Beyond the Yalla Dog

“Monster” is the first word that springs to my mind when reading about the various goings on of the lugubrious Francesco de Medici, who is seen below looking relatively cheerful in a painting by Angolo Bronzino - the favourite court artist of the period.

Francesco was the first-born son and heir of Cosimo di Medici, who became the 1st Grand Duke of Tuscany and established for the Medici dynasty a hereditary right to rule Florence, and his beautiful wife Eleanor of Toledo, who became known as la Fecundissima because she bore her husband 11 children.

Eleonor is shown below with her son Giovanni, in another painting by Bronzino.

She was rumoured to have been buried in this, her favourite, dress – whilst these famous pearls were rumoured to have left a curse on those who inherited them!

What troubles me is how most of these children – born of an apparently devoted young couple who were reputed to enjoy the simple pleasures of eating together as a family and then spending their evenings together at the fireside – turned out to be so strange!

Let’s just look at the key points we know about each of their brood:-

One clue to Francesco’s own depressive behaviour is perhaps genetics. It is said that the beautiful Eleonor herself became deeply depressed in later life and this is certainly born out by her expression, when she was aged only 34, in this later painting by Bronzino.

Francesco was always reputed to be detached, moody and miserable from his early childhood and it didn’t help his mood to be also thwarted in his love life.

His arranged marriage, unlike that of his parents, was not a happy one, and although Joanna of Austria did her duty and produced children the first six were all girls and Francesco needed an heir. In addition, increasingly melancholy herself, Joanna never failed to reprove Francesco for his infidelity and demand that he renounce his mistress.

In 1564 had met and fallen deeply in love with the Venetian Noble beauty Bianca Cappello , of whom it was said that she was the only person who could make him smile. He set her up in some style in Florence – seemingly uncaring of the deepening hostility of both his family, and of the people – who displayed their feelings in graffiti on the walls of her palace (nothing new here then?)

Bianca was married to Pietro Bonaventuri, with whom she had fallen in love and secretly married whilst believing him to be a member of the Salviati family, – in fact he was a relatively impoverished clerk at the Salviati Bank – they had escaped over the Appennines to Florence to avoid the wrath of her family! Pietro became beyond just an expensive nuisance when he had the temerity to conduct an affair with one of Francesco’s ex-mistresses Cassandra di Ricci. Not wanting to be personally implicated Francesco absented himself from town for a few days whilst Cassandra’s family and their friends “did what had to be done” and brutally dispatched both Piero and Cassandra.

Whilst this is pretty monstrous, at the time this was pretty run of the mill Italian family life!

Francesco was only getting into his stride, and things got really nasty after his Father’s death and he became a man with a mission with regard to dealing with the extra-marital relations of the rest of the family.

Francesco greatly disapproved of Camilla Martelli, the younger trophy bride Cosimo 1 had chosen after the early death of Eleanor.  Notwithstanding the fact that she was prepared to take a back seat in the Ducal family and was content to live in relative seclusion with Cosimo during the years of Francesco’s Regency he made no secret of the fact that he loathed her. Incredibly, to modern eyes, within two hours of the death of her husband in 1574, despite Cosimo’s Will and Testament leaving her sufficient money to live as an independent widow – and ignoring her loud and vigorous protests – he had Camilla, then aged only 29, permanently ”walled-up” within the convent cells of the Murate.  Camilla made sufficient fuss to compel the nuns to ask him to move her to a less strict convent but she was only once allowed to glimpse the outside world again – to witness the marriage of  her ( and Cosimo’s!) daughter Virginia in 1586. She died in 1634.

His next task was to agree to the punishment for infidelity of his cousin and brother Pietro’s wife  Leonora – who had been born and brought up with the Medici family in Florence.  Betrothed to Pietro at the age of 15, she took as her mentor her sister in law Isabella, as she developed into a vivacious and witty beauty.  Neglected and openly scorned by her husband Pietro – delicately described by Christopher Hibbert as ”an emotionally unstable parasite and profligate” Leonara took lovers, one of whom, Bernardino Antinori was in July 1576  imprisoned and strangled in the Bargello – faced with her grief at this news the angry Pietro arranged a family hunting party and at the end of the day took out a dog leash and strangled her himself.  Far from censuring his brother it seems Francesco had given prior approval of this action as a punishment for her immorality and the subsequent stain on the family honour! – EM Forster should have been out in Florence in those days – brandishing Howard’s End and crying out “Only Connect!!”

To prevent his his sister Isabella from becoming suspicious of the fate he had agreed for her taking a lover- her execution was fixed for virtually the same time in July 1576 as her pretty sister in law – without telephones and TV it wasn’t easy to get a message of warning across Tuscany . So, despite her distaste for the man, as his wife she had no choice but to comply to the instruction from her husband Paolo Orsini to accompany him on a hunting trip to their Villa di Cerreto Guidi. Nonetheless, according to the family jester, a dwarf known as Morgante, (pictured below – also by Bronzino)Isabella seemed to know what was to befall her when she was summoned by Paolo to eat supper alone with him and entered the room with a wry shrug suggesting ” but what can I do?”

She was powerless – after they had finished dinner Paolo “ signaled to four accomplices to let down a rope through a hole in the ceiling. Pretending to kiss her, he strangled his wife with the rope which the accomplices then pulled back into the room above” and then announced to the servants that his wife had died of a sudden apoplectic seizure.

Far from being angry with Orsini, all of Isabella’s brothers – particularly Grand Duke Francesco who held the family purse strings – remained on good terms with Paolo Orsini and actually helped him pay off his considerable debts.

The next “fortunate” accident was that of his unhappy wife Joanna  on 10 April 1578. She fell from the stairs in the Grand Ducal Palace in Florence.whilst heavily pregnant with her eighth child – she gave birth to a son who unfortunately died immediately. Poor Joanna died the next day and Francesco was finally able to  marry his mistress, Bianca Cappello – at great and massively unpopular cost to the Florentine taxpayer!

So, saddled with increasing unpopularity the miserable Francesco, like his father before him, took his trophy wife out of the spotlight, in this case to Pratolino, where he pursued his lifelong interests in alchemy, chemistry, glass blowing and crystal cutting – unfortunately the couple were still dogged by the public suspicion that all of his experiments were to manufacture poisons to be used by his witch of a wife Bianca!

Which neatly leads us  to the deaths of Francesco and Bianca – of the same symptoms – on the same day – in 19 October 1587 !

The official history claims they were both struck down by malaria, but in 2006, forensic and toxicology experts at the University of Florence reported evidence of arsenic poisoning. This study was also published in the British Medical Journal.

In 2010 evidence of the parasite Plasmodium falciparum, which causes malaria, was found in Francesco’s remains but given the amount of deaths through malaria in the family – he could well have had some resistance of a latent/recurring form of the disease- and this doesn’t explain the simultaneous death of Bianca!

The story told by Clifford Bax in his 1927 book about Bianca Cappello is that Bianca, knowing that she would be ruined if he ever came to the throne,  had determined to kill her brother in law Cardinal Ferdinando. She made a tart of a sort  that he was particularly partial to, but when he refused to touch it Francesco helped himself to a slice, and at once began to eat it – seeing no future and unable to stop him without giving the game away Bianca resolutely also helped herself to a piece of pie with the bitter foretaste of death to follow.

So for a brief moment I feel a tiny bit sorry for Francesco – inadvertently killed by the only one person in the world he had actually loved.