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The Valori Family in the Florentine Renaissance

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The Valori Family in the Florentine Renaissance Introduction: The Valori Family in the Florentine Renaissance On 1 August 1537, the army of the new ruler of Florence, Duke Cosimo I, routed the forces of Florentine exiles intent on toppling the fledgling Medici regime. The future of Medici power in Florence hung in the balance that day. No one, Cosimo included, expected him to assume the ducal throne—the assassination of his cousin Alessandro in January 1537 had thrust him rather unexpectedly to the forefront of Florentine politics. He had been elected by the Florentine senate, led by old, aristocratic houses who hoped to establish an oligarchy in Florence with Cosimo as little more than a symbolic figurehead. In addition to weak internal support and the enmity of an increasing gathering of Florentine exiles in Bologna, Cosimo could count only on obstacles to his rule from abroad. The recent republican uprising of 1527–30 and yet more recent assassination of Alessandro had raised significant doubts about the willingness of Florentines to accept the Medici as princely rulers. Neither the French, nor the papacy, nor even Cosimo’s ostensible ally, the Holy Roman Emperor, were inclined to provide any kind of support until Medici power in Florence appeared secure.¹ In devastatingly unambiguous terms, Cosimo’s victory at Monte- murlo answered all questions about the permanence of Medici power in Florence. Throughout the previous century, the constitution and political culture of Florence had oscillated between a traditional repub- licanism, whether popular or oligarchic, and a more recent princely culture, whether hidden or overt, centred around the Medici family. The fundamentally unresolved tension between the republican and princely visions for Florentine government was the beating heart of the city’s political history from 1434 through 1537. Although the Medici family ¹ On the assassination of Alessandro, Cosimo, and Montemurlo, see Cochrane (1973), 3–53; Coppi (2000), 1–13; Van Veen (2006), 8–31. 2 Introduction had dominated Florentine politics for much of that period, republi- canism remained a powerful and influential political ideology for the Florentine elite, capable at times of coalescing into outright political opposition, as the republican uprisings of 1494 and 1527 demonstrated. But after 1537 and his victory over the exile army, Cosimo built a dynas- tic state more powerful and secure than that of any of his predecessors. The house of Medici never again faced an open republican challenge to their hegemony, though, as this book hopes to show, republican ideology persisted nonetheless in ducal Florence. A gifted and capable dynast, Cosimo immediately set to work laying the foundations for his new ducal state, commissioning a series of portraits, sculptures, and frescoes depicting him as the natural and rightful ruler of an autonomous territorial state.² Particularly conscious of early doubts surrounding his competence as a military leader, he commissioned a number of martial works that connected him to famous generals from antiquity and that evoked his father, the condottiere Giovanni delle Bande Nere.³ Cosimo’s chief architect for the visual style of the newly triumphant Medici was Giorgio Vasari, who among many other works commemorated Cosimo’s victory over the exiles in a fresco at the palazzo della Signoria, freshly renamed the palazzo ducale. Based on a Roman military victory, Vasari’s fresco depicts a martial Cosimo, triumphant on the field of battle, gazing down on the bound and prostrate vanquished republican leaders, Bartolomeo Valori, Filippo Strozzi, and Anton Francesco degli Albizzi.⁴ Vasari classicizes and naturalizes Medici rule, showing Cosimo engaged in two defining ² For the literary dimension of this patronage, see Menchini (2005). ³ Van Veen (2006), 10. ⁴ I am grateful for help identifying the prisoners to Dana Katz, Ryan Gregg, Stephen Campbell, Amy Bloch, John Najemy, and Henk Van Veen. It is difficult to identify the prisoners with precision. In his Ragionamenti, Vasari lists Baccio Valori, Filippo Strozzi, and Anton Francesco degli Albizzi as the principal prisoners—see Vasari (1588). Allegri and Cecchi (1980) identify Cosimo’s soldiers, but not the prisoners. T. S. R. Boase (1979), 24, identifies the prisoners from left to right as Baccio Valori and his son, Filippo Strozzi, and Anton Francesco degli Albizzi. Though he does not provide a source for this identification, I am inclined to agree. Thesewerethethreecrucialfiguresmentioned by Vasari himself, and the age discrepancy between the two figures on the left with the two figures on the right suggests that the Valori are the left-most two figures. Filippo Strozzi was the eldest of the exiles, and it would make sense that Cosimo is pointing to Filippo Strozzi. He does not identify Bartolomeo Valori’s son, but I would guess that it is Filippo, rather than Paolantonio, since Filippo was beheaded along with his father in Florence, whereas Paolantonio, considered less guilty and less threatening by the Medici, was imprisoned in Volterra. On the battle and its aftermath, see Coppi (2000), 4–12; and on Cosimo’s self-image in other works, see Van Veen (2006). The Valori Family in the Florentine Renaissance 3 acts of monarchical rule—the pursuit of war and administration of justice—that in this case merge into a single act of condemning the exiles. Vasari’s Il trionfo di Cosimo a Montemurlo attempted to put an aesthetically harmonious, classical, and fundamentally serene face on Cosimo’s triumph. This book deals centrally with the themes invoked by Vasari’s fres- co, particularly its stark contrast between ascendant monarchism and vanquished republicanism, and with the tensions and complexities of that moment that Vasari attempted to mask and obscure. In effect, it provides an against-the-grain, republican reading of Vasari’s Mon- temurlo fresco and an examination of the political tensions—both before and well after 1537—that it implied the battle had thoroughly resolved. To sixteenth-century Florentines, the image of Bartolomeo Valori, one of the principal defeated republicans in the foreground of Vasari’s fresco, would have instantly invoked the complex and con- flicted question of the Florentine elite’s relationship with the Medici and sparked memories of earlier, successful republican challenges to Medici rule. Bartolomeo had formerly been a key ally of the Medici, the leader of their military forces during the siege of the republic of 1527–30, and one of the chief architects of restored Medici power. His defection from the Medici camp to Filippo Strozzi and the exiles was a major blow to Cosimo’s prospects, recalling to Florentine con- temporaries the larger historical question of the degree of elite support for Medici rule. Bartolomeo’s family history was inextricably connected to the history of Medici power in Florence: his ancestors had played significant roles in the first establishment of Medici power a hundred years earlier, were close supporters of the illustrious fifteenth-century Medici, Cosimo il vecchio and Lorenzo il magnifico, but had been among the handful of families that ousted the Medici from Florence in 1494, establishing the republic famously associated with Savonarola and Machiavelli. Hence, Bartolomeo’s defection in 1537 echoed the pattern of his ancestors’ early allegiance to the Medici followed by open challenges to Medici rule. This book examines the history of that key family, the Valori, their long and complex relationship to the Medici, their intellectual patronage, and the various meanings in their private papers that they attributed to the oscillations of their family’s loyalties. By doing so it reveals a hitherto hidden chapter in the history of Florentine republicanism. Vasari was as brilliant a propagandist as he was an artist and writer, fusing seamlessly an historical narrative of Tuscan artistic genius that was both 4 Introduction perfected and displayed to the world by the enlightened patronage of the Medici. Through Vasari’s carefully crafted iconography and through his celebrated biographies of Tuscan artists, the Medici of the late Renaissance appropriated the rinascita of the arts as ‘dynastic property’, to use Edward Goldberg’s term, a way of indirectly mythologizing Medici rule by celebrating Florentine cultural accomplishments.⁵ Of course, republicans also knew how to buttress political ideology with high culture, and by 1537 the Valori family had established a similarly Vasarian project of crafting a republican ideology that incor- porated as defining features major dimensions of the culture of the Florentine Renaissance. Their patronage grew out of a conviction and instinct that Cosimo shared, that politics was in crucial ways legitimated by culture, though the Valori employed intellectual patronage to legit- imate their republicanism whereas Cosimo deployed artistic patronage to legitimate his ducal identity. Cosimo’s patronage, triumphant and triumphantly public, left a direct imprint on Florence that persists to this day. In contrast, the Valori family’s republicanism is less easy to discern and requires closer scrutiny. They expressed it discreetly and indirectly, a political style and conviction that persisted through fam- ily papers, diaries, and public patronage of intellectual projects that had political implications but that were not in themselves inherently political. Nevertheless, they espoused their distinctive brand of repub- licanism with remarkable consistency and continued to promote it long after the battle of Montemurlo, in a court culture of uncontested Medici power. For this reason, I argue that the patronage patterns of the Valori family reveal a lost republican language of Renaissance Florence. By the standards of the big Florentine aristocratic clans, the Valori were a small family—dangerously so from their perspective, since at several critical moments the lineage was in danger of dying out altogether.⁶ In spite of their size, however, they were key contributors to Florentine history. Indeed, if one considers all the ways in which they affected the development of Florentine history during the Renaissance, they were second only to the Medici in their impact on the city’s cultural and political life.
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