ABSTRACT
In 1537 Cosimo I de' Medici, then seventeen years old, became duke of Florence and set up residence in the fifteenth-century Palazzo Medici on the Via Larga (figure 5.1). Three years later he left the palazzo with his new wife and infant daughter for the Florentine city hall, the Palazzo della Signoria (figure 5.2). Cosimo deemed this building, today more commonly known as the Palazzo Vecchio, as more suitable as his residence; in fact, it had 'regal rooms,' as he proudly explained in a letter to his father-in-law Pedro de Toledo, the Spanish Viceroy of Naples.l Cosimo's court historian, Giambattista Adriani, went one step further in attaching significance to Cosimo's selection of a new residence. The move, he wrote, showed that 'Cosimo was the absolute monarch and arbiter of the government.'2 So Cosimo left the Palazzo Medici behind as a relic - perhaps even an albatross - of the republican past of Florence and of the constraints that that past had placed upon the Medici and their designs to rule the city and its dominion.
