RenEU - Palazzo Vecchio - Machiavelli and the Florentine Chancery

Palazzo Vecchio - Machiavelli and the Florentine Chancery

Palazzo Vecchio and the Loggia dei Lanzi

Polychrome bust of Niccolò Machiavelli, Old Chancellery, Museo di Palazzo Vecchio

Palazzo Vecchio and the Loggia dei Lanzi

From 1498 until the return of the Medici in 1512, Niccolò Machiavelli acted as Secretary to the Florentine Republic, but was in fact head of the Second Chancery. The main seat of his activity was Palazzo Vecchio, in Piazza della Signoria. Palazzo Vecchio (or Palazzo dei Priori or della Signoria) was the symbol of civic power in the city of Florence, and is the seat of the municipal government today. During the republican period the authorities attempted to evince, on the imaginary level as well, the transition to a free regime (that is, a republic) and the end of Medicean tyranny by enriching Palazzo Vecchio with artworks previously acquired by the Medici for their own residence (Palazzo Medici Riccardi). In the courtyard of Palazzo Vecchio were placed the David (now at the Bargello Museum) and the Judith and Holofernes (now inside the Palazzo, in the Hall of Lilies), both sculpted by Donatello. Even more important for the symbolic/imaginary representation of republican power was the construction of the Salone dei Cinquecento (Hall of the Five Hundred) as a meeting place for the Great Council, the body that collaborated with Savonarola in governing the city after the expulsion of the Medici. In the first decade of the 16th century, the task of decorating the Salone was entrusted to no other than Michelangelo Buonarroti and Leonardo da Vinci - although the work was never finished - with representations of the Battle of Cascina and the Battle of Anghiari.

This process of symbolic representation of the Republic included the construction in 1511 of the Hall of the Chancery which, although built to house the first Chancellor, displays today a bust of the second one, Niccolò Machiavelli.

Judith and Holofernes

In the Hall of Lilies in Palazzo Vecchio we can admire Donatello's great bronze statue depicting Judith and Holofernes. According to the Biblical story, the widow Judith saved her village from the Assyrian army by seducing their general, Holofernes, and beheading him after having made him drunk. This work, one of Donatello's greatest masterpieces, has striking visual and emotional impact insofar as it represents a drama that is actually happening, an action caught at its culminating points. It had been sculpted between 1457 and 1464 for Piero de' Medici, the father of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and placed in the garden of Palazzo Medici. In 1495, a year after the expulsion of the Medici from Florence, the Judith, like the David, was confiscated and taken to Piazza della Signoria, seat and symbol of the new republican power. In this new setting, exposed to the admiration of all, the Judith took on new symbolic meaning. The earlier inscriptions of Medicean flavour were deleted, and replaced by words extolling the freedom of Florence. The group was reinterpreted as an allegory of the Florentine people driving out the tyrant. In the meantime, the new republican regime showed itself equal to its predecessors in making Florence a capital of art.

With the end of the Republic and the return of the Medici in the second decade of the 16th century, it was decreed that Donatello's statues of Judith and Holofernes and of David be returned to their owners but, for political reasons, this was not done. The Judith was moved several times between Piazza della Signoria and the Loggia dei Lanzi, where it was transferred in 1504 to make room for the David of Michelangelo. Only in the 1980s was it restored and moved to its current place in Palazzo Vecchio.

Although Palazzo Vecchio was undoubtedly Niccolò Machiavelli's main place of work, he also travelled extensively, as unofficial envoy to various parts of Italy and Europe. Machiavelli traveled on missions to the King of France Louis XII, to the Pope and to several Italian principalities. Moreover, he moved throughout the Florentine territory (and the territories subject to Florence) as emissary of the government - and not least, to garner soldiers - playing an indispensable role in relating the central power of Florence to the people and interests of the surrounding rural areas. In December of 1505 Machiavelli was sent to the Florentine countryside to recruit as many men able to bear arms as he deemed necessary. Machiavelli was personally involved, as he wrote to his superiors in February 1506, in the problems of exacting obedience from peasants unaccustomed to disciple, and of uniting men from neighbouring villages that were, just for this reason, hostile to each other. The operations conducted by Machiavelli followed a precise political strategy, and the refusal to use mercenary troops was only one element. The strategy was more complex, based on principles explicitly stated in the texts on military organization, Cagione dell'ordinanza and Provisione dell'ordinanza. Machiavelli believed that, in forming an army, it was essential to know where to recruit the soldiers, from the city of Florence, the countryside or other independent districts such as Arezzo, Volterra, Pistoia, and so on. The Florentine Secretary firmly sustained that the latter should not be armed, since they might then have rebelled; and at the same time, he stated that only commanders, and not those who had to obey orders, should be taken from the city - implicitly excluding the possibility of arming the proletarians, viewed as a threat by the Florentines. Clearly then, for Machiavelli, a new army should be recruited from among peasants, more docile and less likely to rebel, confirming the hierarchical relationship between the center and the periphery, that is, between the city and the countryside.