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I Gaddi da pittori a uomini di governo: ascesa di una famiglia nella Firenze dei Medici by Daniele Giusti

2022; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 117; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mlr.2022.0025

2222-4319

Gervase Rosser,

Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

Reviewed by: I Gaddi da pittori a uomini di governo: ascesa di una famiglia nella Firenze dei Medici by Daniele Giusti Gervase Rosser I Gaddi da pittori a uomini di governo: ascesa di una famiglia nella Firenze dei Medici. By Daniele Giusti. Florence: Olschki. 2020. xxvi+233 pp. €32. ISBN 978–88–222–6662–0. Florence: land of opportunity. For centuries, the city has traded on its self-image as a society open to talent, persistently republican in spirit even when its political institutions have appeared to be contrary. In the mid-sixteenth century, as the brutal regime of the Medici dukes established itself, its propagandists proclaimed that times were only getting better for ordinary Florentines. Giorgio Vasari, sycophantic promoter of the principate in both his paintings and his Lives of the Artists, told in that work the exemplary tale of the Gaddi: a family of able and hard-working artists of the fourteenth century who, by their own efforts, had enabled their descendants to rise to the highest echelons of sixteenth-century Florentine society. In this, according to Vasari, the painter Taddeo Gaddi and his heirs were typical of those who ‘esercitando del continuo onorano le patrie loro e le altrui in una maniera che bene spesso arricchiscono i loro descendenti e danno principio alla nobiltà delle loro famiglie’ (cited on p. xi). Daniele Giusti, who invokes Vasari’s exemplum for his epigraph, questions neither the writer’s motives nor his accuracy. For Giusti as for Vasari, this was a Florentine family of artisans who, making good in their profession and turning to invest in trade and banking, were able in the course of the fifteenth century to secure positions of trust and influence such that their sixteenth-century successors included patricians, bishops, and even a cardinal. Yet as Giusti himself demonstrates in this fascinating case study of survival in the dangerous world of fifteenth-century Florentine politics, there was nothing inevitable about the family’s rise to fortune. Zanobi, son of the painter Taddeo Gaddi, left his father’s trade and moved to Venice, where he built a family business as a merchant. Zanobi’s heir, Agnolo, [End Page 130] returned early in the fifteenth century to Florence, where he gravitated to the circle of Cosimo de’ Medici: the two had surely met during the Medici’s exile in Venice and conveniently Cosimo, suspicious of the old aristocracy, was a promoter of ‘uomini nuovi’. Services were rendered where the Gaddi business connections proved useful, and by 1478 Lorenzo de’ Medici would present Agnolo’s son, Francesco Gaddi, to the king of France as ‘fiorentino de buona famiglia, allievo di casa nostra’ (cited on p. 60). Beyond a reputable experience in trade, a key theme of Giusti’s characterization of Agnolo Gaddi and his son is the evidence of their cultural interests, which are plausibly put forward as supplementary explanations for their promotion to positions of trust in the Medici entourage. In this respect it is Francesco who stands out: a friend of Poliziano and also of other humanists outside Florence such as Ermolao Barbaro, Francesco on his diplomatic missions always carried books with him. Late in life he compiled an (incomplete) list of a library which, although it included some inherited volumes, had largely been acquired by himself and which contained what he declared to be fine-quality texts of many classical authors. As Giusti notes, for Francesco as for others in his political world, humanist interests and politics were closely intertwined. The writing of Francesco’s own ricordanze, likewise, grew out of a practical life of business and diplomacy. His record of his promotion in 1486 to the priorate, and of his marriage at the same time into the old, though decayed, family of the Guasconi, speaks to an understandable pride in his family’s standing. Upon the fall of the Medici in 1494, ‘Gaddo’, as he was universally known, stepped opportunely back from that association and continued to hold offices in the ensuing Republic. As other historians have noticed, life in the circle of the Medici fostered a political realism and flexibility which anticipated the writings of Francesco’s successor as second chancellor of...