A Mattress Maker’s Daughter: The Renaissance Romance of Don Giovanni de’ Medici and Livia Vernazza by Brendan Dooley (review)

Love stories are always fun, but are they real? The question is well worth asking, especially for the early modern period when, it seems, any love story we might encounter is nothing more than the fruit of a talented (male) writer’s creative imagination and, invariably, ends in tragedy; viz. Romeo and Juliet. Where is the sexual attraction that draws two young persons together, blossoms into love, and then leads to marriage and a “happily ever after”? In “real” early modern life, it seems that arranged marriages and patria potestas worked in tandem to ensure that the union of a man and a woman was, and remained, a purely economic or dynastic matter arranged by the couple’s two fathers. Perhaps in the lower social orders (for which we have much less documentation) two young persons might fall in love and subsequently get married, but in the moneyed and noble classes it appears that business and politics took precedence over any physical attraction that might lead to love, marriage, and conjugal bliss. Though both partners in these arranged marriages were, to an extent, the “victims” of their (male) elders’ family strategies, the bride in these situations was, inevitably, at a much greater disadvantage than the groom because she, much more so than her future spouse, had little or no choice in the matter — she could either adhere to her family’s wishes or face the prospect of a life of seclusion in a nunnery. It is therefore heart-warming (if one can say so) to see a young woman rebel against societal norms and strike her own path to conjugal bliss. Such is the case with Livia Vernazza, the daughter of a mattress maker in late Renaissance Genoa.

Forced by her father to marry one of his mattress-making colleagues, the twelve-year-old Livia (b. 1590) objected most strenuously, even to the point of attempting suicide by defenestration, to marrying the man whom she “did not want at all, and would never agree to take” (67). In the end, however, she had to bend to her father’s and her brothers’ wishes. Needless to say, it was not a happy marriage. Livia never grew to like her much older husband, let alone love him. Five years later, she ran away from him and from the city, fleeing first to Massa, then to Lucca, and finally to Florence where, very soon, she met Giovanni de’ Medici, the legitimized son of Grand Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici and his mistress Eleonora degli Albizzi. Although Giovanni (b. 1567) was twenty-three years her senior and the scion of the city’s ruling family, related by blood to several titled heads of Italy, France, Spain, and Austria, and in spite of the immense social divide that separated them, the two become passionately devoted to one another. Livia managed to have her previous marriage annulled and the couple married, much to the dismay of Giovanni’s family, who did not wish to welcome a commoner into their midst. Thanks to Giovanni’s military career in northern Italy first with the Habsburgs and then with the Republic of Venice (where he was commander-in-chief of their land armies), the couple were able to live, for the most part, away from Florence and Medici family pressures. Their years in Venice were their happiest: they raised a family, socialized, and assembled a respectable patrimony of real estate, art works, and precious jewels. In Venice, Livia became the respected wife of an important man and managed with great skill a household suitable to her husband’s social and professional status. Giovanni even commissioned a coat-of-arms for her to reflect her newly acquired standing in society.

But eventually it all fell apart. The death in Florence of Giovanni’s step-nephew, Grand Duke Cosimo...