Don Antonio de' Medici e i suoi tempi

In the burgeoning literature on early modern Italy, biographies do not take up much space. This makes Filippo Luti's short but careful volume on Antonio de' Medici, a minor figure in granducal Tuscany, all the more opportune. Readers are mostly familiar with the circumstances of his birth to Grand Duke Francesco I and his Venetian paramour Bianca Cappello. Seduced and carried off from her patrician parents' household in 1563 by an impecunious Florentine aristocrat, Bianca had become mistress to Francesco by 1567. Francesco married Giovanna d'Austria in 1565, and had seven children by her when she died in childbirth in April 1578. The grand duke then married Bianca in secret only two months later, before celebrating public nuptials in 1579. Neither the prince (prone to bouts of melancholy) nor his consort ever aroused much loyalty among their Florentine subjects.

Most readers know that the circumstances surrounding the birth of Antonio de' Medici in 1576 were murky. Luti shows us how it was kept secret from almost everyone at court, for Francesco was still married and desired imperial recognition of his granducal title. Antonio's very existence was not acknowledged until he was almost three years old. From the moment he moved to the palace, however, his parents raised him as the legitimate heir to the throne. There were no doubts then either of his paternity, or of his father's intention that he should succeed him. Francesco legitimated Antonio and obtained implicit approval from Philip of Spain (ultimate sovereign of Siena) in 1584 that the former bastard should rule one day. Bianca Cappello underwent a false pregnancy in 1586, rendering Francesco's younger brother, Cardinal Ferdinando, extremely anxious in his own desire for the throne.

Following a little-known 1965 article by Roberto Cantagalli, Luti dismisses the legend surrounding Antonio's birth, that he was taken from a servant mother and presented to a gullible Francesco after Bianca's false pregnancy. Cardinal Ferdinando concocted this story in 1587. Luti concludes, without incontrovertible proof, that the Medici prelate poisoned Bianca Cappello within hours of Francesco's death on 18 October 1587. The cardinal then suppressed and nullified the testaments of Prince Antonio's parents, who still believed he was a bastard. Ferdinando immediately threw off the purple to occupy the granducal throne, and led the impressionable boy to believe that he might not even be of Medici blood. As a token of his magnanimity, the ex-cardinal conferred some substantial property on the youth and induced him to take the clerical habit of the Knights of Malta.

The second portion of the book deals with the adult prince. Antonio joined the Knights of Malta at age eighteen and, after an initial "caravan," accompanied Medici expeditionary forces fighting the Turks in Hungary in 1594 and 1595. A sufferer of syphilis from age twenty, Prince Antonio in better health was a roving ambassador for casa Medici. Luti tells us that Antonio was not entirely a minor personage in Florence, given his passions for the hunt, horses, music, and theater, and also for alchemy and scientific interests. He was an early supporter of Galileo. After the death of Ferdinando in 1608 he badgered Cosimo II for more of his inheritance. The influential dowager Duchess Christina and the Grand Duchess Maria Maddalena d'Austria disapproved of his relation with a Lucchese protégé and the three sons resulting from it. Antonio's persistent demands resulted at least in the legitimation of his children from Pope Paul V and by the grand duke, and in later years all three offspring held decorous but obscure employment. Antonio himself died in obscurity in 1621, having been alienated from the court after 1614.

Luti's account is not chronological in a linear way, and sometimes the book's clarity suffers from it. Part of the text is missing between pages 18 and 19, possibly through no fault of the author. The dominant impression I derived from this book was not so much that Prince Antonio was an influential figure in Medicean Florence, but that the scheming cardinal, a likely homicide and usurper, deserves fuller treatment. Ferdinando I de' Medici was a stellar sovereign, and is overdue for another good biography, warts and all.