FLORENCE:
A PORTRAIT
By Michael Levey

On Cellini's
Bust of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici

"There are some good--or at least understandable--reasons why the image of the Grand Duke Cosimo I and the nature of his achievements for Florence, and the many tangible monuments of his reign to be found in the city, have--with a few exceptions--failed to excite any wide, popular interest.

"His reserved, somewhat secretive and distinctly forbidding personality exercises, on the available evidence, little human appeal. Combined with an unsensational, indeed uxorious private life, his ruthless efficiency and ability as a ruler deprive his career of the sort of colourfulness enjoyed posthumously and unfailingly by, say, Henry VIII of England, a contemporary sovereign until 1547...Yet there is human poignancy, if no obvious drama, in the dwindling into premature near-senility of a man previously so strong both physically and mentally; and in his having elevated his family to such semi-royal status that he had virtually to apologise to his eldest son, the future Grand Duke Francesco, for marrying a commoner. Francesco's fears extended to the prospect of the woman receiving and keeping valuable Medici jewels.

"Posterity generally would probably have taken a greater interest in Cosimo had he been more flagrantly tyrannical and less calmly competent as a ruler, father and husband. The draining of marshes and the organising of a census of a city's inhabitants (Florence, in this case) are not the first attributes associated with Italian Renaissance princes, and certainly do not provide thrilling `copy'. And then some of the more visible and less famous civic memorials to Cosimo's rule, such as the Ponte Santa Trinita, came into existence for entirely prosaic reasons. A new bridge would not have been built had there not been a flood in 1557 which washed away the old structure. And although Cosimo instigated an enormous quantity of artefacts and architectural projects, all of which should in principle contribute to an alluring image of him as enlightened Renaissance patron, his actual aesthetic response to works of art seems rather unsure and possibly never very intense. It is depressing--and probably significant--that though Cellini sculpted a bust of him in bronze (now in the Bargello), Cosimo effectively sent this imperial and imperious likeness--truthful, at the same time, down to the prominent, hairy wart on Cosimo's left cheek--to exile in Elba, while an unanimated, thoroughly tepid marble bust of him, executed by Bandinelli (also now in the Bargello), was kept in the ducal apartments in the Palazzo Vecchio..."