His character and government mingled evil and good. He was as severe and cruel as unsentimental policy might dictate. He did not bother, like earlier Medici, to maintain republican forms and façade. He arranged a system of espionage that entered every family, and used parish priests as spies.29 He enforced unanimity of professed religious belief, and co-operated with the Inquisition. He was greedy of wealth and power, exploited the state monopoly of grain, taxed his subjects avidly, overthrew the semi-republic of Siena to make that city, like Arezzo and Pisa, part of his dominions, and persuaded Pope Pius V to give him the title of grand duke of Tuscany (1569).
In partial compensation for the absolutism of his rule, he organized efficient administration, a reliable army and police, a competent and incorruptible judiciary. He lived simply, avoided costly ceremony and display, managed finances stringently, and left a full treasury to his son and heir. The order and safety that were now maintained on streets and highways revived the commerce and industry that had ailed under repeated revolutions. Cosimo brought in new manufactures, as of coral and glass; he invited and protected Portuguese Jews as a stimulus to industrial development; he enlarged Livorno (Leghorn) as a busy port. He had the marshes of the Maremma drained in an effort to free that region, and nearby Siena, from malaria. Under his conscientious despotism Siena, like Florence, became more prosperous than ever before. He used part of his levied wealth to support literature and art without extravagance and with discrimination. He raised the Accademia degli Umidi to an official position as the Accademia Fiorentina, and commissioned it to set norms for proper Tuscan usage. He befriended Vasari and Cellini, tried hard to win Michelangelo back to Florence, and founded, under his absent presidency, an Arte del Disegno, or Academy of Design. He established at Pisa (1544) a school of botany second only to Padua’s in age and excellence. Doubtless Cosimo would have argued that he could not have accomplished this good had he not begun with a little evil and an iron fist.
At forty-five this iron Duke was already worn out with the strains of power and family tragedies. Within a few months, in 1562, his wife and two of his sons died from malarial fever caught during his efforts to drain the Maremma swamps. A year later he lost a daughter. In 1564 he resigned the actual government to his son Francesco. He tried to console himself with amours but found more boredom in promiscuity than in marriage. He died in 1574, aged fifty-five. He had lived up to the best and the worst in his ancestry.
Though Florence no longer produced Leonardos or Michelangelos, and had no artists to compare in this period with the urbane and universal Titian, the volcanic Tintoretto, or the festal Veronese, she experienced under her second Cosimo as vigorous a revival as could be expected from a generation that had grown up amid frustrated revolt and unsuccessful war. Even so, Cellini judged the artists employed by Cosimo to be “a band the like of which is not to be found at present in the world”30—which is a typically Florentine understatement of Venetian art. Benvenuto thought the Duke a patron with more taste than generosity, but perhaps this able governor considered economic reconstruction and political order more vital than the artistic decoration of his court. Vasari described Cosimo as “loving and favoring all artists, and indeed all men of genius.” It was Cosimo who financed at Chiusi, Arezzo, and elsewhere the excavations that revealed a remarkable Etruscan culture, and unearthed the famous Etruscan bronze statues of The Chimera, The Orator, and Minerva. He bought back as many as he could locate of the art treasures looted from the Medici palace in 1494 and 1527, added his own collections to them, and housed the total in that palace-fortress that Luca Pitti had begun a hundred years before. Cosimo had this monstrous edifice enlarged by Bartolommeo Ammaaati, and made it his official dwelling (1553).
Ammanati and Vasari were in Florence the leading architects of the age. It was Ammanati who laid out for Cosimo the famous Boboli Gardens behind the Pitti Palace, and spanned the Arno with the beautiful Santa Trinità Bridge (1567–70)—destroyed in the Second World War. He was also a painter and sculptor of quality; he won sculptural competitions from Cellini and Giovanni da Bologna, and carved the Juno that adorns the Bargello court. In his old age he apologized for having made many pagan figures. The Pagan Renaissance had now (1560) run its course, and Christianity was regaining its hold on the Italian mind.
Cosimo made Baccio Bandinelli his favorite sculptor, to the horror of Cellini. One of Cosimo’s recreations was in hearing Cellini berate Bandinelli. Baccio was popular with himself; he proclaimed his intention to surpass Michelangelo, and was so critical of other artists that one of the gentlest, Andrea Sansovino, tried to kill him. Nearly everybody hated him, but his many commissions in Florence and Rome suggest that his talent was better than his character. When Leo X wished to duplicate the complex Laocoon group of the Belvedere as a gift to Francis I, Cardinal Bibbiena asked Bandinelli to undertake the assignment; Baccio promised to make a copy superior to the original. To the general dismay he almost succeeded. Clement VII was so pleased with the result that he sent authentic antiques to Francis and kept Baccio’s copy for the Medici Palace in Florence, whence it passed to the Uffizi Gallery. For Clement and Alessandro de’ Medici Bandinelli carved a gigantic group, Hercules and Cacus, which was set up on the porch of the Palazzo Vecchio beside Michelangelo’s David. Cellini did not like it. “If your Hercules had his hair cropped,” he told Bandinelli in Cosimo’s presence, “he would not have skull enough to hold his brains…. His heavy shoulders remind one of the two baskets of a donkey’s packsaddle. His chest and muscles are copied not from nature but from a bag of bad melons.”31 Clement, however, thought the Hercules a masterpiece, and rewarded the sculptor with a substantial property in addition to the promised fee. Baccio repaid the compliment by giving the name Clement to a bastard born to him soon after the Pope’s death. His last work was a tomb prepared by him for himself and his father; as soon as it was finished he occupied it (1560). Probably he would have greater renown today had he not been invidiously immortalized by two artists who could write as well as design—Vasari and Cellini.
Giovanni da Bologna was a more genial competitor. Born at Douai, he made his way in youth to Rome (1561), resolved to be a sculptor. After a year of study there he brought a clay sample of his work to the aged Michelangelo. The old sculptor took it in his hands, pressed it here and there with his worn fingers and heavy thumbs, and in a few moments molded it to greater significance. Giovanni never forgot that visit; throughout the remainder of his eighty-four years he labored with unrelaxing ambition to equal the Titan. He started back to Flanders, but a Florentine nobleman advised him to study the art collected in Florence, and for three years maintained him in his palace. There were so many Italian artists in or near the city that it took the Fleming five years to win acceptance for his work. Then Francesco, son of Duke Cosimo, bought his Venus. He entered a competition to design a fountain for the Piazza della Signoria; Cosimo judged him too young for so responsible an assignment, but his model was rated best by many artists, and probably it won him an invitation to build a much larger fountain in Bologna. After that Giovanni was brought back to Florence as official sculptor for the Medici, and never lacked commissions. When he went to Rome again Vasari introduced him to the Pope as “the prince of the sculptors of Florence.”32 In 1583 he modeled a group, now in the Loggia dei Lanzi, and named in afterthought The Rape of the Sabines: a hero virile and muscular holds in his grasp a ravishing woman whose soft form is realistically compressed against his supporting hand, and whose back is the loveliest in the bronze sculpture of the Renaissance.