A mattress maker's daughter: the Renaissance romance of Don Giovanni de' Medici and Livia Vernazza 9780674369092, 9780674724662

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
List of Illustrations (page ix)
Preface (page xi)
Prologue (page 1)
1. The Family Business (page 13)
2. The Mattress Maker's Daughter (page 66)
3. The Heart of Combat (page 100)
4. Writing the Passions (page 151)
5. A Place for Things (page 183)
6. Mind over Matter (page 216)
7. Durable Goods (page 246)
8. Time and Memory (page 282)
Postscript (page 315)
Notes (page 323)
Acknowledgments (page 433)
Index (page 435)

Citation preview

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I TATTI STUDIES IN ITALIAN RENAISSANCE HISTORY

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

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)

A Mattress Maker's Daughter THE RENAISSANCE ROMANCE OF DON GIOVANNI DE’ MEDICI AND

LIVIA VERNAZZA

BRENDAN DOOLEY

Hl

ty Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2014

Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dooley, Brendan Maurice, 1953-

A mattress maker’s daughter : the Renaissance romance of Don Giovanni de’ Medici and Livia Vernazza / Brendan Dooley. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-72466-2 1. Medici, Giovanni de’, 1567-1621—Relations with women. 2. Vernazza, Livia, 1590?-1655. 3. Princes—Italy—Biography. 4. Soldiers—Italy—Biography. 5. Women—Italy—Biography. 6. Mistresses—Italy—Biography. 7. Couples—Italy—Biography. 8. Renaissance— Italy—Biography. 9. Italy—Social life and customs—16th century. 10. Social change—Italy—History—16th century. I. Title. DG738.29.M43D66 2014 945'.07092—dc23 2013031633

cc DP NON BENE MARS BELLUM POSITA NISI VESTE MINISTRO

I, Mars, cannot make war well unless I remove my clothes. Inscription on Venetian bas-relief attributed to Antonio Lombardo

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Contents

Preface XI Prologue I 1. The Family Business 13

List of Illustrations ix

2. The Mattress Maker’s Daughter 66

3. The Heart of Combat I0O

4. Writing the Passions I5I 5. A Place for Things 183

6. Mind over Matter 216 7. Durable Goods 246 8. Time and Memory 282

Postscript 315

Notes 323 Acknowledgments 433 Index 435

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Illustrations

Bande Nere 15

1.1 Cristofano dell’Altissimo, Portrait of Giovanni delle

1.2 Copy from Bronzino, Portrait of Cosimo I 16

1.3 Santi di Tito, Don Giovanni de’ Medici 27 1.4 Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Francesco I 30 1.5 Scipione Pulzone, Portrait of Ferdinando I 33 1.6 Don Giovanni de’ Medici, facade design for

Santa Maria del Fiore 35

de’ Medici 43

1.7 Jacopo Chimenti detto Empoli, Wedding of Maria

1.8 Peter Paul Rubens, The Disembarkation of Marie de’ Medici AA

1.9 Don Giovanni de’ Medici, design for Cappella dei Principi 50

1.10 Buonsignori map of Florence, detail showing Parione 59 2.1 Lafrery map of Genoa, showing Sant’Andrea parish 72

3.1 The Venetian attack on April 1, 1617 127

3.2 The Venetian attack in June 1617 133 3.3. Pietro Tozzi, Don Giovanni de’ Medici 146 5.1 Plan of Palazzo Pitti, showing Don Giovanni’s rooms 189

5.2. Drawing of Villa Le Macine 200

ILLUSTRATIONS x

5.3. Don Giovanni de’ Medici, design for a fountain 201 5.4. Giusto Suttermans, Portrait of Cosimo II de’ Medici with Wife Maria Maddalena of Austria and Their Son

Ferdinando II de’ Medici 211

7.1 Santi di Tito, Portrait of Cristina of Lorraine 260

Preface

Montughi, June 28, 2010

Thinking the object of our quest might lie in the villa itself, we made our way to Montughi by the gently winding road out of Florence in the direction of viale Gaetano Pieraccini toward Careggi and the main hospital of Florence. Villa “Le Macine” was unmistakable by the plaque, affixed to the wall probably long after Livia Vernazza and Don Giovanni

de’ Medici sojourned there. In the vicinity were traces of some other previous owners. Not Giovanni Francesco Marta, the couple’s son. He lived there after his parents were both dead and made a deal with the Celestine fathers to whom Livia left the property, keeping just the house while the Celestines kept the gardens. But he made his mark elsewhere, not here; and so did some other owners, including a certain Captain Francesco Cardi da Cigoli and members of the Strozzi family. Eventually the villa passed into the Casamorata family, who gave the name to the street where it now stands and, to Florentine music, a com-

poser. Just beyond the villa this road intersects with another, commemorating another previous owner: the Livorno-born actor Ernesto

PREFACE X11

Rossi. By his time, the villa had already played a distinguished role in the history of the performing arts. We came looking for more evidence of a long-lost love affair, more insight into why a Medici prince formed a liaison with a mattress maker’s daughter, against his family and a disapproving world, and how they managed to survive. Perhaps engaging with their things ourselves

we could understand what their things meant to them and how possession and ownership bound their souls one to another. Sharing some of their spaces perhaps we could sense their freedoms and their constraints. Pieraccini for us was far more than a street name. He was the

author of a multivolume study of the Medici family, written in the early twentieth century to demonstrate how personality and medical condition affected political behavior. He was also commemorated because of his role in public health and his term as postwar mayor of Florence. By the time “his” street was built alongside the hospital that

he helped plan, all that remained of Livia was her legend, which he contributed at least to embellishing, if not actually forming. Around the villa we found no sign of the dramas of love and death mentioned in the documents. Livia’s coat of arms, improvised by Giovanni to exalt her parentage, was no longer prominently displayed on a corner of the structure. The garden was no longer a respite for weary socialites or a refuge for an outcast. There was nothing left of the fine fountain or the wall in which it was built; fruit trees were few, the rose bushes were small and new, and there were no vegetables. There was a palm in one corner, possibly planted during the fashion for trees that hearkened back to Italy’s brief African empire. The whole area had been developed well after Florence ceased being the first capital of the

new Italian state. Rather than sweeping over a distant horizon, the vista stopped short at the surrounding constructions crowded into the available space during the building boom of the “Italian Miracle” in the 1950s.

Venturing inside, we discovered a setting for dramas of another kind, not dreamed of by Livia and Giovanni. There had never really been any signs here of the studies that made Giovanni famous in his time, or the disagreements with Galileo that earned him a place in science history textbooks. This was supposed to be Livia’s villa, not his;

PREFACE X111

but there were also no signs here of the woman whose legend charmed the imagination of Gabriele D’Annunzio, Italy’s national poet. Gone

were the paintings on the walls, by the finest Renaissance and early Baroque hands, Italian and Transalpine; gone were the fine Persian rugs, the rich tapestries, the ornate oak and walnut consoles, chests, tables, chairs, now replaced by utilitarian objects mostly of steel and plastic, resistant to use and mishandling by the legions of young people who now frequent these halls. No small, well-furnished kitchen served up simple but elegant dishes based on ingredients grown on the estate,

flavored with herbs and spices from the garden, to be washed down with the products of the attached vineyards, now nowhere to be seen. A university department devoted to “Sciences of Education” now held courses in “social pedagogy” on these premises, terminating in a BA degree qualifying the candidate as a “Professional Educator.” There was much here worthy of pondering in the context of our two protago-

nists. We looked at some of the brochures. The innovative style of teaching placed “the student at the center of the formative processes.” Each one was assigned a tutor, who, with the professor, would accompany the student in “activities of analysis, of comprehension, of matu-

ration.” User-friendly education in an open society promised each young citizen a chance for self-fulfillment, perhaps the chance that would make their lives. The same approach characterized the kind of childhood education that was the subject of the courses. Seminars proposed “What game shall we play?” based on the notion that “chil-

dren’s games are a form of knowledge and experimentation with reality.” And again, students would be taught to pay attention to the child, as the child has something to say—even when silent. “The language of children” is something adults ought to learn, while taking account also of “nonverbal communication.” Stepping out again into the warm afternoon, we reflected upon what we had just seen and heard. The principles of the new program seemed to enshrine values and prospects that our society, long since the time of Livia and Giovanni, had come to hold in high regard. Young people should no longer have to run away or remain unheard; nor should they sacrifice themselves on the altar of convention, or be disgraced. Children

may behave like children until they find their own road in life. Since

PREFACE X1V

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

“a The following chapters enter the world of Livia and Giovanni, so distant, so unfamiliar, by the few remaining passageways making it intelligible, possibly still fascinating, certainly instructive. Discovering the garden of Le Macine in its prime, and the people who enjoyed it in

their youth and advancing age, and the circumstances that brought them here and to their other haunts—between Careggi and San Miniato,

between porta al Prato and porta San Niccolo, between Florence and Venice, between Italy and Europe—and their thoughts and preoccupa-

tions, their missions and objectives, their triumphs and disasters, reveals the ways of a remote cosmos, focused through the lens of a single half-forgotten episode, and a memory’s strange career over five hundred years. I hope the reader may find the journey enjoyable as well as worthwhile.

A Mattress Maker's Daughter

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Prologue

The first time Don Giovanni mentioned Livia Vernazza to his family was in the account of a street brawl that nearly ended in homicide. He had been entertaining some friends at the palazzo in Parione, along the Arno River on the western edge of Florence, late one night in early July, 1611. The weather was hot; the guests were restless. Geography

and climatology supply what the document does not. Evening breezes

would have been seeping in while the river gurgled past the south window, bearing various trade-related discharges. The advancing stench from the rotting animal carcasses in the city dump just downriver from Parione would have enveloped the palazzo in the same asphyxiating miasma noted by observers many decades later in this part of town.’ No wonder Giovanni gave up on sleep and headed for the door. Although he did not pronounce her name in his account to his half-

brother, the grand duke of Tuscany, their liaison was well enough known for his reader to recognize Livia as the “young lady” who “is my friend.” A few details seemed calculated to shock a prudish imagination:

PROLOGUE 2

Your Most Serene Highness must know that yesterday after dining at my house, completely undressed, wearing only a cape of Flanders silk over my shirt, in the company of Signor Don Garzia Montalvo and

Signor Vincenzo Martelli, who were also in their shirts and stockings, without coats, after dinner Signor Vincenzo went about his business and I, along with Signor Don Garzia retired to my rooms, and as there was a young lady present, who 1s my friend, I said I did not know how I would get to sleep.?

The term “undressed,” in its ambiguous syntax, seemed calculated to scandalize the grand duchess with whom the report would no doubt have been shared.

Giovanni apparently put the question to Don Garzia: what to do now? Don Garzia, his companion on many a venture, both of virtue and of mischief, proposed a carriage ride. Giovanni liked the idea, and

a conveyance was prepared. Although his account is detailed, some interpretation is needed in order to make sense of the outcome. He specifies that he packed the weapon only as an afterthought, so he did not simply go looking for trouble. “Only when I was already in the carriage I had my old butler hand me my short sword.”’ The grand duke would surely know that the deserted city was a dangerous place after

sundown, when those who circulated were only night watchmen and criminals—or persons able to defend themselves against both. The insulation between ruler and ruled over the past century had not yet become so absolute as to remove all awareness of actual urban life.

But were Giovanni’s innocent intentions merely a pose? He tried to emphasize spontaneity. Dressed just as they were, “in this good company, slowly slowly, without any servants, we proceeded to San Giovanni.”

As they moved down via Tornabuoni and turned into via de’ Cerretani, what was going through his mind? Perhaps he thought of her—the person whose name he would not pronounce to his Medici relations. In the document he called her a “friend,” but his reader would know Livia was more than that. “Friend” here in Florence was a loaded term—not just because the literary folk related this, as so many

other things, to the ancient Romans. Friendship was bound up with

PROLOGUE 3

pleasure, passion, and survival: the main themes of life. He could not do without her and vice versa, although the relationship seemed hopelessly lopsided because of the difference in rank. As his more or less exclusive concubine and muse since 1609, she owed him everything, and from what she gave him she got much in return, as a protégée in

every sense, pampered and protected. He showered her with gifts, lodging her in his own palazzo and acquiring her one of her own, across the street. He may have thought that somewhere in this night was a prize he could win for Livia to stoke their fantasies and rekindle their desires. What did he see in her? The following chapters will put the question in different ways. Apart from the natural beauty, noted by all observers, perhaps her pathetic story was at least part of the attraction. The evidence suggests that he viewed himself as a kind of chivalric figure, a

rescuer of ladies in distress. Was he intrigued by the complex personality? Just below the surface of her demeanor, we seem to discern

profound fears—fears that her youth might one day fade, that the improbable fable might end. She liked to repeat the adage: “there is nothing sweet without there being also bitterness.”° Wherever she went she brought along her premonitions of disaster. Her longings, springing

from a far different corner of the social and mental world, somehow eventually coincided with his own. There was more. Among the multi-

tude of his preoccupations, perhaps Giovanni was conceiving yet another deeper reason why a prince bearing the name of Medici should befriend a mattress maker’s daughter. He knew he was her bridge to a new world, but in an odd way, was she also this for him? Arriving in the piazza the trio would have encountered a shadowy expanse populated by looming presences, including barely visible figures sculpted on the monuments—duomo, bell tower, baptistry—and live figures in motion. “There were many people” even at this late hour,

Giovanni reveals, but the usual crowds were obviously not milling about buying and selling goods or passing through to the other areas of the city where business was done in the daytime. The night belonged to the strong or to the furtive. There would have been other carriages

bearing other privileged parties sharing the need to stir up some air. Their lanterns and the stars above would have provided almost the

PROLOGUE 4

only light, and the moon was on the wane.® A few torches perched on outsized brackets underneath the windows of major palaces would be

paying feeble homage to official rules about keeping a minimum of illumination in the city center.’ Youths from some of the best families would be clustered here and there, distinguished by the muted finery of their casual dress. As the carriage rounded the baptistry, from one of these clusters someone emerged, approached the carriage, poked his head inside, and said, “have a good ride.” Friend or foe?® Giovanni took the youth’s remark for a provocation. No one with

innocent intentions poked their head inside a carriage. And “have a good ride” (“andate a buon viaggio”) carried insinuations in regard to his concubine that he could not tolerate. We imagine him shouting snatches of repartee to Livia and Don Garzia across the dim interior as he did a mental run-through of the reasons for his spontaneous indignation. Any noble youth in Florence, by good breeding or simply by good sense, should have known enough to behave deferentially toward him, the grand duke’s uncle. Just months away from taking up his generalship with the Venetian forces in Friuli, he was as famous for his

Medici background as for his quick temper. Those travelling in the same coach deserved to be treated with respect, whoever they might be.

As it happened, they were persons with dignity all their own: Don Garzia, the ex-secretary to Giovanni’s brother Pietro de’ Medici, who had died in Spain in 1604, and Donna Livia. The insult was not only to Giovanni and to his male friend, but to Livia and all she represented: the woman whom he helped to form a new identity and a new existence, and to whom he dedicated his possessions and his life. Such effrontery (Giovanni wrote) could not be excused by mere ignorance, since the youth “had a good look to see who we were.” If not,

the quick conference with friends, observed during the next minutes, surely informed him about his indiscretion. In the rumor-soaked world of Renaissance Florence, Giovanni’s liaison with Livia was no secret.

The combined effects of curiosity, envy, and admiration amplified the few available details regarding Livia’s troubled background: the humble origins, the failed marriage in Genoa, the flight to Florence, the refashioning into a salon attraction. There were all the ingredients of a good scandal in the making, or a salacious novella for any

PROLOGUE 5

would-be Boccaccio. Perhaps the youth acted with such condescension due to the very presence in the carriage of a woman of Livia’s reputa-

tion. In that case severer measures were in order if the offense was repeated. Giovanni was ready with the punishment. He remarked to Don Garzia (the document reports) “strange new manners people have these days.” At the time of the action he may not

have known that the youth belonged to the Buontalenti family (no relation to the architect)—this seems to be a detail added in retrospect to his account. Instead, he said to Don Garzia, “must be some kind of drunkard.” Giovanni was still fuming as the carriage slowly rounded the baptistry six times. On the last circuit they passed by the Loggia

del Bigallo, the gothic entryway to the rooms of the Misericordia charity association whose members offered first aid to the needy—not

at this hour. They passed the stone benches, and one in particular, which Giovanni calls the “Pancaccia,” where street gossipers joined merchants to exchange the latest news during the daytime. No sooner did the coachman obey the order to turn and head for home than the same Buontalenti youth once more approached, this time with two companions. He followed the carriage for a short distance and (specified Giovanni) “placed his hand upon the woodwork.” In a voice audible above the general murmur of the crowds, he said, “It’s time to go now, take my advice.”! That was enough. “I jabbed my sword in the direction of that person, and he withdrew,” Giovanni clarified, “then I immediately opened the door and leapt out of the carriage.”"! A picaresque scene ensued. “Since

the carriage was in motion and I was wearing slippers, my cape got tangled and I almost fell down but put my knee to the ground, and at the same time the other two youths who were with the first one came at me with their knives, one of which I parried with my left arm and the other with my scabbard.” He tore himself away and soon he was upon the first youth, whom he whipped to the ground with several quick blows of his scabbard and prepared to finish off for good. Don Garzia, fearing a tragedy, climbed out and dashed after his friend, dodging the flailing arms and legs, almost getting himself hurt before subduing Giovanni and letting the offender escape alive. Back in the carriage, the three friends headed for home and rest.

PROLOGUE 6

The day following the episode, Giovanni wrote his nephew grand duke Cosimo II a full account of what happened—naturally, with no apologies for his own behavior. In his view, he was perfectly in the right,

and the Buontalenti youth was in the wrong. He may even have rel-

ished the idea that this latest report about his outrageous conduct would only provoke a few sighs of resignation at court. There had been a similar incident one night in Florence when he was only twenty—it probably came to mind now, as it would to the minds of his audience.

The only difference was the condition of the victim: the unfortunate Florentine watchman who pronounced a few stupid words in Giovannt’s direction paid for his impudence with his life. Then in 1604 there was the famous homicide in Flanders. That time Giovanni directed Cosimo Baroncelli, his faithful squire, to claim that the assassin was someone else, but he never bothered to deny his own involvement.'? Why should

he? He had been busy enjoying the delights of an Antwerp bordello and ordered his servant to quiet a group of musical merrymakers on the street below, who probably knew what was going on above. An altercation occurred, which degenerated into mortal combat. Who actually pulled the trigger on the miscreant made no difference. Death or the threat of death seemed to follow Giovanni wherever he went, even into the halls of state. In 1608, the year he met Livia, he quarreled with Concino Concini, the favorite of his niece Maria de’ Medici, queen

of France. Unable to risk an open challenge, he was said to have had assassins sent up especially from Florence.'* Unfortunately (depending on the viewpoint), they botched the hit. This was not the first forgiveness letter he had penned in recent years. As he reread the words and sanded away the wet ink, he may have

reflected that he had always been more contrite about his habitual gambling than about any violent outbursts, for a good reason: he occasionally needed money. He could not regard wagering on papal elections as being any more unacceptable than betting on his chances for a cardinalship, in spite of the illegality.'* The only evil in gambling was

bad luck: elites all over Europe were unanimous about that. As one who lived by who he was and not by what he had, he showed his worth every time he conspicuously frittered away a fortune; and the excite-

ment of intense anticipation was no substitute for the thrill of battle

PROLOGUE 7

unless the stakes were high and the players powerful enough to enforce

payment. Even at the front, in the absence of other more intense stimuli, gambling passed the time—the more, the better. His gambling operations at the siege of Ostend in the Flanders wars, not only on the game of Faro but also on the outcome of the siege itself, reached diz-

zying proportions. When his gambling partner died, leaving both in debt, he demanded a quick bailout from the ducal treasury, knowing it would have to be paid to avoid disgrace to the family.’ Flouting convention was a point of pride: not only in his romantic attachments but also in his intellectual pursuits, as later chapters will show. He let local booksellers know he wanted almost anything prohibited by law. Not that he intended to fight a campaign for freedom of

thought. Far from it. He enjoyed discovering and discussing magic, alchemy, and the darker arts partly because they were off-limits to others. He hired a local Jewish leader as his librarian and instructor in Cabala, fully aware that cohabitation between Jews and Christians was becoming more severely limited by grand ducal policy, in compliance

with the Church. His nature prevented him from avoiding conflicts, even with the best. The rivalry with Galileo was not about innovations

in mathematics and natural philosophy or, much less, about supporting traditionalism and the local Aristotelians at court and in the university. The problem was another: the upstart mathematician challenged Giovannt’s personal prerogative to determine truth and falsehood. A few weeks after the midnight carriage ride, he would have another chance at his rival, who dared to cross him in a controversy about falling bodies. He had little to gain by reciting mere facts about his actions. If he

bothered to set pen to paper, he needed a deeper motive. Prestige, status, privilege: he knew as well as the rest of his clan, all depended upon impressions—impressions that must be made and repeated as

often as necessary until they sank into the marrow of society. The twenty-one-year-old grand duke, a ruler since 1609, was now mature

enough to appreciate the finer points of privilege in a Renaissance state, particularly with reference to Giovanni himself. It was time to remind him (just as he had reminded the Buontalenti youth) “who he

was.” Considering who he was, he had a right to drive through the

PROLOGUE 8

streets of Florence after curfew with whomever he wished. By implica-

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

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

long-term tasks of regular diplomacy, such as Curzio Picchena and Belisario Vinta, who owed their survival and their prestige entirely to

PROLOGUE 9

their jobs.'° Maybe he faulted the regime for preferring them to him. He had equally little to show for a lifetime spent as the family’s soldier of fortune. Time after time he had gone into the field with a Tuscan regiment to remind neighbors that the Medici were a fighting race, risking life and limb for the Catholic cause, to which the family was bound by credo and by marriage. But there could be no more joy in it, if the only thanks he got were a few distracted words of encouragement

from a grand duke or duchess. The quieter pursuits quite likely gave him no greater satisfaction, though he could still hold his own with the best in brilliant conversation. The best were getting better, and his long-promised discoveries and creations were still just words. For turning promises into productions, there was no competing with the likes of Galileo, whom Cosimo was trying to lure back to Florence from the University of Padua. Nor, as an architect, was he obviously the equal of the inspired Bernardo Buontalenti, whose massive new monuments were filling the city. In short, he was good at too many things and not good enough at one alone. Surely his whole education, he may have thought, could not be at fault. For maintaining his freedom of action here in Florence, the prospects did not look bright. Far too much power was concentrated in the dynasty for even the old elite to compete, much less a natural son like him. It was small consolation that people with the surnames Capponi, Guicciardini, and Antinori, and the other greats whose elegant palaces dotted the cityscape, were reduced to fawning sycophants. He would have known all the stories about how Cosimo the Elder, the first great Medici power broker back in the fifteenth century, rose stealthily to preeminence, outside the civic offices but able to control them by finan-

cial clout, using skilful negotiation to keep the lid on discord among the oligarchs.!’ There had still been some semblance of a Florentine republic. By the time his father Cosimo I came along, there was a whole new list of role models: not Cosimo the Elder but the hereditary kings of France and Spain, whose massive war chests and sprawling colonial empires were reshaping the political landscape of Europe. He never, so

far as we know, commented on his half-brothers’ mad dreams for a royal crown to appear somewhere on the horizon since Florence had

PROLOGUE Io

made the grade of a grand duchy and could aspire to something even better. The trend, however, was clear: citizens were supposed to become subjects and courtiers—too bad he could be neither. If he considered the matter at all, he probably preferred the Medici family of the past to the Medici family of the present. They, not he, had changed. In the exclusive club of the hereditary monarchs, to which they obviously wished to belong, brains were always trumped by blood; policy was always trumped by legitimacy; commerce and banking, the very wellsprings of Medici money, were always trumped by feudal landholding.’® If they had no feudal landholding the family had better buy, steal, or marry some. The same went for legitimacy: they had to acquire

this too. Recent history was against them. After the family had been ejected from Florence for misgovernment in the fifteenth century, the main hereditary line of Cosimo the Elder had given out. The descen-

dants of the cadet branch headed by the condottiero later known as Giovanni delle Bande Nere, leader of a famous troop of soldieradventurers, took over, beginning with Cosimo I.” Historians, poets, and painters got the job of constructing, embellishing, and promoting a fictionalized genealogy.?° Giovanni may have once had the sensation

of fitting in by virtue of his father’s attempts to guarantee his future, in spite of having been born out of wedlock. Now he was not so sure. Maybe he would have found the Florentines of the past, at least, those of the age of Cosimo I, more congenial than the present ones. Not since the days of Savonarola, the monk who abolished carnival back in the Quattrocento, had his fellow countrymen shown such reltgious devotion—this time, apparently destined to last more than a season. If he looked around Europe he would have seen the same thing everywhere: new confessional passions in politics, new grassroots reltgious trends. A rigid morality seemed to be setting in.?* No wonder rulers were paying more attention to public misbehavior than ever before and attempting to make some show of actually defending the faith rather than simply paying it lip service. Under the circumstances, he would be forced to admit: the Medici family’s recent emphasis on holiness was a brilliant move. Catholic rulers had solid practical reasons to stop assuming people might behave well for conscience’s sake and step up repression and enforcement. They also had plenty of new

PROLOGUE II

laws to enforce. In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, they must

now defend orthodoxy as defined by the authorities of the Roman Church. The story was, to create a community pleasing to God, they must crush sinfulness and nonconformity, or there would be plagues and strife. Their growing bureaucracies must therefore engage censors, inquisitors, and police to keep strict discipline. Government was easier now, based on the twin pillars of fear and faith. Maybe he thought the libertine rebels against this trend were not so wrong after all. Break the rules, pay the consequences. The family sought advance-

ment within the community of European dynasties in an age that prized legitimacy and orthodoxy. Obviously he could not (at least not openly) commit the same indiscretions that had been the hallmark of Medici behavior in years gone by.” His father Cosimo I’s consorting with Protestants was as inconvenient a memory as were the numerous concubines and their several children (including him). His half-brother the grand duke Francesco I’s dallying with Bianca Cappello, the eloped Venetian conveniently freed from her first youthful marriage by the mysterious murder of the spouse, and over whose head there hung sus-

picions of further dallying of her own with other lovers besides Francesco, had all largely taken place during Francesco’s first marriage with Johanna of Austria. Already by the 1570s, Pietro, another son of

Cosimo, had to be shunted to a semi-permanent post in Spain after murdering his wife Dionora de Toledo because of suspicions that she had a liaison with a youth of the Antinori family, also killed. Even crimes of honor were beginning to require a heavy dose of amnesia. Sooner or later his relatives would turn on him. To deplore the consequences of a loss of favor, all he had to do was

to observe his nephew Don Antonio. This son of his half-brother Francesco I had been invested at a tender age with the newly created principate of Capestrano in the kingdom of Naples by a pact with

Philip II of Spain, and groomed for the grand ducal succession in Florence.*? When Francesco and Bianca died, Ferdinando forced him to renounce all pretensions including the investiture and accept instead an appointment to the crusading order of Santo Stefano anda vow of chastity. Don Antonio thus slipped to the edges of the Medici universe, where Don Giovanni must have felt himself headed now.

PROLOGUE I2

Perhaps Giovanni shared the general suspicion, carefully cultivated by

Ferdinando, that Antonio was not really the son of Francesco and Bianca at all and therefore had no rights whatsoever. In the haste to combine the new wedding, so it was said, Bianca had tried to cover the embarrassment of a faked pregnancy by either substituting a baby conceived with her previous husband or by acquiring the child of another couple. Giovanni, at least, was a Medici through and through. All he wished was to enjoy Livia with his honor intact. If this seemed impossible, he could chalk it up to the new climate. What may have disturbed him more was knowing how appearances deceived. But he was not fooled. Let the grand dukes, grand duchesses, and their minions (he may have thought) present themselves as protectors of the faith and of a strong and Catholic state, to the delight of the

present generation of Florentines. Referring to Ferdinando, Filippo Salviati had effused about “the great devotion and piety of our Most Serene grand duke.”** How much was propaganda? Under the cloak of religious zeal, Giovanni knew how they, their circle, and their fellow dynasts around Europe cunningly deployed the new weapon of hypocrisy for eliminating rivals. The strategy applied equally within families

and among states. Perhaps he could sense they were about to make him their next target. Already middle-aged, he had let time slip by, while those in charge took him for granted and other men passed ahead of him in honor and prestige. Clearly there was no career left in Tuscany doing any of the things he most enjoyed. At some point he decided the dead end must become a pathway to something else. The Republic of Venice had always

impressed him, first when he went there as a child in great pomp to bear the good tidings of the marriage of Bianca Cappello. Worldly, rich, and tolerant, bustling with trade in goods and ideas, here was a place where his lifelong search for self, status, and security might fittingly resume. A generous offer of employment from the Venetian government was

now tipping the scales in favor of expatriation. To his new home he would move his things, his thoughts, and his mistress—but not without concluding the last items of business with his impossible family.

I The Family Business

As he prepared for the transfer to Venice, Giovanni may have wondered why being a Medici was such hard work.

Perhaps he thought about his childhood, and how he became a Medici in the first place. Since he never recorded his early experiences, we have to rely on accounts by family friends or associates to under-

stand the facts at his disposal when he reflected upon his life. For instance, there was the bathing lesson described in the obituary by his close friend Giovan Battista Strozzi. Giovanni, so the story goes, had been watching on shore as Cosimo I and Francesco, his father and half-

brother, current and future grand dukes at that time, swam in the Arno River. The year was 1574, just three years after the Turks were routed with Medici money at the battle of Lepanto. The location was upriver from the tanneries that turned the water brown, where the artist Domenico Cresti, known as Passignano, painted bathers a few decades later having a summer frolic. Around San Niccolo the river flowed by a massive old guard tower marking the city wall, and in the hottest weather, merry groups of youths struck athletic poses or sat on the short partition, dangling their feet in the mill run that followed

THE FAMILY BUSINESS 14

the river. His father’s very presence guaranteed a well-behaved crowd: this rite of passage by the youngest son deserved a respectful audience. Next came a fatherly taunt: did he know how to swim? “Would he be able to do as we do?”! If Giovanni was terrified, he seems to have put on a brave face. Suddenly he threw himself in, clothes and all (“at the deepest part,” Strozzi specified). Since no one ran to help, Cosimo must have made some sign commanding forbearance. Giovanni “aided himself by feet and hands as swimmers do,” finally dragging himself shore-

ward to safety. If he then got a quick embrace under the approving gaze of the onlookers, signifying that he had passed the test, this detail is lost. Sink or swim: Giovanni knew the policy well. Another incident from around the same time involved a surprise for his father, organized by his half-brother Francesco. Giovanni was visiting the old gothic Medici

palace along the river in Pisa, where Cosimo had come to monitor progress on public works, including the new university buildings. One afternoon, the eyewitness reports, he appeared at the doorway of the

main hall in a full suit of armor, pike in one hand and mace in the other. We can picture him waddling clumsily across the room toward the seated patriarch under the gazes of court and kin. Francesco had put him up to this, and the secretary, Antonio Serguidi, was supposed to report back to Florence about reactions to the ingenious mis en scéne. His seventh birthday would not be for another few months, but the gift of metal clothes was intended as much for the father’s amusement as for his own use, and no one knew how long the aging Cosimo would last. He achieved the intended effect, or so it seemed: Cosimo, wrote Serguidi, “was so pleased that wept tears of joy, seeing [the boy’s| gravity

and skill in that armor.”” Giovanni may have wondered, why the tears? He had no doubt heard

all about the half-mad condottiero who had been Cosimo’s father (Figure 1.1). Even if he saw some of the portraits around Pitti, he would have been too young to appreciate the crazed expression in the eyes of

Giovanni delle Bande Nere, as his grandfather would eventually be known. The resemblance to the man who loved only war and died from

it when Cosimo was his very same age then was slight. Peeking out from under his own little helmet would have been the father’s softer

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THE FAMILY BUSINESS 17

look (Figure 1.2), or perhaps the mother’s. Maybe Cosimo was wondering

whether Giovanni could hope for a better destiny from the profession of arms. As the child submitted moments later to having the heavy burden peeled off his back, perhaps he thought, where is my reward?

That came later. Within less than a year Cosimo was in the grave, having sired over a dozen children in and out of wedlock. Giovanni hardly knew him, although he benefitted immensely from some of Cosimo’s final acts. Official recognition as a legitimate offspring, the endowment of property, and incomes sufficient for a life of privilege: with such advantages, he was off to a good start.° From experiences like these, Giovanni had learned to be a Medict. Then what happened? Faced with the prospect of leaving Florence, maybe never to return, with Livia as his only trophy, he probably asked himself: how could he have degenerated so quickly from insider to outsider? The change was astounding even by his own family’s standards. Known for overwhelming conquests and exquisite vendettas, they should have cast him among the punishers, not as a victim. Year after year he had weathered their various seasons of homicidal selfdestruction: too shrewd to eliminate, too useful to suppress. His talent and intelligence, plus the material advantages he got from his father,

supposedly fit him for a unique task: strengthening the profile of the family and the state. Now he was struggling just to avoid ostracism. Something had gone terribly wrong, and the reasons lay deep in the past.

a He could hold nothing against his mother, Eleonora degli Albizi, of a Florentine patrician family and Cosimo’s penultimate mistress. She remained in Cosimo’s affections only until Camilla Martelli took her place; and while this last mistress became the last wife, she instead was wed to a Medici courtier to save appearances. The man in question, one Carlo Panciatichi, looking for a reprieve from a murder charge plus the

promised ten thousand scudi dowry, had no intention of keeping house with her. At the Medici villa in Castello, therefore, she remained mostly on her own except for the company of the son, Giovanni, whom

THE FAMILY BUSINESS 18

she reputedly adored from his first breath. But she could not be allowed

to keep him as long as anyone at court thought she might use him as merchandise in some embarrassing vendetta against the grand duke who scorned her. On a somewhat paradoxical pretext referring to her morbid attachment to the infant, now four or five years old, she was forced to give him up.* Another five or six years went by and she became a test case for new inventions in legal casuistry to be applied to incon-

venient women. Accused of infidelity to Carlo, she transferred to the convent of the nuns from Foligno located at St. Onofrio in Florence by order of Medici officials, remaining until her death. Perhaps some bitter-

ness tugged at a corner of Giovanni’s mind, although he would have shared the view that her sequestration was necessary for the family and the state. He knew he had been wrested from his mother’s arms, but he would only really remember growing up at Pitti. There among the others of the Medici brood, in a sprawling dynastic residence set to rival all the others of modern times, he experienced a world within a world. The building site for the planned enlargements would soon be crammed with even more Medici family and retinue than had once crowded into Palazzo Vecchio. The secluded location across the Arno had been good

enough, but Cosimo deprecated the Pitti family’s original mansion.° Everything must always be bigger, better, more befitting the worldchanging role the family wanted to play. Giovanni would have passed his time moving among the endless salons with their warm bright colors and stone-cold floors. The child care from the legions of servants no doubt left its mark, but probably not the names—they would remain buried in the court rolls and payment lists: wet nurses, deputy wet nurses, matrons and under-matrons, governesses, masters of various subjects, physicians of various types. Of his early education within the walls of Pitti, besides basic skills, what elements would remain in his mind? The rudiments would have come from the old family servant Ostilio Guelfi, noted in the court rolls as Giovanni’s “governor”—that is, a kind of guardian. Spiritual elevation would have come from two regular canons of the nearby church of S. Maria Soprarno, possibly in the company of his half-sister Virginia, Cosimo’s daughter by Camilla Martelli and one year his

THE FAMILY BUSINESS 19

junior.° Perhaps somewhat more distinctly he would remember Baccio Baldini, his father’s personal physician and to him, a tutor.’ And rather

than by the lessons regarding the virtues of Cosimo, about which Baldini had published an entire book, perhaps he would have been impressed by the lessons on human destiny. “This malevolent and impious notion that Fate and Fortune have power over men’s operations and force free will to do this or that, often causes men to be less

prudent concerning what they must do,” noted Baldini in another book, dedicated, fittingly enough, to Bartolomeo Panciatichi, Eleonora degli Albizi’s father-in-law, and abounding in citations from ancient and modern authors, including those of the Florentine tradition from Dante onward.® Giovanni, possibly taking the cue from such learning, would spend a lifetime attempting to build a future by using his intelligence. His other lessons from Baldini would have included a broad

sampling of knowledge in the arts and sciences and some rigorous drilling in verbal skills. He would not simply be an admirer of culture like his father, a man of “mediocre learning” even in the opinion of the flatterers, or his grandfather, who knew only war. Rather, he would try to become a participant in this as in every other aspect of Florentine life.’ We can imagine his frame of reference growing quickly beyond the palace walls. Sometime between the 1570s and the 1580s, he would have begun to notice that his surname and the city were practically synonymous. He would sense the eerie quiet on the political front, his father’s legacy after the Medici takeover following the Italian wars. Republicans

were almost extinct, and those famous discussions and debates about consensus-based government that he had read about in books from Machiavelli’s time were nothing but a reverberation. Even the Rucella1 family became obedient courtiers, they whose gardens had once been a breeding ground for rebels. Other major families followed the same route rather than seeking advantages in civic unrest. He was eight years old in 1575 when the last gasp of rebellion took place. He would have

heard (from Grand Duke Francesco, his half-brother?) about what transpired in the so-called Pucci conspiracy: about how Orazio Pucci attempted to elevate a family grudge into something more substantial and rounded up a group of supporters, hoping to succeed where the

THE FAMILY BUSINESS 20

Pazzi conspiracy had failed in the previous century.'° He very likely agreed with the outcome. Any attempts to murder Medici family members ought to be suppressed. What better test for the forces of order that Francesco was developing in concert with all the other rulers of the time? Likewise, here was a good excuse to add another family’s property to the vast Medici domains. If he ever doubted the potency of fear and convenience as human motivations, all he had to do was look around him. Florentines, once a fractious and irritable people, gave in to Medici rule, apparently in view of the many evils that might befall them due to instability and weakness in a better-armed world. So much for fear. What about convenience? By taking over Siena and turning the duchy into a grand duchy Cosimo surely benefited all Florentines. Maybe they would share even more benefits if Francesco became a king—not of Corsica, which had been a possibility under Cosimo, but of some more famous place. Giovanni was on the only side that mattered in Florence, and he knew it. He would have concurred in the widespread judgment of art being a chief glory of Florence, visible in all the public spaces. And he would have known the artistic scene first-hand. Bustling by him in the corridors of Pitti with brush or chisel in hand or a roll of projects, he would have met Cigoli, Santi di Tito, Ligozzi, and other painters, the sculptors Giambologna and Ammanati, and the multitalented Buontalenti, all at work on Medici business. The palace was rapidly filling up with the best past and present productions.'' We may wonder exactly when he began to look at artworks with a critical eye, and what judgments he would have made of what he saw. We know he joined the new Academy

and Company of the Arts of Design, promoted by his father in collaboration with the painter-historian Giorgio Vasari.'* Activities would likely have seemed more geared toward celebrating past accomplishments than toward inspiring new ones. After Michelangelo’s body had been returned to Florence from Rome in 1564, the Academy had overseen the solemn burial under an impressive monument in the church of Santa Croce. Vasari provided the rationale in his history of devel-

opments from Cimabue onward, published in the definitive edition the year after Giovanni was born, replete with reminders that art could

THE FAMILY BUSINESS 21

aspire no higher, and that Michelangelo’s contemporaries had badly deviated from the path set by the Quattrocento greats.'° Things were surely not as bad as Vasari suggested. But current Florentine painting must have seemed somewhat retrospective by comparison with the more adventurous new trends in Bologna and Rome and elsewhere.” For the moment, Giovanni seems to have directed his attention chiefly to music instead. Scholars he knew were joining forces with musicians he had met, as the basics of opera coalesced around him.’ Did it occur to Giovanni that the same vein Florentine creativity so clearly delineated by Vasari in regard to the visual arts of the Quattrocento might be evident in the acoustic arts of his own time? The research into Greek music theory by Girolamo Mei and Galileo Galilei’s father Vincenzo may have seemed no less esoteric than the few speculative attempts to perform ancient music. But already as a toddler, he would have heard some of the more unusual sounds emanating from the so-called Florentine Camerata, a group of writers and musicians centered in the Bardi palace, including the same Vincenzo along with the singer-composer Giulio Caccin1. The newly developing style of monody was supposed to make texts more dramatically intelligible than did the prevailing style of polyphony. A new world of sound was only just being discovered, and no one knew what delights it might bring. He could scarcely have imagined then how deeply he would become involved in the new compositions that became a hallmark of Florentine pageantry, as an observer, writer, and stage designer. New performance trends came and went. He left the playing to the

professionals, although he possibly strummed a few notes for his closest friends on the “Spanish” guitar later mentioned in the list of debts against his estate. He commissioned it from a luthier called “Mateo di Giorgio,” noted in the documents as “a German,” apparently a foreign artisan pressed into the service of the latest-arriving fad from Naples, where some said the instrument was first developed. The repertory was not large, although any compositions from its direct ancestor, the Spanish vihuela, could easily be transposed. Maybe what he liked about it was that it was the instrument of choice among the wandering

THE FAMILY BUSINESS 22

troops of commedia dell arte players now seen in every city. Was it another

transgression on his part, mixing the water and wine of popular and elite?!®

With so much to be curious about and so little time, philosophy and natural knowledge had to be squeezed in somehow. Keeping track

of the names of the major trends was challenge enough, given the contrasting views and fierce debates. He had a privileged vantage point on new knowledge in the making, right there at Pitti.'’ He would

have run into Andrea Cesalpino from time to time, head of the new university botanical gardens, and the family physician. Perhaps he heard about herbs not mentioned in Celsus or Dioscorides and cures not found in Galen and Hippocrates, as well as about the reasons for not throwing out the Ancients just yet.'® When he was growing up, while Galileo was still in school people thought the earth was the center of the universe.'? Mastering the mathematics necessary to make sense of a moving earth was far beyond most Florentines, and Copernicus was still just a funny name. But Aristotle-bashing was a regular pastime among scholars, and the Aristotelian cosmos was showing signs of stress: the reliance on logic over quantification, the annoying incompatibility with Christianity, the question-begging mechanics, the irksome definition of matter. Maybe he shared a few scholars’ view that simply turning to Plato or the pre-Socratics would not do.*° There had to be a better plan; and while ages-old intellectual

icons were falling fast, Ptolemy, articulator of the geocentric world view, was the first to go. Perhaps more than knowledge itself, what he wanted were the results of knowledge: the esteem of others, the ability to solve problems real or imagined. Asa youth, plodding through the dense prose in those awful

tomes probably made his head spin—a single volume of the work on mathematical proportions by master mathematician Girolamo Cardano weighed as much as a small child. He may have asked himself, was there no other way? At least by the works of his hands, he could advance from concept to execution in an instant, perhaps even change the world

with a single gesture. Such was the work of the conquerors and other warriors in his classical readings. Whenever the choice was to fight or to study, he chose the former. Very likely, the route to immortality

THE FAMILY BUSINESS 23

was much more tangible on the battlefields of his imagination than in the libraries there. Yet he was torn between the two interests, and from the evidence at hand, there seems to have been no one in his environment to help him somehow fuse them. Maybe if he had been able to

put the question to the only father he had ever really known, his elder half-brother Francesco, he would have set his life on a different path. Later he would discover that Francesco was experiencing serious problems in the desperate attempt to match the legacy of Cosimo I. Only later he would begin to understand the difficulties Francesco faced in attempting to match the legacy of Cosimo, who died in 1574. The severe regime of work just barely sufficed for maintaining the territories already gained,. The Habsburg spouse, Giovanna d’Austria, dutifully produced, if not princes enough to guarantee the succession, at least princesses enough to ensure the alliances; alas, she was neither a beauty nor a wit, Finally there was some relief when a brilliant concu-

bine, Bianca Cappello, taught him to enjoy the fruits of his position; but would she bring salvation or damnation? If Giovanni had been

Francesco, perhaps he too would have believed that the secrets of nature might offer some answers about the road to happiness, and if not, about the way to more power. No wonder Francesco seemed so drawn to that strange figure, the emperor Rudolf IJ, who was turning the court of Prague into a Mecca for occult investigations of every sort.*?

Giovanni was a witness as Francesco’s obsessions gradually grew into manias. News about the well-furnished museum and alchemical foundry in Prague only triggered more activity in Florence, all focused on the same goal. The natural history specimens, the alchemical operations, the metallurgical processes, the mineralogical investigations, and the days and nights spent in the company of artisans and books were all supposed to help carry the grand duchy to heights unreached by Cosimo—or at least to leave a mark on history as yet unmade. Francesco’s workroom in Palazzo Vecchio obviously had to be greater than their father’s studiolo (“little study”) upstairs; and Giovanni may have admired the thought-provoking decorations: earth, air, fire, water—

the four elements providing the basic substance for every operation; Jupiter and Mars, the ruling planets; Francesco himself, depicted as an

THE FAMILY BUSINESS 24

artisan, stirring some mixture over the laboratory stove while watching

the percolations in a nearby alembic, perhaps attempting one of the operations outlined in the discourse on alchemy dedicated to him by Francesco di Viert, or in one of the various manuscripts inherited from Cosimo’s secret collection.?* Perhaps the two half-brothers occasionally walked together from Palazzo Pitti to the workroom, along Vasart’s specially built corridor over Ponte Vecchio and through the Uffizi. Did Giovanni agree with the distinguished visitors who came away impressed not just by the studies but by the time spent on them in lieu of other things? “Excessive,” Michel de Montaigne proclaimed, after paying respects in November 1580.*°

Giovannt’s real school was the grand ducal court itself, not just his half-brother. His teachers were all those around him. Some lessons would have been more memorable, perhaps not for the best reasons. Did he discover that Montaigne, author of an essay “on the art of conversing,” spoke more eloquently than the other various major digni-

taries and statesmen.** His assessment alas has gone unrecorded. Maybe the details were less crucial than the general impression: to craft a life could be as demanding as to craft a work of literary prose and required nearly as much grounding in the ancient classics. Did he find that Ulisse Aldrovandi, the Bolognese naturalist on tour to view the collections, brought the best gifts? Of the more exotic specimens there would have been beautiful engravings, rather than, say, the actual armadillo from New Spain, or the tropical toucan.?° Easily transportable items, like the bezoar stone from the stomach of a llama for emergency snakebite relief, might have provided more delight. No more detailed reaction has been recorded either in this regard or in regard to the various artists who came and went on any given day, their different

levels of familiarity with the grand duke indicating the different degrees of regard in which they were held: Ignazio Danti over Bartolomeo Ammanati, Bernardo Buontalenti over everyone else. In regard to Buontalenti, we can only judge the cause by the effect, namely,

that Giovanni one day would beat the master: so those frequent meetings about massive building projects around the city must have trailed off into private conversations, maybe even lessons, to the extent that Giovanni would one day beat the master at his own game.?°

THE FAMILY BUSINESS 25

Before he met Livia, whenever he thought of womanhood, with all due respect to the little princesses who had been his playmates, perhaps he thought of Bianca Cappello, Francesco’s second wife. If so, he was not the only one. Tasso once exclaimed, “Goddess or woman she equally resembles” in one of fifty songs in her honor.’’ The darling of poets and artists, recipient and subject of their works, she was as compelling a presence to her admirers as she was repellent to her detractors—usually those who disparaged female assertiveness of any kind. The youthful elopement from Venice with a Florentine male somewhat too conveniently eliminated after Francesco set eyes on her, the secret

Medici marriage announced only six months after the death of the previous grand duchess, Giovanna d’Austria, all added to her infamy as well as to her glamour. The Venice connection added an exotic flavor to cultivated conversations. When she was in the room, Giovanni may have first heard pronounced the name of Jacopo Sansovino, architect

of Piazza San Marco and the Rialto Bridge, or of Aldus Manutius, printer and editor of the classics. She kept her own mini-court, centered in the palace built for her by Buontalenti in via Maggiore (now “via Maggio”) around the corner from Pitti.*° Anything he learned of her famously refined entertainments would have likely derived from reading accounts about them in the novels by Celio Malespini, including cruel jokes played on unsuspecting servants tricked into falling

down artificial precipices and veritable Hells of writhing devils to delight the dinner guests.”? He was still too young. His first diplomatic assignment, at age twelve, was about her. The year had been 1579. In the company of the Florentine ambassador, he was supposed to make the official announcement of Bianca’s marriage and serve as a spokesman for a new alliance between the Medici and the Venetian patrician in-laws. In return he was to receive the Senate’s congratulations and Bianca’s official designation as a “daughter of the Venetian Republic,” a title previously conferred on the Queen of Cyprus

in the fifteenth century.°° There was more beneath the surface, of course. The real point was to effect a political reconciliation after the earlier scandalous elopement, quiet suspicions about the assassination of the first husband, and banish all talk about a loose woman. Very likely, he barely grasped the insinuations being made around him at

THE FAMILY BUSINESS 26

the time, while burying them deep in his brain for further contemplation later on. The term “adventuress” to him would have had only a dictionary definition. The religious education maintained his innocence about some matters, not about others. His childish simplicity had probably been his greatest asset under the circumstances, and the main reason why he did his job with such memorable brio: “in such a manner,” the ambassador reported, “that he left behind him a good impression and a great desire” to see him again—as happened in fact.*! He had liked Venice so much then that he eventually ended up settling there. There was no getting around the fact: despite all his other activities, the fields where he seemed to excel with the least effort were the military arts. Fortunately, nobility was still defined par excellence as a military

profession, and true virtue was what might be gained in military pursuits. It was his trump card when all else failed. Hunting was the usual introduction, and he began on the expeditions to Pratolino, Francesco’s favorite among the Medici villas because of the plentiful game. Next

came human quarry. He became such an expert swordsman that a fencing master dedicated a manual to him.” At the riding school next to the Botanical Gardens, he would have met dozens of other knights in training from the noble families of Florence and elsewhere, permanently maiming a few of them, by accident or by design. Discretion ruled:

no one would tell. Francesco had the new jousting lists built there especially so the “most noble youth of Florence might decorate themselves with equestrian splendor” (said the inscription, now lost) “and especially his brother Giovanni,” who enjoyed the expert instruction of a famous riding master called Rustico Piccardino.*? Soon he would be fighting on his own. If ever he cast his mind back along the course of his life, he would have found that the end of the 1580s offered a sunny resting place for

his thoughts. At that happy time, he embodied everything that his family did best, and his ambitions matched the role. He surely had no need to prompt Santi di tito, his portraitist, to deliver a portrait glowing with youthful self-assurance: the portrait would speak for itself (Figure 1.3). Not that he ever wished to remain stuck in that time; surely he knew that experiences belonged where they occurred. However,

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THE FAMILY BUSINESS 28

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

“a Francesco, his surrogate father, made things very clear: sooner or later, he would have to go to war. As a legitimized—not legitimate—child, for

all intents, an orphan, outside of the line of succession to the grand ducal throne, the career options were limited, and some were out of the question. The most recent playing around with scenography, such as during the festivities for the wedding of Virginia de’ Medici to the duke of Modena, was a fine ornament to a complete personality, and a significant help to the family, but could never be a proper profession for a

gentleman.** That left the military or the Church. The choice was obvious. The one portrait that has survived from the period, evinces worldliness, not otherworldliness; boldness, not holiness. The change in climate and a little hardship, Francesco determined, would do him good, add strength and sinew to that lanky frame. Other engagements would have to wait. In making the journey in September 1587 to try his fortunes in the Flanders wars, he was in good company. Youths from many of the great houses were on hand for the action.*° The time was right, especially considering the perilous juncture in European affairs, and the temporary shortage of bellicosity in Italy after the warring states, exhausted, finally concluded the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis back in 1559. For claiming the necessary prize of honor, the New World was an option only for the noble poor or desperate. He accordingly joined the Catholic forces led by Alessandro Farnese, governor of the Spanish Netherlands, fighting on behalf of Philip II. The mission was to seize what territory they could from the secessionist Dutch Republic and defend the rest from further attacks. Philip’s developing plans called for mastery over Europe, including a vast strategy to neutralize England by invasion. Just when Giovanni arrived, there were orders to divert the army of Flanders toward the coast and float it out on barges to join the Spanish

THE FAMILY BUSINESS 29

Armada.°*° In the midst of catastrophic information deficits between Spain and Flanders, the plan seemed more and more obviously impossible as time went on. If the news from Spain arrived in agonizing gasps, so did the news from Florence. The next family tragedy caught him off guard. As far as we can tell, for many weeks he made nothing of the silence at the other end. Only on the 19th of November, did he become aware that Francesco had died back on October 20th—shortly followed by Bianca Cappello, both in mysterious circumstances (Figure 1.4). Giovanni's grieving was

weeks behind the times; there was no catching up. The rest of the family had already been able to adjust to the idea. The sense of displacement seems to have been compounded by a feeling of general bewilderment. If not of self-pity, at least a few notes of uncertainty slipped in between the lines of his letter to his other half-brother Ferdinando, the new grand duke, still a cardinal of the Church: “I have lost a patron, a father, and a brother, who I am certain loved me and would have shown this in his own way whenever the occasion demanded.”*’ He did not say so, but he probably wondered whether he would also be able to depend on Ferdinando to maintain the fragile

understanding he had enjoyed, concerning his ambitions and his monthly upkeep. He did not ask much: just a basic agreement with his choices and some aid in the pursuit of a career. But he would obviously

have to try still harder to please his unyielding world, if the right moment would only arrive.

He was as surprised as everyone else about the double death of Francesco and Bianca, and no doubt the same disturbing questions occurred in his mind. Who stood to gain from the coincidence? The only possible answer was the unthinkable one: Ferdinando.** Ambitious, worldly, and unscrupulous, here was a far different man from the older, more cautious sibling. If the grand duchy now fell on him rather than on some spurious son of the dead couple—namely, Don Antonio—

this could only be the result of careful forethought and astute planning. Whether Antonio was really the son of Bianca made no difference now. Ferdinando had him quickly sidelined and disinherited. To avoid

further suspicions about the deaths, he ordered the bodies hastily

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er. GL opLycigus cage Ge iat *. Any attempts against the city would be frustrated by the continuous passage of men and goods coming across the Karst. The Venetians determined to attack the supply train itself. Baglioni and his force swept down from Doberdo, deep in the Venetian-dominated part of the Karst,

to engage the enemy while waiting for the Dutch contingent from

THE HEART OF COMBAT 138

Fara to make a combined raid on the supply train. Marradas came to meet them. In the fierce fighting, Baglioni caught a sword blow to the head, raising to two the number of monuments from this war to be built in the Venetian mausoleum of Ss. Giovanni e Paolo. The setback inspired Giovanni to reclaim his leadership by insisting once again on his idea for an all-out assault on Gradisca. This time the design had to be elegant enough to impress the other strategists and at the same time so intricate that only he could possibly pull it off. The occupation of the fortified villages of Sdraussina and Fogliano would only be the beginning, he explained. Next would come the star-shaped fort directly across the river from the Venetian camp, and finally an entire encirclement. Never mind that previous experience demonstrated the virtues of simplicity. The difficult terrain and climate, the cumbersome command structure, and the painful lack of essential resources all rendered any highly articulated operations involving several simultaneous movements practically impossible. All this he set aside for the moment in view of his daring objective. To shift the blame

upon others in case something went wrong, he communicated his ideas in detailed letters to the Venetian authorities while arranging things on the field.*"°

Concerning the timetable for completing the elements of his attack plan on Gradisca, Giovanni made no precise specifications. There were far too many variables to take into consideration. Better to proceed step by step and see how things went. The pace corresponded to his new attitude of a relentless push rather than a lightning strike. In the second week he reported to Livia that the enemy was already “very badly off in Gradisca.”'’ On September 6, 1617, the Venetians put some suppliers and their military escorts to rout, killing a few and leaving the rest “fleeing practically naked through the woods.” Another major strike would follow, he promised, from a new fort, “as high as a tower” on the Gradisca side of the river; three heavy cannons would be hoisted into it “to make nice music.” At the proper moment, the rain of fire from this fort would combine with the artillery shower from the opposite side of the river, when the Venetians succeeded in occupying the forts along that side, which would be “very soon.”!'8

THE HEART OF COMBAT 139

For any vacillation, he threw the blame back on the Venetian officials.

There was nothing he could say about the sincere and always reliable Nicolo Contarini, who continued to press for victory. But the Venetian provveditore, Antonio Lando, had lost all interest in the battle: “he can’t

wait to be in gondola,” Giovanni complained to Livia; “he speaks nothing, listens to nothing, consults about nothing, thinks about nothing but Venice.” In the midst of such apathy, “things are being done and undone according to their private interests.” His final assessment: “it is a most terrible shame.”*!”? Only the replacement of Lando and Francesco Erizzo, accompanied by the return of Pietro Barbarigo, a fine

general who had been temporarily removed due to power struggles within the war administration and was now ready for action, could possibly make a change for the better.'*° If he could only make the cur-

rent Venetian authorities listen to reason, the campaign could be saved. “I hope that when it pleases God I will be able to complete what I have ordered for your greatness, peace, prosperity and reputation.” And again: “my desire to come and be with you in perfect tranquility drives me to endure any effort or discomfort as long as it leads to the desired end.”!?!

By late September 1617, Gradisca was still holding out, when Livia

announced that “the peace has been concluded.” She hesitated to rejoice. The diplomatic endgame had already begun back in April, when the Venetians were hoping to bluff their way to victory. At that time the war was already a stalemate, and the two sides seemed capable of mutually exhausting themselves without gaining anything decisive. The Venetians had some bargaining power left, plus the best possible advice from their astute counselor, Paolo Sarpi, so they stalled while trying out various solutions. The first diplomatic feelers went out via their representative Piero Gritti, looking for a profitable peace mediated by Spain; and preliminary negotiations began in Paris in July. Nothing came of it, and the blame fell alternately on the incompetent Venetian delegate Ottavio Bon or on the squabbling “young” and “old” in the Senate. Soon the favorable moment passed and the conclusion of matters between the Venetians and the archduke became mixed up in the larger questions at issue between France, Spain, the Empire, and

THE HEART OF COMBAT 140

the Italian princes. The final treaty signed in Madrid on the 26th of September included provisions not only for the war in Friuli but for ending the Mantua Succession War.'*? Half skeptical and half relieved, Livia told Giovanni a few days later, “As for me, I can’t believe it.”’*° Two months of frustration followed: the time allotted to the signa-

tories for ratifying the Treaty of Madrid. In principle, operations on the field could continue while the Venetian leadership, especially Nicolo

Contarini, attempted to squeeze whatever advantages they could out of the last phase of the conflict. “In Venice everyone is crying, Peace!” Giovanni observed from the field, “but here everyone says the opposite.”'** If they were hoping for a reversal significant enough to force the bargainers back to the table, it was a pipe dream. By late October, Giovanni no longer reported progress in major operations, only occasional skirmishes. And killing five or six soldiers out of a raiding party

in retreat back into the Karst from the star-shaped fort, which he recorded on the 28th of October, was obviously not going to make much difference. Finally in early November, he got the order to maintain the acquired positions and avoid offensive actions, while allowing

a predetermined quantity of approved provisions to enter Gradisca. The truce, he told Livia, was merely a subterfuge to keep the occupants of the citadel on the side of the living while the Venetians wore themselves out.'*° Still he refused to believe everything was over.

“a What finally stopped him came unexpectedly. So far he had avoided the musket shot, the cannon ball, the mine, and any number of other battlefield hazards. He had survived the weather and the hardship, hardened in his body as well as in his mind. He took his physical frame for granted: a reliable instrument of work and play. Suddenly, for the

first time since on the field of Flanders some thirty years before, his otherwise perfect health began showing signs of damage. There were small annoyances: a persistent “influenza,” a low-grade fever.'*° As symptoms grew more worrying, Livia understood and trembled. “By the body ofJesus Christ!” she exclaimed.'’ She had atheory. “Remember that you weren’t born today or yesterday,” she told her fifty-year-old

THE HEART OF COMBAT I4I

lover. “Don’t forget that you have been struggling for eleven months with no respite,” notwithstanding the advancing age, she said: “The sufferings have been great, especially those of the spirit.” She feared the worst: “something could happen that I do not wish, for all that I hold dear in life.” A brief holiday in Udine during the truce-time slowdown at the front worked like a balm, but the effect was transitory.'*®

The tumor began in December, when Livia had already packed things up in Udine and journeyed back to Venice—an “inflammation” on the neck and throat that he told her “really hurt.”!?? There was no more point in ignoring it or hoping it would go away by itself. It infected his thoughts and robbed him of sleep. His hand was not yet trembling, but he did write “Easter” instead of “Christmas” when telling Livia the probable date of his return. The camp doctors had no better remedies than what he usually prescribed for himself: muddle through, perhaps in a better-heated tent. He needed a furlough and a surgeon. All that held him back was duty and vague thoughts about his legacy in Friul.. “Every day these gentlemen invent something new that makes my continued presence here seem necessary.”'°° Christmas came and went, December ended, then came the month of January. On New Year’s Day,

he reported a new development that weakened his resolve to depart immediately. The tumor, grown to an unsightly goiter-like lump, still bothered him when he ate, but it had ceased to hurt constantly.'*! He would try to hold out for the rest of the month.'*? By the end of January Giovanni finally convinced himself to put the Friuli adventure definitively in the past. Most of the Venetian regiments had left already. There was not much more glory remaining to be earned; and he, not his presumed successor, don Luigi d’Este, the duke of Modena’s younger son, would be credited with the accomplishments of the campaign. If he played it right, a retirement embellished by the pleasures of his studies and the joys of his companion awaited him in Venice. All he needed was to arrange an elegant and honorable exit befitting his reputation. To the Venetian authorities he promised to be back on the field at an unspecified time after his convalescence. Considering his faithful service over the past year, “I beg you,” he wrote

them, “not to refuse this request for some leave to get treatment for myself” so that, once restored to health, he could again “demonstrate

THE HEART OF COMBAT 142

the ardent desire that continues in me, to act for the benefit and greatness of this Most Serene State.”!’> He had a message to convey to the Senate, he told Livia, namely, “if they don’t provide for many things, everything will be spoiled.” In fact, “I want to tell them this in person

or else be silent; and being silent would be far too dangerous for them.”'°* This in itself was worth a furlough. He dissimulated the illness. His real torment, he assured her, was in “the spirit,” from being so long away from her.'’°> Soon the torment would be over. They were reunited in late January.

“a The respite from fighting left him plenty of time for other interests and energy to dedicate to them. Already in February he invited his librarian and cabalist Benedetto Blanis up from Florence to work on his projects

connected with the occult.'°® After he had the surgeon remove the tumor in September 1618, there was one last piece of war-related business.'°’ Reputation, he knew well, was made only partly on the field. Then followed opinion—carefully cultivated, where possible, and jud1ciously propagated. There was no time to lose. Already in the last days

of 1617 a writing, shoddily printed and badly proofread, had begun to circulate in Venice, purporting to recount The Wars of Italy Between the Most Serene Republic of Venice and the Archducal Armies of the House of Austrid.

In ordinary circumstances, he would have been ready with the sword

to defend himself and his honor. In this case there was no culprit, no matter how hard he tried to find one. “Pomponio Emigliani,” supposedly

a “Milanese” according to the pamphlet’s title page, was obviously a pseudonym, and no one in Venice knew the real name. Even the printer, “Peter Gat,” was unknown, and “Poisdorf” did not exist on any map. Precisely because the writing came to the notice of the Venetian administrators, it had to be refuted—all the more so, as Paolo Sarpi, passing judgment on it for the Venetian book censors, condemned it on the grounds of injuriousness to the interests of the Republic, without in any way impugning its accuracy.’*® Setting aside the sham attempts at groveling (“Giovanni having always demonstrated knowledge, virtue,

THE HEART OF COMBAT 143

prudence and authority in his every action .. .”), the attacks were very real.'°? Observers of his temporizing in the campaign for Gorizia (it said) made some consider him “unfaithful.” The Venetian Senate (it went on) had gone so far as to consider dismissing him but reconsidered only because peace was near. “Venetian matters in Friuli went very

badly because the war was badly administered by the captains,” it explained. Insiders would know the reference in the next phrase: “particularly blamed was the doubtful fidelity of [left blank in the original], about whom the Senate made no remonstration, preferring instead to make an apparent remedy by replacing Lando with Pietro Barbarigo.”!*° In context, the indictment was as incisive as it was damaging. By subtle

innuendoes and even some direct charges, it threatened to destroy what he had spent an entire campaign, if not an entire lifetime, to build up, at no small cost to his own health and Livia’s tranquility. The record, he thought, must be set straight—and soon. A point-by-point refutation would be too obvious, and anyway might draw undue attention to Emigliani’s diatribe. Giovanni resolved instead to tell the story in his own way, and so memorably that the other would quickly be forgotten. The format he chose was novel and eye-catching: a series of eight carefully prepared engravings accompanied by a narrative explanation. He already had plenty of material, written nightly at

camp in the grim penumbra of an oil lamp or sketched on location by himself or by his engineers." For the artwork he engaged Jacques Callot, a talented engraver from Lorraine on the Medici court rolls, not yet renowned for the great series on “The Miseries of War,” but already celebrated for depictions of the Mardi Gras celebrations of 1616, and possibly the author of an earlier sketch of Gradisca.'” Giovanni offered the generous sum of two hundred scudi for the eight-

part work. When finished he would have a small number of copies printed up for distribution to friends, confidants, and especially, the court of Florence and the Collegio in Venice, the principal theaters of his military honor.'*? His reputation would be secured—or would it? Here finally was the chance to narrate the triumphs of the Venetians, the depredations of the Austrians, and the perfidy of the Dutch, all of which had been bothering him since the beginning of the campaign. He accordingly started his account not with the Venetian raid on San

THE HEART OF COMBAT 144

Servolo that sparked the war, but with the terrible action of Count Frankopan at Monfalcone. To make his point more forcefully, he did

not bother to distinguish between any particular “Austrian” and another. Thus, “the Austrian skirmishes penetrated to the territory of Monfalcone, passing by way of the valley of the Karst from Vermigliano, and sacked many villages, setting fire to seven of them.”!** And again,

“the Austrians stole many animals in the village of S. Antonio near Marina.” Likewise, he drew no distinction between one “Venetian” and another, thus deflecting from himself the mention of any faults he might have had as a general and attributing them to the whole team. In the very month when he arrived on the field, he said, “The Venetians, having secured as well as possible the headquarters in Meriano by cut-

ting off all the roads and approaches with double barriers to thwart the advance of cavalry and gain more security, fortified later the area between the Priuli and Lucinis forts to prevent the Austrians from crossing the river.”'*° More could have been done in the attack on San Martino, had the men cooperated. “But the solders retreated, terrified

and in a panic, in spite of all efforts by the officers to keep them in order.” Worst of all were the uncooperative Dutch. During the July 1617

offensive, “The Dutch under Nassau no longer wished to stay in the Karst, rebelled against their officers, and crossed the Isonzo at Fara, abandoning four positions, namely the forts delle Donne and Imperiale, which had been taken, the little building on the Isonzo, and the houses in the woods with the battery; and they refused to fortify their present

position, even when offered payment, contrary to their promises and our orders.”!*” Despite all these difficulties, victory on the field would have been possible, prevented by the ceasefire.

Between script and print there stood only one obstacle: Grand Duchess Maria Maddalena. As soon as she got wind of the manuscript’s existence, she ordered Cosimo Baroncelli, Giovannt’s secretary,

to tell Giovanni “not to have it printed.” Although she never directly stated her objections, she may well have taken some offense at the passages about the depredations of the Austrians. If she perceived a personal slight, she was probably right. Likewise, the account of how the Venetians routed her brother Ferdinand’s armies may have been framed

with rather an excess of lurid glee. She already disapproved of her

THE HEART OF COMBAT 145

brother-in-law’s boisterous behavior and amorous attachments. Here

was another occasion to show her feelings. In the meeting with Baroncelli, however, she made no attempt to defend the Austrians or her brother. Instead, she made vague references to the “many things that can be learned” from the work by common people who should remain ignorant, a typical remark any censor might have used to block a political treatise regarding “reason of state.” Matters of the sort that Giovanni narrated should be kept “within the family”—not divulged indiscriminately. If anyone wished to know what war was like, she went on, let them “risk their own lives and give their sweat and blood” on the field. And as for having the work printed anywhere else (in other words, in Venice), this was out of the question. The grand duke, she added, agreed. So if Giovanni did not wish to incur the displeasure of his lord, he had to give up the idea forthwith, and the scarcity of surviving copies (one only of the narrative and none of the engravings) suggests that he complied.!*8 However, there was nothing Maria Maddalena could do to prevent Giovanni from going ahead with yet another project of mixed-media self-congratulation. This time the engraving was by Pietro Tozzi, a print maker in Padua (Figure 3.3). There was no mixed message here. In the image, he wields the baton of command while bringing his horse up on its hind legs in a perfect levade. In the middle ground is a cavalry regiment charging toward a distant “Gradisca,” accompanied by com-

pact ranks of musket-bearing infantry. For the poem beneath the image he may well have commissioned Gabriello Chiabrera, an old acquaintance from the Florentine days, whose verses had celebrated Giovannti’s adventures beginning with the first wars in Flanders and who had most recently written a poem “To Signor Cosimo Baroncellt, When Don Giovanni de’ Medici Was Hired by the Venetians.”!*? To Chiabrera, he would have related the whole troubled story of the war. The result was: But you, O Tuscan chief, who with your gaze Confused all those who stood before your ire, Domesticator of fierce armies, bold, Born to lead and to a greater role

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

As Giovanni would have requested, there was a reference, in the fourth line, to the opportunities offered and taken away, and, in the fifth, to the more recent accusations of dereliction. At 25 centimeters by 18 centimeters, it was modest enough to have been hawked on the street along

with the usual effigies of the Grand Turk and the Virgin Mary. One copy is known, acquired by some Venetian admirer or spy whose papers ended up in the Correr Museum. So much for saving his reputation. For ensuring his legacy, Giovanni needed something more. Only an enduring work of history, maybe of

the kind that the Venetians commissioned official historians to write from time to time, could instruct posterity in remembering what he did, from his point of view. And just as he began to realize that his own authorship would compromise perceptions about the objectivity of the work, even supposing that he had the time and inclination to write it, he found the perfect partner: Faustino Moisesso. He had known of this

Friulian nobleman during the wars but had not been a close friend. Back then, he had been grateful for the personal offer of three knights to serve the Venetian cause when he needed them most, plus all related

expenses, to be deployed as Giovanni determined. What happened later, he did not care to know. Suddenly in late August 1619, Moisesso

approached him with a surprising request for help in writing a new history of the war. Here was an ardent and long undeclared admirer, ready to interview the heroic protagonist of the events to be related. Giovanni was no doubt as much impressed by the adulation as by the law degree from Padua; the man would be able to argue his case at least as well as he could himself, and maybe better. All he had to do was to supply documents and original material, including whatever he could remember of events in which he was involved, and Moisesso would do the rest. He liked the idea. He sent Moisesso his notes, confident of receiving in return the promised “good level of glory.”!*! For the final touches on the manuscript, in

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May 1620, he invited his collaborator to sojourn with him and Livia in the palazzo on Murano. That way they could confer daily regarding

interpretations and recollections and change necessary phrasing to suit his tastes. The final draft must not only convey his version of events, but also remind readers about who he was: a learned prince, who “spent almost all night” on the field “in thinking and writing,” and when off the field, dedicated himself to the arts and sciences. True,

the manuscripts of his productions still lay unfinished in his study, while his experiments still awaited his attention in the laboratory, but that was unimportant. “Not many of those who are supposed to be scholars or have the reputation of being scientists [scienziati| ... would have been able, in the leisure and quiet of the night and day to write so many things, and so well, as Giovanni did.”'? Let posterity remember him as a man who combined life and learning. Moisesso obliged.

“a For Giovanni and Livia, the wars were over. For the Venetians, there was more work to be done. They would have to return the portions

of territory gained in Istria during the war, according to the agreements made in Paris and Madrid, and Archduke Ferdinand, Maria Maddalena’s brother, now king of Bohemia and soon also king of Hungary and Croatia, agreed to have the Uskoks expelled from the coastal cities within the Habsburg territories, including Zengg, where a garrison would be set up with commissioners from both sides. The next task was to ensure that the obligations were met. In spring there were conferences at Fiume and at Veglia to deal with the practical matters.'>° For instance, “since His Majesty” (using the new form of address)

“is supposed to pay the cost of flour and wheat and other things for the people of Zengg in one hundred days, clearly this money should better go to paying the soldiers.” Moreover, “a captain of good fame will be

sent there to administer justice and punish disobedience.” This personage, obviously not Giovanni, but some successor to him in the next round of glory, would sequester all the boats except, for the time being, four to be used for transporting legitimate merchandise. The Uskoks were supposed to take some responsibility for policing themselves on

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behalf of the king, by appointing representatives of their own who would be personally liable for handing over delinquents. By July the treaty provisions had been carried out more or less to the satisfaction of both sides, also thanks to the secret gift of a golden goblet worth a thousand scudi to the king’s chief negotiator, Karl von Harrach.'**

With matters somewhat settled in Friuli, the Spanish threat was still very real, and whatever fears or premonitions Giovanni had were more than fully borne out. Already in the first months of 1617, dis-

turbing news had come from the Venetian ambassador in Naples, Gaspare Spinelli. Apparently the duke of Osuna, Spanish viceroy there, had actually been working up plans for a seaborne invasion of Venice, ordering spies to scout the defense works along the Adriatic coastline

and inspecting military craft capable of navigating the canals. And if Ossuna was in earnest about picking Venice for himself as a personal fiefdom, mused the ambassador, this could only be considered the product of a troubled mind. Troubled or not, Ossuna had to be reckoned with, especially since his ships were now navigating the Adriatic with no regard for Venetian jurisdiction. In April that year the Spanish fleet sailing out of Puglia attacked the Venetian island of Lesina (Hvar)

off the Dalmatian coast and was repulsed; further engagements followed in July.'®° At least according to one source, a fleet of Uskok vessels sailing out of Trieste and bound for a rendezvous with the Spanish narrowly missed landing at the tiny fishing community of Pellestrina

just south of the Lido, within view of St. Mark’s bell tower, and had been turned away only by a mid-July sea squall. Thus, the mutual defense pact Venice signed with Savoy in March 1618 against Spain had a history of its own. Still in April, Spinelli was worried that behind the

impossible plans and the improbable claims there lurked a serious danger.'»°

Giovanni and Livia no doubt watched in awe as the events of May 1618 in Venice unfolded right before their eyes. Their neighbor, Alfonso

de la Cueva, Marquis of Bedmar, the Spanish ambassador, turned out to be the only other operative in Italy more imprudent than Ossuna.'°” Over the years he had made himself notorious to the Venetian secret

service by his dealings with extremists in the pro-Spanish faction among the nobility. And if the presumed gunpowder plot imputed to

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persons 1n his retinue already in 1612 proved to be a fabrication by his enemies, his suspicious acquaintances between 1617 and 1618 among the disaffected in Venice did not. Everyone thought he was somehow

involved when an association of outcasts and adventurers led by a French pirate named Jacques Robert cooked up a vague scheme to take over the city with powerful foreign aid. He was not directly charged

with planning to “blow open the Treasury at night with explosives, promising their soldiers all the money they could get there, burn the Arsenal, take over the Rialto Bridge with a strong force, cut various bridges,” and a long list of other mischief mentioned in the trial, including “setting fire in various places of the city in private houses to

cause universal confusion, revolution and terror.” Thus, when the Council of Ten, getting wind of the matter in May, had the plotters executed, Bedmar was spared.’°® But his self-avowed carelessness, loose

talk, and offers of Spanish service to Dutch mutineers from the Venetian war in Friuli were enough to get him removed from his post, by request from the Council, in the midst of one last exchange of bravados between Venice and Spain. For Giovanni and Livia, the whole business must have seemed better than a theater play—in fact, years later, in far-off London, Thomas Otway would make it one. Eleven days after the executions in Venice, before Livia and Giovanni had quite made up their minds about whether recent events concerned them or not, on May 23, came the defenestration of Prague. Weeks later when they read about it they would understand how a Protestant protest against Ferdinand’s elevation to the throne of Bohemia had taken

on enormous symbolic significance; and at the Prague meeting, the ejected Catholic commissioners escaped death only because they were saved by angels (said some) or (said others) by falling into a conveniently located dung heap. The European powers were caught up in the maelstrom that was to become the Thirty Years War. But by this time the two lovers had retired from politics, from warfare, and from much else. They wished to spend the rest of their days in peace and contemplation—including contemplation of each other. The simple wish was granted—for a time.

Writing the Passions

The War of Friuli was still going full blast when Livia discovered the betrayal. Her understanding of what was going on may have occurred in stages. At first there would have been disbelief. Then she would have wondered whether Giovanni’s many declarations of fidelity were just repetitions of what he was saying to someone else. She often said that she took his words to heart; perhaps she even mouthed them as any new reader might: “my eternal love,” “your obedient slave.” Saying them over and over to herself perhaps made them more real to her; now they

would only remind her that a removal of affection could have consequences too painful to imagine. The signs of the other woman’s existence were plain through the gaps in the overburdened military mail system. What tipped her off was a mysterious message to her own phy-

sician ordering a “double purge” to be sent to Giovanni at the front.! Severe constipation was not rampant there, as far as she knew. However,

such strong medicine was often prescribed to induce an abortion. She found out by chance: obviously Giovanni was getting careless, or was in a hurry to do whatever he had to do. In any case, things with the other woman had apparently been going on for a while, and there were serious repercussions.

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Moments of reflection are the hardest to recapture. We only know the times and the spaces, not how they were filled. We can imagine Livia wondering why she had noticed nothing in the past months, despite all her efforts to keep in touch. We imagine her seeking some clue in the pile of letters, his correspondence, which she kept and no doubt read and reread, sitting alone at home while he was away at war. Every plea he made for forgiveness after some tiny fault would now seem to reveal a guilty thought regarding something he was not telling her. The excessive praise, the promises, would all take on a new aspect. She enjoyed the theater and lived in a world of performances, of plays within plays, of clever simulations suggesting all the world was a stage, but so far, she enjoyed the tropes of the theater only as a spectator. Did she now view herself for a moment playing the victim in some comedy called “The Lying Lover”?? Indignation would have given way to fear. It was bad enough having to worry about Giovanni’s survival. Now she had to worry once more about her own. The hard old life she had left before meeting him had

vanished. If she walked out the door, she had nowhere to go, and the prospect of having to rely on the types who once had helped her surely chilled her soul. How aware she was of her predicament her letters do not tell. We may make a few conjectures. She must have supposed that all her present acquaintances would side with him, and the servants would turn their backs. She must also have begun to wonder about whether the two main compass points of her current existence were nothing but illusions: the illusion of importance and the illusion of being loved. Maybe she began to doubt whether she was really as special as Giovanni made her feel. Thinking forward a bit, she would have feared that the gilded life she had been living for eight years, beyond

her wildest childhood dreams, was nothing but a flattering parenthesis. She knew Giovanni well, or so she thought; surely he could not bestow upon her all the cares he claimed while dividing his thoughts with someone else. She gathered her courage, and on September 17, 1617, she confronted him with the evidence of his transgression. At first he made some lame excuse, which only deepened her mistrust, expressed in another letter. Finally in the first week of October, he admitted his fault: it was too

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little, too late. Now she wanted more. “Find some remedy, Your Excellency, because I cannot and will not stand it any longer!”? Act now, she warned,“if you love me and still want me by your side.” Perhaps

she knew she would get him back, simply because the alternative was so unthinkable. But it would not be easy for him or for her. There was one chance for a reprieve, she told him. He must prove his love by an act of boldness. He must risk something dear to him, even at the

cost of his reputation, showing by his sacrifice that he placed her above all else. Giovanni understood and made a plan. He could not so easily abandon their love or the entire culture of Renaissance lovemaking that he was sure he perfectly embodied. Someone else would have to pay.

“a She would have read the letters differently at different times. Perhaps

the second time around she began to see the pattern. His very first communication had contained an apology: Florence, 19 February 1616

I can hardly wait to see you and serve you, throwing myself on my knees before you so you may pardon me and punish me; because I have been the reason why Your Ladyship has had so many great inconveniences, bothers and displeasures in the past months; My Lady I await you with extreme desire, and soon I will profess to you my obsequious and humble servitude, and therefore I hope you will make me as usual worthy of your good grace while I, reverently loving you and humbly adoring you, kiss your hands, with the hope, your goodwill permitting, to make this compliment even better in person.*

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

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She expressed some embarrassment at having to respond in her own simple script, diligently mastered with the help of Giovannt’s servant Signor Urbani and coaching by Cosimo Baroncelli, Giovannt’s secretary: utilitarian, expressive, but completely without frills.° The tone was light-hearted, because she was as happy as her incurable fatalism allowed her to be; her distrust was momentarily silenced by a thin layer

of security; and the security derived from feeling loved. Her belief seemed to make the fable true, well into the Advent season of the same year. By that time Giovanni was in the field and she was staying as close to him as she dared. Palma, 2 December 1616

I got two letters from you, in which I heard with great pleasure and contentment that you were well; and lam infinitely happy about this. As far as my desire to see Your Excellency again I don’t have to say anything; I'll let you judge whether I desire that or not.°

As the weeks passed she added her wishes for a good outcome to her wishes for his well-being. The following January she was congratulating him on some small victory or other, joining her own ambitions to his: Palma, 2 January 1617

Your Excellency’s letters were very dear to me, especially the one of this morning, in which I heard about your good success; God willing, it may be to your greater glory and contentment, because I also participate in that; I will await Your Excellency’s return with the greatest desire one can possibly imagine.’

At that time, her only real preoccupation had been the fortress town of Palmanova itself: remote, strange, lonely. She longed for a city where normal people circulated, not just soldiers and camp followers, and where the activities comprised more than just waking, sleeping, and waiting: Palma, 4 January 1617

Your Excellency should not be surprised if I write to you that I am imagining things, because being in these melancholy places with not

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

The words are simple and direct, perhaps just like herself. When she formed the characters with her own hand without dictating to a secretary, we seem to discern her soul: vigorous, stark, questioning. She no doubt wondered at first how he could write at such length, sometimes five or six pages, filled with information and instructions. He always had so much to say; just answering him was a struggle. She sometimes said he was simply using her as an extension of his household personnel, to keep affairs in order while he was away. And when it came to her own needs, he left everything up to her, as though she were

no more than an afterthought: Palma, 14 January 1617

Iam happy that Your Excellency is in good spirits and is getting some

enjoyment. Your Excellency writes me a long long letter, I do not know whether you are writing in anger, and I won’t try to respond to all the details because I don’t have so much knowledge to put on paper so many things; I will wait to respond to them in person, if God pleases to give me enough time to respond, I will say only this to Your Excellency that writing so long and that I do what I want and that all things are left up to me I understand that too well, and saying it’s up to you and do what you want, I don’t care, Your Excellency is

right, because when someone has such great things to think about, he throws the others into a corner; that’s duty.’ She may have experienced the letters as a substitute presence, bringing him beside her: consoling, decisive, elegant. She only wondered whether he meant everything he said. She couldn’t understand, at the time, why Giovanni pounced on her suggestion that he might be enjoying himself, and why he answered so vehemently for what seemed like no reason. She just said he was “getting some enjoyment.” She was not being ironic when she said it, and

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she knew practically nothing about what was going on at camp. Either

he deliberately misinterpreted what he had read or else this letter business was more devilishly complicated than she had imagined. She worried that she might lose him just because of some silly misunderstanding. Palma, 16 January 1617

Yesterday I got one from Your Excellency that was very dear to me because I learned of your being well and I had already heard about Your Excellency’s continuing good will to me, wholly without any merit of mine; Your Excellency writes that you can neither take me nor leave me, meaning that I am troubling to you; but if I wrote any-

thing that gave offense pardon me and I won’t commit the same errors again; when I wrote that Your Excellency is getting some enjoy-

ment, I did not write it with any bad intention; but there is nothing worse than being thought ill of, as Your Excellency does of me. You also say someone was looking to create trouble and told me some lie; I swear in the conscience of my soul that no one told me anything.’

Having only recently crossed the threshold into literacy, Livia began to worry about the problem of expressing her ideas in writing, perhaps in somewhat the same way that the problem had haunted Giovanni since his earliest attempts to divulge his ideas. Very likely, before placing her

seal and handing a letter to the courier, she was now looking more carefully than ever at what she had written. The words made sense to her, but she knew they might look differently to Giovanni. She tried again later that month to explain everything that was weighing on her mind: Palma, 22 January 1617

Would to God that Your Excellency should maintain your good disposition, but I strongly fear not; because distance does awful things and causes many accidents; please God that my thought is wrong; Your Excellency did not want to do that favor that I asked the other day, it wasn’t something important to you, but you did me wrong, but you are the master; you can do what you wish; Your Excellency knows that whoever loves also fears.!!

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There was so much writing in the world, she was beginning to think,

and such a likelihood of being misunderstood. She would gladly give it up.

But for long months, writing was all she had. The lapses between letters seemed interminable, partly because of her imaginings of what might be happening that she did not know about: Venice, 21 March 1617

I am sorry not to have had any letters recently from Your Most Ilustrious Excellency; and I don’t know what to make of it, except to blame your many occupations; I know you know very well that I can have no greater happiness than receiving letters frequently from Your Most Illustrious Excellency. I therefore beg you, in as much as I know you love me, not to deprive me of this pleasure and out of your love for me to try to rob a little time to make me happy in this particular, because I cannot be so any other way.'”

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

“a Giovanni liked her to write in her own hand, as he always wrote to her. Maybe she seemed more real that way. “When I see your handwriting I

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

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mingled in his mind with the words of Plato, Aristotle, and the rest of the Western tradition of writing on, about, and with love, which would have been familiar to him? When finished, would he have admired yet another splendid production of his own mind? Would he view his letters as a lesson on love, for his lover and for future voyeurs that he assumed would peek into his affairs, since, as he knew, perhaps more than anyone else, “words fly, but writing stays”? He gave the voyeurs plenty of food for thought. As always, in his romantic expressions he exceeded the bounds set by Church and censor. He took up a notch Petrarch’s fear that love had made him “love God less.”"* Carefully studied excess was his identifying mark. He crossed the line, ever so slightly, into blasphemy. Perhaps he even imagined what effect it might have on his hypocritical relatives once the documents were revealed. Mariano, 15 April 1617

Iam with great desire My Lady to be able to serve you and I reverently

supplicate you to indicate to me how I can obey and what ts your pleasure; the rest I hold to be trifles; please command and you shall be faithfully obeyed, in everything without exception, as I desire to serve Your Most Illustrious Ladyship as much as God Himself, adoring you as much as I do Him, and perhaps more, so please My Most Illustrious Ladyship accede to my reverent request to be benign in your graces to me and conserve me keeping me constantly in your memory and giving me a sign by commanding me, and I will be most obedient and faithful on every count. If anything important occurs, I will do my duty; nor will I fail to write most frequently and write again, so Your Most Illustrious Ladyship may command me, and I give you reverence and wish God to grant you happiness, health and every goodness.'°

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

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He may have crossed the line into blasphemy, but Giovanni was not obscene. In his letters he included only the most chaste references, even though the palace library, as we know from the documents, was full of

authors to fit any mood, if reading went along with lovemaking. Perhaps, for raising the intensity of desire, he would have found some recent still-permissible authors to be far more powerful than the prohibited ones. Contemporary poets’ allusive references to kisses, breasts, sweaty palms, thighs, sighs and the supreme delight were almost more

erotic than the “lubricious sonnets” by Aretino, or the “positions” drawn by Giulio Romano and engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi, or even Aretino’s informative dialogues with Pippa the apprentice whore, all published before the Counter-Reformation.'® Desire arose from a lack: censorship stimulated a black market for books and a legitimate market for metaphors. From Giambattista Marino’s Rime, among the few texts whose presence on Giovannt’s shelves can be verified without a doubt, he would have read lines, ostensibly written in dialogue with a courtesan, that said one thing and meant quite another: The hard weight lying on that tender thigh of impious mortal sword you lightly bear, O youth for honor’s sake, and others’ pain, Whence come this stiffish pose and valiant mien?!”

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

The combination of amorous insinuations and military imagery surely

would have appealed to “the warrior of both Mars and of Love.” Then came: From me with steel so rigid and so mean the earth-bound angel seems to me to guard the secret part of earthly paradise.*°

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Was he ready to enter? Was she ready for him? With the documents still silent, a history of off-the-record playfulness awaits a new range of sources.7!

Letters he used for mental, not physical seduction. His words, not his arms, would seize her mind and body. He would surround her with the orchestra of his phrases, playing notes of affection amid melodies of passion. He would overwhelm her with courtesies, shower her with promises, and place her on a pedestal: Mariano, 12 May 1617

I desire, My Most Illustrious Mistress, to be conserved by you as a most humble and most devoted servant, because all my contentment

has its origin, means and end in you, my only and true Most Illustrious Mistress, so that, 1f you love me as I believe, I will be able to accept this favor, which is as much as I can ever desire; I hope I will not be denied, because the faithfulness whereby I serve, and will eternally serve, has no greater recompense than this, whereby I will live consoled, if I will have the favor. Command me, Your Most Illustrious Ladyship, and you will be reverently served.”

Her gratitude would break down every resistance, he hoped, and perhaps compensate for whatever foibles she had noticed or whatever inconvenient discoveries she might make. To the world, she was his friend—not the other way around. He could

never forget the norms, the structures, and the prejudices that made their life possible and impossible at the same time. His attachment to her was a relation in a world of relations, not just a sensation or a feel-

ing.*? He took advantage of his privilege to play outside the rules, accepting her as his friend no matter who she was, placing her within the circle of his associates, his dependents, and his clients, demanding their acquiescence to him, and expecting their obedience to her. She could never have done the same. When he spoke of her as his “amica”

he meant to indicate more than just the casual friendship between lovers occasionally promised by the characters in Matteo Bandello’s novels.** He wished her to enjoy all the advantages implicit in the idea of amicizia, without the practical aspects of the concept ever spoiling their amore. He would have known very well how skeptical his fellow

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Florentines were about Cicero’s belief that true friendship could only

be disinterested, that amicitia and amor were the same thing: they thought friendship needed the benefit of patronage and mutual support, without which the city would fall apart.*° He wanted to have his friend and her love too. At least in his correspondence, they would thus be courtly lovers—but with a twist. His words, according to the pattern set for courtly love by

Andreas Cappellanus in the twelfth century, would be the intelligent foreplay before the physical act of love, the heart-softening exploration of tastes and emotions while waiting for the chance to strike.*® And just as in the sixteenth-century revivals of medieval chivalry by Ariosto

and the other romance writers, popular in the neo-feudal courts of present-day Italy including Florence, he would be her knight in shining armor.’’ Every act of his would be for her—hopefully without the disastrous consequences of Tancredi and Clorinda or Rinaldo and Armida,

cruelly separated on the one hand, cruelly deceived on the other, in Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered. He would behave as her servant and treat her as his lord, just as in the dialogue on love by the current love theorist Sperone Speroni.*® Unlike all of these, which usually preferred two heroes belonging to the aristocracy, he would actually abase himself and raise her up. As in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the clever spoof on the whole tradition, published just in these years, Livia is his Dulcinella, the common girl whom the Don treats mistakenly as his princess. “Her name was Aldonza Lorenzo, and upon her he thought fit to confer the title of Lady of his Thoughts.””? Unlike Don Quixote, who is mad, Don Giovanni does so with a sound mind, in an elaborate exercise of selfconscious role-playing. Stock phrases, he knew, were never enough. His letters must appear spontaneous while conforming to the pattern. He could obviously not discard the accumulated wisdom of the centuries, concerning how to put ideas into words. He had read his Cicero and his Quintillian, and he knew as well as any educated man how to follow an exordium by a narratio, a petitio by a conclusio.°° He also knew how to pen letters of thanks and congratulations to relatives and dignitaries—in the archival folders dedicated to this part of his correspondence, they are all alike, with a few differences to fit the occasion and compliments enough to

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make the most determined supplicant run out of breath. In diplomatic prose he was on par with the Venetian ambassadors, some of whose reports had become literature.** As a comic writer, surely, if the

scripts had survived, we would find he was as good at turning out model love letters as were the authors of the letter-writing manuals, from Antonfrancesco Doni’s Three Books of Amorous Letters by Doni for Every Sort and Type of Affair to Francesco Sansovino’s Nine Books of Love Letters, all placed on the Index in 1590 along with anything else encour-

aging adultery—an obvious indication of the supposed appeal and perhaps the supposed effect.** Precisely by virtue of his vanity as an author, he would have no ghost-writer suggesting (straight from Sansovino) “Although I take it for certain, my most dear and most beloved Lady, that you by the very obvious signs must by now have noticed the amo-

rous flames in which for some time I continue to be consumed for you.”*° His words would be all his own; for real love letters must reflect

the personality of the writer while taking into account the personality of the receiver. There could be no substitute. To make his words more concrete, he joined to them his plans for their future life together. He painted a picture for her of two lovers in an ideal setting, a locus amoenus, dreams fulfilled, desires satisfied, all

but salvation achieved. The suggestion of marriage was vague. He referred instead to “inseparable unity.” Was it the same thing? Marriage after all was love’s assassin, the literature said: adultery was the bed of choice. Maybe he wanted to see how the words of permanence sounded in his own ears before pronouncing them at the altar.°** Fara, at the Venetian Camp, 10 September 1617

For the rest, My Most Illustrious Mistress, I reverently beg you to believe that I live more than ever as a most devoted and obliged servant, and with extreme desire to one day have the honor and the grace that I ask of God, to finally join myself to you inseparably until death, which is my continuous desire, my true and desired aim that makes me tolerate this difference more willingly, which I hope will be the reason, when allowed by God’s majesty, for our being able to have

perfect quiet to live united in peace and consolation the rest of life

that His Divine Majesty concedes to me, and supposing this is

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pleasing to Your Most Illustrious Ladyship, and I see many signs that itis, and hope for more from your humanity and courtesy than from anywhere else, because no quality of my own is enough to make me

believe that this is entirely to your liking, My Mistress: only your innate courtesy, whereby I have always been favored by Your Most Illustrious Ladyship since the beginning of my servitude, and with so many favors that this makes me believe you will continue to obligate me and make me your true slave by this seal, which is my true purpose.°°

In any case, the picture showed a life of joy and freedom, lived at one another’s side. Livia was sure to appreciate that. When writing her he may have tried to put on his most sincere face, and she probably believed him. The feints, the ruses, the tricks of love: he knew them all—or at least,

he evidently thought he did. He armed himself as much for her as against her. Love was a battle, he would have read in Ovid’s Amores: Every lover’s a soldier, drafted in Cupid’s legion; Atticus, listen: every lover’s a soldier.*°

Along with every schoolboy, he would have known the Art of Love, not only the descriptions of transcendental pleasure at the end of Book 2,

but also the instructions on the correct timing of an attack, whether by him or by her. Maybe he agreed that “delay ever spurns lovers on, if but its term be brief.”°’ Driving the passions to the limit required planning, including advice on love-baiting, which mutatis mutandis could apply to either him or her: “But neither promise yourself too easily to

him who entreats you, nor yet deny what he asks too stubbornly.” Dangle the other for a time and see the result: “Cause him to hope and fear together.” Timo et tremo—“temo e tremo”: he would use that line in the letter of October 28, 1617, almost as a signal to the curious historian.°°> Rather than on a waxen tablet, like the hypothetical lovers in Ovid’s account, fit to be erased, he would write in stone—or at least, on documents that some archive would preserve. Pain was another of the pleasures of love: this he also surely knew. We find a cheap edition of Pietro Bembo’s Asolani among the items he

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acquired during his book-buying days. Was this his Bible on the subject?*’ He too, as in this dialogue, had no doubt experienced the psychic ambivalence of love, that is, the sensation of being pulled in multiple directions: lovers “dare and fear in the same instant,” one speaker said; they are “most happy and most afflicted in the same hour.”*° He may have wondered how “a single soul should be able to wish two contrary things.” What he controlled by his free will might be

in vital conflict with what nature imposed; he could be drawn to the forbidden, delighted by trespassing, whether he wished it or not. Rather than a St. Paul, saved from his sinfulness by his faith, maybe thought

he would be a Petrarch, fascinated by the contrast of wills but not entirely convinced that turning his back on his pleasures would be any help. Even thinking about it probably whetted his appetite for more. He was an expert, though a reluctant one, in delayed satisfaction— imposed by war, not by choice. A relevant text would have been Leone Ebreo’s sixteenth-century dialogue on love, penned, incidentally, in Genoa over a half-century before Livia was born there. Was it among the many texts in Giovann1’s library whose traces have been lost? There, the reader sometimes wishes the characters would simply shut up and get on with it. But no. Poor Philo, grossly overmatched by the young Sophis, his lady, can only attempt some pointless opening gambit and is soon put in check after a new defense by her. The spiritual and the sensual must go hand in hand, she insists, dodging once more her lover’s advances. There are external and internal senses, and too quickly

conceding the satisfaction of desire is a crime against love, cutting short what should instead be prolonged. Delectation, she continues, is all the greater when insatiable; and in potentia it is more spiritual and united with the soul.” Engaging in the same thinking, perhaps Giovanni

felt that abstinence not only refined the imagination, but also sharpened the appetite for the real thing. Writing and loving, in Giovannt’s letters, seem to merge into a single act. Communicating and feeling are each an extension of the other.” I supplicate Your Most Ilustrious Ladyship, My Mistress, to believe that I have no other good in the world except you, My Ladyship, nor do I desire or seek, nor shall I ever seek anything else but to revere

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

The repetition of concepts in different words with different nuances—

“no other good in the world,” “revere and serve you,” “praying and supplicating”—suggest the exercise of a single extended thought, with the attendant emotions, as the physical sense of writing takes over the

arm, the shoulder, the back, and head. He wants to “possess” her in every sense, as though, turning a profane glance to a biblical concept, “the word was made flesh.”** He owned a Bible; maybe he also owned a copy of the recently published letters by Heloise to the teacher Abelard,

which had just been published for the first time after five hundred years, articulating the physical experience of the pupil’s thoughts about

love, including simulated transports induced by her imagination of love’s embraces occurring even during the sacraments.*° Physiologists

and philosophers were now forging new paths to understanding the duality of body and spirit. Descartes had not yet put pen to paper on this subject, but Fabricius ab Aquapendente, lately of Padua and now of Florence, put a knife to the human brain around this time, possibly with some such questions in mind. Giovanni would have known him as the doctor who had cured his nephew Carlo and the Grand Duchess Cristina.*° What image of her did he conjure up in his mind as he wrote? As she was the last time they met? As she was the first time, almost a child? Seeking the connection between beauty and the divine was a Florentine tradition. Marsilio Ficino, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s favorite philosopher, tried to solve the problem by going back to Plato.*” Giovanni may have heard enough about the discussions to know that the true initiate into the mysteries was supposed to be able to see through the physical into

the metaphysical.*® The uninitiated, that is, he who is blind to the

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higher significance of beauty, “does not easily rise out of this world to

the sight of true beauty in the other” and “looks only at her earthly namesake, and instead of being awed at the sight of her, he is given over to pleasure, and like a brutish beast he rushes on to enjoy and beget.” Perhaps Giovanni did not see himself in either role. Somewhat indif-

ferent to begetting, he nonetheless wanted his earthly delights, while contemplating the ideal; that was not bestial, but only human, as he would try to explain to Livia later on in one of his letters. Another more recent contribution came from the Venetian courtesan Tullia d’Aragona, who dedicated her Dialogue on the Infinity of Love to none

other than Cosimo I, Giovannt’s father. There the positions in Leone Ebreo were exactly reversed. The character Benedetto Varchi in the dia-

logue, in real life a Florentine state historian who had lectured on Aristotle’s Ethics, defends friendship as the height of love, not too successfully.°° Tullia shoots back with a brilliant take on Neoplatonism, insisting that union with the beautiful is not just a spiritual but also a physical concept, and the spiritual and the physical must go hand in hand.°! Giovanni was neither pure intellect nor pure sense. One day he would try to explain that to Livia, but soon he would have to explain much more.

“a Things went well until September 1617; then Livia began to get susp1cious. At first, she just noticed some discrepancies between what she

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

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Yet Giovanni never bothered to clear things up, and this distance and the solitude were doing strange things to her mind. She told him she was ready to pack her bags and head back to Venice. More information began to leak out; she discovered he had been sending money to someone to get a girl out of trouble. There was no more doubt. Her anger caught Giovanni by surprise, and he shot off a pardon letter of astounding spontaneity: Fara, 19 September 1617

I remain so amazed and astonished by the letter I receive at this moment from the hand of the paymaster, written to me by Your Most

[lustrious Ladyship on the 17th, that I do not know what to do and Iam as dead, knowing my innocence and my faithfulness. I say no

more, My Mistress, except that on my knees before Your Most Illustrious Ladyship, I beg you by the entrails of Jesus Christ, to discover the truth and see my innocence and the malice of whoever has represented to you such an exorbitant and most bestial lie, which I am ready to challenge with my life. My Lady and Mistress, I beg you, for the love you have for me, which I know, to discover the truth, that Iam most innocent; nor shall I write more because I die, I don’t know where Iam and Iam most desperate. God help me. I give reverence to Your Most Illustrious Ladyship; and I write no more because of the passion and pain that are killing me, and God preserve you.°°

Before mailing perhaps he wondered what else might serve to defuse the situation, not bothering to cancel the repetitions and write a second draft. He must have known the strategy of attributing falsehood was weak, but to keep his own equanimity, he had to believe it might do

the trick. There was no more space on the page, so he wrote in the margin: Some malicious person, trying to bring about my downfall, is emitting these falsehoods; My Most Illustrious Mistress, I reverently beg you and supplicate you to seek out and you will find me a most innocent and true slave; and someone who wishes me ill, and consequently also Your Ladyship, is sowing discord for our ruin. God help us.

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Then he waited. Livia sulked for the rest of the month and then resumed the offensive. Another excessive penitence for a silly fault renewed her suspicions. We have the impression that she was beginning to see between

the lines of what she read, to the different worlds visible in a single phrase. The more skilled she became in reading prose, the more she hated what she saw. As always, she wrote down exactly what came into her mind. Udine, 2 October 1617

That Your Excellency kept the letter of Signor Cosimo Baroncelli and

did not send it to me in time is not such a great fault that Your Excellency has to think Iam angry, or would have any extraordinary reason to be; it does not seem to me to be such a great sin for me to be so angry, except that under the metaphor of the letter maybe Your Excellency wanted to say something else; because to tell me I might

have an extraordinary reason makes me think that what you said recently is true, and that Your Excellency wants to tell me jokingly in a way I understand, so that if Isome day complained, Your Excellency

could then say, I wrote to you about it, that you had reason to be upset. I thought this because your not having sent me the letter does

not seem so important as to require such great excuses; I hope to God I am wrong.°*

The following week she struck again, even harder. Interpreting Giovanni was not only difficult: it was becoming painful. Now she was sure there was another woman. She summoned her best writing abilities and produced a white-hot tirade: Udine, 10 October 1617

The more I look at those letters, the more they bother me and by God they don’t let me rest. It’s not possible for me to live like this, because I neither sleep nor eat and the constant anger I feel doesn’t let me live. But Your Excellency must find a solution: I neither will nor can be like this, because feeling like this is not good for me and for others. If you love me and want me near you, I beg you, Your Excellency, to make sure I have no such bothers, otherwise I will be forced to take

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

If the writing did not exactly make her feel better, at least it may have

made her feel more in control. She added a new request. Show me the woman. Giovanni resorted to the best defense he knew, when there was no defense: to plead ignorance. He would admit everything that was necessary to admit, except his own fault, thus taking the accusation away from the accuser. On October 10, in a letter Livia received a few days later, he acknowledged that there was a woman—no one in particular, just someone in trouble whom he was trying to protect, and there had been some misunderstanding. If Livia really wanted he would be happy

to arrange a meeting, but he had no idea where the woman was at present. He had organized for her removal from Friuli at his own expense because her presence there was becoming burdensome. He was very busy with the war and could not worry about every civilian in the

area. He would make a few inquiries as to her whereabouts and get back to Livia. There was no rush, he said. So smooth, so superior, so like the general that he knew he was. He played for time, hoping that a better solution would occur to him if the problem did not just go away by itself.

Livia already knew the truth because she had the evidence about the physician. Now was the time to use it, citing chapter and verse. What made things worse, we may imagine, was the sensation of being surrounded by the accomplices to her betrayal. It would have been just

another reminder that any sense of being in control was actually an illusion, that every scene of her life was directed by Giovanni. She

let out another raging tirade, this time repeating her request to see the woman. Udine, 14 October 1617

The letter of Your Excellency of the roth of this month would have given me great satisfaction if it had been possible for me to believe your words fully, especially concerning that disgraceful woman, which is difficult to do because you, Your Excellency, have deceived

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me so many times regarding this matter that I don’t know if I should believe you this time. But since Your Excellency writes to me that you'll make sure that I have her in my hands if this is what I want,

and because I don’t want to trust a third person any more, I will accept Your Excellency’s offer; therefore I beg Your Excellency to make sure I get my hands on her. Don’t tell me “I don’t know where she is,” because I know very well that Your Excellency knows, because I found

in a letter of Giovanni Galetti dated the 17th of April saying that they

were having her cured and that she needed a double purge and the money Your Excellency ordered to be paid, were for having her cured,

and Your Excellency wants me to think it was to get her out of the way; I was so ashamed in front of these gentlemen that I would have come all the way over there to show Your Excellency how you treat me. But let it please Your Most Illustrious Excellency to believe that I do not want things to stay like this because the anger would kill me. And you, Your Excellency, must take care that I don’t do anything crazy, because, believe me, my anger is eating away at me and I can’t live like this. I speak to you openly because it’s not possible for me to remain serene, because I would die and you, Your Excellency, would have a laugh about it. I say this because if you love me the way you say you do, you wouldn’t give me these afflictions.°®

To show his devotion, Giovanni must act now, according to her instruc-

tions. Then, at least, she could pretend that her word was his command, as he always claimed.

What made things worse was that this was not even the first time. On two other occasions, she had suspected betrayals, but she never had enough information to launch any precise accusations or face her lover with the evidence of his transgression. Back then, she probably made some vague allusions and had been satisfied with the response. This we gather from the absence of any references in the correspondence to the first two of the “three times” of which she speaks in October 1617.°” Now, very likely, she was as much encouraged by the increasing signs of

devotion coming from Giovanni as she was disappointed by the new evidence. The two contrary feelings strengthened her resolve to state openly what her position was and let him fight for her.

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Gabriele Ughi, Giovanni’s agent, obviously on Giovanni’s urging, chimed in from Florence to ease Livia’s mind, adding some comic relief to the developing tragedy. Giovanni, he suggested, had already passed the test of his devotion. How could Livia be so skeptical? Was this fair? The tone shifted from the comic to the serious. However, Livia refused to be taken in by another expert at the letter-writing arts. She immed1-

ately saw the significance of the pseudo-erudite allusions and was ready with the answer. She happened to know about the ancient legend he cited, of Leucippe and Clitophon, which had made a small sensation in the retelling by Lodovico Dolce published in Venice.°® It was irrelevant to the present case, she said. Leucippe endured a series of

dramatic abductions, having to rebuff the advances of abductors far more powerful than she, after which she was still able to prove her vir-

ginity, whereupon Clitophon took her as his spouse. There was no virgin in the present case. Udine, 15 October 1617

My dear Signor Gabriello, all the comparisons Your Lordship makes are appropriate except this one at the beginning of the letter, concerning the story of that little work called Leucippe and Clitophon, which does not seem relevant to me, i.e., in relation to the business we both know about. In fact, it’s contrary, because that girl was badly treated, but wrongly, and in this case there is no innocence, because the deeds speak loudly, and you know as much as I do whether I am the reason why His Excellency became a tyrant: and there is no one who is guiltier here than His Excellency, because if he hadn’t made the first mistake, then the second and then the third, of violating his word to me, not one but three times, in this business, we would not be at this pretty pass.°?

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

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immediate consolation was ready at hand: flattering words and blandishments, the warmth of another body. He bestowed his affections (he wouldn’t have called it love) on a woman of spirit and some resources—

apparently a recurring theme in his life. He no doubt thought she would be harmless because she was only in Friuli temporarily on some errand and would soon return home to Florence. But how did things get so complicated so fast? Was she indirectly acquainted with his relatives, who endorsed her goodwill mission, perhaps sending along their greetings? Did they hope she might distract him from Livia? Had they

once again stepped in to disrupt his life? In any case, the matter got out of hand, both for him and for her, and apparently the encounters became regular. Months went by. There was a pregnancy. The abortioninducing drug failed to work, or the woman failed to take it, hoping by this to press some claim upon his honor.®? He made clear by words and actions that his involvement would never be more than purely casual. The woman may have returned to Florence to apply some leverage. Her relatives would have taken some interest in the matter: the lover was a Medici prince, after all.

By this time Giovanni had nothing more to hide. The basis of his relationship with Livia, had been that abstinence sharpens appetite. Now he had gone too far. Livia had penetrated the armor of his eloquence and ripped the mask off his chivalric persona. All he had left was his contrition and his misery. The point was, what now? He started

his letter of the eighteenth with the usual declaration of innocence, knowing how hollow it must ring to her. Fara, in the Venetian camp, 18 October 1617

I remain with an immortal obligation to Your Most Illustrious Ladyship, seeing that everything comes from the affection you have for me, without my deserving it, and I hope to gain pardon for the past, because Iam ready and most disposed to make amends, if I can,

praying with humility to soften the soul of Your Most Illustrious Ladyship; I beg you not to keep the unfavorable opinion you have of

me, because I am certain that in the matter Your Most Illustrious Ladyship writes about, My Mistress, you are making by God a very

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great mistake, taking me for a madman who might have preferred such a woman or considered her equal to you, when I would not leave behind even the shadow of your shoes to follow somebody else, no matter how great her merit, nor would I dream of comparing the sun to the mud. You do me too great a wrong, and by God without reason, because I have never even dreamt of doing such a bestial thing. Indeed

I would have behaved brutally as a brute beast, if I had had such a crazy, vain, stupid and evil thought. My idea was most foolish, and I confess that I have erred, my mistress, but the end, by the true and immortal God, was never other than what I have already repeated so many times, so I won’t bore you with it now. I have erred, it’s true, because I didn’t think that my act would cause any harm and I had promised security, but it was a mistake on my part to make such a promise and by God I’m paying for it. In my behavior, My Dear Mistress, there is no willingness to err, no contempt of God, no imaginable regard for such a vile subject.*!

The Platonic stereotypes of purity and bestiality seemed a perfect fit

for the occasion. He would have to match his words by his acts. Meanwhile he followed the Venetian dictum that nighttime brings good counsel. Tomorrow came, and with it a new plan. Giovanni would agree to Livia’s demand for the woman to be delivered so she could settle the matter in person. He would mobilize various servants to carry out the

abduction with the maximum reserve. The pretext would be a new encounter with him; the itinerary, by way of Bologna. Fara, 19 October 1617

Girolamo the porter will conduct her, as I have ordered, and I believe it will take place as I say, as long as he is not too old, but I think he is strong enough. I did not write why or how, only the necessary words so things will proceed infallibly without raising suspicions. I cannot know which day he will arrive, except by guessing, because the trip can take more or less time according to when it starts, and I do not know when this will be.

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He displaced the guilt by turning to the schedule. But if the letters go out with this post, that is, Saturday the 21st, they will be in Florence Thursday, eight days from today, that is, the 26th; and if they leave eight days from Saturday, 1.e., the 28th, they will be in Venice fifteen days from today, that is, the 2nd of November; but if they do not leave immediately for some reason and were sent with the

other postman, this whole calculation would be extended just so long as the length of the delay.

The next orders took the whole matter out of the personal and into the area of espionage and covert operations. I ordered that as soon as the letters arrived, she has to be told that she must come via Bologna, accompanied by the said Girolamo, and that no one should see her leave: this I told Girolamo; and I frightened the parents into refraining from holding her back or discouraging her, so they should not say anything, and she should just get in the boat and leave. I will order her to go directly to the Florentine post station in Venice, and there Your Most Illustrious Ladyship will

command what she has to do; I only mention now that if I do not know to whom she is to be given, perhaps Girolamo will cause some trouble; but I will write as Your Most Illustrious Ladyship will see written in the letter accompanying this one, that Girolamo will consign her to whoever gives him this letter, and this I believe will be enough to make sure he obeys me, seeing my hand, my seal, my signature, so not even I will know who will get her, because Your Most Illustrious Ladyship has no more faith in me.”

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

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“a Giovanni seems to have drawn a dark veil over the whole matter; yet subsequent letters indicate he knew nothing would ever be the same. Not because of the missing woman or because of Livia and the usual bitterness between lovers scarred from the same wound inflicted by deceit. The whole affair with Livia made him think about himself and the world in ways he may never have thought possible. Perhaps he was surprised to discover what Livia meant to him, and he only began to realize the depth of his involvement when he risked spoiling things by his own behavior. A new path now opened to his own self-consciousness.

He tried to tell her in words she might understand. Fara, in the Venetian Camp, 15 October 1617

Only one thing remains fixed in my mind, My Lady, and it so torments me I could kill myself, and it is, that I believe I am badly considered by Your Most Illustrious Ladyship; and because you are, My Lady, of very powerful impressions and perfect memory, with a soul inclined to desire satisfaction from whoever offends you, the thought that I should forever be seen in this way, viewed with disdain and not liked, so that no action of mine will ever be accepted or considered to be sincere: I do not know how to live with this bad impression of Your Most Illustrious Ladyship, because I serve you in order to be able to revere and adore you quietly, to find peace and consolation, and the way things are I will have a bad life, perpetual restlessness and great anguish, to the point that my every effort will be in vain, my every thought will achieve nothing, and I’ll never please you again, and Pll be grinding water in a mortar.®

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

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peace, after having served you for so long, this impression that I can

never hope to erase, although Your Most Ilustrious Ladyship has every right |to feel this way], the perpetual tribulation that awaits me for these few years that I have left from fifty onward, the constant torment of knowing that Iam always misjudged, always considered

to be a perfidious, disloyal bad-natured person with an unstable mind, to receive this constant mortification, My Illustrious Ladyship,

is an arduous task. At this point in the letter, after five pages with still more to go, we begin to wonder about the thought processes behind this outpouring. Perhaps for the first time, Giovanni wondered whether or not he was a bad person, after all, in the eyes of the world. He needed confirmation about his good will from the person whose opinion mattered most.

In the documents at hand, we seem to discern an inner conflict. What Giovanni thought about this conflict is something else again. As a youth he had met the master of self-knowledge, Michel de Montaigne, at the dinner table in Palazzo Pitti.°° Perhaps he knew the Essays in Girolamo Naselli’s Italian translation published in Ferrara in 1590.°°

His own tribulations were as far from the skepticism-based ones of Montaigne, a man tormented by the means for discerning truth, as they were from the faith-based tribulations of Augustine, tormented by the need to avoid sin. The Giovanni we are coming to know would not have been so concerned about whether things he heard or read were true or not, provided that he could use them; and as for sin, as the theologians defined it, he would repent in the end. What he may have appreciated in Montaigne was the insight that experiences did not present themselves to his consciousness as a unitary whole; he seemed to be overwhelmed with competing wills. He was aware of a self that he would like to repudiate, in contrast with the self that he accepted and adored. He might have said it just as in Montaigne’s words: “We are all made up of patches and put together in so shapeless and diverse a fashion that every piece plays its own game, and there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.”°”

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Overcoming the self-contradictions was a worthy challenge, Montaigne suggested, but not an easy one. Giovanni agreed. He began to measure himself by reflection from her. The experience of their exchanges of love and affection, as well as their battles, gave him the perspective necessary for self-observation. Did he take to heart

Montaigne’s insight that love of a woman was “a reckless and fickle flame, wavering and inconstant; a fever flame, subject to paroxysms and intermissions, and that holds us but by one corner”?°® Unlike Montaigne, he was not discouraged. In fact, he forged his consciousness by by allowing himself to burn in this flame. Pain after all was a drug, for which he had a far greater tolerance than Montaigne. He bore the scars to prove it. His letters, like the Essays, would be an extended imaginary conversation between him and himself, as well as between himself and the idealized Livia. Fara, in the Venetian camp, 18 October 1617

Iam not so bestially sensual as not to be able to tell the difference between precious jewels and excrement; by God! don’t consider me to be such a beast, I beg you, Your Most Illustrious Ladyship, because the thought alone leaves me breathless.°”

Livia was at once his judge, his punisher, his muse, and his other self. The necessity to commit words to a page, imposed more and more by time and distance, inevitably required deeper thoughts concerning love, affection, the other person, and his own being. Even after the disposal of the rival woman and the return of serenity, the struggle continued: this time, not with Livia, only with himself. Yet once again,

Livia was the mirror, the trampoline, the backboard of his ideas. Sperone Speroni, in a dialogue On Love, expressed a similar idea to the one that may have occurred to Giovanni, where a character says, “the

lover seems to me properly speaking a portrait of the beloved, and the lover, by love, considering the behavior and the actions of the beloved, may better know the essence and the worth of the latter, than by any other means.””? Writing letters with a view of the beloved in mind, therefore, was a way of coming to terms with himself. Perhaps he wondered whether the contemplating or the loving brought more

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knowledge: surely Aristotle was wrong to prefer the latter path to the

former; but the explication of the Ethics by Galeazzo Florimondo, present in his library, gave no insights.” Mariano, 17 March 1618

Believe me, My Mistress, considering that you are far from me and knowing your great merit and other most noble and most worthy qualities, and knowing my small ability to serve you, not because of any lack of willingness but by lack of power and force, and the small merit I have acquired by my servitude, not having been able to ind1cate in the tiniest way the extent of my obligation for the infinite courtesies and favors that I have always received from Your Ladyship, My Mistress, makes me so confused 1n myself, that by God I do not

know where I am, whether I am half-discouraged or am almost losing my mind, I fear and I tremble, confide and hope, and thus fluctu-

ating, by the true God, I almost do not know what I am doing; I thought I felt your departure in my soul; but truly I did not think it would afflict me so much, because I consoled myself by the power of my thoughts; but now feeling the privation afflict me, and my contentment consisting only of castles in the air, by God, by God, I truly do not know if I can stand it; I continue to depend as always on some sign from Your Most Illustrious Ladyship, who, as my guiding star, will point the direction of every action of mine.”

He wished to do what he could not do; he wished to be what he could not be. It was a conflict of wills: all his own. Seneca had the right words: “Magnam rem puta unum hominem agere: Consider it a great thing to play

the part of a single man.”” Giovanni sought recourse in another form of expression.

Now, by God, would be the time to become a poet again; but the occupations prevent me and also the confusion I have in my head from the thousand thoughts that this distance places there.”*

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

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“a Throughout 1618 and 1619, retirement, leisure, and the multiplying ail-

ments triggered new preoccupations. Livia, after all, was a living person, not a figment of his imagination. He was no Dante, envisioning a girl, a woman, whom he would never know.’”> She had her needs, and he had his duties. If she was to survive him in anything like the style to which she had become accustomed, they would have to be legally mar-

ried. Continuing his biological line, making himself eternal by his brood, exemplifying the obsessions of Francesco Barbaro and Sabba da Castiglione, the Renaissance theorists of domesticity, not to mention his own relatives—that was for conventional couples, not for him or for her.”° Their relations and their love existed in some other realm, inaccessible to the traditional family, and for which the best arguments were probably more on the side of the adulterers, or at least, the unofficially joined. However, marriage could at least settle a few of Livia’s doubts about his philandering and give her some peace of mind if the worst should happen. After all, in the event of a tragedy, Livia was once again a woman in trouble. She stood no chance alone in a hostile world, without his name and his property. The annulment proceedings, concluded successfully in June, freed her from her previous marriage. Now was the time. Thus on the 25th of August, Livia and Giovanni became man and

wife, by a simple ceremony in San Giovanni Decollato in Venice, a church connected with Florence by way of the city patron. Giovanni chose two witnesses, Bartolomeo de’ Barbieri and Antonio Succarelli, from among the Florentine community that often gathered there. To make sure there was no interference from his relatives, he obtained a dispensation from the patriarch of Venice waiving publication of the

banns.’” Now, despite the other Medici, she was part of the family. There was nothing they could do (so he hoped). They would have to respect her and her new child, now seven months in her womb. Thoughts about the future opened a new perspective on the significance of this time in his life. The documents suggest a sense that he was moving toward some kind of final stage. Maybe he quietly rejoiced that he did not yet look like the “third age of man” represented in the

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painting by Giorgione in his father’s collection at Pitti: he could still pass for a lusty prince of pleasure, so there were still a few good years left. Soon there would be a resolution, comfort, and eventually, peace— in the company of Livia. He wrote a stylish tribute to domestic bliss, as he saw it. Villa Torniello, Paluello, 23 September 1619

I beg you, Your Most Illustrious Ladyship, to remember me and keep me in your good graces, for the very devout and obliged servant that Iam and will forever be, since I have no other desire than to be certain that you will keep me in your good favor. This is my goal and my

concern, and |if I obtain this] I can be sure to live quietly until my dying day. Accompanied by this thought I have sailed through life and I have never feared storms or tempests, and no matter how difficult the voyage I have never given up hope of reaching the harbor and finally I have arrived, and for this I praise God with pure love and I give affectionate thanks to you, Your Most Illustrious Ladyship, and I beseech you to grant me with your generosity that tranquility in life that I have always aspired to obtain from your kindness, because in that I find my real rest and in you, Your Most Illustrious Ladyship, I put my trust and place my hopes.”

She was his one certainty in a tumultuous world (just as he was for her). The enigma that had been his life so far was finally solved. There was only one remaining problem: the Medici family—the boon and bane of his existence. Livia, too, could have no illusions about the general opinions circulating in her regard within the Florentine court.

Perhaps she occasionally thought about having to face the family again, and the thought repelled her. She would also have been reminded of the insecurities that had plagued her life before Giovanni. Without him, she would be at their mercy, and she could count on there being

little enough of that. She appealed to him to think of a way to make her safe forever. That, after all, was the meaning of everlasting love. Grab up your sword, knight, and save your lady, we imagine her repeating, whenever she could. Not one to be daunted by the impossible, he invented an ingenious stratagem. They would set up two legally separate households: one his,

WRITING THE PASSIONS I8I

one hers—one in the villa at Paluello outside Padua, and one in Venice. Hers would contain everything she needed for a dignified life; and his,

as much as he needed to get by. Whatever the Medici family might attempt to do, at least she would have her possessions, her child, and her home. Villa Torniello a Paluello, 4 December 1620

I have resolved to put down on this paper the small remedy that I have thought could be adopted, to resolve the doubt Your Most Illustrious Ladyship last expressed, namely, that on my death she would have trouble standing up for her interests, 1n the house where Ilived.... There is no doubt that the difficulty Your Most Ilustrious Ladyship indicates could only come from my relatives, who might

pretend that what is in the house is mine, or came from me, and therefore, although wrongly, wish to take possession of it; and they might use as a pretext that it belongs to this poor little son of Your Ladyship and me; 1n this case I think the best and most secure way is to separate everything that is necessary for my use from everything that is of Your Most Illustrious Ladyship, and keep it separately in a place, and in a separate house, where I will live, so that everyone, including those in the house where you will be, will know that there is nothing more there belonging to me, because, when God pleases to liberate me from the travails of this world, no one whatsoever can say this is mine, except what will be with me, in the house where I will live.””

Having finally set out in words what he had been thinking for a long time, he may have considered that, as a gentleman, as a hero, as a lover, as a man, he had done all he could. He might now rest in peace. But how could he get Livia to agree? Given the terms of their relationship as she now understood them, she would never accept any form

of permanent separation. The war letters were a proof of that. The terms therefore had to change. To bring Livia into the plan, he had to make one final sacrifice-the supreme sacrifice. He had to seemingly turn his back on her. He had to tell her that he saw his own death on

the horizon and wished for a solitude that in his heart he really abhorred. Their last years together, he had to say, must take into

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account his advancing years. Above all, he explained, he wished to avoid becoming a burden. He would spare her the “constant demands” typical of “the capriciousness of age.” Their life in each other’s physical presence every day, one constantly in the way of the other, would spoil what they had. They would henceforth live apart: he with his books, she with her child. Any time she wished, he would stay for a few days, a week, a month, or whatever time was necessary to satisfy her desires

and bolster her contentment. She only had to say the word and he would come running. “I shall fly to where you are and in a few hours I will be able to serve your every command.” Their “souls would remain

wholly united” while their bodies remained apart only to the extent required for living in peace. Harmony would be achieved, in appearance and in fact. Nor, he added, should she imagine that the old bugbear of competing affections would ever bother them again: he was cured, once and for all, of the vice of infidelity. Perhaps Livia suspected that the apparent act of generosity might be the greatest ruse of all. Perhaps she had a presentiment that Giovanni had something new up his sleeve; in any case, when he first presented

the project to her she dissolved in tears.°° Whether he was actually trying to cast her aside and go forth once more as a hunter in the fields of love, as Cosimo had done after sidelining Eleonora, she would never

know. Soon the final illness overtook him, and Palazzo Cappello, which he had rented in 1620 on the remote island of Murano, a short boat ride from the center of Venice, became his hospital.*! The solitary joys of the countryside, if such were what he really craved, would remain a dream. Indeed, the creation of a dream-world out of a playful notion of who they were, amid an accumulating inventory of possessions, was a leitmotif of their story.

A Place for Things

The inventories, the probate records, and the correspondence with builders and agents all suggest the framing of a certain kind of life. On a typical evening, a soft tap at the new oak portal and Livia’s butler,

Antonio Ceccherelli, would let Giovanni in. Maybe she would be waiting in the hall by the sculpted mantelpiece where her name was set in stone, a none too subtle reminder to their acquaintances that this was her domain.’ A few words, perhaps a quick embrace, and they would pass through to the garden in the back. This feature, apart from the location across via del Parione from Giovannt’s palazzo, had been the main attraction of the property when she got it on a lifetime lease

from the Ardingelli family, well-established owners in this part of Florence.* If they walked past the freshly planted spring flowerbeds, they might have paused by the central fountain, where the dribbling water gave an undertone to the evening birdsong and the wind just

beginning to rustle in the fruit trees. Back in the house, a table of edible and potable delights would await them to accompany their banter concerning the topics of the day. Finally, on a pretext, she would slip upstairs to her bedroom; he would follow. “Sometimes I was the one who undressed him when he went to sleep with her,” Ceccherelli

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later reported to the court attempting to divest Livia of the property left to her by the deceased lover. Maybe she would watch.* Off would come the dagger, the cape, the doublet, the stockings, possibly not ina heap on the floor but all conveniently laid out as the servant discreetly bowed and left. She would surrender her own garments delicate piece by delicate piece to her lady in waiting. The stage having been prepared

so meticulously, the intimacies would begin. She his Venus; he her Adonis: morning would break on a scene of conquest, each by the other, and the day would start anew. Such, at least, was the evident intention, and the records (including

Ceccherelli’s testimony) indicate there were some times like that. However, for almost the duration of their life together, the various structures were still being built. While the front and back facades of the house in Parione were under construction, digging went on in the garden. Any movements around the property required stepping over clumps of stone, bypassing piles of earth and tools, dodging workers and shipments of building materials. While they designed Parione, they were shipping things to Venice; and once in Venice, they worked on Montughi. Thoughts of what they needed here and there pervadedtheir conversation when they were together and their letters when they were apart. They wanted whatever Giovanni’s improving position would some day allow, and they spent their days preparing for a future that never came. Their aspirations rose in inverse proportion to the possibility of realizing them. They were a dream in the making, and the making was their life. Between one residence and the next, they rushed breathlessly to manufacture the greatness they thought they deserved. Fortunes came in and went out, spent on immense quantities of jewels, paintings, and

sculptures; massive home and garden improvements; and all the clothing to be worn in the various activities that the spaces were meant to contain.* The movable items, boxed and shipped back to Florence from Venice after Giovanni died, would become a legend at the Court of Wards responsible for keeping track of it all. Status, indeed, depended on the admiration of the inferiors, and admiration, due to the literalmindedness of most people, depended on owning more things. They hardly needed Girolamo Muzio, the theorist of nobility, to tell them

A PLACE FOR THINGS 185

that.° Even if there was no one else around to see what they had, things perhaps made them feel more like who they were. Accordingly, when not doing anything else, they spent their time in the company of agents

of various kinds—architects, artists, tradesmen of all sorts, writing around to manufacturers and merchants, in what seems to have been a mad rush to make their greatness tangible. While examining the next pearl to be acquired or viewing samples of fine fabric for the next

garment to be made, they could muffle, not silence, the nagging thought that the next day might well be their last.°

“a At acquiring the trappings of greatness, Giovanni had an enormous head start. His income of some ten thousand scudi per year, and the associated property, made him one of the richer men in Florence.’ The stunning patrimony included what was left to him by Cosimo I plus purchases made through other assets or exchanged with his brothers in return for an annuity (in the case of certain iron mines). Apart from the interest-yielding hoard of Spanish government bonds held in Rome

and deposits in the public bank in Florence (Monte di Pieta), there were dozens of income-producing properties.® Such were the three flour mills outside of Florence, including their appurtenances and profits: one near the walls of Pisa, another outside Porta al Prato, and yet another on the Bisenzio River. In the city, there were the mills on the Arno River at Ognissanti, to the west of Ponte alla Carraia. There

were farmlands in and around the town of Limite (now Capraia e Limite) on the Arno between Prato and Empoli. There were three entire

canals: one around the forest called the Navetta, at the bend in the Arno just above Pontedera; another at Biéntina, just north of Calcinaia; and yet another at Vicopisano, along the Arno to the west of Calcinaia. There were houses adjoining the palazzo della Sapienza in Pisa, the

main building of the university then and now the university library. More houses with adjoining agricultural businesses were in Cerreto Guidi, Vinci (near the birthplace of Leonardo), and in Fucecchio and Empolt. Along the city wall at Porta al Prato, there was a building and garden known as La Vaga Loggia, which would be transformed into

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public baths under the Lorraine government two centuries later.’ Last but not least, there was the palazzo in via del Parione. He never worried about where the wealth came from, only what to do with it. The family’s centuries-long spending spree since their ancestors made a fortune in banking could clearly not stop with him.'° Nor could he bear to look much worse than the other plutocrats in Florence,

including the sons of the Riccardi and Strozzi families, and others whose parents and grandparents had survived the bankruptcies, wars,

plagues, and confiscations of the past two centuries and funneled wealth carefully down the somewhat (at least in his city) recently discovered path of primogeniture, salting the larger portions away into permanent trusts.'’ But he had little inclination to embrace the mission spelled out in these years by state theorist Giovanni Botero, to spend conspicuously for the greatness of his city.'? If his private money contributed in some way to the beautification of the public space, so much the better; he would not look for it.!’ He needed no excuse for the gulf between the poor and himself: there was no reason to justify a law of nature. Wealth, he knew, would not make virtue, but it helped. His ideas were probably molded less by the gospel about the camel, the rich man, and the eye of a needle, a staple of zealous preachers in commercial

cities, than by the disagreements between Muzio and another late sixteenth-century noble theorist, Alessandro Sardo.'* Of family roots and personal merit, Sardo preferred the former, while Muzio, the latter; but they agreed that the main component of nobility was perfection. That would be Giovanni’s goal, evinced in as many of his endeavors as we have been able to document. To reach perfection, they said, economic means were as important as morality, inasmuch as excellent virtues require wealth to inspire great deeds. Wealth therefore was a means not an end: luxury goods, great houses, such were the signs of a potential—a potential to do good—and the sign must be as apparent as it should be rare. If his behavior in any way reflected his thinking, he could not agree more. After all, the chief result of the laxly enforced sumptuary legislation in every Italian city, despite the stated banalities

about preventing families from ruining themselves by the rush to spend, was to provide up-to-date lists of the latest extravagances for

A PLACE FOR THINGS 187

those eligible to flaunt them. He was fully committed to doing his part in this, if necessary.» Beauty was a way of life, Giovanni believed: one worth living to the

fullest and protecting with all his power. It was the essence of buon gusto or “good taste” in all things. Thinkers had given the selfish quest for it a good name by the association with such other more obviously

useful eternal concepts as “truth” and “the good.” Even his favorite poet, Tasso, had gotten carried away by the ambiguities of Plato’s original word for it in Greek, To kaAov, rolling all these concepts into one key value, the only one worth having.'® The question of whether beauty

was more prevalent in simple things or in composite ones, furiously debated by writers as diverse as the philosopher Marsilio Ficino and the ex-courtesan Tullia dAragona, probably seemed, if he was familiar enough with their ideas to make a judgment, as pointless as the question of whether the artist was nature’s imitator (a thought attributed to Leonardo) or nature’s perfector (supposedly Michelangelo’s view).'” Whatever the definition, whatever the cause, he knew the acquisition of beauty was an attribute of the greatness to which he aspired. Pursuing beauty required time and talent, and he started at an early age.'® When he was only seventeen, Raffaello Borghini dedicated a dialogue to him on the matter. He knew the main speakers in the work—all Florentine noblemen, knights of the order of Santo Stefano, friends of

his family; and he knew the villa I/ Riposo belonging to Bernardo Vecchietti, in the countryside outside Bagno a Ripoli, where the conversations were supposed to have taken place. The life depicted there, a far cry from the loud shooting parties at the Medici villa at Artimino in Ferdinando’s day, seemed to represent an ideal worth his striving. He could imagine himself on an afternoon hike down a Tuscan hillside and up another, with the villages of Grassina or Lampeggio or the height of San Giusto a Monterantoli in the distance, rewarded at the end by a visit to a remote chapel, home to a half-forgotten fresco cycle. The description of humans in harmony with nature was a better essay on painting than so many dry treatises: “They had arrived in a meadow

resembling a theater, arrayed by thousands of varieties of flowers appearing to them like a very charming carpet, inviting everyone on it to take a rest. This was densely surrounded bya tall garland of cypresses

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and thick grass, shaded by the cypresses which looked almost black.”!?

A metaphorical quest was not enough. He would attempt to acquire as much beauty as he could and enjoy the acquisitions as long as possible.

He lavished the greatest attention on the palazzo in Parione, his first real residence after Pitti. He had come here looking for independence around 1588, when he began to outgrow his eight small rooms on the ground floor of the family compound (Figure 5.1). Most likely, he had no objection to the rooms themselves, situated on the north side of Pitti directly beneath the main kitchens, with high barrel-vaulted ceilings and a view on the main courtyard. They were as convenient

for him as they would be to later planners who turned them into a bar/café serving modern tourists. For conducting business and entertaining visitors, he had easy access to the more impressive public rooms

on the first floor where the real art was hung. The kitchen produced victuals fit to delight the most demanding epicureans in Italy. The center of town across the river was accessible in rain or shine, far above the crowds, by way of Vasari’s corridor over the Ponte Vecchio. But as his interests developed, he sought a stage of his own, with no relatives

breathing down his neck. To Pitti, for instance, he could never have brought Livia, and as time went on, he needed more and more space for her and his many other acquisitions. Parione was ideal for the way he wished to live: just far enough from the gaze of the court and the curious to give an impression of secluded

detachment, yet minutes away by carriage from the cathedral square and Piazza della Signoria. The vicinity to the river, whence the name (pars rionis recalled the ancient times when the whole area was just a riverbank), may well have given him a sense of freedom from the claus-

trophobic urban canyons. He owned a large complex of buildings on the south side of the street, mostly confiscated by his father back in 1555 from the rebel Altoviti family, among the losers in the Siena war.*!

To the east was the basilica of Santa Trinita, redone by Buontalenti shortly before he moved in and containing the famous frescoes by Ghirlandaio of the life of Saint Francis. Due west was the open space where Palazzo Ricasoli overlooked the north end of Ponte alla Carraia.

Here the only protocol was what he defined for himself; the guests

A PLACE FOR THINGS 189

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preferred the Spanish fashion, imported in the sixteenth century, requiring “every shade of black.”!'® Like all Florentine men of the age, he eschewed the multicolored tights typical of the earlier Renaissance, and his palette below the waist was more subdued, but tights were still

the mainstay. The “six pairs of Rheims [linen] and [ordinary] linen stockings” mentioned in the inventories could well be his, along with the four pairs of leather pants with gold trim.''? His collars became less elaborate over the years, starting with the high ruffled one in Santi di Tito’s portrait in the Galleria Palatina at Pitti and ending with the reduced version barely visible in Jacopo Chimenti’s Marriage of Maria de’ Medici in the Uffizi. As the beard grew out, the collars seemed to grow in. On the other hand, he was not entirely averse to bombast himself, if the presumed image of him nudging his niece ashore in Rubens’ The Disembarkation of Maria de’ Medici, now in the Louvre, was any indi-

cation, showing a gorgeous pink cape, or zimarra, trimmed with gold over a jacket of green silk, but here we may instead be observing Rubens’ impression of a later fashion.

Fitting the zimarra to the rest of the outfit was serious business, for him and for her. After the underwear and a shirt, it was the garment par excellence. The word came from the Spanish zamarra, but apparently the root went back still further to Arabic, stimulating modern etymological disputes between “sammtr,” meaning sable, or “khimar,”

meaning a woman’s veil; the Italian word eventually slipped into English.'2° While the early sixteenth-century version of the garment had already lost any resemblance to the middle-eastern kaftan, it was still worn loosely about the shoulders. The example in Bronzino’s Turin

portrait of Eleonora had arms in sleeves, and the shimmering warm red color bespoke a quiet elegance. Closer to Livia’s time, the one in the portrait of Maria Maddalena d’Austria by Suttermans, shown with the

future grand duke Ferdinando, now in the Galleria Palatina, featured decorative sleeves, left to hang unused, as had become the custom (Figure 5.4).

There were hundreds of varieties: Livia and Giovanni had them all.'*' The fine silk cloth (“tabis”) zimarra, felt-lined, was gold embroidered with glass beads. Sometimes the fastenings were fascinating in themselves: the model cut from silk taffeta and wine-colored felt with

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satin embroidered trim had 134 gold buttons; the black curly velvet one

lined in padded perfumed taffeta had gold buckles and 110 cameos. Another, of worked black velvet embroidered with satin trim, had 150 gold buttons; yet another, of black silk taffeta intercut with gold chains,

lined with turquoise taffeta, had little gold half-buttons in pairs, trimmed. The stitching was sometimes the prominent element, as in the case of the zimarra of fine red and gold wavy silk cloth lined with red taffeta trimmed with gold embroidery with sixty pairs of pearl stitches, or the one of black silk velvet taffeta and embroidered satin trim, with seventy-two pairs of gold stitches.'?* Such was the quality and kind of these and the other many models that Livia may have enjoyed trying on more than one before perfecting the outfit for a particular outing. Getting all the elements just right was no easy matter. The manual by Titian’s brother Cesare Vercellio was hardly any use, seeing that the

“ancient and modern” clothes it illustrated with such care dated to 1590 at the latest, when the book was published; and anyway the explanations were unrevealingly laconic: “Noble Florentine married women used to wear silk zimarre as outerwear, of pretty colors, embroidered, buttoned only at the chest, and underneath a dress of gold brocade.”!*° The Venetian married women, on the other hand, “often change their

dresses, which are usually of satin or some other material, decorated always with pearls, gold and jewels of great value.”'** Maybe the expla-

nations were useful for the “painters, draftsmen, sculptors and architects” for whom the book appeared to be written, but they could have applied to almost anything in her wardrobe. She may have devoted

some serious thought to matching fabrics, combining colors, and adding accessories, and she would no doubt have preferred to be served by her maidservant, not taught. Special days would require hard choices: would it be the “dress |sottana] of striped linen |cataluffa| turquoise and reddish-brown |lionata]

trimmed with gold” or the “fine linen dress of silver and white with half-bust”? Then the question was which zimarra fit best—the fine wavy silk brocade of various colors lined with yellow-green taffeta trimmed with hints of silver, or the one of fine iridescent (cangio) silk

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taffeta (ermisino) embroidered with leather and lined with yellow taffeta with eighty-eight perfumed buttons with gold rosettes?'*> If she

left her arms out of the sleeves and the sleeves of the undergarment slightly pulled up, she could add the pair of gold bracelets (maniglie) worked in the Turkish style with large rubies;'?° then the Milanesestyle enameled gold chains could go around her neck.'*’ For footwear, one of the “many” pairs of gold-embroidered shoes might do.'?° For travel on hot days, she would likely remove a fan from its tiny box and bring it along. Fewer clothes meant more accessories.

Wearing things was one kind of pleasure; buying was another. Encouraged by Giovanni, Livia may have had the impression that the

number of possible acquisitions was only limited by time and the ability of producers and merchants to bring in the goods from wherever they could be found in the East or West. She would have enjoyed studying the various types of zimarre, camisoles, diamonds, and rubies and imagining herself to be one of the beautiful women adorned by this finery. Neither he nor she appears to have thought any more about

the ethics of their accumulations than did the others of their set. Perhaps they tacitly agreed with Boccaccio’s principle, now only slightly

less sensational than it had been in its time, that creatures were made to use their reason and seek their own advantage. Giovannt’s good for-

tune and their life together joined nobility and nature: the world rewarded them not only because he was born to privilege and she acquired it through him, but because they together had discovered how to use the world. Buying involved the exercise of a right, not just the carrying out of a transaction. They got none of the items in their wardrobe by so-called

“shopping,” if that meant selective searching in fairly well-defined shops offering a variety of goods.'”? According to the conventions of their social world, goods were acquired mostly by special arrangements with various tradesmen. Giovanni dealt with Milanese merchants via

his ubiquitous squire (Cosimo Baroncelli) and his agent in Florence (Francesco Renzi) to acquire pearls worth two hundred scudi, taking care to have them examined by one Ottavio Balatri, a goldsmith, and compared to pearls owned by the family friend Vincenzo Salviati.'°°

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For a pair of earrings to be worn by Livia, he had Renzi make him impressions in wax and in lead of the pearls on offer.'*' Livia ordered an ornament made of solid gold, which Renzi was able to obtain at ten anda half scudi per pound, a good price considering the short notice.'*”

She ordered silk cloth through the family friend Don Garzia di Montalvo in Florence, and expressed her disgust at the tailor, Messer

Benedetto, concerning a certain item of trim on the last order of cloth.'®° To forward one particularly valuable bolt of cloth costing no

less than 109 scudi, Renzi slipped the piece into a box marked “cheeses.”'°* Strategies for eluding greedy officials have never changed. Because of the couple’s status as special customers, they might discuss and even dispute on price, especially through their agents, and receive the usual discount (“tara”) of 5 percent that was customary in all shops;

however, most of the time, they did not have the benefit of a shop’s public space for bartering or even for threatening to go to the shop next door. On the other hand, at least in the case of Don Giovanni, money rarely actually changed hands in his presence. The way he distributed money in exchange for goods Giovanni would have regarded as yet another aspect of his privilege. The economics of eminence were based on the power of the promised payment.'°° By nature he was supposed to be a man of his word, but his word was never “now”—at least not to inferiors. He could wait as long as necessary and bestow speed or slowness at his will. Whether the law was on his side or not, in this game of nerves, he knew that nonetheless the lawgivers and the courts emphatically were. He received the unques-

tioning acquiescence of the class of tradesmen as part of that deference, of that obeisance, that suffering which, as Aristotle said in the Politics, was the lot of those who ought to serve rather than be served. Only after he died would a formal claim be made on his estate by one tradesman to the amount of fifty-six lire for work done twelve years earlier, in 1609, “papering a reception room with gold and turquoise brocade, another five rooms with red velvet, one with green velvet, one with brocade, and two with Bergamo cloth.”!*® The size of the bill bore

no relation to Giovanni’s promptness to pay, as another tradesman experienced making a claim to the estate for five pairs of black silk stockings ordered in August 1610, along with four felt hats from Lyon

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

“a To have and to hold—this concept defined Giovanni and Livia’s life together and referred to the rise and fall of fortunes. Certainly, they thought about things; she, after his death, would have nearly a lifetime to recall once having more. Did they ever reflect on the significance of the material world with reference to the immaterial one? Perhaps they admired the famous breakfast paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, with their veiled references to the execrable vices, and the more literalminded vanitas paintings with the obligatory placing of a skull somewhere in the scene.’°® But most of the time, they did not seem so deeply

troubled as the authors of those works. Occasionally, to be sure, they unwillingly revealed some thoughts about the matter, in the context (for instance) of some talk about the building of a new line, his and hers, of Medici family interests. On another page in the same collection of documents where he left a drawing of a fountain to be built in the garden at Montughi, Giovanni made another drawing, this time of the full Medici coat of arms, as he would have wished to see it sculpted and perched at the top of the pediment of the fountain, surmounted by a grand ducal crown.'%? Next to the arms, he made an anagram based on the letters of Christ’s name: IESU. He placed his different solutions neatly one below another: ISUE, SUIE, IEUS, none of which led anywhere until finally he reached EIUS—his and hers. The anagram spoke more eloquently than any treatise on luxury. The conclusion was obvious: possession was not only a good thing—a helper of cities, pleasing to the senses, soothing to the soul, a stimulus to the imagination—it was next to godliness. And yet, they somehow knew, it was not forever.

Mind over Matter

Livia had hardly gazed into the void of widowhood, and the Medici agents were already barking orders around the palace in Murano. She

could stand it no longer. Feverish, eight months pregnant, and exhausted from the last painful days of Giovann1’s illness, she finally gave in. At midnight on July 23, 1621, she climbed aboard the boat for the trip down the coast to where land transportation would take her

to Florence, never to return. She did not go alone with her butler and the boatman; at least on this much, she had her way. Joining her were her chambermaids, her ladies in waiting, her physician, and a special friend of Giovanni who supplied whatever light-hearted conversa-

tion might be had under the circumstances. For these remaining acts of the life she once lived, she would travel in style. Maybe as a provocation or as an adieu to Venice, anyway, something the Florentine ambassador considered worthy of remark, she demanded her sable pelt—the

diamond-studded one with the solid gold head and feet—to place around her shoulders. Was not a lady entitled to some protection against the breezes of the lagoon? “A Venetian custom,” observed the ambassador months later, still amazed at the apparent indifference to

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reality.| Maybe for a moment she managed to forget where she was and

what was happening, but surely she knew that her troubles had only just begun.

“a For Niccolo Sacchetti, the Florentine ambassador, at least seemingly, the worst was over—after what was likely the most harrowing week of his career. When he got this job two years before, a bright young doctor of civil and canon law, he no doubt expected a different conclusion to his search for a profession, imagining perhaps carefree days spent wandering through brilliant halls of state, conversations with powerful masters of the cosmos, glorious rewards. Instead, here he was befuddled by distasteful tasks for which he had little preparation and less aptitude. The prerequisites for success in diplomacy that he might have thought he possessed were skill in the arts of persuasion and wisdom in the ways of the world. Recent events were enough to shake his confidence on both counts. Livia had been running circles around him from the moment when Giovanni expired, tricky to convince and impossible to deceive. At least now she was gone; although he probably suspected the Livia matter would plague him still. The orders had been clear enough: the woman was to be placed in custody so the process of confiscation could run swiftly and smoothly without her interference. To facilitate matters and break Livia’s stout resistance, the grand duchesses sent Giovann1’s erstwhile friend Don Garzia di Montalvo up to Venice, the same Don Garzia who had accompanied the couple on a wild carriage ride through the streets of Florence ten years before, almost to the day. A monastery was the obvious place, allowing the reality of sequestration to be perfumed with the scent of sanctity, keeping an inquisitive public out of grand ducal business— dissolving the person, according to St. Teresa’s principle, “as a drop of water in the sea.’* The question was, where? The grand duchesses Cristina and Maria Maddalena preferred Venice, perhaps right here in Murano. A simple order to the officials in charge should suffice, they thought. However, in Sacchetti’s judgment, they overestimated their

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credit with the Venetian government. A request to the Senate for imme-

diate confinement might easily be refused, and refusal meant embarrassment. Moreover, convents in Venice did not conform to the strict model that made them such convenient destinies for unwanted women in Tuscany, from Sacchetti’s point of view. In Venice, he suggested, there were actual possibilities of contact with the outside world, and inmates always “had a chance to flee.”° No, Livia must be brought back to Florence. Sacchetti wrote to the grand ducal secretary unveiling his plan. Once she arrived, he explained, she could be disposed of as necessary. As she began to understand her “new circumstances” and the grand duchesses’ “friendly and courteous

treatment of her,” she might even “change her style and conform entirely to the taste and satisfaction of Their Highnesses.”* He thus implicitly, and with a subtle note of irony, offered the prospect that she might one day make a suitable servant. He may well have suspected that, in writing such words, he would not exactly match the mood of the grand duchesses to whom this letter would be read. The constant presence of a servile Livia in their midst was nothing they could savor with any great relish. If she came to Florence, he must have imagined they would insist on placing her where she would indeed be made per-

petually to remember her subservience to the Medici family but the family would be able to forget about her forever. Livia evidently had no such intention. However, we only know her point of view by extrapolation from Sacchetti’s narrative. Judging by her defiance, she must have known she had some rights. A keen observer of male psychology, she would have observed the same mounting anx-

iety that we detect in Sacchetti’s letters to the grand ducal secretary, drawing her own conclusion: that Tuscan laws and Tuscan lawmakers were irrelevant in the territory of another state. Furthermore, she had no interest in giving up her possessions and dedicating herself to God: there was too much life out there still left to live. She already knew the practical consequences of this particularly favored tactic of Renaissance family planning. She would have heard tell of the sad letters emanating from Eleonora degli Albizi, with their pathetic requests, showing how

forty years of convent life could reduce a proud former concubine of Cosimo I to a terrorized mendicant, despite the periodic ministrations

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by Giovanni, the son. Surely her friends in high places would save her

if she could only hold out long enough, she must have thought. A simple message to Padavino, the secretary of the College, the highest body of the Venetian government, would be enough—he had in fact

announced plans to visit as soon as the news broke concerning Giovanni’s death.° All she had to do was present herself in the Senate chamber, the pregnant widow of a hero with the three-year-old orphan Giovanni Francesco Maria in tow, who had been held in baptism by the doge, and hearts would melt. While Sacchetti watched the daily mail for a message from the grand duchesses approving his new plan, he heard that Antonio Grimant, of a distinguished Venetian family, had already shown some interest in the widow. Matters now became more complicated. Would there be a

courtship and eventually a marriage proposal, thus removing her entirely from the reach of his patronesses? His understanding of the desire for power and things appears to have made him their perfect alter ego, but he was slightly tone-deaf in the presence of other motiva-

tions. He supposed Grimani was after her “thinking she had a great pile of money [peculio].”° He could imagine no other attraction, and apparently he did not share in the widespread views about her charms. Indeed, the evidence suggests a man far above such temptations. He had not yet taken the vow of celibacy prior to Holy Orders (that would be for when he really had his foot in the door of Medici preferment), but apart from Livia, female acquaintances are nowhere mentioned in his correspondence. He had still heard nothing from the grand duchesses when he finally decided to send Livia to Florence, willingly or unwillingly. Her liberty had to be canceled as soon as possible, especially (so he wrote to the

secretary) “here where the word liberty is heard with very delicate ears.”’ He would thus have to disobey orders and stop lobbying the Venetian authorities for her confinement to a convent in Venice. On the 22nd of July, almost as a confirmation that fortune favors the bold, circumstances offered him exactly the “stratagem” he needed. “Really

something to laugh about,” he commented in his narrative. That morning, he explained, the mail arrived from Florence. Don Garzia, who had already managed to push aside the members of the household

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while Livia was sick in bed, seized it and sorted it. Livia “demanded to see the letters from Baroncelli,” Giovannt’s secretary and her faithful

correspondent over the years.® Don Garzia stood his ground and insisted on opening whatever looked important. Sacchetti was particularly impressed by the way this wily adventurer

took control of the situation and of her. He states that one of the Baroncelli letters, read out by Don Garzia, referred that Livia had been “Brutally accused by the Inquisition.” Whether Baroncelli, who had secretly passed to the side of the grand duchesses, was telling the truth or not, we cannot determine; nor have we any other account of the letter’s contents. The plausibility of the story, to Livia’s ears, would have arisen from her likely implication in Giovanni’s many dangerous activities: magic, trafficking in prohibited books, and association with Jews. Having conveyed the information about the supposed accusation, Don Garzia added, there was no way the grand duchesses could prevent the Inquisition from pursuing her “outside of Tuscany.” Sacchetti described the scene: “At this point Don Garzia immediately seized the occasion

and put her in such a fright, and I too with diverse inventions, confirmed what he said, so that after chewing on this for a while she finally became inclined to leave here.”’ And no wonder. Compared to the peace

and benevolence that surely awaited her under the protection of the grand duchesses, what could she possibly hope from the Venetian Republic, a large impersonal organization? Don Garzia apparently pocketed the letter, and inexplicably, Livia did not call their bluff by asking to see It. Sacchetti breathed a sigh of relief nearly audible in the documents.

He could now term Livia’s terrified departure as a voluntary act of “love” rather than as an abduction.'? The characterization fit the legal casuistry of the time. Livia willingly left Venice just as anyone voluntarily jumps away from a charging steed or voluntarily parries a lunge with the sword. How much more difficult things would have been, if physical force had been required, Sacchetti left the grand duchesses to imagine. Not that she was any match for these men who had tested their mettle in feats of violence and endurance, against other males, and perhaps females too. To describe her strength of mind, Sacchetti could only think of the adjective “terrible”; and he remained so altered

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by the experience that he was not ashamed to write it down.'' She was completely, Sacchetti remarked, reaching fora word, “unpersuadable.”!” In the aftermath he reflected, perhaps more deeply than usual, upon what had transpired. The deciding factors in Livia’s acquiescence, he added, were not, alas, his virtuosity or Don Garzia’s, but her illness and advanced pregnancy. “Even in that state, she scares us,” he confessed, adding, “she could give a whole town a hard time, not just Don Garzia.”!’ Had she been well, there is no telling how long she might have kept them at bay. When it came to expressing satisfaction for a job well done, Sacchetti

was almost as generous with Don Garzia as he was with himself. However, in his correspondence with the grand ducal secretary, he observed that his partner was initially unable to share his spontaneous jubilation. In attempting to account for this strange anomaly, he suggested that the reason had to do with Don Garzia’s incurable chivalry

and almost instinctive inclination to “helping the woman.” If he knew anything about the years of friendship, the many favors given and reciprocated, the common interests, or the shared adventures, he did not bring these into his explanation. From his standpoint, friendship was conditional upon the possibility of receiving rewards, and since Livia had nothing to give in return, there was no point in giving anything to her. His own relations with the grand ducal court, on the other hand, were a bouquet of friendship, hopefully set to remain in flower for years to come. He noted that despite any scruples, Don Garzia “behaved stupendously in this matter” and in recognition of his service “would be the right person to charge with other matters like this,” no doubt with the promise of adequate compensation."° Sacchetti himself needed no reminding about whose side he was on, or why. Before him lay the examples of meritocratic rise within the ranks of the Medici bureaucracy in figures like Curzio Picchena, upon whom three new offices had been piled at once, including the corresponding emoluments, in return for unquestioning devotion even in the seediest matters. Sacchetti could have had no inkling of his own

future promotion to the bishopric of Volterra at this early stage. However, he knew that any ecclesiastical goals within Tuscany, like any civic ones, depended largely on Medici favor.'® After years of service in

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the diplomatic corps, with a recommendation by his relative, Cardinal Giulio Sacchetti, and by the grand duke, in 1634 he would reach his final destination.'” Even in the relatively minor matter of Livia’s property—only a sampling, we assume, from a wide range of services rendered in return for the desired reward—he carried out his orders with amazing tenacity over a period of several years.

Now there remained only the matter of the toddler, a Medici by birth. Clearly he could not stay with the mother. “If the child remained in her power,” Sacchetti reasoned, “a woman of this kind... would be able to do much scheming.” He made no mention of any fantasies he

might have had of how she might use him as bait, as a hostage, as a human shield, for whatever treacherous plot she might be cooking up in her mind. Yet fast action was called for, he went on: “we thought it necessary not to give time a chance.”’® He knew that as soon as Livia perceived there was a plan to abduct the child, she would realize that her own final destiny was the hated monastery and would resume her

resistance. She must not be allowed to suspect anything was afoot. Accordingly, in the hours after Giovanni’s death, gondolas were readied

for immediate departure and a watch kept for the right moment to move out. On the evening of Wednesday, July 20, Sacchetti managed

to separate mother and son long enough to slip the boy on board. Next stop would be the Florentine ambassadorial residence in Venice where transportation would be arranged to have him spirited off to the grand duchesses or their servants, while Livia was being dispatched from the Lido. Sacchetti may have secretly hoped the child, already severely ill, would die of measles along the way (he uses the word “vaiolo”), but he had to prevent the blame from falling upon himself.'? The sick child,

he insisted, had been “seen” by Giovanni’s physician, the famous Quattrocchi, before leaving Venice. It is possible the physician saw him more than once: Quattrocchi was close enough to “see” him as he was

rushed out of the house in those twelve hours that had elapsed after Giovanni's death, and the doctor, asked whether the child was dying, replied in the negative. Three days of rattling and rolling in land transportation to Florence was no effective prescription for a child still shiv-

ering from fever. At least he would be accompanied by Faustino

MIND OVER MATTER 223

Moisesso, Giovanni’s historian, who was still looking for a handout from the grand duke, and a certain Filippo Sciameroni, looking for the same. Whether one of the two unnamed servants from the Sacchetti household who went along on the trip was competent to care for the

child or not could only be judged by the result: he arrived alive, not dead.

“a Back in Florence, the city was still in shock, not from the death of Giovanni (more of an annoyance than a tragedy, as far as the family was concerned) but from the death of Grand Duke Cosimo II at the end of February.*° The grand duchesses hardly noticed that Livia came “accompanied by a few more people than might have been anticipated” (as Sacchetti had warned).*' In fact, they hardly noticed her at all. Their main job now was to rule the grand duchy, at least nominally, as guard-

ians of the young heir-apparent, Ferdinando, now eleven. Although they had expected the perennially infirm Cosimo to expire at any moment, still, the abrupt shift out of the life of leisure and into public affairs (alongside a council of ministers including Curzio Picchena and Belisario Vinta to do the real work) took them somewhat by surprise.

Schedules had to be reorganized to accommodate meetings with people whose names they hardly knew, but who had been operating the bureaucracy from behind the scenes for many years. As for Giovanni,

even if they had not already been ill-disposed to him because of the Livia affair, any possible grief was effectively canceled by other more immediate preoccupations. Nor did this particular conjuncture of the Florentine state make the job of ruling any easier.** It was bad enough for the grand duchesses that they had to learn to navigate a conflict of unprecedented proportions, extending far beyond Europe, with no end in sight (which would last, in all, thirty years). They soon found themselves up against the most severe economic and social crisis in recent memory. They very likely reinforced each other’s apprehensions that the occurrence of famine in the same year as the death of the grand duke might be some kind of divine portent rather than a mere coincidence. An extra hour

MIND OVER MATTER 224

or so now and then in the family chapel was obviously unavoidable, and maybe a few more gifts to the churches. But they also considered that setting an example of devotion was not enough, however much this attitude suited their temperament. As paupers began streaming into the city from areas around the countryside where the harvests had been particularly disastrous, they were reminded by their advisors that plague had been reported across the Alps.*? Measures of public health and welfare, they agreed, must be taken at once, and such measures must be made to reflect and maintain hierarchy and order. They accord-

ingly oversaw the transformation of the convent of the Benedictine monks at San Salvatore, called the Camaldoli, along the western wall in Oltrarno, into a poor house. Into this hospice would be herded as many mendicants as possible, and there they would be set to the discipline of daily work by practice in various arts and manufactures. The austere conditions inside this and the other hospices would serve as a warning to potential users. The policy was not to comfort the unfortunate in their plight but “to discourage by the fear of reclusion” (so said one of the official memoirs on the subject) “any increase in the number of mendicants who might otherwise be tempted to leave their work to go and beg.”** With Florence free of mendicants, presumably disease could be avoided. There were more pleasant things to attend to than death, funerals, and economic catastrophe. Snatches of information were arriving at

the grand ducal court regarding the hoards of Giovanni’s property sent back from Venice in sixty-seven huge crates. The under-officials of

the Court of Wards, accustomed to combing over things far better than any they could ever have, would no doubt be talking about it for a long time to come. They had heard the rumors, but they were not prepared for either the quantity or the value. Every crate seemed more stuffed than the last, with the materials of elegance, nobility, status, money, and all those qualities that demanded admiration. Arriving at crate number thirty-six, they dutifully recorded: Zimarra [loose gown] ivory-colored [cappellino] of fine silk cloth |tabis| lined with felt with gold trimmed with gold embroidery and glass beads |[canutiglia]

MIND OVER MATTER 225

Zimarra of silk taffeta with wine-colored felt trimmed with satin embroidery and 134 gold buttons Zimarra of black curly velvet lined with padded perfumed taffeta with gold buckles and 110 cameos Zimarra of worked black velvet with embroidered satin trim and 150 gold buttons Zimarra of black silk taffeta intercut with gold chains, lined with turquoise taffeta with little gold half-buttons in pairs, trimmed Zimarra of black silk taffeta worked with stripes lined with pale taffeta with 108 little gold buckles with pearls and gold buttons Zimarra of fine red and gold wavy silk cloth |tabis| lined with red

taffeta trimmed with gold embroidery with sixty pairs of pearl stitches

Zimarra of black silk velvet taffeta trimmed with embroidered satin with 72 pairs of gold stitches Zimarra of fine silk brocade with waves of ivory and other colors, lined with green taffeta trimmed in traces |riscontrini] of silver Zimarra of fine iridescent |cangio| silk taffeta [ermisino] embrotdered with leather and lined with yellow taffeta with 88 perfumed buttons with gold rosettes Zimarra of fine silk |[tabis] wavy brocade with silver, lined with taffeta with silver trim.?°

And on and on until they got to the gowns:

Gown of striped linen [cataluffa] turquoise and reddish-brown [lionata] trimmed with gold

Gown of striped linen, worked with red and white, trimmed with gold Gown of striped linen, red and gold, trimmed with gold Gown of striped linen, scarlet, trimmed with gold.”°

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

MIND OVER MATTER 226

perhaps a visual scene of carnivalesque frivolity, a modeling session involving a few of the zimarre, to lighten the gloom induced by the political moment. The grand duchesses knew one thing well: if having power meant they could achieve their ends, achieving their ends also meant having power. Since their commands were symptomatic and constitutive at the same time, they must respond to each challenge, no matter how miniscule, or lose their authority.*” As their attention drifted away from rules, regulations, poverty, disease, and other such issues, back to more familiar questions regarding their own patrimony, the documents show they began to reflect seriously about the opportunities of the Livia affair. There was no doubt. Giovanni’s considerable inheritance somehow slipping into the control of the nonentity Livia would not only puta blight upon the family, but such disorder could encourage

defections of all kinds, like the runs on the Medici bank that had occurred from time to time as confidence rose and fell. They followed the grand ducal example by regarding family policy and state policy as more or less the same thing and by regarding the status quo—that ts, the family’s role and the state’s independence—as the main imperative. They were committed to using the vast stores of Medici treasure not only to field armies in defense and soldiers in service of advantageous friendships, but to demonstrate the continuity of the family’s potential. To ensure the correct tone, they actually increased the size of the

court, even as Tuscany slipped to the third tier of European states. There was no more hope of the grand duchy becoming a real kingdom; nor could they lay any special claim to diplomatic intelligence capable of arbitrating the balance of power in the northern portion of the pen-

insula.*® But they sensed that the family’s sheer grandeur might somehow save Florence. The incomes were not exactly as dynamic as in former times, and the late Cosimo had given up actively investing even before he got sick. They had other ways to conserve and increase wealth: on the death of Don Antonio, son of Grand Duke Francesco, at the beginning of May, they sent parties of lawyers into the field to collect and secure the property to their offspring. Now they could work on Livia.

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Not surprisingly, the Venetian senators received no response to repeated requests for further instructions on what to do with the body, or even for symbolic financial participation in the funeral arrangements. They had the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo decked out for a state funeral with all imaginable pomp to celebrate the life of their great condottiero and mourn his death. Any differences between them and Giovanni, any misunderstandings about his commitment to the cause or his policies for carrying on the war, were for the time being forgiven and forgotten. After the formalities, they had the body placed temporarily in the church of Santa Lucia, still with no further word from Florence, in a chapel restored and decorated by the family of the Florentine merchant Michelangelo Baglioni. It shared the company not only of other deceased members of the Baglioni family, but also of the shriveled corpse of Saint Lucy herself, who lay in a finely decorated sepulcher upon the altar under Palma il Giovane’s representation

of her, celebrated in Sansovino’s late sixteenth-century tribute to Venetian art and architecture.*” To avoid a diplomatic rift caused by what in any other context would be regarded as a deliberate slight, the senators requested the Medici family to tender at the very least an official note of gratitude, which after some hesitation was grudgingly vouchsafed.

The grand duchesses had no doubts about the final outcome of the heredity question; nor did anyone else. They also needed no Sacchetti to remind them that the necessary verdict would require some effort and tedium on the part of their employees. They were, after all, not

entirely above the law, and they respected the Medici tradition of ensuring that grand ducal prerogatives advanced just one step behind a system developing to accommodate them.’ What they did was legal, according to the logic of realist politics in every age, because they made laws that made it legal.°! They could by no means meddle with the Cosmian settlement, that is, the tacit agreement of the patrician families in Florence to allow Medici domination in return for peace and

order. Too many false steps out of this pattern, too many excesses beyond what was normally allowed to the eminent, might rekindle the smoldering embers of Renaissance republicanism into a major

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conflagration. They were no doubt reminded, every time the topic of Florentine history came up in polite conversation, of the various antiMedici movements, and they knew the memories of resistance went just as deep as did the memories of any good the family ever did. Don Lorenzo, son of Ferdinando I, possessed Michelangelo’s statue of

Brutus, conceived by the expatriate artist among other prominent republican expatriates in Rome during a moment of rebellion against the family and now an ambiguous symbol of power—traitor to his lord or martyr for freedom?** The grand duchesses, Florentine by marriage not by birth, by now knew the pattern well: any arbitrary acts, executions, or crimes of honor had to be papered over with a suitable layer of bureaucratic explication and record keeping, while preserving customary norms long ago born of the rights of the strong over the weak. They could have their way, but not exactly as they wished. In the present case, what played in their favor was the persistent confusion about what belonged to the grand dukes and what belonged to the state. Not that they were particularly familiar with the docu-

ments that passed authority on to the family after imperial forces besieged the city in 1530, long before they came on the scene. They did not need to know that the various jurisconsults engaged in engineering the transition from republic to principate were careful to describe the

new “dux” as a “servant of many,” brought in to lead a preexisting polity, unlike a typical patrimonial monarch, who inherits the patrimony of a predecessor.°’ They had little patience for the subtle argumentation that was supposed to silence the apologists for the other dukes on the peninsula (especially the Gonzaga of Mantua or the Este of Modena), who claimed the Medici were “new” rulers of a “new” state, and therefore less worthy of respect. Such things were for their lawyers,

secretaries, and bureaucrats. However, they could feel fairly well at home in the new state language that had replaced most of the republican rhetoric, drawing on contemporary ideas about sovereignty, like “plenitude of power” or “sent by God,” and the like, which circulated in the Habsburg lands and in France, where state and ruler were the same thing.** While the words gave a more and more actual picture of the facts, they continued to use money as had Cosimo I, namely as though the Medici family’s private assets served its public role and vice

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versa, a situation that would persist until the transition to the new Lorraine dynasty in the eighteenth century.°° The civic officers whose involvement was formally required in the Livia case shared common interests with the grand duchesses. Giovanni degli Alessandri and Pietro Formiconi, magistrates in the Pupilli or

Court of Wards, were thrust into the role of legal guardians for Giovanni Francesco Maria and, for a time, according to the documents’ delicate wording, “of Livia’s womb,” where lived the unborn child.°° The first came from among the same patricians who had eased the Medici into power and at present were content enough with their share in the general peace and prosperity not to push them out.°’ The second was a grand ducal appointee. They were not allowed to forget who ran the show. Their headquarters were located on the ground floor of the Uffizi building designed by Vasari for Cosimo I. Above was the new picture gallery containing the Medici collections and the entrance to a covered passageway, the famous “Vasarian Corridor,” running directly from here all the way across the river to Palazzo Pitti, where the grand duchesses lived and played. Cosimo had consolidated the

civic offices in this space for the same reason that he occasionally allowed himself to sidestep the usual election procedures by directly appointing magistrates: so they would do his bidding when necessary.°° The grand duchesses were committed to continuing the practice, confirmed by the last three grand dukes, of developing the professional bureaucracy as an extension of their household; and to maintain the loyalty of those less directly dependent on their largesse, they handed out noble titles to patrician families. Now more than ever, with a limited amount of time available for the state affairs that were their province since the death of Cosimo II, they needed an obedient and efficient officialdom to achieve their ends.°’ They could regard Livia’s undoing as just one more step on the road to the new Tuscan state their contemporaries envisioned. Pandolfo Marchetti, the Medici lawyer, had much to gain from his intervention on behalf of the grand duchesses.*° If successful in pursuing their interests 1n the Livia case and other family business, he could join the long procession of legal practitioners who had parlayed their applied expertise into distinguished careers within Medici officialdom

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inside and outside the city. Giovanni Uguccioni, Bartolomeo Valor, and Giovanni Venturi all had begun as lawyers (or at least, as laureates in law) and had gone on in recent years to become Florentine senators, counselors of state, and ambassadors, adding whatever other office their loyalty might secure, guaranteeing their own positions and their families’ prosperity. True, they were all Florentine patricians, whereas the Marchetti house, however distinguished, stemmed from somewhere in the papal state, placing Pandolfo at something of a disadvantage with respect to the rest of the local elite. He had to ensure that the current mission served as the springboard for others great or small: a further mission, say, to Lunigiana (as actually happened), overseeing legal matters very close to the Medici family, and, having confirmed his dependability as a Medici operative, a secure post within the principle offices in Florence and in Siena. Only time would tell.

But first, Marchetti had to eliminate Giovanni Francesco Maria as heir to Giovannt’s fortune, and to do that, he had to show that illegitimate children could not inherit. This was not as easy as it seemed. Cosimo I made eight separate donations to Giovanni between 1565 and

1567, stipulating that if their owner had no heirs, the property would pass to Don Pietro and respective descendants, and lacking these, to Ferdinando and descendants. Now Pietro had died in Spain in 1604, leaving only a natural son also called Pietro. Some of the donations specified “to the legitimate and natural heirs” (descendentibus .. . legitimis et naturalibus), some of them did not; some again specified “male heirs,” some (such as the donation of iron mines in Florence and Siena)

included females.** Giovanni himself had procured a legal opinion, presumably some time after the birth of Giovanni Francesco Maria, which stated that the phrase “legitimate and natural” meant exactly what it said.** In 1606 Ferdinando wrote his testament, apparently overriding portions of Cosimo’s gift, by specifying that the property he might inherit from Don Giovanni’s death “without legitimate male heir” would go to his own son Don Lorenzo, excluding, in other words,

any “natural” offspring.*? Marchetti procured advice from far and wide, on this or that aspect of the matter: from Alessandro Vettori in Florence, later a state auditor, and even from a certain Franciscus Georgeius, “juris consultus Hispanicus.” Particularly useful was the

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contribution of Raffaello Staccoli, later a state auditor and correspondent of Galileo, who seemed to articulate the general consensus, noting that by and large “the doctors consider it to be a shame for the house and goods of a nobleman to pass into the hands of a natural offspring, excluding the legitimate one.””* Marchetti’s next move, to establish the child’s illegitimacy, involved still more complications. The birth certificate gave Don Giovanni and Livia as legitimate parents, and the couple had been wed by the Rev. Girolamo Barbieri on August 25, 1619, in the church of San Giovanni Decollato in Venice, in the presence of two Florentine witnesses named Bartolomeo de’ Barbieri and Antonio Zuanelli, with a dispensation conceded by the patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Francesco Vendramin, waiving publication of the banns.*? To make the wedding possible,

Livia’s previous marriage had been annulled the same year on the grounds of vim et metu, that is, that she had been forced to consent. When she married Giovanni, she was, legally speaking, a free woman, and the relevant documents, duly archived at the time, were there to prove it. If the child was actually conceived a few months before the couple had been married, nonetheless he was baptized on October 5, in the church of Santi Gervasio e Protasio, in the presence of thirty-five

senators and the ambassador of the duke of Mantua. The godfather had been Michele Priuli, son of Doge Antonio Priuli, also present. Before leaving the scene, Giovanni had done his best to ensure the pas-

sage of property would go according to plan—as long as too severe scrutiny was not applied.

Rather than on Livia’s marriage to Giovanni, Marchetti and his team focused on the first marriage. Here was some real room for maneuver. The story would be that the annulment had been obtained under false pretenses, and therefore, the first marriage was still valid. Livia willingly and freely married Granara; therefore the provisions of the Tametsi, the new Church legislation regulating marriage, had been met; subsequently she had led a dissolute life until meeting Giovanni, and witnesses in the annulment hearing (so this version went) were either bribed or threatened or both. On this interpretation, minutely referenced to Baldus, the early Renaissance jurist, she could not be tried for bigamy since the second marriage did not really exist.4° They

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would add various petty offenses to the dossier making Livia out as a gold digger and an adulteress as well as a criminal—the last element perhaps adding an air of plausibility to the first, as well as giving the grand duchesses the right to place as severe a sanction upon her as they might wish. However, to avoid drawing too much attention to Medici interests, Marchetti and his team made Battista Granara, Livia’s former husband, not the grand duchesses, the plaintiff in the case. They got the idea from a good source: none other than Pope Paul V himself. The

pope proposed it to the Florentine ambassador (so the ambassador reported) in order to “save as much as possible of the appearances before this world,” so the Church and the grand duchy would not seem too obviously allied in a matter of power and greed.*” The lawyers’ task

would thus be to show that Livia ran off looking for trouble and Granara was ready to forgive and forget. They already had a head start: soon after the first inquiries had been made back in 1619 on the occasion of the annulment and subsequent marriage to Giovanni, Granara had been abducted by Medici agents in Genoa in S. Pier d’Arena, and confined for a time first in the Livorno fortress and subsequently in the Belvedere fortress in Florence. This last measure was somewhat disin-

genuously referred to Giovanni as tending to protect his interests by keeping the former husband away from the former wife.*® All they had to do now, with Giovanni gone, was to examine the annulment hearing

for points that could be refuted and possible irregularities that could be brought to the attention of the judges.

Marchetti and his team did not dare to bring Granara into the courtroom for interrogation. Who knew what he might say, after nearly two years in jail, or what the judge might make of testimony from a plaintiff who had been abducted by those who stood most to gain from

the verdict? Instead, they gave him as indisposed and produced a signed affidavit from a parish archive in Genoa, dated some time before

and supposedly providing his version of what happened when Livia left. It was a pitiful story. On December 10, 1606, he purportedly said, a certain Francesco Bono (1.e., Francesco del Buono) had broken into his house and stolen a number of things: a walnut box “alla Napoletana” containing two hundred lire in doubloons and eight reals, some other

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money, a number of capes including a striped one (zimarra di frisato), one of goat’s hair, another of “Spanish” wool, another of black coarse wool, and yet another of red and green coarse wool, a pair of hooded capes with a bust of scarlet silk, a pair of long shirts in yellow and another pair in white with yellow trim (new), four collars, five or six shirts, and

three or four flat collars, all of which amounted to more than six hundred lire apart from the two hundred lire mentioned before, “besides which, he took my wife.” They hoped the judge would not notice that in Granara’s telling, if this was indeed his story, the loss of Livia seemed to have been thrown in as an afterthought, a mere bagatelle in comparison to the loss of the money and capes.*? Although the document had obviously been pasted into the parish record later and for no apparent reason, they insisted that the handwriting was definitely that of the curate. So far, so good. The grand duchesses were well aware of the maxim

of civil procedure, dating back to the time in history when law was taught from memory, not from books, to wit: when attempting to take from others, move quickly; when attempting to keep one’s own, draw things out as long as you can. They knew what was at stake, and they knew time was of the essence. To keep the other side off balance, they obtained, on some plausible grounds, a shift of the tribunal from the original location in Genoa to the small center of Sarzana, where the docket was thinner and the officialdom more malleable. There were

other reasons for this strategic choice of a place barely within the Genoese Republic’s territory next to Tuscany. The Medici connection was still strong in Sarzana (not by chance, the citadel today bears the

Medici arms). After the family had bought the town in the fifteenth century for avast sum of money, it had bounced back and forth between different lordships, including the Florentine Republic, finally landing with the Genoese. In a sense, it was Genoese in name only and the officialdom obeyed whoever showed up first with something in their fist. No court outside Tuscany could have been more favorable to Medici interests; and the local bishop, Giovanni Battista Selvaggi, who served

as the judge in this case, was somehow beholden to the family. The grand duchesses had their officials write him to the effect that they wished the trial to go forward quickly—adding (with impeccable logic) that neither side could afford the expense of a lengthy process far from

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home. From time to time during the proceedings, they sent along reminders of how grateful they were in advance for his favorable treatment of them.°?

Once the Medici machine began to churn, Livia had no chance. Deprived of most contacts with the outside world, she left everything up to Cosimo Baroncelli. Baroncelli, however, like Don Garzia, had

changed his allegiances in the direction of the blowing wind. He accordingly left things up to the grand duchesses and their agents and

followed direct orders from them not to interfere. To represent the defense, Girolamo Sanguinetti was chosen from among the legal profession of the small town of Sarzana (and not, therefore, from the more distinguished among the legal college in Genoa nor, of course, from Florence). Sanguinetti’s hands were in some ways tied by the conflicting

interests of his clients. The Court of Wards, whom he represented as

the legal guardians of Giovanni Francesco Maria and the unborn child, in any property dispute not involving other families of the Florentine nobility, would not likely brook any too subtle caviling in Medici business. In fact, they were secretly committed (as the grand duchess later admitted) to referring any of Sanguinetti’s communications directly to the judge.*! Livia, on the other hand, wanted her marriage and her child, and her goods. Somehow, from her guarded retreat in Montughi, through a leak that Sacchetti, the ambassador in Venice, would later demand to be plugged, Livia managed to communicate a few of her thoughts to one or another of her remaining associates, and they to her. In November, 1621, with the tensest portion of the judicial proceedings warming up the onset of winter, she conveyed her anxieties to her brother Giovanni Francesco. She uttered no obvious libel (that would come later); there was nothing actionable under /aesa maiestatis, the law on treason. But she was intelligent enough to know matters had been fixed on both sides to lead inexorably to one possible conclusion—she might have said, like any crooked Florentine football match. She made no direct allusion yet to tampering with witnesses; even Livia knew some things were better thought than said, and she would save that accusation for a last resort. Now she asked her brother Giovanni Francesco to stand in for her at the trial to ensure that her interests were represented. Even

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without any legal training, she was sure he could do a better job than Sanguinetti. Of course, the only way to make this happen was to appeal to the judge, which Giovanni Francesco accordingly did, in person.”

Instead of taking the petition into consideration, the judge dismissed the petitioner. There was no point even discussing the absurdity of the request, the obvious ignorance of the prerogatives of the legal profession, and so forth. He simply wrote to the grand duchesses

informing about Livia’s attempts to intervene and explaining his response. The grand duchesses ordered their agent to reply, thanking the bishop for his attention in a matter of such great personal concern

to themselves. “Your solicitude in having revealed the design of Giovanni Francesco Vernazza has been recognized by Their Most Serene Highnesses as an act of your singular humanity,” the agent stated.°° Any dispassionate observer (the agent went on) would be able

to perceive immediately the falsehood of the imputations in Livia’s letter—supposing things so obliquely outlined were understood at all. As for the suggestion of having an actual representative of Livia’s wishes at the trial, this was not only outrageous in itself, but would give rise to a suspicion of irregularity. Future interests demanded that even the slightest aspersion cast upon the proceedings must never under any circumstances enter the documentary record. The judge agreed.

Sanguinetti had little to gain except his fee, which he was owed whether he won or lost. There was no way in this case to curry favor with the great; the best he could do was to steer a middle course somewhere between excessive zeal and obvious incompetence in what he

knew was an impossible job. Apart from the conflicting interests between Livia and the Court of Wards, how could he possibly defend

clients he had never met, who failed to show up in court, or, referring to Livia, were in custody in another city? Any conclusions based on Livia’s supposed refusal to appear were evidently false.°* Anyway, a suit regarding a marriage should not be tried in contumacia, he wrote, with no testimony from either of the couple (Battista Granara being likewise indisposed). But apart from these ludicrous conditions, he insisted, this should have been an open and shut case: the documents

sent down from the annulment proceedings in Genoa three years

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before gave eloquent testimony to the argument about a forced marriage. The present court had no jurisdiction to appeal a previous welljustified decision reached in another court with impeccable attention to all formalities. The suit was obviously frivolous and should be dismissed and the inheritance allowed to run its normal course in favor of the child, without wasting his clients’ slender resources on costly lawyering. The motion was denied.

Marchetti’s task, as Granara’s lawyer, paid by the Medici, was in some ways more straightforward, if only in the aspect that there were fewer constraints on his operations. Money was no problem despite the grand duchesses’ complaints about the expense, and no amount of zeal would be considered excessive. In fact, the previous verdict gave him a wide field on which to exercise his ingenuity. Unfortunately for Livia, Giovanni had originally acquired the annulment in the same way that a great man acquired anything else: by asking for it, and leaving the details to others. Death, however, put an end to sprezzatura. Marchetti determined to grind as finely as need be and compiled a list of I15 questions to put to the new witnesses, based on yet another list of eighty-five points to be established in the case. Of these questions, the one designated as number 79 invited particular reflection. The witness would be asked: “When a Signore recommends the expediting of a

trial of a woman or servant of his, do you believe he does anything wrong?”> The right answer, under the circumstances, was supposed to be “yes”: justice is blind, and throwing aristocratic weight around in the courtroom is unfair. How often the same thing could be asked in

regard to the grand dukes, their mothers, their widows, and their dependents was an irony Marchetti preferred to keep to himself. Though the case could not be about Giovanni's patrimony, Marchetti and his team ensured that no one forgot the importance of the property question. They avoided mentioning the grand duchesses or their offspring, Ferdinando and Lorenzo, at any point in the proceedings. However, they freely referred to Giuliano Borghi, Matteo Maffei, and Francesco de’ Rossi, lawyers representing those few of Giovannt’s var-

ious creditors who managed to squeak their claims in when news of the proceedings got out and who had a right to skim a portion off the property as soon as it was subtracted from Livia. They even allowed a

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complete accounting of Giovanni’s massive estates to enter the court record, including the impressive list of real estate mentioned in the donation by Cosimo, alongside a list of debts totaling over 9,000 florins, with a bill for 1,209 florins from Giulio Cappont, silk merchants, and for thirty-one from Andrea Ferrucci, sculptor, and assorted debts to major barons like Antonio Magalotti, owed 1,000 florins.°® They did not have to spell out the implications: that their success in the case was necessary for justice, in the sense of ensuring to each his (or her) own, in such a fashion as to maintain the status quo throughout the various levels of society.

Without once drawing the obvious conclusion, they demonstrated the contrast between this huge wealth and the meager resources of the people in Livia’s childhood environment. Little could be hoped, they implied, of someone who had grown up in a three-room rented apartment in a large building with many other such apartments, and whose

father (by tacit comparison with the mighty rentiers who really counted) was a “poor man who lived by his own efforts.” Her designated husband, Battista Granara, they told the judge, lived in an even smaller space, which was supposed to be the couple’s in the first months of marriage. In their view, because she and Granara were “equal in con-

dition,” a most important element in a successful union, despite the twenty-five-year difference in age, her happiness should have been complete.°” They left the judge to figure out why, if the pair were logically so well suited for each other, before ever meeting Giovanni, Livia braved

possible dishonor, expatriation, and temporary indigence just to get away. For them, there could be only one reason: she was a criminal in the making, a bad sort. As such she got her original annulment only in

order to benefit from Giovanni's patrimony, not because of any real injustice.

Of Giovanni, on the other hand, Marchetti and his team appeared highly respectful. In reality they were building a case within a case, intending to demonstrate his diabolical intelligence and Livia’s wiles. Their general description in point 55 read almost like a eulogy, as though something about the true Medici genius must inevitably be said in his regard. “The aforementioned most excellent Signor Don Giovanni de’ Medici, apart from his valor in arms, was a very learned

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man, with a full knowledge of all the sciences.” Next came, he “made a

profession of letters and knew very well how to discuss and treat in matters of philosophy, theology and civil and canon law.”°® Only such a mind could have conceived the infernal conspiracy that they sought to reveal: from the supposed tampering with witnesses to the solicitation of a favorable judgment in Livia’s annulment, to the murder supposedly attempted or meditated (point 60: Giovanni threatens the life

of Granara). He was the one, they attempted to show, who originally contacted the Vernazza brothers with the plan for an annulment—not the party (Livia) who had supposedly been wronged (point 61). Inspired by cunning and armed with dexterity, he personally wrote the drafts of

most of the correspondence necessary to set the appeal in motion (point 64), devised the orders to give to the witnesses (point 65), and

insisted on looking for more witnesses until a sufficient number of them agreed to his theme (point 70). For all his intelligence, they insisted, he allowed the inferior Livia to drive his actions. As soon as he met her, point 49 insisted, “he fell in love.” Subsequently (point 50), “coming to her house every day and having intercourse with her... he began to burn with love for her.”°? Desiring to be in her presence always and have her entirely to himself,

he first brought her to his palace and then got her one for herself nearby. Wishing to please her (point 52), he kept her outfitted with every kind of luxury and supplied her with staff “as though she were a princess.”°” Next, at point 58, as the newly appointed general of the Venetian forces in Friuli, he brought Livia to Venice, where she kept house with him and dined openly at his table. More damning still, he

often had her follow him to war, when he was supposed to be concerned about leading his troops into battle. Only a man completely bamboozled by an evil woman could have engaged in such dangerous brinkmanship on the battlefield, abandoning all sense of honor just to pursue a pointless romance.®! In case anyone doubted his complete infatuation, they filled out the record with the love letters written between them, sequestered during the raid on the palazzo in Murano and now part of the public record.” The revelation of the letters was an especially brilliant move. The lawyers calculated with unfailing accuracy that the bishop of Sarzana

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would take many expressions amiss. Esteem and even subservience between a man and a woman who loved each other were one thing. But if a woman’s life was duty, what was he to make of “I swear to you, in

the name of the love I feel for you, that I can’t live like this”?® If a man’s duty was domination, what of: “I want to be considered by you to be your most humble servant; this is my true and only goal”?°* The

testimony was as moving and human as any he was likely to have encountered among his flock, and yet it revealed dangerous amoral tendencies, hedonism, and even blasphemy. On the paper next to the most scandalous passage in one of the letters, they drew a small finger pointing in the margin. The passage read: “I desire to serve Your Most Illustrious Ladyship as much as God Himself, adoring you as much as I do Him, and perhaps more.”® Surely if the bishop needed any clearer sign of the devil’s work in this case, here it was.

Meanwhile Marchetti went about dismantling the original testimony used in the annulment proceedings. To find weaknesses he did not have to look far. When Giovanni’s agents came to Genoa back in 1619, people in Livia’s neighborhood had taken full advantage of the prince’s generosity. The changing times worked strange effects. At least two of the original witnesses admitted in confession to having been bribed, and as soon as this secret was referred to the court by a scrupu-

lous priest, they received immunity from prosecution in return for their testimony against the annulment. Another had meanwhile been sent to jail for various crimes. Livia’s house in Murano, ransacked from top to bottom, yielded precious documents, including a letter from her

previous lawyer, which at the time she did not follow instructions to

“destroy so it cannot damage our case” and reminding about the amount of money (“a very large sum”) required to loose the tongues of those who might depose in her favor.°” Rather than reexamining the original witnesses one by one and running the danger that they might

prove more loyal than necessary to their original engagements, Marchetti declared them all unfit and compiled a new list including only “persons who are honorable and worthy of being believed, above any possible exception.”

Marchetti and his team took care that the new witnesses should have even more powerful reasons to testify than the simple need for

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cash. Antonio Ceccherelli, for instance, Livia’s former butler, dismissed for dereliction of duty and possible theft, had escaped from Venetian

authorities pursuing him for still other crimes and taken refuge in Florence, only to find himself clapped in irons as a likely witness in any

case involving Livia. Now he was grateful for having been set free by the late grand duke in a streak of deathbed mercy-granting and determined to stay that way. In return for lenient treatment for his involvement in the original annulment proceedings as a messenger and amanuensis, moving back and forth between Genoa and Venice, he was only too happy to volunteer the requested opinion regarding the original witnesses in Livia’s favor. They were basically her neighbors, he said, but none could be believed. In general, “they are not con-

sidered to be honest men and women.” Most were of poor and vile condition, and as such, could not be trusted. On the grounds of his own experience or, more often, hearsay, he stated that Lazarina Raggi was a “woman regarded badly in Genoa,” whereas Michelangelo and Niccolo Turcotti were automatically discredited by their profession of “cops” (birri)—just slightly better than hangmen in the popular mind. Finally, Francesco and Antonio Rolandi were somehow related to Livia (a textbook reason for exclusion).°? Benedetto Blanis, Giovanni’s former librarian, had the most to gain

from cooperating with Marchetti and the other lawyers. Currently confined in the grand ducal prisons due to suspicions of blasphemy, sorcery, usury, and, last but not least, incitement to apostasy among recent converts from Judaism, he hoped to get a reprieve before the Inquisition had time to get involved in his case. He might even have considered himself a scapegoat for the grand duchesses’ disapproval of Giovanni's dangerous dabbling in magic, flirting with cabala, and traf-

ficking in forbidden books. Although no specific charges were ever made, he knew what he had to do. With the obvious relish of one who

resented his former mistress, he indicated, “as far as concerns her having been a woman for hire before the friendship with Giovanni, I heard the same from her mouth and from those who knew her.”’? No matter how hard the lawyer pressed him, however, he would not say that Giovanni did or planned any wrong. The supposed murder plot against Granara was entirely a failed project of Antonio Ceccherell1,

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considering that Giovanni himself was not one to leave important business undone. If Giovanni had been involved, Granara would be dead. As for the tampering with witnesses for the story about domestic violence, “I do not think Livia’s brothers would have decided to break up the marriage between her and Battista Granaro on the grounds of being forced, unless this was the truth.” No, his former master was an honest man, and the accusations were false. In perhaps an oblique reference to the interrogation of Ceccherelli, he volunteered: “In general I

can say nothing more than that I believe one must put little store by the words of one who is being examined about a person who has done them wrong.””! Witnesses played their parts mostly according to Marchettt’s script, confirming the points in his list, with careful encouragement according to the prescribed questions: “Is it true that Signora Livia couldn’t just leave Granara’s house, because the father and brother beat her?” “Is it

true that married women have places to go if they need to, but they prefer to leave the state because of popular rumors?” “Did the brothers of Signora Livia bring her to Battista Granara’s house at night or in the daytime?” “Did you ever hear the said Signora Livia call herself Livia

Vernazza or Granara, and how many times, where and by whom?” Especially, “ask them if they believe that Signor Bartolomeo Tassarelli |Livia’s lawyer in the first trial] or Livia’s brothers, ever set out to find witnesses who deposed falsely,” considering such behavior behooves

not “men of honor.”’”? Moreover: “is it true that Don Giovanni de’ Medici studied civil and canon law?” Alessandro Bruni, a solicitor living about a hundred paces from the Vernazza’s, agreed that Livia was “beautiful,” adding, however, that he had “seen other girls as beautiful as she was, and more noble.” Some of these, he said, “took older men for their husbands, even uglier than the said Battista Granara.”’”° Ascanio Albo, a musician, said Granara “could have been around forty,

but he did not seem old or ugly,” although he was unable to confirm whether or not “the marriage between Battista Granara and Livia was forced.””* Giovanni Canale, a tailor, revealed that he had been in the

room next to where the marriage was taking place and, “I don’t remember how many times she was asked by the priest before she finally said yes, if she responded to the second or the third, because

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here in Genoa the little girls are ashamed to say yes the first time even when they are taking their loved one.””* And so it went as proceedings dragged on until June 1622. Livia, whose situation at Montughi had not improved, and to whom news arrived by trickles, may have had some difficulty avoiding the downward slope from anxiety into despair. She had been through one lonely summer since leaving Venice and now another was on the way. We can well imagine how she missed Giovanni, the excitement of her

old much busier life, the theater, human contact of any kind, and someone with whom to converse and to complain. Worst of all would have been the uncertainty about the future, mixed with a vague prospect of many decades of the same solitude until the end. The house at Montughi must have provided little consolation, having been reduced to hollow walls and empty rooms, since the furniture was removed years ago for the transfer to Venice and now lay under sequester in the Medici warehouses awaiting redistribution or liquidation. In one last effort to do for herself what the lawyers and her fortunes had denied her, Livia prepared a coup de scéne. Pen and paper were still to be found in her semi-imprisonment; she resolved to use them as best she could. Her flagging spirits, either from uncured diseases or mental fatigue, were evident from every line she wrote. And there was no way now to hide behind a secretary’s formal hand. The characters were

nothing like those of her earlier autograph letters, large, brisk, and powerful, but rather those of an old person, shaky chicken scratchings tilting down to the lower right corner of the page. She aimed straight for the only person in the world who could help: the judge in the prop-

erty case, upon whose decision her future ultimately lay. She sum-

moned all her strength and protested that “she could not defend herself,’ and that “for nine months they only allowed me to write to Genoa when they wished”—meaning, to the Genoese Republic, includ-

ing Sarzana. Now the news had arrived and she was certain: the witnesses for the plaintiffs had been bribed. “My brother advises me that in Genoa, those witnesses who were examined in favor of the other part took money for this.”’° It was a courageous accusation, and she would pay for it.

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The grand duchesses discovered Livia’s designs through Marchetti’s

regular reports on what was going on in and around the courtroom, and they reacted immediately. They would deal later with her attempts to communicate with Sanguinetti, which already had resulted in offhand comments between the opposing lawyers about the possibility of

contaminated proceedings. They now had to ensure that any such insinuations would not influence the judge while the lawyers were making their summaries. On the 13th of June, through their agent Andrea

Cioli, they once more thanked the bishop of Sarzana in advance for ensuring a rapid outcome, favorable to the Medici side, necessary to avoid “so many irregularities,” reminding him of the importance of the case to the family, and referring to the old friendship.’” Again on the 15th, they repeated the message, adding that any efforts by Sanguinetti, Livia’s lawyer, ought to be repulsed “in the greater interest of all.””® The bishop of Sarzana was less impressed by the substance of the accusation than by the temerity of the accuser. He knew exactly what to do: he presented the grand duchesses with Livia’s appeal. “See with

what license she puts things on paper and distributes them,” he remarked. Fortunately, no one who knew “the pious mind of Your Highnesses” would ever believe such nonsense, but clearly the woman

was dangerous. If any other emanations of a similar kind came his way, he promised to pass them on, as part of the infinite duties of observance to which he felt inclined 1n the course of his “obligations and service to your Most Serene House.””” Soon the family would see, he added, how well “I have acted in the execution of your commands during the course of the proceedings.” From the very day “when Dr. Pandolfo Marchetti first came to represent the matrimony case,” he had done his best to accommodate the grand duchesses’ “particular interest.”°° Now that things were finally drawing to a close, they could rest assured that he had done his duty. He even put some slightly unfavorable point in the judgment, he warned, which he considered necessary for the appearance of impartiality. “If I have neglected some small thing in your regard in the interest of justice,” he explained, “this may

be considered to be of little importance considering the principal goal.”®! The goods, and the documentary record, were secure.

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The sentence, pronounced on June 27, 1622, was as predictable as it was harsh. At least Livia would not be punished according to the canon law prescription for female bigamists, enshrined in Gratian’s Decretum, by having her hair cut off and her clothes torn to rags.** Nor would she be forced to go and live with the hapless Granara, who could hardly

stand the sight of her at this point: other plans were being made in regard to her freedom. As for the property, Giovannr’s real estate was to be returned to the legitimate side of the family and divided up. A good portion of the movable and immovable assets were added to the patrimony of Don Lorenzo, who had, after all (so his lawyers protested to

the grand duchesses) received so little in the previous property divisions, whereas “his Most Serene brothers have received properties with much greater incomes.”®° Here at last was an opportunity for ensuring that justice was adequately served. Lorenzo moved into the palazzo in Parione, filling it with his considerable collection of artworks and com-

mencing a rigorous schedule of entertainments. Soon he would need to sell off the movable assets to pay debts.** To take some attention away from the partiality of the proceedings (at least such was his explanation), the bishop of Sarzana had decided

that a limited number of the creditors, the major ones who had pre-

sented their appeals at the beginning of the trial, would get their money back. The actual distribution was up to the Court of Wards, operating according to a clearly defined mandate. Satisfying the major

clients was far more important than preserving the good memory of Don Giovanni by honoring his debts. Even while the trial was going on, they let Don Lorenzo pick over the furnishings, books, and other valuables from Venice. Then they sold off a number of lots to the amount necessary for paying off a few more creditors. They passed the rest on to Cosimo Baroncelli, who had not failed to remind them of his rights as the last surviving among the servants to whom house-

hold furnishings were to be distributed according to the terms of Giovanni’s original will penned in 1588.°° Anyone else forever held their peace.

Livia was ruined. Her property was gone, and her reputation as a fallen woman was legally confirmed. And yet, the grand duchesses had not heard enough words of contrition or seen enough abasement. They

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never expressed their reasons for what happened next, at least not in any document. They merely said the word to staff members capable of interpreting their desires, and their vendetta was complete. By Andrea Cioli, they were informed that “the temerarious insolence of these brothers of Livia grows and grows,” but “in the end it will be the worse for them, because their destruction will be all the greater.”®° They left

Cioli to decide how to carry this out. They paid greater attention to Livia herself. In response to the latest letters from Sacchetti in Venice,

complaining of another outburst from her containing the usual bestial impertinences, accusing the officials of who knew what illegalities, subterfuges, and general injustice, they decided that house arrest would not do.®” Nor would a convent provide sufficient daily reminders of her duty to God and man. A sterner solution was in order.

Even Livia was surprised. Just when she thought she had seen the worst, a year after the trial ended, on the night of August 2, 1623, the Medici officials, different ones this time from those who had invaded her homein Murano two years before, burst into her villain Montughi.*®

They needed no warrant, nor did they owe an explanation to her or anyone else, beyond the vague imperative of service to the grand duchesses. They simply took her straightaway to the fortress of San Miniato, high above the city. There would be no trial, no lawyers, and no judge. She had no champions in Florence, and loosed from her Medici moor-

ings, she was fair game. The officials placed her somewhere in the structure where the cold and dampness would affect her later medical record, but not long enough to kill her. Soon they transferred her to another prison: the Belvedere Fortress, supposedly the Medici fam-

ily’s refuge in case of attack, situated on the eastern corner of the gardens behind the Pitti Palace. Years before, Giovanni had flattered the Grand Duchess Cristina of Lorraine’s desire to add a woman’s touch to the austere military architecture there by designing a small chapel according to some vague specifications. That area was off limits to Livia.

She would endure the confinement altogether for sixteen years, without pen or paper or other form of contact with the outside world.

Perhaps now she would learn humility; perhaps not. To the grand duchesses’ infinite annoyance, the Livia affair was not over yet.

Durable Goods

Porte Belvedere, 10 January 1638

Twelve years of “strict confinement” in the Belvedere Fortress took their toll on Livia, also because of the quality and location of the single room.’ There were apartments in the central villa of the fortress fit to

house the grand ducal family, which would actually transfer to this location temporarily during the worst days of the plague of 1630, far away from the contagion raging in the streets of Florence. Considering that Livia lived in the fortress when the grand ducal party arrived, she could not have been lodged anywhere near these spaces.* Nor would she have shared the secret known to a few trusted officials that some-

where beneath the whole structure was a passageway leading deep down to where the Medici kept their treasure, an immense quantity of gold and precious stones worth the entire wealth of several kings. Her room would have been on the ground floor, in the vicinity of the tiny fortress garrison—although conversation with the soldiers, or with anyone else, was strictly forbidden. She lived, as she referred in a mes-

sage to the grand duke that one of the guards scrawled for her on a scrap of paper in an unlearned hand, “as in a jail, without being able to

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write or speak to any living person.” After age 40, her health finally broke; from this time on, she would complain (in the few messages that have survived) of undefined illnesses, brought on, presumably, by cold, damp conditions, bad food, bad air, lack of light, lack of movement, and depression. Her experience of Renaissance prison life was in general not unusual, except that she survived it.? Others who survived apparently blocked it out or else found no way to fit it into the accepted genres of memoirwriting, except Benvenuto Cellini, who, true to form, only mentioned the picaresque elements of the sojourns in Castel Sant’Angelo and the Tor di Nona in Rome: vermin, squalor, and a famous escape. Had she been regularly allowed pen and paper, Livia would have written mostly to gain sympathy for her plight, addressing her complaints to the local authorities, and like the imprisoned poet Torquato Tasso, to everyone she knew.* Day to day, week to week, month to month, many things no

doubt occupied her mind. Not being Michelangelo, hiding in a dark and airless cell underneath his New Sacristy at San Lorenzo during the siege of Florence, she drew no pictures on the walls to remind herself of her projects and the world outside, as far as we know. Nor did she, like some other inmates, discover her religious self. Her prison cell graffiti, if she lifted any sharp stone or leg-iron in anger against a wall, might have included themes of salvation as well as of rebellion, but the crucifixes would most likely have been as protective talismans against the depths of despair and mind-consuming hatreds.° Since the familiar correspondence ceases after Giovanni’s death, we have no direct access to her state of mind. In writing to the grand duke, she remarked about the inconvenience of receiving no “relief for the soul” (sollevamento danima) in the Medici jails—in her case, “never being allowed to hear a

Mass.” But the real purpose of the letter was apparently to gain a transfer to a more comfortable location, not to demand the assistance of a priest. What kept her alive, we may be sure, was her desire for revenge.°

She must have wondered about what she was missing, especially the life she could have had but never would. She still owned a garden on the outskirts of the city, behind Villa Le Macine in Montughti, with a

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graceful fountain designed by Giovanni. The Medici family had allowed her to keep it so the dwindling incomes could pay her jailer and her lawyers, for bad services rendered to body and things. Perhaps she pictured how the farmers working the land marched their oxen across the rose-lined pathways (as we know from another document), chopped the trees for wood, and stole what olives and grapes there still

remained.’ On better days, maybe she thought of how the garden looked when she enjoyed it, with the breezes blowing fresh from the foothills of the Apennines and the scent of rosemary in the air. Maybe she also thought about her secret treasure—nothing like the family’s, but important nonetheless to her. For through all the years of imprisonment, there was one set of her items that remained secure from the grand duchesses Maria Maddalena and Cristina of Lorraine despite all their attempts, and those of their agents, to divest her of these too. Thinking upon them, and their many associations, rather than on the things she lost, may have brought her at least some solace, may have placed her in some oasis of beauty on a mental landscape of ugliness and spoiled dreams. The fading memory may have helped her keep her sanity as well.

Again and again she must have turned her mind back to the miserable month of July 1621. In the last hours as she had gazed around her

island palazzo in Murano, she must have known she would never return to Venice. Her life was being dismantled before her eyes piece by piece like an elaborate opera set after the music stopped and the singers took their bows. But just as she began to realize her days of freedom were over, with Niccolo Sacchetti and other Medici agents hovering over her drawing up lists of property she would never see again, she made one last gesture of defiance. In the midst of this ignominy, she gathered the objects that contained many of the memories

of her former life. As soon as Don Garzia di Montalvo arrived in Murano at noon on the day after Giovanni's death, to help Sacchetti take possession of the palazzo and of her, she managed to hand three chests over to Cornelia, the midwife, to load discreetly aboard a gondola for a trip to the other side of the island, where the nuns at the two convents of Santo Spirito and of Santi Marco e Andrea awaited with orders to keep them for her until she gave the agreed-upon sign

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

“a Livia was surely not the only one with memories of that day. Niccolo Sacchetti, now bishop of Volterra, must have occasionally reflected about those first steps in his now-abandoned career as a diplomat. In taking the vow of celibacy, perhaps he also took a vow never to be fooled by a woman again. By the time he figured out what had happened, on July 24, 1621, Livia

was long gone. Yet as the grand duchesses’ representative in Venice, he was personally responsible for getting the property back. The woman was once again up to her old tricks, he likely thought, and eventually she would see there was no use. She would realize all resistance was futile and that full cooperation might avoid matters getting very much worse. For now, however, she was not his problem—his problem was the

property. He knew there were jewels, and he had detailed information from the officials of the Medici Wardrobe that Giovanni had ordered a good quantity of the family silver to be sent to Venice for his use in 1615. There was a log notation of the pieces, with the value stated at around four thousand scudi.® Where were these and where were the other valuables? The grand duchesses ordered him to find out. There had already been one slightly embarrassing moment, two days after Giovannt’s death, on July 19, when he saw a suspicious-looking strong box being trucked out the door of the palace. Thinking it might contain the jewels, he had the box brought back upstairs and secured the house so nothing else would get out except under his orders. Livia protested, whereupon he had someone try “to calm the woman down as much as possible.”? Only when she was gone did he discover that the jewels and silver were already in the convents. How to get them out? It would be harder than he imagined. Sacchetti thought these holy women, these women “consecrated to the service of God,” as he put it in his report to the grand duchesses, would do their duty by handing over the goods.'° He was wrong, and the disappointment expressed in his report shows just how high he

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had raised his expectations. Perhaps he had set out for the other side

of the island of Murano to the convents of Santo Spirito and San Marco e Andrea playing over to himself the witticisms and courtesies he would use to win their confidence. Although he was no ladies’ man, he knew what supposedly worked to bend the will of the female gender; and after the experience of Livia, we may imagine he needed a boost to his waning self-confidence in this regard. He would have gone accompanied by the strongest lackeys on his staff to wield the boxes and the chests, making sure there would be room in the boat. However, the varieties of womanhood he encountered to date ill prepared him for what he found when he crossed the threshold of the convent of Santo Spirito. The nuns, it seemed, saw matters rather differently from the way he

did, although we can only read their thoughts by his descriptions. Agostina Morosini and Benedetta Benedetti, Livia’s contacts, were dis-

interested in his problem and curious about the world. They obeyed

their abbess, not the Florentine ambassador. In their view, their behavior suggests, they had nothing to gain from paying him the slightest heed.'! The more urgently he appealed to them, the more they seem to have become convinced that he represented the grand duchesses of a far-off polity and not Livia Vernazza-de’ Medici. The more he attempted to make of the jewels an affair of state, the more they suspected an intrusion of international politics in their relations with the woman, a suspicion that only increased their sense of self-importance. They had received the things from Livia with nothing but vague ind1cations of where she was going and with orders to give them to no one but herself. Sacchetti’s very presence here no doubt made them think that Livia had left the island involuntarily and was being held incommunicado.'* His evident hurry to get things done probably reminded them that they had all the time in the world. The ambassador was ina

difficult position, and they could play this game of cat-and-mouse almost ad infinitum. Suor Agostina and Suor Benedetta, as inmates in an institution, knew all about power; and for them, very likely, power was something different from what it was for Sacchetti. Power was a memory of whatever agency their sex normally allowed within secular society. They

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were the younger daughters of the Venetian patriciate or gentry, from whom power was removed on the day when their families forced them to submit to the rules of the convent, and eventually to take vows and join a religious order, so as to give more power to their siblings.’ Family wealth was conserved by male primogeniture and by giving a limited number of daughters away in marriage; any protest was supposed to be smothered by prayers, hymns, and austerities. Some of their fellow nuns, like the daughters of Galileo Galilei in Florence, had been born of common women whom their fathers, perhaps of ancient but impoverished aristocracy, were too embarrassed to marry off for the dowry they could afford. Stored away as children to save money and honor, they spent their best years writing letters to their families about the beauties of the Cross, convent minutiae, and properties only their relatives would see or enjoy, articulated with occasional sparks of insight

that might be expected of good brains and endless opportunity for reflection." They had few illusions. Only to outsiders would the erudite diatribe, Innocence Undone, also called Paternal Tyranny, written by a fellow nun

named Arcangela Tarabotti, recently admitted to the convent of Sant’Anna in Venice, offer any new revelations about the world of forced vocations. To insiders, her comparison (published decades later) of nuns to courtesans and parents to pimps, seducing young girls into a disreputable trade in the service of convents and themselves, would seem amply confirmed by daily experience, even without the sea of citations to every ancient and modern classic that a well-stocked monastic

library might have on hand, and even without the companion piece, Monastic Hell, which remained in manuscript until modern times.'> To be sure, Tarabotti’s picture of a “a little bird, going about in its pure simplicity among the branches of the trees or along the banks of the rivers, sweetly whispering in gentle harmony, pleasing the ear and consoling the heart of whoever listens, when all of a sudden it is caught by

the insidious net and deprived of its dear liberty” was perhaps too bleak. Nuns, too, had fun in the convent, attested by their reams of plays, poems, and novellas, written and performed to while away the hours by images of the world outside—the real world of families, children, and lovers that they craved or feared—which modern scholars

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have unearthed in the archives."° The nuns at Santo Spirito would now have some fun with Niccolo Sacchetti. Unfortunately for Sacchetti, his strategy to elude the nuns was based on a false premise—false, at least, at this stage in the story. In his view,

they sought to keep the jewels and silver in order to steal what they could for redistribution to their families, as devoted and unscrupulous agents in family policy. They may already have sent the goods to “the house of some nobleman,” he feared.!’ Busy day and night with the conservation and augmentation of Medici property, and his own, he could imagine no other possible motivation for the nuns’ tenacity.

The important thing, then, was to have inventories drawn up and report a crime. Eventually, whatever was present at the convents would be compared to the inventory, and the nuns would be forced to give up

the missing pieces in return for lenient treatment. Malefactors who refused to cooperate would be dealt with harshly. First of all (so he reported to the grand duchesses), he would have the gondolier who had originally transported Cornelia the midwife and the goods to the convents arrested by order of the Council of Ten.'® Presumably, if the Ten were involved, and not just the police, some metal could be applied to

his body and a confession elicited. That might lead to an affirmation concerning other people involved; one person would lead to another, and the investigation might have a snowball effect. Next he planned to have the nuns themselves excommunicated, which would presumably leave them at the mercy of his men. The three ringleaders would be rounded up, namely, Suor Laura Celega, later the abbess of Santi Marco e Andrea, and, at Santo Spirito, Suor Agostina

Morosini and Benedetta Benedetti. Especially upon this last, in his words the “shrewdest” of the three, some extra pressure could be put. The law was an instrument for keeping people in their place, not just for punishing crime; justice, after all, meant “to each his own,” that ts, in terms of status. Justice was also a matter of paying due respect to

heads of state and their families, at home and abroad—a particular specialty of the fine-tuned Florentine system, missing here in Venice “where justice is rendered with a hatchet” and not, in other words, with a scalpel. Now, it seemed, this Suor Benedetta “is not noble”; therefore, “there is an advantage,” supposing that the scalpel and not the hatchet

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would be applied—because with her the Patriarch of Venice “can proceed with no compunction whatsoever.”!? On receipt of an encouraging response from the grand duchesses, Sacchetti set about his work. He had a note extracted from a reluctant Livia on a false promise of liberty, asking for delivery of her property, along with a power of attorney issued in her name. His first stop was the bishop of Torcello, directly responsible for ecclesiastical affairs in

Murano and thus for the monasteries in question. Bishop Zaccaria della Vecchia’s current headquarters were still in Venice; only his successors would live on the island of Murano in the same Cappello palace where Giovanni died. The bishop was no stranger to controversy. As a churchman he could hardly avoid entertaining a slightly uneasy rela-

tionship with the Venetian government; families connected to the papacy were routinely excluded from Senate deliberations on ecclesiastical affairs. He himself had been a papal protonotary at the time when Paul V launched a terrible Interdict against Venice for supposed insults to the Church. Above all, he knew about nunneries, because he had to

report on them periodically to his superiors in Rome. No one had to remind him that the creatures therein were not simply hooded ciphers waiting to do the bidding of their betters. They were often highly educated, frequently opinionated, not necessarily happy about their fate, and above all, dedicated to studying exactly what they owed to whom,

when, and how often. He trusted their judgment about their own affairs and would gladly leave them to their own devices. As for himself, he was happy to offer his services to any of the faithful, including Florentines, of whatever allegiance, although strictly speaking, he was more concerned about their souls than about their property. He was

willing to help the Florentine ambassador, to a certain extent. The ambassador could forget about enrolling him as an accomplice in this tawdry business. The bishop accordingly had himself rowed out to Murano with his vicar late on the evening of August 13th to visit the nuns of Santi Marco e Andrea. There were other matters on the agenda, and he ended up staying over two hours. He brought up the question of the property belonging to Livia. They knew all about it. In fact, they had their own theories about what the ambassador was up to, for whom, and for what

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reason. They also had a pretty clear idea of where their own interests and duties lay in this regard. The bishop got back to Venice too late to call upon the ambassador and report what he heard, so he wrote a brief note. Livia’s things, he said, were very safe “and would remain so”; there

was no need to worry about that. Likewise, the letter supposedly by Livia and the power of attorney were “safe’—not that the nuns had been too impressed by either one.*° Especially Sister Laura Celega (the

bishop recounted) demanded proof that Livia was alive and well and actually desired to avail herself of her things while now in Florence, where she had purportedly returned. Let a list be sent, in Livia’s hand (which the nuns knew very well from the correspondence over the years). Sister Laura had “very loudly” demanded this. “Let us have this list,” the bishop concluded, “and we will overcome everything.”

It was not the response Sacchetti had hoped for. He vowed to put more pressure on the bishop and, in turn, on the nuns. Meanwhile he reconstructed for the grand duchesses what had happened, in his own words. It was like having to deal with a whole roomful of Livias. The nuns were “terrible and proud as can be.” Instead of behaving “as reason demands,” that is, obeying grand ducal orders, especially this Sister Laura told the bishop “a thousand impertinences.” She even went

so far as to suggest that the letter, purportedly from Livia, and the power of attorney with Livia’s name on it were false, or else had been extorted from Livia by force, and much else fit to make one “lose one’s patience.”?! True or not, such matters were none of their business, and

their behavior indicated a dangerous attitude of indifference to the authority of the prince. They had also made a strange request: let Livia give some sign they had agreed upon, signifying all was well. This time, however, he would not be Livia’s fool. The grand ducal agents must make her produce a list of the goods (“half a Bible,” if need be, said the ambassador) and give this sign. This he would take to the next hierar-

chical level above the bishop in order to make the nuns “do what is proper” (ie., by threatening them with punishment).*” Confiscation of the property, so he believed, was only a matter of time. By mid-August his mind was apparently running along several parallel lines, including the problem of extinguishing Giovannt’s debts

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in Venice once and for all. Here the jewels and silver could be a real help. For instance, there was a significant claim against Giovanni’s estate by a certain Primicerio Cornaro in Venice, scion of a major patrician family. Now, there was a danger that “paying off one creditor one would have to pay off all the rest.” But this approach might facilitate

“setting Livia’s things back from the nuns on Murano,” because Cornaro was a state official with some responsibility for political oversight of one of the monasteries, and if the prospect were offered of an immediate payment by liquidating the property, perhaps the creditor himself could be enlisted for retrieving it.*° All that was necessary was

a little official insistence to secure Medici control, and then Medici officials could either have the goods auctioned off or else assessed and the appropriate portion assigned to the debt as a payment in kind. As the weeks and months went by, with no resolution to the question of

Livia’s things anywhere in sight, Sacchetti prepared to pay off the Cornaro debt using other assets. He would have to set aside the eventual destiny of the jewels and silver until he managed to get his hands on them. Livia was still at Montughi in summer 1621, probably wishing she could stay forever but knowing there was more trouble in store. The catastrophe of the trial would have been still fresh in her mind as bits of her property fast disappeared into Medici hands. A sable pelt had been practically ripped from her shoulders by Medici agents as she climbed aboard the boat on the way to Florence back in July (we know this from the later appearance of the same accessory in an account of things sent separately as soon as she was out of sight).?* Such experi-

ences most likely did not quiet her spontaneous diffidence about anyone claiming to act on her behalf. So when Sebastiano Cellesi came around toward the end of August proposing to retrieve her jewels and silver in Venice, she must have wondered whether he really had her best interests at heart. The documents suggest that she responded to questions, perhaps fearing the consequences if she did not, drawing up an

inventory “not in her own hand because she was too weak.”*? She recalled the items, although some of the details were fuzzy 1n her mind. He took the dictation.

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First, a case with a pearl necklace inside, of six strings, and two strings of pearls serving as bracelets; the chain has a gold clasp in gold with black enameling; and the bracelets have two small clasps, and if I remember correctly there is also a round necklace of pearls which, if it was not in the same case was in a kerchief with other gold chains enameled in the Milanese fashion, and in this kerchief there

were two chains of Milan, enameled, and one had attached to it a little locket with three little figures on it, and inside was a portrait of His Most Illustrious Excellency, God have him in glory, and also there was a pair of Turkish-style bracelets with turquoise and small rubies and emeralds and also there was a pair of little hands without enamel, in a plain style |alla piana|, and another pair, open, without enamel, and also there was a dagger with a sheath of nacre, and with its points of enameled gold, and a handle of corniola and lapis, and a circle of emeralds attached to the said dagger, and woven chain, and a purse of solid gold in the French style.

The recital must have brought back some memories of the people formerly in her life. She went on for another thirty lines: A small seal made of jasper with my arms engraved on it, and a gold

watch with a covering in gold weave, also a pair of earrings with pearls, a pair with five pearls each, and a pair with seven pearls each, a gold chain with nothing, and also a little red velvet cushion with 48

pins in it of enameled gold each with a diamond at the top, a little pin with little turquoises in the middle of its pillow, and also a small case with two pairs of earrings in it, one with three pearls each, round and big, and two small ones, and diamonds mixed in, the other pair

all of diamonds with a single pearl, and another case containing a diamond jewel in the form ofa lily, another with a jewel of diamonds, rubies, and round emeralds, another case with a broken gold watch

in it, and yet another case with a little gold enamel box in it with a portrait of a woman.”°

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

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jewels are concerned, there could be other minor things, which I do not recall,” she commented, adding, “but when I see them I will know if anything is missing.” Significantly, at this early stage in the retrieval, she gave a narrative, not alist. Perhaps her emotional bond to the things was still too strong to be reduced to such bureaucratic formalities. Did she experience a natural diffidence to lists? She said she had to see her things to know if anything was missing; perhaps also, practical person that she was, she also had to see them to feel that they were real. Simply stated, word for word, they would have seemed to be only necklaces, bracelets, rings, or pendants on a page. Without holding them in her hands, she would no longer have felt the exoticism: the stones from faraway places—India diamonds, Burma rubies, New World emeralds—exquisitely worked by craftsmen mostly in Italy but also in Northern Europe. Even the most

famous of them all, the diamond-studded lily, which raised much speculation among the Medici agents about whether it would survive the sticky fingers of the many people through whose hands it was certain to have passed during the time since Livia’s deposit at the convent, seemed to be nothing but words.*’ Ten bags containing various types of currency worth one thousand ducats were nothing more than a few figures written in pen. Even the silverware—the goblets, plates, serving utensils, and what not, filling two bulky trunks full of stuff—lost its luster in a bare description. But list or no list, she was sure of one thing: if she could not enjoy them, no one else would either.

She put her signature on the sheets of paper where Cellesi had written down the inventory. In the last week of August she dictated letters to the various nuns in the convents, a veritable barrage. Sacchetti

made arrangements to get these directly from the Medici agent on arrival in Venice, so he could ensure the next step would be “only what was approved” by him.*® He had them delivered to those concerned

and awaited the outcome. However, once again he underestimated Livia’s resourcefulness. From her communications she apparently omitted the previously agreed-upon sign that the nuns would understand to refer to her actual state of mind. Her requests to have her things placed in the hands of the Florentine ambassador and his men were read for what they did not say: as indications about the house

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arrest, the agents standing over her, and the threat that if she did not behave as they commanded, she would have to suffer more, while the so-called return of her things really meant their redistribution to the grand duchesses, Don Lorenzo, and the rest. For Livia, trust was a oneway street: Sacchetti could not trust her, but what really mattered was

that she could not trust him. At the end of August, the bishop of Torcello referred to Sacchetti the latest bad news, that the nuns “would

not be forced so easily to satisfy the desires of Your Illustrious Lordship.”*”

The grand duchesses got wind of the existence of this interesting property almost as soon as they heard about Don Giovanni’s death.°° If Livia may have experienced some difficulty in conceptualizing her things as a mere list, they quite likely would not have shared any such feelings. They lived by lists—of titles (Maria Maddalena’s father had five), of illustrious ancestors, of progeny, of estates, of property. They

had far too much to hold in the hand or to wear around the neck or with which to swathe the body, and far more than they could possibly look at or even count in a day or a week or a month or a year.*! Without lists, there were only piles and piles of unnamed goods in warehouses, in family museums, in family collections of books they would mostly

never read, of paintings they would rarely admire, in houses around Tuscany and elsewhere that they occasionally visited but that in themselves were containers for huge quantities of things that could only be fully appreciated, traced, and protected by lists. They had entire staffs of servants dedicated to keeping the books, the files, and the registers of the properties and goods up to date, with the latest appraisals, running after each change, each successive augmentation, each successive revaluation, since objects that dropped off a list, as far as they were concerned, dropped off the earth. They had been married to their hus-

bands accompanied by a list hoping to gain another list, and they would die leaving a list to their heirs. They were determined to add these new things to the masses of other things they had, even if they never lived to touch the things themselves. Using the jewels and silver was not the point. These things were not for using; they were

for owning, and the grand duchesses determined to own them at all costs.

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Ownership was power, the grand duchesses knew well; and ownership of the beautiful was, essentially, beautiful.°? Possessing the beautiful—objects stunning to the eye and exhilarating to the touch—was a way of cheating nature, which had its own (grossly unjust) system for distributing good looks. Therefore, by the logic of an aristocratic ethos committed to correcting nature where nature had been parsimonious, power was beauty. By this definition, the grand duchesses were beau-

tiful enough already. No wonder the court portraitists, in an age of unusual honesty in art (which would not outlive the painters Giusto Suttermans and Santi di Tito), focused on Madama Cristina’s beautiful dress and encrustations of costly ornaments (Figure 7.1). Another

generation of painters would resume the tradition of flattering their less comely subjects by erasing the physiognomic effects of serial preg-

nancies, rich food, and boredom occasionally relieved by intelligent reading, but not yet. Thus the same ambiguous favors were bestowed upon the stocky figure of Maria Maddalena, who, perhaps lacking some of the interior qualities that occasionally embellish the fading luster of youth overcome by middle age, was portrayed in gorgeous cos-

tumes studded with precious stones.°’ Natural beauty was an insult unless it could be co-opted or destroyed. The Livia case suggested a combined approach: they would destroy her and take her things. Yet the grand duchesses also belonged to an environment where the power of jewels was impossible to ignore, quite apart from any visual appeal or money value. Their sensitivity to the etymological nuances of their adopted language would have alerted them to the curious transformation of the word used for “jewels” in Italian, derived from the

Arabic giohar, or gemstone, commonly called “gioie” or “gioielli,” merging thus with the word that was the same as “joys.” Their jewels were their joys; and the joy of jewels came from much more than the joy of having or of depriving another. Maybe they felt enchanted by jewel

magic, one of the few kinds of magic fully authorized in the Bible. If Bible reading was indeed among their devotional pastimes, how could they not think of their own jewels when contemplating Aaron’s jewelstudded breastplate in Exodus 28:15-21? Even without St. Jerome’s gloss

relating the twelve jewels embedded in the breastplate to the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve signs of the zodiac, or the later medieval

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