Medici family timeline from 1397 to 1743: 89 dated events on a map with sources, from the Florence bank and the Pazzi plot to two popes, two queens of France and the pact that kept the art in Florence. Follow the family street by street through Rome, Paris and Livorno.
Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici split from the bank of his nephew Averardo and moved his small house from Rome to Florence. He raised 10,000 gold florins to do it. The business was a partnership run through ledgers and letters of exchange, with a manager in each city. Historians date the Medici Bank from this year. It lasted 97 years.
The Venice branch opened on 25 March 1402. The bank employed about 17 people that year, five of them in Florence. Giovanni di Bicci was elected a Prior of Florence for the first time the same year. Rome and Venice between them produced 75 percent of the bank’s profits from 1420 to 1435, Rome 62 percent and Venice 13.
Baldassare Cossa, made a cardinal in 1402, was elected Pope John XXIII in 1410 with Medici money behind him. Two years later the Medici were named official bankers to the papacy. The appointment put the Curia’s deposits on their books. In 1415 the council deposed Cossa, and he fled to Florence. The Medici kept the account.
Filippo Brunelleschi began work on the Church of San Lorenzo in 1418, the parish church that became the Medici burial place. Giovanni di Bicci’s tomb would be unveiled there 11 years later. The same architect began the Ospedale degli Innocenti in 1419 and took the commission for the cathedral dome in 1420. PBS lists all three in its Medici chronology.
Baldassare Cossa, the former John XXIII, died in Florence in 1419, four years after losing the papacy. Donatello unveiled his tomb the same year. The tomb was a public statement of loyalty to a deposed pope, made in the city where his bankers lived. Giovanni di Bicci’s house had financed Cossa’s election nine years earlier and had kept the papal business after his fall.
Giovanni di Bicci was elected Gonfaloniere in 1421, the head of the Florentine state. He had first served as a Prior of Florence in 1402, the year the Venice branch opened. The Medici held the top civic office without owning a title or an army. Giovanni withdrew from the bank in 1420 and left its leadership to his two surviving sons.
The Roman branch held about 100,000 florins on deposit from the Papal Curia in 1427. The whole bank was capitalized at about 25,000 gold florins that year. That ratio is the arithmetic of the Medici fortune: other people’s money, four times the firm’s own, lent out at a margin. A Florentine tax return of the same year listed 31 Medici family branches in the city.
Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici died in February 1429 and left 179,221 florins, by one count. His son Cosimo, about 39, inherited the direction of the bank. Brunelleschi unveiled Giovanni’s tomb at San Lorenzo the same year. Florence, led by the Albizzi faction, declared war on Lucca in 1429, the campaign that would soon be used against Cosimo.
From exile in Venice, Cosimo gave the city a library designed by the architect Michelozzo, the same man he would hire to rebuild San Marco four years later. Exile cost him his place in Florence but not his bank. The Venice branch had been open for 31 years, and Cosimo went first to Padua and then to the city where the firm already had an office.
In September 1433 Cosimo was imprisoned in the Palazzo Vecchio, accused over the failed attempt to conquer Lucca. A vote of the public banished him from Florence for 10 years. He turned a jail term into exile and left for Padua, then Venice. Florence lost the Lucca war the same year. He had the bank’s branches, and they went on working without him in the city.
About a year after his banishment, a pro-Medici Signoria was elected and Cosimo came home. Pope Eugenius IV had demanded his return, and the Albizzi family had collapsed after war against the Duke of Milan. Standard lists date his rule from 6 October 1434. Britannica counts the family as ruling Florence and later Tuscany for most of the period from 1434 to 1737.
The dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, commissioned from Filippo Brunelleschi in 1420, was completed in 1436, two years into Cosimo’s rule. It became the fixed point of the Medici city. The Council of Florence would meet under it three years later, and the family’s worst day, the Pazzi attack of 1478, would happen beneath it during High Mass.
The Sylvestrine monks vacated San Marco in 1437 after Cosimo pushed for an observant Dominican community from Fiesole. He hired Michelozzo to rebuild it, and the architect worked there from 1439 to 1444. Giorgio Vasari later put Cosimo’s outlay at about 40,000 florins. Michelozzo built the cells and the library on the upper floor. Fra Angelico, a friar of the house, painted the walls.
The Bruges branch was officially founded on 24 March 1439, with sources giving 1446 or 1455 for its later change to a full partnership. A London office was set up some time after 1435. These northern houses sat far from Florence. Tommaso Portinari managed the Bruges branch for decades, and the losses he and the London office ran up would close both in 1478.
Cosimo had helped persuade Pope Eugene IV to move the church council from Ferrara to Florence. On 6 July 1439 the decree of union, Laetentur Caeli, was issued between the Latin and Greek churches. A plaque on the wall of the cathedral commemorates it. Many Greeks repudiated the union once they got back to Constantinople. The Byzantine delegates reappear in Medici art 20 years later, in Gozzoli’s frescoes.
Michelozzo finished his work at San Marco in 1444, the year Cosimo founded the first public library in Florence inside the convent. The final dedication of the rebuilt house had taken place on Epiphany night in 1443. The long room on the upper floor stood above the friars’ cells. PBS dates the library’s opening to 1437, the year the rebuilding began.
A limited partnership was formed in Avignon in 1446 and became a full partnership within two years. By then the network ran from Rome to Bruges. Pisa had joined in December 1442 and would run until 1476. The Medici put more than 28,800 florins into banks in 1458 and about 7,900 into their three factories.
The Milan branch opened in late 1452 or early 1453. Francesco Sforza, Cosimo’s friend, had become Duke of Milan in 1450. Where the Florentines had fought Milan at Anghiari in 1440, Cosimo now put money on a friendly duke, and the branch followed the alliance. It would cease to exist by 1494, when the bank itself did.
Michelozzo’s chapel in the family palace on the Via Larga, begun around 1449, was probably finished by 1459. Benozzo Gozzoli painted the Journey of the Magi on its walls in a few months, under the supervision of Piero, Cosimo’s son. The procession includes Medici portraits. Scholars have linked one king to John VIII Palaiologos, a guest of the 1439 council, and the youngest to Lorenzo. Gozzoli signed his hat.
Cosimo de’ Medici died at the family villa of Careggi on 1 August 1464, aged 74. His son Piero, called the Gouty, took over that day. The Signoria then awarded him the title Pater Patriae, Father of the Fatherland, and it was carved on his tomb in San Lorenzo. Between 1434 and 1471 the family spent an average of 17,467 gold florins a year.
The Geneva branch, founded by 1429, moved to Lyon, and the move was completed in 1466, two years into Piero’s time in charge. Geneva had itself replaced a closed Naples branch in 1425, one more instance of the network being rearranged as business shifted. Marie de’ Medici would marry Henry IV of France in Lyon in 1600.
The marriage contract was made on 7 February 1469, and the wedding took place in Florence on 4 June. Clarice was the daughter of Giacomo Orsini, lord of Monterotondo and Bracciano. Lorenzo was 20. Six months later his father would be dead, and he would be running the family’s affairs. Clarice’s son Giovanni would become Pope Leo X.
Piero the Gouty died on 2 December 1469 after five years in charge. His son Lorenzo, born on 1 January 1449, took the leading role in the state at 20. Florence’s calendar then began the year on 25 March, so Lorenzo’s birth was recorded in 1448 there. He had no formal title. His reign is dated from the day his father died.
In 1473 the bank took an interest in the Tolfa alum mines, north of Rome, in exchange for forgiving some of the pope’s debts. Alum fixed dyes in cloth, so the mines were a chokepoint of the textile trade. Pope Sixtus IV repudiated both the alum control and the debts after the Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478, wiping the arrangement out.
Edward IV of England owed the London branch 10,500 pounds sterling, and English nobles owed 1,000 more. The liquidation finished in 1478 with losses of 51,533 gold florins. Bruges went the same year. Its manager Tommaso Portinari had lent Charles the Bold 16,150 pounds groat, against a partnership limit of 6,000. Combined losses in the two cities passed 70,000 florins.
On Sunday 26 April 1478, during High Mass in the cathedral, Bernardo Bandini dei Baroncelli and Francesco de’ Pazzi killed Giuliano de’ Medici. Two of Jacopo Pazzi’s men attacked Lorenzo, who was wounded, fled to the sacristy and got home alive. The attack happened under Brunelleschi’s dome, finished 42 years earlier, in the church where the family’s allies gathered for Mass.
Francesco Salviati, Archbishop of Pisa, went to the Palazzo della Signoria the same day to seize the government. He failed and was arrested, and he was hanged from its windows along with Francesco de’ Pazzi and others. The Pazzi name was then removed from public registers. Their buildings and streets were renamed, their dolphin shield was obliterated, and anyone married to a Pazzi was barred from office.
A bull of 1 June 1478 excommunicated Lorenzo, his supporters and the members of the current and previous governments. On 20 June Sixtus IV placed all of Florence under interdict, forbidding Mass and communion. By July, Neapolitan troops under Alfonso of Aragon and Urbinate troops under Federico da Montefeltro were attacking Florentine territory.
With Florence losing the war, Lorenzo sailed personally to Naples, where King Ferdinand held him for several months. He came home with a settlement. That diplomatic success let him push through constitutional changes that increased his own power in Florence. King Ferdinand’s attempts to intercede with the pope had not worked, so the settlement rested on Lorenzo’s personal negotiation.
Bernardo Bandini dei Baroncelli, who had struck Giuliano, fled to Constantinople. Sultan Mehmed II sent him back in fetters. He was hanged from a window of the Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo, now the Bargello, on 29 December 1479, still in Turkish clothing. Twenty months had passed since the attack in the cathedral.
Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici was named a cardinal on 9 March 1489, aged 13. He could not wear the insignia or sit in the college’s deliberations until 1492, the year his father died. On 9 March 1513, 24 years later to the day, the same man would be elected pope and take the name Leo X.
The Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, assigned to San Marco in 1482, came back to it in 1490 at the initiative of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. His sermons began to draw large crowds. He preached against clerical corruption and despotic rule from a house the Medici had paid to rebuild, about 40,000 florins of it by Vasari’s estimate.
Lorenzo de’ Medici died in the late night of 8 April 1492 at the family villa of Careggi, aged 43. His son Piero, who had no talent for banking, took over. Michelangelo had lived with the family for three years and dined at its table. The bank Lorenzo left had fewer offices than the one he inherited.
Charles VIII of France invaded Italy, and Piero conceded to him. On 8 November 1494 Piero was overthrown and the family left Florence. The bank’s assets and records were seized for creditors, and all branches were declared dissolved. A mob burned the Florentine banco. After 97 years the firm had at least seven branches and more than 50 factors on its books.
After the Medici fell, Savonarola helped set up a republic he effectively controlled. Pope Alexander VI excommunicated him on 12 May 1497. A proposed trial by fire in April 1498 collapsed and public opinion turned. He and two friars were arrested and tortured, and on 23 May 1498 they were hanged and burned in the main square. Their ashes went into the Arno.
Eighteen years after their expulsion, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici began ruling Florence on 31 August 1512. The same year saw the Sack of Prato and the exile of Niccolò Machiavelli. Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513 while out of office. Britannica counts 1494 to 1512 as the first of two brief intervals in which the family was out of power.
Giovanni was elected pope on 9 March 1513. The election was proclaimed two days later, and he was crowned on 19 March. A Florentine banking family now held the See of Rome. His rule of Florence ended on the day of his election. Giulio, his cousin and later Clement VII, was made a cardinal in 1514.
Catherine de’ Medici was born in Florence on 13 April 1519. PBS lists her birth and that of Cosimo, the future grand duke, in the same year. Leonardo died in France that year, and Michelangelo started the Medici tombs at San Lorenzo. Catherine would be sent to France at 14 to marry a king’s son.
Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici commissioned the funerary monuments in 1520, and Michelangelo did most of the work between then and 1534. The chapel was vaulted over in 1524. Two tomb groups honor Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, and Giuliano, Duke of Nemours. The reclining figures are Night and Day, Dusk and Dawn. Lorenzo the Magnificent and his murdered brother lie beneath the entrance wall.
Leo X was linked to the sale of indulgences to pay for the rebuilding of St Peter’s, a practice Luther’s 95 Theses challenged in 1517. PBS records a jubilee sale of indulgences launched in 1515. The bull Exsurge Domine of 15 June 1520 condemned 41 propositions from Luther’s teachings. Luther’s excommunication was formalized on 3 January 1521.
Leo X died of bronchopneumonia in Rome on 1 December 1521, aged 45, and was buried at Santa Maria sopra Minerva. He had spent eight years on the papal throne. Between Leo and his cousin Giulio stood the papacy of Adrian VI, who died in September 1523. The conclave that followed lasted about 50 days.
Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, cousin of Leo X, was elected pope on 19 November 1523, ending his rule of Florence. He took the name Clement VII after a conclave of about 50 days. Henry VIII asked him for a divorce in 1526, a request that would later help split the English church from Rome. Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, of the Medici family, was killed in action the same year.
About 35,000 troops from Spain, Germany and Italy under Charles, Duke of Bourbon, attacked Rome on 6 May 1527, against about 5,000 militia and the Swiss Guard. Bourbon was killed the same day. Clement VII fled through a secret passage to Castel Sant’Angelo. The elevated corridor, the Passetto di Borgo, still runs from the Vatican wall to the fortress.
Clement VII surrendered on 6 June 1527 after a month in Castel Sant’Angelo. He paid a large ransom and gave up papal territories in northern Italy. Florence seized the moment and expelled the Medici that same year, and Michelangelo’s David was damaged in the fighting. Britannica counts 1527 to 1530 as the family’s second interval out of power.
Spanish and papal forces, working to restore the Medici, laid siege to Florence from October 1529. Catherine, aged 10, was inside the city, held in the Santissima Annunziata delle Murate convent. The siege lasted nearly 10 months. Clement VII summoned her to Rome after the city surrendered, and the Fortezza da Basso was ordered as a direct result of it.
Florence surrendered on 12 August 1530 after nearly 10 months of siege, supported on the attacking side by Spanish troops. Alessandro de’ Medici, then 20, was named head of state. He arrived in the city on 5 July 1531. PBS lists the end of the siege and his appointment together under 1530. He became hereditary duke in 1532.
Emperor Charles V made Alessandro de’ Medici hereditary duke about nine months after his arrival in the city, and his reign is dated from 1 May 1532. The title ended the Florentine republic in law. He was 21. Sources disagree on the year the duchy itself began, with 1531 and 1532 both given. Charles’s illegitimate daughter Margaret married him in 1536.
Catherine, 14, was married on 28 October 1533 at the Église Saint-Ferréol les Augustins in Marseille to Henry, Duke of Orléans, later Henry II of France. Clement VII, the Medici pope, died in Rome 11 months later. PBS lists the marriage under 1534 alongside his death, a year later than the Wikipedia date. She would be queen within 14 years.
Duke Alessandro ordered the Fortezza da Basso in 1534, with Pier Francesco da Viterbo and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as architects. It employed 1,500 workers and covered 80,000 square meters inside a wall about 1.5 kilometers long with five bastions. It was built to shelter the duke during an uprising and to deter one. It was finished in 1537.
On the night of 5 to 6 January 1537, Lorenzino de’ Medici and a servant, Piero di Giovannabate, lured Alessandro to a palace with the promise of a sexual encounter and stabbed him while he was unarmed. The Florentine gives six wounds. Officials hid the body in a carpet and buried it secretly at San Lorenzo to avoid a rising. Lorenzino fled to Venice and was killed there in 1548 on the orders of Charles V.
Cosimo, 17, became duke on 6 January 1537 through the Palleschi, the Medici party. Republican exiles marched on Florence in late July and were defeated near Montemurlo, in the Prato area, on 1 or 2 August, sources differ. Alessandro Vitelli led Cosimo’s troops, and reprisals ended organized opposition. Charles V formally recognized Cosimo as duke on 30 September 1537.
Duke Cosimo I and Eleonora of Toledo were married by proxy on 29 March 1539, a little over two years after he took power in Florence. She had eleven children, ten of whom survived. Ten years after the wedding she bought the Pitti Palace, across the Arno from the Palazzo Vecchio. She died in Pisa in 1562.
Francis I died on 31 March 1547, and his son Henry II took the throne with Catherine as queen consort. She was crowned on 10 June 1549, in the 16th year of her marriage. Henry II died on 10 July 1559, and three of Catherine’s sons would reign after him. The Medici had now married into the French crown.
Eleonora of Toledo bought the Pitti Palace in 1549 from Buonaccorso Pitti. The sale included a large palace, an old house and an orchard of about 146 staiora. The hillside behind it became the Boboli Gardens, developed from the 16th to the 19th centuries and now on the UNESCO list with the Medici villas. Marie de’ Medici would be born in this palace in 1575.
Piero Strozzi, a Florentine exile fighting for Siena, was caught in retreat in daylight at Marciano in the Chiana valley on 2 August 1554. Gian Giacomo de’ Medici of Marignano, a commander for Florence, inflicted a heavy defeat. Strozzi escaped. The battle destroyed Siena’s only field army and left the city to be starved.
Siena surrendered on 21 April 1555 (17 April in some accounts). In February, 4,400 people the city could not feed were expelled, and after eight days outside the walls about half had died. In 1557 Philip II gave Siena and most of its territory to Cosimo. Coastal towns stayed under Spanish control as the State of the Garrisons, and some Sienese held out at Montalcino until 1559.
Cosimo I ordered the building in 1560 to hold Florence’s administrative and judicial offices. The word uffizi means offices. Giorgio Vasari designed it, and when he died in 1574 Bernardo Buontalenti finished it. The gallery that made it famous came later. In 1581 Francesco I set up a private gallery on the top floor of the east wing.
When Francis II died on 5 December 1560, his brother Charles IX was a child and Catherine became regent. Her regency ran until 17 August 1563. Her husband Henry II had died 17 months before, on 10 July 1559. France was moving toward religious civil war, and the woman from Florence now governed in her son’s name.
Eleonora of Toledo, Cosimo’s wife for 23 years, died in Pisa in 1562. She had borne eleven children, and researchers later examined her remains at San Lorenzo for the effects of childbirth on her pelvis, part of a wider study of the family. Cosimo lived 12 more years, the last of them in retreat at the Villa di Castello.
For the wedding of his son Francesco and Joanna of Austria, Cosimo I had Vasari build a private walkway from the Palazzo Vecchio across the Ponte Vecchio to the Pitti. It took about five months. The corridor is about 750 meters long with 73 windows. It let the ruling family cross Florence above the street, out of reach of the people below.
Pope Pius V raised Cosimo I to Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1569, and his reign in that title is dated from 21 August. The House of Medici ruler table gives 6 January for the elevation. Philip II had given him Siena and most of its territory 12 years earlier. The family that began as a small Rome bank in 1397 now held a princely title conferred by a pope.
Days after a royal wedding in Paris, an attempt on the Huguenot leader Coligny failed. On 23 August 1572 Charles IX, Catherine’s son, gave the order recorded as “Kill them all!”, by the Wikipedia account. The massacre of Protestants began two days after the attack on Coligny. Historians still argue over how much of it Catherine directed.
Cosimo I, first Grand Duke of Tuscany, died on 21 April 1574. He had spent his last years in retreat at the Villa di Castello, north of Florence, a Medici property since 1477 that he renovated from 1537. Giorgio Vasari died the same year. Cosimo’s son Francesco I took over the title.
Bernardo Buontalenti completed the Tribuna in 1584, three years after Francesco I set up his private gallery on the top floor of the Uffizi’s east wing. The room was part of the private collection for the next 185 years. Johann Zoffany painted it between 1772 and 1778, three years after the gallery opened to the public.
Grand Duke Francesco I and his wife Bianca Cappello died at the villa of Poggio a Caiano in October 1587, one day apart. Official chronicles blamed tertian fever. A study from 2004 to 2006 pointed to arsenic. The villa was the one Lorenzo the Magnificent commissioned from Giuliano da Sangallo. Francesco’s brother, Ferdinando, a cardinal, became grand duke.
Catherine died at the Château de Blois on 5 January 1589, aged 69. She was buried provisionally at Blois on 4 February. Her son Henry III was assassinated six months later. Three of her sons had worn the French crown. The last Valois king had no heir, and the crown passed to Henry of Navarre.
Grand Duke Ferdinando I invited foreign merchants of any religion or nationality to settle in Livorno in 1591, with security of person, property and conscience. Francesco I had started planning the new port on a malarial coast, and Buontalenti drew a pentagonal town from 1577. One writer called Livorno “a continuous fair of foreigners”. A 1676 decree later abolished import and export dues altogether.
The Leggi Livornine were issued in 1593 by Ferdinando I’s administration to govern trade and settlement in the port, and they stayed in force until 1603 by Wikipedia’s account. On 19 March 1606, Ferdinando raised Livorno to the rank of city. Most Italian ports had some free port status by 1730, and the model reached the Baltic and the Caribbean.
Marie de’ Medici was married by proxy on 5 October 1600 in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, with the Duc de Bellegarde standing in for Henry IV of France. Born at the Pitti on 26 April 1575, she was 25. Older sources sometimes give her birth as 1573, but a baptismal record gives 1575. Euridice was staged at the Pitti the next day.
Jacopo Peri’s Euridice was performed at the Palazzo Pitti on 6 October 1600 for the wedding of Marie de’ Medici and Henry IV, the day after the proxy ceremony. Peri sang Orfeo himself, and Giulio Caccini supplied some of the music. It is the earliest opera to survive. Peri’s Dafne of 1597 is lost.
Marie and Henry first met on 9 December 1600 and were married in person at the Cathedral of Saint-Jean-Baptiste in Lyon on 17 December. She was 25. Lyon had housed a Medici banking office from 1466. All of its branches had been dissolved in 1494, 106 years before a Medici came to the city to be queen.
Cosimo I had the idea and Ferdinando I carried it out. In 1602 Don Giovanni de’ Medici’s sketches went into an informal competition, and Matteo Nigetti designed the chapel at San Lorenzo with changes by the aged Buontalenti. The grand ducal hardstone workshop was set up to clad it in marble and semi-precious stone. Pietro Tacca made two niche statues of grand dukes between 1626 and 1642.
Galileo had tutored the young Cosimo from 1605 to 1608. When he found four moons of Jupiter, he named them after Cosimo II and his three brothers, dedicating Sidereus Nuncius to the new grand duke in 1610. Galileo was named court mathematician in 1610 by Wikipedia’s account, or in 1611 by PBS’s. The moons are now named Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.
François Ravaillac killed Henry IV on 14 May 1610, the day after Marie’s coronation. Parliament confirmed her as regent for the boy Louis XIII within hours. The regency formally ended on 2 October 1614, and she stayed head of the Council of the King afterward. France was now governed by a Medici for the second time in 50 years.
Marie bought the site in 1612 and building began in 1615 to designs by Salomon de Brosse. Rubens painted a 21-piece series glorifying her life and reign between 1622 and 1625. She had been born in the Pitti in 1575 and left Florence for France at 25. The palace went up in Paris while she held power as head of the Council of the King.
Ferdinando I commissioned Giovanni Bandini for the monument in 1595. The statue was finished in 1599, arrived by sea in 1601 and was inaugurated by Cosimo II on 29 May 1617. Pietro Tacca was tasked in 1602 with adding the four moor statues. Project Manifest, a European heritage project, describes the monument as a symbol of the trade in enslaved people in the Maritime Republics.
A plague in 1630 killed about 10 percent of Florence’s population during the reign of Ferdinando II, who had taken the grand ducal title in 1621. His reign is counted as the start of Tuscany’s long economic decline. Cosimo III would inherit that decline in 1670 and carry it for 53 years.
The Day of the Dupes on 10 and 11 November 1630 left Richelieu in place as chief minister against her efforts. Marie was forced to reconcile with him, and on 19 July 1631 she fled from the Château de Compiègne toward the Spanish Netherlands. She lived the remaining 11 years in exile. She would die five months before Richelieu did.
Galileo published his Dialogue in 1632 and was summoned to Rome and forced to recant in 1633. Ferdinando II, grand duke since 1621, was his patron and friend. He could not protect him from the Inquisition. Galileo went back to Tuscany under house arrest in 1634 and died there in 1642.
Marie de’ Medici died of pleurisy in Cologne on 3 July 1642, aged 67, five months before Richelieu. She was buried at the Basilica of St Denis in Paris on 8 March 1643. She had been in exile for 11 years. Catherine de’ Medici had been in her grave in Blois for 53 years when the second Medici queen of France died.
Ferdinando II and his brother Leopoldo founded the Accademia del Cimento in Florence in 1657 to test nature by the Galilean method. It closed in 1667. Leopoldo became a cardinal on 12 December 1667 and died on 10 November 1675. He also began the collection of artists’ self-portraits later hung in the Vasari Corridor.
The Riccardi family bought Palazzo Medici in 1659, more than a century after the ruling branch had moved across the Arno. It has been called Palazzo Medici Riccardi since. In 1689 an outside staircase forced the chapel entrance to move. Two sections of Gozzoli’s wall were cut out, and the oldest king’s horse was divided between wall segments.
Cosimo III died on 31 October 1723, after a 53-year reign, and his son Gian Gastone succeeded him. Gian Gastone had left his wife after about a year in Reichstadt and lived in Prague, where he gambled and ran up debts until he was called back in 1708. He had no children. The Archbishop of Prague was among his creditors.
Gian Gastone, last Medici grand duke, died on 9 July 1737. European peace terms negotiated in 1735 had already assigned Tuscany to Francis Stephen of Lorraine, a settlement finalized at Vienna in 1738. Medici rule of Florence, begun in 1434, had lasted almost 300 years. Francis Stephen succeeded him, and the grand duchy passed to the Lorraine family.
Anna Maria Luisa, the Electress Palatine and last of the line, signed the Patto di Famiglia on 31 October 1737, leaving the Medici collections to the Tuscan state on condition that nothing leave the capital. The purpose written into it was “for the ornamentation of the State, for public use and to attract the curiosity of foreigners”. The original, in French, is in the Austrian State Archives.
Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici died on 18 February 1743, ending the main line. Some tables record 19 February. She had outlived her brother by five and a half years. Florence commemorates her each 18 February. Art historian Cynthia Miller Lawrence argues that her bequest set up Tuscany’s future economy around tourism.
Grand Duke Peter Leopold of Lorraine opened the gallery to the public in 1769, by one account, 26 years after the last Medici died. The same page also says sixteen years, and the dates do not agree with each other. The offices Cosimo I built in 1560 for his clerks had become a public museum, under the terms of the 1737 pact.
In 2004 Gino Fornaciari of the University of Pisa and colleagues sought permission to study 47 Medici buried at San Lorenzo, among them Cosimo I. The bodies had been reburied below the floor after the tombs were plundered in 1857, and there are no exact burial records. Brass plaques mark the graves. The 1966 Arno flood may also have disturbed the remains.
Closed since 2016 for safety rules, the Vasari Corridor reopened on 21 December 2024 after restoration costing about 10 million euros. It was the first time the general public could walk it. The self-portraits were gone. New ramps, lifts, and five emergency exits were added to a passage built in five months in 1565 for one family.