As many friends and patrons of the Medici Archive Project already know,
the Mediceo del Principato
archival corpus is composed mostly of
correspondence directed to and originating from the grand dukes and duchesses,
princes and princesses, secretaries and ministers, agents and ambassadors in Italy and abroad, and letters
primarily dealing with military matters and war dispatches.
Documenting the political, diplomatic, personal, economic, artistic,
military and medical culture of early modern Tuscany and Europe, this archival collection contains over three million epistolary documents, included in more than
6,400 volumes.
Few are aware, however, that the Mediceo is much more than
letters. A limited number of volumes contain handwritten news reports (avvisi),
travel accounts, treatises, printed speeches, copies of wills and marriage
contracts, rudimentary sketches, pasquinades, conclave reports, and other
disparate typologies of documents. This material is sometimes grouped together
without much chronological or thematic criterion and is almost always superficially
indexed in various catalogs and publications devoted to the grand ducal
archives. For this very reason, scholars often bump into remarkable-and unexpected-finds
when examining such volumes.
Mediceo del Principato 6381 certainly belongs to this
category. This plump, unbound volume holds seven modern manila folders, for the
most part seventeenth-century accounts of travels, written by Tuscans during
their extended sojourns in Europe. Even a quick examination of
this material reveals three very different types of travel accounts. The first,
records of Leopoldo and Anna di Cosimo II and the young Cosimo III’s diplomatic
missions beyond the Alps, are straightforward reports, written by members of
the Medici entourage, and have little literary quality. The second group
comprises missives, minutes and dispatches whose function is to provide
constant travel updates.
The last group, however, is closer to Michel de Montaigne’s Journal
de Voyage en Italie (1580-1): documents that capture the personal
experience, mostly in the form of memoirs, mostly by Florentine merchants,
scholars, diplomats, and missionaries. The most exceptional of these accounts
is Roberto Pucci’s manuscript, about 100 folios, of his travel in Northern Italy, Germany, Holland, Flanders, England, France and Spain in the years 1657-1661.
Somewhere in
between a modern guide and a travel journal, with some news and curiosities for the pleasure of any friend who desires to travel in these parts of the
world, Pucci remains throughout his work attentive to cultural and artistic
matters. In the first pages, he provides detailed descriptions of paintings by
Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto and Jacopo Bassano in the Veneto. Soon after
crossing the Dolomites, he embarks on lengthy descriptions of the cities,
people, customs, religious divisions, oddities and food of northern Europe. He
is mesmerized by the clocks, fountains and mechanical city gate in Augsburg.
During his German sojourn, he remarks on the cultural differences between
Catholics and Protestants and on the Teutonic passion for beer. In Amsterdam,
aside from its harbor and multitude of canals and botteghe, his eye is
caught by mountains of cloves, pepper, and cinnamon that have just arrived from
the Indies, and the gargantuan piles of tobacco that he has seen in a pipe
shop. He describes other curiosità in full detail: a collection of
skeletons in Leiden (along with the exhibited flayed skins of two Spaniards), the
tapestries after drawings by Peter Paul Rubens in Antwerp, the myriad bookshops in Hamburg.
Pucci’s chapter on England is especially packed with
information. He is initially concerned with women. He tells the visitor that
London is very safe at night, except in the neighborhoods where prostitutes are
accustomed to lure their clients. In general, he testifies that women enjoy a
kind of freedom unseen in other parts of Europe. He finds their beauty and the
ease with which they befriend foreigners remarkable, likewise their dance
skills and knowledge of religious matters.
Pucci considered Londoners great gamblers, betting on everything
from cockfighting to horseracing. Amazed at the buildings, he describes in
detail the churches of Saint Paul, most famous in the world for its size,
and Saint Peter (Westminster Abbey) with sepulchers made of marble and
bronze of the first kings and knights of the kingdom; Palace of Whitehall, unimpressive… except for one hall…; the home of the Earl of Arundel, decorated
with statues from Greece and Rome; the Tower on the Thames, famous more
for its ancient origins; and Hampton Court Palace, which houses… nine
pieces of Andrea Mantegna’s Triumph of Caesar in tempera, bought by the King
for nine-thousand scudi a piece … a small picture representing three Jesuits
with an inscription: JESUIT FATHERS GO
TO HELL!… the Seven Deadly Sins drawn
by Albrecht Durer… and Indian carpets.
The lavishness of the Spanish court under Philip IV greatly attracted
Pucci, who spent an entire winter in Madrid after and before his travels in France.
One folio is solely devoted to their passion for chocolate, particularly among
noble Spanish women, as well as acciote paste, sugar and vanilla. He was
impressed by a house in Madrid that stored over 10,000 pieces of chocolate. In
another large section he describes at length the elaborate drinking and eating
ceremonies involving the menini and meninas at Court. Pucci
especially admired the king’s collection of armor and a carriage furbished with
coral from Sicily; the many horses in the
Royal stables; an elaborate stage set with pastoral decorations designed by
Baccio del Bianco for the Buen Retiro theater.
However, what struck Pucci the most was the spectacular collection of
paintings: in the Royal Palace you shall see marvelous things by Rubens,
Tintoretto, Coreggio, Paolo [Veronese] and others…Have them show you
Titian’s room, where you can find the beautiful Europa along with Diana’s
Baths, and other stories and single figures, that amount to twenty-two pieces…Aside
from these works, you shall see endless number of pictures by the most
excellent Flemish and Italian artists, both ancient and modern…the very
beautiful arrangement of these works was planned by the King’s painter, Assistant
to the Privy Chamber, and Knight, called Pedro [sic!] Velázquez.
Later on in his work, Pucci claimed that one could wander anywhere in the
Escorial and still find superb art, though the sacristy was especially crammed
with pictures: Titian triumphs with eight sumptuous pieces, Tintoretto, with
a panel fifteen feet long which the King purchased from Mantova spending
nineteen thousand scudi of today. By Raphael you will admire a Madonna at head
of the sacristy. Rubens, Andrea [Mantegna], Coreggio, Paolo Veronese, Van
Eyck, Baroccio, surround this work, while Guido [Reni] is also among
these triumphs of art.
Another travel account, Fra Francesco da Pavia’s description of “four-legged,
winged and water animals in the kingdoms of Congo, Angola, is altogether quite a different
work. Neatly handwritten in tiny script and covering the recto and verso of two
folios, this brief treatise was probably sent along with a letter to Cosimo III
de’ Medici or a member of his court around the turn of the seventeenth century.
This Capuchin missionary is known to have written a number of reports on the
Kingdom of Kongo and its population at the time when this region was suffering
from civil turmoil. His exhaustive (and sometimes exaggerated) account of
lions, wolves, water buffalos, elephants, oxen, rhinoceros, zebra, hares, rats,
wild boars, crocodiles, pelicans, parrots, snakes, and bees often includes
comments on their cohabitation with the local villagers. Whenever men would
cross paths with these large felines, they would begin to beat their chest
and fall on their knees, and talk to them as if these possessed reason and were
noblemen, asking humbly not to take their lives. Less prone to diplomacy
were the cheetahs: a number of times I had to run for my life whenever I
would hear one nearby. The most aberrant entry concerns a certain breed of
macaques, remarkable for their quasi-human behavior (they stood on their two
feet, cried, laughed and made intelligible gestures). These animals,
according to the Portuguese, were born from the violent union of macaques and
local women.
Fra Francesco
also indicated how some animals possessed medical properties. The genitalia of
a hippopotamus were especially useful for curing water retention and kidney
stones, especially if minced and cooked in broth. The right ear of a large
rodent named Imboice performed miracles against apoplexy. The teeth of
the Engalas, instead, have the identical medical powers of a Bezoar
stone; if one doubled the usual amount and ground them, they could put an end
to terminal infirmities. He lists a number of roots that served as powerful
antidotes. Thanks to these medical treatments-and to the help of God-he thrice
survived poisoning.
He ends this account with a rather ambiguous statement: I have seen
and observed many other things in that part of the world. The more notable, I
wish one day to summarize so that one may better comprehend the qualities of
this region, its inhabitants, both from a spiritual and political perspective
and thank God to have us be born and live in Europe, which is the Garden of the
world.
