Precious balsam in a fragile glass”: the Ideology of Virginity in the Later Middle Ages’, Journal of Family History, 8 (1983): p. 19, citing Augustine’s concept of purity that suggested that a virgin who had been raped did not lose her virtue. 78   On the decoration of the chapel at Poggio Imperiale see Marilena Mosco (ed.), La Maddalena tra sacro e profano (Florence, 1986), pp. 237–9. 79   Anderson, Material Culture of Domestic Religion, p. 35. 80   On the significance of virginity as a theme in theatrical spectacles commissioned by and staged for Maria Maddalena in relation to the programme at Poggio Imperiale, see Harness, Echoes of Women’s Voices, pp. 62–110. For a different interpretation of the programme, see Ilaria Hoppe, ‘Maria Maddalena d’Austria e il culto delle reliquie alla corte 76

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However, it must surely also be significant that while nine of the ten lunettes in the grand duchess’s bedroom depict virgin martyrs, the tenth lunette features a more worldly female saint, Helena (Figure 6.5). In this image Helena, the diminutive, crowned figure at the centre of the scene depicting her discovery of the True Cross, is illuminated in a pool of light as the relic is presented to her. As Augusta and as mother of Constantine, as pilgrim and relic-hunter, Helena was perhaps of all the women depicted in the apartment the one most emphatically aligned to grand duchess Maria Maddalena’s own ideal. This devout and politically assertive figure represented a suitable exemplar for Maria Maddalena as a widow and mother, and as a wealthy and powerful patron committed to glorifying that position.

Figure 6.5 Domenico Pugliani, Saint Helena, c.1622–4. Florence, Villa del Poggio Imperiale. dei Medici. Scambi di modelli dinastici ed ecclesiastici’, in Christina Strunck (ed.), Artful Allies. Medici Women as Cultural Mediators, 1533–1743 (Milan, 2012), pp. 241–4.

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Conclusion Glorification of Maria Maddalena’s role and status was a principal function of the Villa del Poggio Imperiale in all its diverse aspects: art and architectural patronage, sponsorship of theatrical events, the collection and display of valuable objects. Its project was carefully managed. In the performance and negotiation of her identity as a female leader – whether through participation in rituals or in the choices she made as an art patron – Maria Maddalena was obliged to take on board notions of personal, dynastic and feminine responsibility, issues embedded in the decorative programme of the main apartment at her villa. The images there survive as testimony to the fact that Maria Maddalena implicitly understood how to celebrate her status: she projected an exulted image of herself as Mediceo-Habsburg patron through the spectacular project of Poggio Imperiale as a whole; and, in the politicized, personalized context of her apartment, images connected the patron to the exemplary acts of celebrated women. Yet these women – and so Maria Maddalena – are commemorated here only indirectly for their power, because attention is carefully focused above all on their purity, piety and humility. The problematic identity of the widow was one that had to be carefully negotiated if opportunities to seize the worldly and spiritual potential suggested by this readjustment in status were to be maximized, and the project of the Villa del Poggio Imperiale points to precisely that.

Afterword Through the pages of this book we have followed the progress of Giovanna d’Austria, Cristina di Lorena and Maria Maddalena d’Austria across aesthetic, religious and political realms in order to assess the significance of the fusion of visuality and sacrality in the experience of these women and in the fashioning of gendered identities. Letters and chronicles, as well as objects (including portraits, devotional paintings and reliquaries), suggest points at which visuality and devotion intersect in these women’s experiences – in activities including prayer, worship in churches, pilgrimages to shrines local and distant, and the collecting of sacred relics. These activities strikingly reveal both patterns in their practice and sharp distinctions between patrons’ needs, interests and opportunities, as well as differences in the outcomes of these activities. Devotion gave the grand duchesses special access to public space, and they used the spaces of devotion to position themselves politically. Piety, as an essential component of a particular contemporary ideal of femininity, played a part in defining their political selves, as an idealized image of devoutness helped to structure and determine their roles as leaders. Indeed, the centrality of piety to virtuous female leadership is made intensely clear in the public response to the tragic death of Giovanna d’Austria, and in the reputations for devoutness of Cristina di Lorena and Maria Maddalena d’Austria. Moreover, the diverse rituals in which the grand duchesses were involved functioned as performances by which they claimed authority. The practice of piety as a strategy for promoting an idealized and powerful image would seem to be one that paid off. Regular and special devotional practice allowed the grand duchesses to stage relationships with holy places and to be seen doing so – glimpsed en route to Florence’s churches, observed as they enacted their devotions. Their activities perpetuated, refreshed and evolved the grand ducal family’s connections with favoured sites, particularly the shrine at Santissima Annunziata. These localized peregrinations, as other conspicuously devout activities, thus worked to empower the women who performed them because of the special attention that these activities produced. Nevertheless this attention had to be carefully managed. The activities of Cristina di Lorena and Maria Maddalena d’Austria changed the scope of public ritual in Florence. The first dowry festival of 1592, introduced by Ferdinando I, placed Cristina di Lorena at the head of the procession of dowry recipients. The festa delle doti became an annual spectacle of Medicean benefaction in which the grand duchess or her surrogate took the lead. After the death of Ferdinando I in 1609, Cristina and Maria Maddalena played increasingly significant roles in the performance of public life. But their experiences were very different. During more than twenty-five years of widowhood, Cristina di Lorena

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tended to opt for a low-key approach to devout visibility. Making Santissima Annunziata her particular focus when in Florence, she visited there frequently (as had her husband) often travelling across the city ‘incognito’. With one of her daughters installed at the nearby convent of La Crocetta from 1621, Cristina could combine worship at Santissima Annunziata with a visit there, now connected by a private passageway to the church to facilitate privileged viewing of the shrine’s sacred image. Thus this zone of sustained Medicean devotion and patronage became increasingly feminized. Journeys from palace to church or convent, or both, characterized Cristina’s habitual practice when in Florence, which became significant through repetition. Maria Maddalena chose a different route. During the era of Cosimo II, her experience can be seen as a struggle for visibility that came to be articulated through the assertive manipulation of her image in publicly oriented ritual in commemoration of the female life cycle. Eight pregnancies in the first eight years of marriage necessarily meant the repeated withdrawal of the grand duchess from public life, but the spectacular orchestration of the rituals around the births of grand ducal children – from the relatively private and exclusively female prime visite enacted in Maria Maddalena’s bedchamber to the elaborate processionals staged for purification rituals, when the grand duchess went to be churched forty days after giving birth – meant that Maria Maddalena’s re-entry into the public sphere was intensely theatricalized. During these years, Maria Maddalena took the lead in the festa delle doti. She thus challenged the limits of this role through the energetic way in which she expressed her responsibilities as Cosimo’s wife, mother of grand ducal heirs and a leader in her own right. In the ceremonies in which she figured, the grand duchess used the accoutrements of her position – lavish attire, a significant entourage – to deliberately enhance her visibility and thus to challenge the power of the gaze of others. New visual articulations in these ceremonials made her role more prominent and her agency more evident. Devotional spaces are sites of transition and transformation, of power positioning and cultural determination. But the term ‘devotional space’ works only as a generalization, and an understanding of the specificity of place is required to interpret the relevance and impact of devotion, as in the case of Santissima Annunziata. Each of the Medici women made devotionally resonant journeys beyond Florence, cultivating relationships with particular sacred places, such as the church of Santa Maria all’ Impruneta, and the Marian shrine at Monsummano. These activities contributed to a developing landscape of holiness in Tuscany and even beyond it, in which female Medicean piety was highly visible. On diplomatic trips into Medicean territories, the grand ducal family transferred and extended established codes of display to new sites. Tours of Siena and Arezzo in 1611 and 1612, for example, were underscored by acts of worship at the major and favoured shrines and churches of their territories, the veneration of relics and giving of alms. In these contexts Cristina, and especially Maria Maddalena, had increasingly significant roles to play in public contexts: made visible in Tuscany, they forcefully

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positioned themselves as part of the grand ducal group and as Tuscany’s leading female figures. The most compelling use of devotion in terms of power positioning by Medici women was in that most elaborate of processions, the far-flung pilgrimage, of which the most significant, because ambitious, spectacular and self-advertising, were their journeys to the Holy House at Loreto. Giovanna established the precedent for secular Medici figures with her pilgrimage of 1573; Cristina and Maria Maddalena followed with their own versions of the journey in 1593 and 1613. The spaces of Medici women’s pilgrimages to Loreto are problematic: at once deeply personal as a collection of devout experiences, they were also highly public, visual processes that could be politically useful and versatile. These processes curiously and paradoxically rendered displays of humility ostentatious. A matrix of devotional, dynastic and political concerns focused on objects with sacred resonance as well as events. From the altarpieces and reliquaries that Cristina di Lorena gifted to Florentine churches, to the fabulous collection of relics and reliquaries which Maria Maddalena brought together in her chapel at Palazzo Pitti, a space that was redecorated on her order and used by her as a setting for regular and special services, the grand duchesses used devotional images and objects tactically, to lend support to a particular cult, or accrue to themselves spiritual blessings and wider dynastic and political prestige. Maria Maddalena in particular, as a passionate collector of relics, deployed these precious objects strategically, as commodities to be obtained as gifts and sometimes gifted, and in operations of display and veneration within the environment of the palace. In the period of the regency, Maria Maddalena used art patronage to explore her status as a Christian leader, as widow and regent. At the Villa del Poggio Imperiale she cleverly united her worldly and devout interests, as part of a wider programme of advantageous self-positioning following the changes in her status. Maria Maddalena’s project at the villa is contemporaneous with Maria de’ Medici’s patronage of Rubens at the Palais du Luxembourg. These projects can be usefully compared as lavish programmes of art patronage by Medici women, but they are also very distinct, not least in terms of the needs and strategies of the patrons and the different effects produced. Maria Maddalena’s project operated with greater subtlety to celebrate and enhance her power. Rather than invoking the patron directly, the decorative programme at Poggio Imperiale explored and evolved links between female sanctity and power with images of sainted queens and empresses, biblical heroines and female martyrs. Maria Maddalena used this project in tandem with events and activities with devout resonance staged in the villa and its grounds in the 1620s, including theatrical performances, and services around the feast of Corpus Christi, which blurred distinctions between sacred and (ostensibly) secular interests, and placed the grand duchess-regent at their centre. Her diverse strategies of association with female exemplars at Poggio Imperiale countered the potentially problematic status of the widow by exalting both widowhood and virginity. Maria Maddalena’s association with her namesaint – through images and relics of the Magdalen – became part of this project, as

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she claimed for herself a state of renewed spiritual wholeness through which she sought to determine and exploit an enhanced political role. Case studies of the diverse activities of three high-placed Medici women demonstrate that personal piety alone can no longer explain the scope of these patrons’ devotional acts and interests. So long as women’s political identities could not be expressed directly, and indeed could seldom be articulated explicitly, their agendas necessitated the use and evolution of different modes of expressing and shaping powerful roles. Acknowledging cultural restrictions in women’s practice, and, as a result, expanding on a definition of ‘art patronage’ to encompass wider cultural and devotional objectives, allows one to recapture the richness and diversity of these patrons’ interests. It also opens possibilities for wide-ranging comparisons with women of the early modern period and outside of it, in order to ask pressing questions on patterns in women’s practice: not least, how unusual were the Medici women in their uses of devotion, seen against the activities of others, in other times and places, other cultural settings and political situations?

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Index page numbers in italics refer to images Allori, Alessandro Portrait of Giovanna dʼAustria (Plate 1), 18 St Fiacre Healing the Sick 47 Vision of St Hyacinth 47, 48 Allori, Cristofano 81 amber 72, 82 Arditi, Bastiano 29, 30, 31, 32 Balducci, Giovanni called Il Cosci 40 Cristina di Lorena taking leave of Caterina deʼ Medici 41 baptisms 11, 29 (note 72), 67–8 Borromeo, Carlo St 52, 79 Borromeo, Federico 79, 80, 88, 89 Brunelleschi 49 Burke, Peter 6 Butler, Judith 7 Caccini, Francesca 65, 117 Callot, Jacques Life of Ferdinando series 40, 42, 51, 52, 62, 96 Illustrations for Lottiniʼs Scelta dʼalcuni miracoli e grazie della santissima nunziata ... 95–6, 96 Cappello, Bianca 4, 21, 29 (note 72), 30 Caravaggio and Caravaggisti 122–4 Caterina deʼ Ricci 26 childbirth 4, 13, 25, 29–30, 42, 43–4, 62–4, 107 rituals around childbirth 9, 11, 58, 64 Prime visite 64–5, 67, 140 Messa in santo (churching) 65–7, 68, 70, 90, 140 use of relics 75 churches (for Florentine churches see entries under ‘Florenceʼ)

Cathedrals Livorno 99–100 Perugia 102–104 Turin 14 Siena 109, 114, 120, 140 San Francesco (Foligno) 104 Santa Maria allʼImpruneta 53, 80–81, 100, 140 Cicognini, Jacopo 87 clothing ordered by Maria Maddalena dʼAustria 66–7 represented in paintings Artemisia Gentileschiʼs Penitent Magdalen 122, 123 Francesco Curradiʼs Artemisia drinks the ashes of Mausolus 127, 128 portraits of Medici women 18, 35–6, 113 worn in rituals 8, 27, 57, 66–7, 68, 70 lying-in-state of Giovanna dʼAustria 31–2 convents (for Florentine convents see entries under ‘Florenceʼ) Las Descalzas Reales (Madrid) 32, 74 Las Descalzas Reales (Valladolid) 86 Le Contesse (Foligno) 104 San Vincenzo (near Prato) 26 Val-du-Grâce (Paris) 115, 133 (note 73) visited by Margaret of Austria 24 Corpus Christi, festival of 14, 39, 64, 118–9, 141 Cristina di Lorena 1–5, 8, 10, 35–56, 59, 60, 64, 66, 68, 75, 90, 93, 98, 99, 100, 108, 109, 117, 119, 121, 122 (note 33), 129, 131, 139–42

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as granddaughter of Caterina deʼ Medici 4, 35, 40, 76 Cristina di Lorena taking leave of Caterina deʼ Medici by Giovanni Balducci 41 as recipient of sacred presents 75 as regent 1, 110, 113, 114 as widow 6, 36, 42, 51, 95, 110 bridal entrata 20–21, 59, 60 collection (Stanza di Madama at the Uffizi) 76–77 commissioning paintings 47, 86, 121 (note 26), 124 commissioning/owning reliquaries 77, 81 (note 50), 83 devotion to shrines Monsummano 54–55, 56, 100, 140 pilgrimage to Loreto 2, 46, 101–105, 108, 110, 141 Santa Maria allʼImpruneta 100 Santissima Annunziata 2, 45 (note 39), 64, 66, 94, 95–6, 109–110, 140 Marriage of Ferdinando I and Cristina di Lorena by Jacques Callot 42 parents 4 portrait by Scipione Pulzone (Plate 2) 35–36, 113 portrait by Tiberio Titi (Plate 3) 36 role in the Festa delle doti (dowry festival) 8, 50–52, 55, 62, 69 support of convents 98 (note 50) La Crocetta 96–8, 140 Curradi, Francesco 86, 135 Artemisia drinks the ashes of Mausolus 127, 128 Del Monte, Francesco Maria, cardinal 71, 121 (note 25) Della Bella, Stefano View of the Villa del Poggio Imperiale 117, 118 Devotion of the Forty Hours (Quarantore) 52–4, 56, 95 Dowry Festival (see ‘Festa delle dotiʼ) Eleonora dʼAustria, duchess of Mantua 22, 24

Eleonora of Aragon, duchess of Ferrara 31 Eleonora di Toledo, duchess of Florence 2, 23, 25, 26, 30, 45, 69, 100, 120 (note 23), 123, 132 Este women 44, 66, 67 exemplary women in literary and pictorial traditions 130–33 portrayed at the Villa del Poggio Imperiale 11, 125–9, 134–7, 141 Falchi, Jonas 83 Festa delle doti 3, 8–9, 11, 50–52, 55, 58, 61–2, 68–9, 70, 119 (note 19), 139, 140 engraving of the Festa by Jacques Callot 52 Florence churches Baptistry 32, 39, 44, 51, 64, 67–8 San Lorenzo 5, 14, 32–3, 38, 49–51, 55, 59, 60, 61, 95, 119 (note 19) Santa Croce 32, 38, 61 Santa Felicita 38, 44, 45 Santa Maria del Fiore (Duomo) 14, 16, 32, 39, 45, 53, 54, 57, 59, 60, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 94, 108, 119 (note 19) Santa Maria Maria Novella 38, 44 Santissima Annunziata 3, 9, 11, 14, 16–7, 25, 32, 36 (note 9), 38, 44–5, 46, 53 (note 70), 54, 56, 64, 66, 87, 94–7, 103, 109–10, 139, 140 Santo Spirito 47 convents and monasteries 23, 24, 38, 98 (note 15) La Crocetta 3, 84, 96–8, 140 Monastero Nuovo 84 palaces Palazzo Ducale (Palazzo della Signoria / Palazzo Vecchio) 25 (note 49), 29 (note 72), 31, 38 (note 16), 39, 40 (note 26), 45, 59, 68, 74, 94, 120 (note 23), 132 Palazzo Medici on Via Larga 16, 32, 49, 51

Index Palazzo Pitti 38, 39, 44, 45, 47, 57, 60, 66, 67 (note 34), 84, 90, 94, 108 Cappella delle Reliquie/Chapel of Relics 6, 11, 72, 79, 81, 82–91, 93, 99, 135, 141 Palazzo degli Uffizi 5, 38, 76–7, 125, 126 funerals 6, 8, 10, 13, 26, 31–33, 43 Gentileschi, Artemisia Florentine sojourn 122 Penitent Magdalen 122, 123 Giambologna 27 Giovanna dʼAustria 1, 3–4, 13–34, 36, 45, 46, 59, 67, 68, 75, 131 bridal entrata 8, 10, 13, 18–21, 40, 59, 60 death 4, 10, 13, 21, 25, 29–31 financial constraints 25 funeral 8, 10, 32–3 parents 3–4 piety 22–3, 25, 29–30, 31 pilgrimage to Loreto 2, 26–9, 46, 100 (note 25), 101, 104, 107, 108, 110, 139–42 portrait by Alessandro Allori (Plate 1), 18 support of the Jesuits 23–4 Giovanni da San Giovanni 55, 97 Gonzaga family/dynasty 14, 24, 39, 54, 94–5, 121 Grosz, Elizabeth 8, 58 Habsburg court 18, 82 Habsburg family/dynasty (see separate entries for Giovanna dʼAustria and Maria Maddalena dʼAustria) 20, 21, 24, 32, 33, 34, 59, 60, 73, 74, 78, 81, 100, 125, 131, 137 Ferdinand II, archduke 78 Holy Roman Emperors Charles V 20, 24, 31 (note 81), 32, 125 Ferdinand II 5 (note 11), 94–5 (as king of Bohemia), 125 Matthias 94 Maximilian II 20, 22, 25, 74

163

Rudolf II 74, 125 Joanna (Juana) of Austria 24, 32, 74 Karl (II) of Syria 5, 59, 78 Margaret of Austria 121 Margarita of Austria, queen of Spain 24, 33, 43, 59, 76, 86, 115, 131 Philip II, king of Spain 27, 33, 39, 74, 84, 121 Helena, St 127, 136 Domenico Pugliani, St Helena 136 Hills, Helen 9, 110 Incuria, Girolamo 101 Innsbruck 13, 18, 23, 31 Isabella of Savoy 44 Jesuits 23–4, 25, 54 (note 73), 80, 101 jewels and jewellery 18, 28, 31, 32, 35, 36, 66, 67, 68, 76, 88, 90, 119 (note 19) cross worn by Cosimo I deʼ Medici 71 grand ducal crown 35, 90 Julius II, pope 107 Knights of the Order of Santo Stefano 38, 50, 53, 55, 90, 108 Church of the Cavalieri di Santo Stefano (Pisa) 54 La Verna 87, 100 (note 25) Landucci, Luca 16 Leo X, pope 26, 77, 105, 107, 108 Leonardo da Vinci 129, 135 Ligozzi, Jacopo 124, 129 The Madonna appearing to St Francis 87, 100, 103 Livorno 43, 99–100 Loreto Holy House of the Virgin (Santa Casa) 2, 9, 11, 13, 26–9, 46, 56, 80, 93, 94, 101–108, 109–10, 141 rivestimento 26, 106–7 engravings of the Holy House by Hubert Vincent 105–6 Madrid 24, 121, 74 Maggi, Giovanni Bridal Entrata of Maria Maddalena dʼAustria (engraving) 57, 58

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Mantua 24, 39, 95, 121 Maria Maddalena dʼAustria 1–3, 5–6, 9–11, 62 (note 15) as relic collector 6, 11, 72, 74, 79–83, 90–91 as regent and widow 1, 6, 11, 66, 72, 113, 130–37, 141–2 Portrait of Maria Maddalena dʼAustria and Her Son Ferdinando by Sustermans (Plate 4), 113 bridal entrata 8, 10, 13, 18–21, 40, 59–61 engraving by Giovanni Maggi 57, 58 death 5 (note 11) devotion to St Mary Magdalen 71–2, 86, 87, 135 inginocchiatoio at Poggio Imperiale 128–9, 135 Portrait of Maria Maddalena dʼAustria as St Mary Magdalen by Sustermans 72, 73 parents 5 patronage at Villa del Poggio Imperiale 11, 113, 116–38 (Plate 4), 113 pilgrimage to Loreto 2, 9, 11, 93, 101–2, 103, 105, 107–9, 110, 141 Medici, Alessandro deʼ, duke of Florence 5, 77 Medici, Carlo deʼ, cardinal 100 Medici, Caterina deʼ, queen of France 2, 4–5, 20, 35, 40, 41, 78, 114, 132–3 cabinets at the Hotel de la Reine 76–7 Medici, Caterina deʼ, (daughter of Cristina di Lorena) 42 (note 27), 46, 66, 68 as Caterina deʼ Medici–Gonzaga, duchess of Mantua 94–5, 121 Medici, Claudia deʼ (daughter of Cristina di Lorena) 42 (note 27), 68, 94, 119 (note 19) Medici, Cosimo deʼ, (the Elder) 35 Medici, Cosimo I deʼ 14, 16, 17, 18–20, 23, 31, 32, 33, 35, 38, 50, 59, 69, 71, 84, 90, 114 Medici, Cosimo II deʼ 5, 11, 40, 44, 47 (note 49), 49, 51, 55, 57, 59–61, 64, 72, 75, 77, 83, 86, 90, 93, 94, 97, 99, 100, 108, 113, 114, 122, 131, 135, 140

pilgrimage to Loreto 80, 101, 103–4, 107, 108, 109–10 tours of Tuscany 98–9, 102, 109 Medici, Eleonora deʼ (daughter of Giovanna dʼAustria) 4 Medici, Eleonora deʼ (daughter of Cristina di Lorena) 42 (note 27), 68 Medici, Ferdinando I deʼ 3, 4–5, 10, 17, 35, 36, 40, 41–3, 47, 49, 50–51, 53, 56, 59, 62, 64, 71, 93, 100, 107, 114, 139 devotional practice 17, 36–9, 44, 45, 46, 50, 54–5, 94, 99–100 Life of Ferdinando series, by Jacques Callot 40, 42, 51, 52, 62, 96 Medici, Ferdinando deʼ, later grand duke Ferdinando II, 5, 49, 62 (note 15), 64, 65, 66, 68, 67 (note 34), 81 (note 50), 87, 94, 108, 109, 113, 124, 125 Portrait of Maria Maddalena dʼAustria and Her Son Ferdinando, by Sustermans (Plate 4), 113 Medici, Filippo deʼ (son of Giovanna dʼAustria) 4, 29, 31, 67–8 Medici, Francesco I deʼ 3–4, 13, 17, 18, 19, 21–2, 27, 32, 33, 35, 46, 68, 78, 84, 114 Medici, Giovanni deʼ, cardinal 4 Medici, Giuliano deʼ 16 Medici, Lorenzo deʼ, (the Magnificent) 5, 16, 35 Medici, Maria deʼ, queen of France 2, 4, 40, 46, 61, 75, 114–5 and exemplary women 130–33 art patronage (also see relevant entry under ‘paintingsʼ) 62–4, 133–4, 141 Medici, Maria Cristiana deʼ (daughter of Maria Maddalena dʼAustria) 62 (note 15), 68, 79, 84 Medici, Maria Maddalena deʼ (daughter of Cristina di Lorena) 42 (note 27), 68, 84, 96–8 Merlini, Cosimo 81, 83 Michelangelo 5, 49 Michelozzo 16 Monsummano 36 (note 9), 54–5, 56, 100, 140

Index Montesenario 16 (note 8), 54 Napoletano, Filippo 77, 121 (note 25) Orsini, Camilla 69 paintings 77, 139 at Villa del Poggio Imperiale frescoes in the ground–floor apartment 116, 125–6, 126, 127, 131, 132, 136–7, 141 Domenico Pugliani, St Helena 136 other artworks 116–27, 135 Francesco Curradi, Artemisia drinks the ashes of Mausolus 128 for Eleonora di Toledo 120 (note 23), 132 in the Reliquary Chapel 84–7, 89 Volto Santo 88 in the Tribuna of the Uffizi 78 Rubensʼs Maria deʼ Medici Cycle 62–4, 133–4, 141 Birth of Louis XIII 63 Palais du Luxembourg 133, 141 Parigi, Giulio 88, 89, 97, 109, 116, 117 Paul II, pope 26 Perugia 27, 93, 102–104, 110 pilgrimages (also see ʼLoretoʼ) 11, 34, 93–111, 139, 141 Pisa 8 (note 16), 25, 43, 45, 54 Pius V, pope 23, 27, 44, 75, 90 Pulzone, Scipione Portrait of Cristina di Lorena (Plate 2), 35–6, 131 Raphael 78, 104 relics (also see ‘Loretoʼ and ‘pilgrimagesʼ) Chapel of Relics at Palazzo Pitti 6, 11, 72, 79, 81, 82–91, 93, 99, 135, 141 Clare of Montefalco 103, 104 gifting of relics and sacred items 27–8, 44, 47, 54, 71, 73, 74, 75, 79–80, 84, 141 girdle of St Margaret 75 Gonzaga family’s use of relics 14, 95 hair (of Christ; of St Mary Magdalen) 71–2

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Holy Shroud 14 milk of the Blessed Virgin 102 St Fiacre 41 (note 49) St Fortunata 99 St Francis 74, 104, 110 St Hyacinth 41 St Inès of Hungary, and reliquary 74 St John the Baptist 109 St William of Aquitaine 80 reliquary by Andrea Tarchiani 83 St Zenobius 14, 46, 108 True Cross 74 (note 9), 80–82, 84, 99 (note 20), 136 reliquary by Cosimo Merlini 81 Virginʼs wedding ring 102–3, 104 Ricci, Caterina deʼ 26 Ricci, Giuliano deʼ 25, 29, 30, 31, 32 Rucellai, Palla 26 sacred images Annunciate Virgin at SS. Annunziata 2, 17, 38, 87, 97, 98, 140 Madonna of Impruneta 19, 53, 81–2 (note 50), 100 Siena 19, 23, 25, 98–9, 102, 103, 109 Sienese artists 122, 124 Sustermans, Justus 72 (note 4), 121 Portrait of Maria Maddalena dʼAustria as St Mary Madgalen 72, 73, 135 Portrait of Maria Maddalena dʼAustria with Her Son Ferdinando (Plate 4), 113 Sustermans, Jan 121 theatrical spectacles (including sacre rappresentazioni) 2, 87, 89, 137, 141 La liberazione di Ruggiero dallʼisola dʼAlcina 117–8 La regina SantʼOrsola 126 Tinghi, Cesare 10, 37, 40, 46, 51, 54, 61, 61, 64, 65, 66, 88–9, 90, 95, 103, 107, 109, 110, 116–7, 127 Titi, Tiberio 121 (note 26) Portrait of Cristina di Lorena (Plate 3), 36 triumphal entries 19 bridal entrate 6, 8, 10, 13, 18–21, 40, 59–61, 62

166

Art, Gender and Religious Devotion in Grand Ducal Tuscany engravings of entry arches by Orazio Scarabelli 20, 21

Valladolid 24, 76, 86 Valois family/dynasty 40 portraits 77 tapestries 5 Vasari, Giorgio 21, 31, 132

Corridoio 38, 44 Villas Ambrogiana 43, 45 Montevettolini 55, 100 Poggio a Caiano 23 (note 40), 55, 100 Poggio Imperiale 3, 5, 11, 87, 100, 113, 116–37, 141 Pratolino 50 (note 57), 53 (note 70)