Reading response

Pietro Tacca’s Quattro Mori and the Conditions of Slavery in Early Seicento Tuscany

Mark Rosen

In March 1799, Napol�eon’s troops landed in the Tuscan port city of Livorno under the command of the French general Sextius Alexandre François Miollis. The general immediately sent a list of demands to the city’s governing council. Beyond an exorbitant charge for reparations, Miollis had some rec- ommendations for the locals about how to reconfigure the city’s most important monument (Fig. 1).1 Placed on the city’s harbor and facing all arriving water traffic, the sculp- tural group featured the standing marble effigy of Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici (r. 1587–1609) on a pedestal and, below, four slaves cast in bronze, each chained to a cor- ner of the base. Responding to his first impressions of the group, Miollis wrote the council:

A single monument exists in Livorno and it is a monu- ment to tyranny, insulting humanity. Four captives, chained to the pedestal and a hundred times more coura- geous than the ferocious Ferdinando that treads on them, have for three hundred years offered a distressing specta- cle as soon as one sets foot on the port. Feelings of pain, scorn, contempt, and hatred should necessarily disturb every sensible soul that approaches it. Let us avenge the injury done to humanity! You should be pleased, citizens, to order a statue of Liberty be substituted for one of that monster. Let one hand break the chains of the four slaves, while the other smashes with a pick the head of Ferdi- nando spread out on the ground. Salutations and Brother- hood. Miollis.2

In his letter, the general was rehearsing an argument that had recently played out in Paris. During the Revolutionary violence of 1792, images of French monarchs were defaced, torn from their pedestals, and dragged through the streets.3

Among the royal images destroyed was the early seventeenth- century equestrian monument to Henri IV on the Pont-Neuf, a work that consisted of a central raised pedestal bearing the king and his horse and a stepped marble base with four slaves in chains (Fig. 2). The mob destroyed the effigy of the king and his horse but preserved the slave figures, which today are in the Mus�ee du Louvre, Paris (Fig. 3).4 Commissioned by Marie de M�edicis, the Parisian monument was cast by the same Tuscan school that only a few years later would produce the bronze slaves in Livorno dedicated to Marie’s uncle Fer- dinando.5 Undoubtedly, the parallels between these two ensembles, with the sovereign striding above a group of bound captives below, triggered in Miollis a similar recogni- tion of the problematics of representing power at the expense of those who unwillingly served the ruler, and with Revolutionary fervor he proposed a more inspirational alter- native to reverse its meaning.

Although the sculpture of Liberty was never made, General Miollis removed the effigy of Ferdinando I from its pedestal

and stripped the bronze trophies that cascaded down from his feet toward the bound slaves below.6 Less than four months after Miollis arrived in Livorno, the Austrian army reentered the city and placed it under the control of the Flor- entine Senate, with jurisdiction over the next decade veering back and forth between France, Austria, and Spain, ulti- mately returning to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in 1815.7

The unbeheaded sculpture of Ferdinando then was rein- stalled on its pedestal, and there it has remained, although in 1888 the entire monument was moved some forty-two and a half feet (thirteen meters) closer to the harbor to be a bit more coherently aligned with the port it faces.8 Significant bomb damage during World War II occasioned much rebuilding of the harbor to the point where it scarcely resem- bles its early modern appearance; despite the fact that nearly everything around it has been altered, the monument at least stands very close to its original positioning, its fundamental arrangement intact. Unlike the royal monument destroyed in Paris in 1792, the

Livornese group was an assemblage from two different histori- cal moments, evolving over nearly three decades into its final form. Miollis thought it much older than it was; the ensemble had stood at the harbor for less than two centuries at the time of his arrival. The marble likeness of Ferdinando I was sculpted between 1597 and 1599 by Giovanni Bandini, one of many effigies of the ruler made during his rule and sent from Florence to Tuscan subject cities (Fig. 4).9 Cast separately a generation later, the four bronze slaves (1621–26) were the work of Pietro Tacca, the great inheritor of Giambologna’s studio and method. The monument itself also has a dual nomenclature. Many local Livornese historians, especially those writing prior to the twentieth century, refer to the com- posite work as “the monument to Ferdinando I,” emphasizing Ferdinando’s critical role in the construction and develop- ment of the city and port.10 To almost everyone else, and especially in the art historical literature, it has been known since the eighteenth century as I quattro Mori (The Four Moors), reflecting how interest has shifted to the mon- ument’s fascinating supporting figures.11 Over time, and cer- tainly in the years after the end of the Medici line in the eighteenth century, the incongruity of the grouping attracted criticism beyond Miollis’s letter; a typical comment, by the eighteenth-century traveler Edward Wright, noted the supe- rior quality of the bronzes, claiming “[A]ll the Slaves are (I think) better than the principal Figure” of Ferdinando.12

Others, though, fixated on the message. Stendhal called it “truly a poor idea to surround a prince with the eternal image of pain,” while the visiting American painter Rembrandt Peale referred to it simply as “a disgusting monument.”13

At the time the bronzes were cast, the insertion of slaves into a triumphal monument was not, at least on the surface,

unusual. Conventional Enlightenment sensibilities sought the destruction of any royal monuments in which the sover- eign strode above imprisoned captives. But the slaves of the Quattro Mori received far more attention, especially for their mimetic qualities, than those of any similar monument; clearly the nature of the depiction rather than its very fact induced such diverse responses in later viewers. As captives bound at the foot of a conquering victor, these slaves nomi- nally belonged to a typology of image dating back at least to Greek and Roman art, carrying deep iconographic and his- torical resonances.14 In Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s mid-trecento Allegory of Good Government frescoes in Siena, similarly bound figures represent the supporters of tyranny brought to justice by the well-governed republic, their clothing and postures suggesting political imprisonment rather than servi- tude and their swarthiness indicating a generic otherness contrasting with the fair skin of the allegorical figurations above (Fig. 5). Two centuries later, Michelangelo’s Euro- pean-featured captives conceived for the tomb of Pope Julius II were described by Giorgio Vasari as having a similar

purpose, representing “all the provinces subjugated to this pontiff and made obedient to the Apostolic Church.”15 Never installed in their original configuration, Michelangelo’s slaves came to symbolize (among other things) the Neopla- tonic limitations of the mortal body in a Christian cosmology, their enslavers absent and their torment more spiritual than physical (Fig. 6).16

Although drawing from both strains of iconography, the slaves in Livorno signify differently from their predecessors: not only do they signal defeat at the hands of an autocratic ruler rather than a republican government (a reversal of Lorenzetti’s communally governed popolo) but also the cor- poreality of the struggle by muscular yet nonidealized physi- cal forms grounds them in a manner distinct from Michelangelo’s thematic bodies. Despite their shackles and subjugation and undoubtedly in contrast to the expectations surrounding the figures at the base of a conventional trium- phal monument, these slaves resist conforming to the norma- tive portrayal of a defeated population. The Quattro Mori presents the viewer not with European types but with the

1 Giovanni Bandini, Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici, 1597–99, marble, and Pietro Tacca, I quattro Mori, 1621–26, bronze, total height 33 ft. 3 in. (10.14 m). Piazza Micheli, Livorno (artwork in the public domain; photo- graph by Scala, provided by Art Resource, NY)

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features of contemporary Muslim men (Fig. 7)—the Otto- man subjects, Maghrebi, and sub-Saharan Africans who in fact formed the slave population of this busy Tuscan port, rendered in what appears to be near-documentary fidelity, certainly in comparison with the images of slaves that pre- ceded these figures. Their twisting contortions make it clear that they are meant to be seen as under the command of the rigid, columnar Ferdinando above, yet their characterization as racially diverse individuals adds power, pathos, and speci- ficity that threaten to overwhelm the traditional messaging of victor and captive. Nor would such questions disappear in future renderings of this subject; as Kirk Savage has noted in discussing nineteenth-century sculptural monuments commemorating the abolition of American slavery, “The medium’s obsession with ideal human form made the whole subject of slavery extremely difficult for sculptors to repre- sent. More than any of the other arts, sculpture was embed- ded in the theoretical foundation of racism that supported American slavery and survived long after its demise.”17 The first work of major monumental sculpture to depict slavery as specific to its time and place rather than as merely an abstract notion and to bring such a depiction to a city filled with actual slaves, the Quattro Mori raised—and similarly left unre- solved—these same issues centuries earlier.

As documentary sources and images of the city from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries elucidate, the Quattro Mori as monument served as the focal point of the Livornese harbor, regularly surrounded by merchants and by current and former slaves themselves (Fig. 8). The work’s initial view- ers usually read the sculptural group in line with expectations of similar autocelebratory monuments, favoring its honoring of Ferdinando’s command over the harbor and defense of the Mediterranean from Ottoman and Maghrebi ships. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, attention shifted away from the sovereign to the bronze bodies at the base of the Quattro Mori. People who studied the monument carefully, especially those from outside Medici lands, recognized how its slave iconography was invested with a concreteness spe- cific to early modern Livorno, bearing a distinctly modern

power simultaneously detached from the traditional signifi- cation of bound figures and offering a harrowing, empa- thetic vision of the hardships of captivity. General Miollis’s comment cues one later response, that of horror and con- tempt (an “injury done to humanity”)—but that probably would have been his response to any monument with slaves included. Yet even among any early modern monuments fea- turing slaves, this one aroused much stronger emotions in its audience, transcending thematic slavery to evoke the physical fact of non-Western European captives. What was initially intended to commemorate Medici power over land and sea instead became over time something more complex: a reflec- tion, largely sympathetic, of those who served and suffered at its expense.

The Port of Livorno, Galley Slavery, and the Bagno

As the main port of Tuscany and the launching site for the fleet of the Knights of St. Stephen that crusaded against the Turks, Livorno possessed a character distinct from the capital of Florence and the rest of the Grand Duchy. The city’s rela- tionship with Florence, in fact, was not especially long-stand- ing. From the eleventh century until the early fifteenth century, it was a minor port caught in wars between Pisa and Genoa. It was only brought into the Florentine orbit when the republic bought the city’s medieval fortress

3 Pietro Francavilla with Francesco Bordoni, Two Slaves from the Henri IV monument, 1614–18, bronze, each approx. 63 £ 25¼ £ 22 in. (160 £ 64 £ 56 cm). Mus�ee du Louvre, Paris, M.R. 1670–71 (artwork in the public domain; photograph by Thierry Ollivier, � Mus�ee du Louvre, Dist. RMN–Grand Palais, provided by Art Resource, NY)

2 Jean-Baptiste Lallemand, The Henri IV Monument on the Pont- Neuf, ca. 1775, oil on canvas, 26 3/8 £ 36 7/8 in. (67 £ 93.5 cm). Mus�ee de la Ville de Paris, Mus�ee Carnavalet, Paris, P.194 (artwork in the public domain; photograph � RMN–Grand Palais, provided by Art Resource, NY)

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(approximately one square kilometer, or about one-third of a square mile, in size and built mostly in the late fourteenth century) from the Genoese in 1421 for a sum of 100,000 flo- rins.18 Previously, Pisa served as the port city for Florence, but it became increasingly unusable as the waters at the mouth of the Arno silted up over the course of the fifteenth century.19 With the founding of the Duchy of Tuscany in 1530, the Medici dukes began to invest more in Livorno, and under Cosimo I (r. 1537–74) it become an important center of trade, with an expanded fortification network and new cus- tomhouse and military hospital added in the 1540s.20 In order to attract a population to the city, Cosimo declared Livorno a porto franco (free port), with less strict customs duties than the rest of Tuscany. It would also welcome refu- gees and outsiders; Jews fleeing Portugal and Catholic Greeks were specifically named in Cosimo’s edicts of 1547 and 1548.21 Especially pressing to Cosimo was defending the city from two distinct threats: the fuorusciti (the Florentine exiles opposing his rule), who early in his reign threatened to return from the sea; and the Ottoman navy, whose ships were regularly spotted along the Tyrrhenian coast.22 A new series of fortifications and port expansions in the early 1550s brought the population up to about 550 inhabitants, and the port’s increasingly important status was commemorated in Giovanni Stradano’s fresco of Livorno (1556–59) in Duke Cosimo’s namesake audience hall, the Sala di Cosimo I, in his home and center of authority, the Palazzo Vecchio.23

Just prior to his death in 1574, Cosimo gave Bernardo Buontalenti the task of rebuilding the fortress and expand- ing the city; this project officially got under way in 1577 and proceeded slowly through the reign of the new grand duke, Cosimo’s eldest surviving son, Francesco I.24 Despite the pro- motion of new commercial activity, the number of perma- nent residents in Livorno was still less than a thousand people at his death in 1587.25 Only in the time of Ferdinan- do I, the powerful cardinal and noted antiquities collector who abdicated his ecclesiastical role to succeed his brother as grand duke of Tuscany in 1587, was a major investment in the port and its fortifications begun. Ferdinando had Buon- talenti and the engineer Claudio Cucurrano expand the for- tress, build new roads, and dig canals to make the off-loading of goods and merchandise easier.26 Most significantly, Ferdi- nando extended the exceptional status of Livorno with a new bando (proclamation) with forty-four articles issued in 1591 and again with slight additions in 1593, collectively referred to as “La Livornina.” It gave privileges and exemptions to merchants from around the Mediterranean, and among those who actually came in large numbers were Corsicans rebelling against Genoa, French fleeing the religious civil wars, Sephardic Jews, and also criminals and debtors whose infractions had been committed outside the Tuscan state.27

The bando’s opening directly addressed “all you merchants of any Levantine or Ponentine nation, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, German, and Italian, Jews, Turks, and Moors, Arme- nians, Persians, and others. . . .”28 Separate invitations to Dutch, English, and French merchants were made in subse- quent additions to the decree.29 The most striking aspect of the bando was its extension beyond Christian refugees. Jews in Florence were limited to the ghetto and subject to strict state control, but in Livorno they could settle where they wished and practice their religion openly. Free Muslims from Ottoman lands and North Africa were also explicitly included in these privileges. The late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century expan-

sions of the city created a fortified and protected harbor zone of about three miles (five kilometers) in circumference, and the city’s population expanded rapidly: from less than 1,000 in 1591 to 5,800 in 1609 to more than 10,000 in 1622 (Fig. 9).30 The constructions added an enclosed harbor with

4 Giovanni Bandini, Ferdinando I de’ Medici, 1597–99, marble, max. height 14 ft. 5 in. (4.4 m). Piazza Micheli, Livorno (artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author)

5 Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Allegory of Good Government: Virtues, detail showing soldiers and captives, 1338–39, fresco. Sala dei Nove, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena (artwork in the public domain; photograph by Scala, provided by Art Resource, NY)

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a long, slender dock running parallel to the coastline and controlled by a narrow mouth allowing entry to the inner harbor; the monument was placed facing west at the south- ern end of the inner harbor next to the city’s arsenal, the location where most passengers and cargo would disembark. (The harbor’s postwar reconstruction added a large, wide marina in the old inner harbor, making the monument’s present-day location less prominent and conspicuous than it once was.) Most notable in the city’s growth was its slave pop- ulation, the largest share of which manned the oars of the Tuscan galleys; the less physically robust usually remained onshore to serve on construction crews.31 Unlike slaves in much of medieval Europe or later in the American colonies, most slaves in Italy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century had not been acquired in their home territories but rather had been captured in the Mediterranean aboard enemy ships, effectively serving as spoils of war.32 Depending on the type of ship, galley crews usually numbered between 200 to 300 rowers, most of whom were slaves taken on the high seas.33 They formed the majority of rowers on European ships, especially those of the Italian powers: at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, there were more than 1,200 slaves aboard the Venetian galleys and a further 550 on the papal ships.34

The Tuscan state, controlled by the Medici grand dukes in landlocked Florence yet increasingly dependent on trade by sea, devoted great resources to its port at Livorno as both seat of its mercantile interests and center of warfaring opera- tions. To protect both these interests, as well as to bond Tus- can nobility to the Medici authorities against a common enemy, Cosimo I founded in 1561 the Knights of St. Stephen (I Cavalieri di Santo Stefano), a new sea-based knighthood devoted to the martyred pope Saint Stephen (r. 254–57).35

Similar in conception to the Knights of Malta, the Tuscan order had strict entry requirements for its members (defined by Cosimo as legitimate noble birth, strong moral conduct, and good financial standing) and was expressly devoted to

6 Michelangelo, Bound Slave, ca. 1513–16, marble, 82¼ £ 28½ £ 21 in. (209 £ 72.4 £ 53.5 cm). Mus�ee du Louvre, Paris, M.R. 1589 (artwork in the public domain; photograph by Rapha€el Chipault, � Mus�ee du Louvre, Dist. RMN–Grand Palais, provided by Art Resource, NY)

7 Pietro Tacca, I quattro Mori. Piazza Micheli, Livorno (artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author)

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wars and military campaigns against Muslim powers, espe- cially the Ottoman Empire.36 Much of their activity con- cerned patrolling the Mediterranean to protect the Italian coast and trade routes to the east, and during their skir- mishes at sea they regularly captured many Turkish and Maghrebi ships, forcing those taken to become slaves at the oars of Tuscan galleys. (These operations worked in both directions, with many Christians from European nations simi- larly taken at sea by Ottoman or Maghrebi ships and forced into galley service or as construction labor for the Barbary regencies. A much more highly developed series of slave pris- ons existed in North Africa than anywhere else around the Mediterranean, a fact that greatly influenced the choice to build such a structure in Livorno. In both Muslim and Chris- tian lands, freedom from enslavement on both sides often depended on large trades of slaves made between the ruling sovereigns.37) The activity of the Knights of St. Stephen grew in tandem with the development of the port of Livorno, where crews of galley slaves often docked for the night. Vit- torio Salvadorini has estimated that the number of slaves cap- tured by the knighthood between 1600 and 1620 alone was higher than six thousand, with nearly two thousand Magh- rebi slaves taken together in the sieges of the Algerian coast in 1607 and 1610.38

On being taken at sea from either an Ottoman or Magh- rebi ship, a slave would have his beard and head shaved except for a small tuft of hair at the back of the skull.39

Besides being placed in chains, those forced aboard Tuscan grand-ducal ships would be given a recognizable outfit, usu- ally red in color, of shirt, tights, cotton cap, and cloth coat.40

(White Christian slaves taken by Maghrebi ships typically faced the same treatment; on arriving as galley slaves in Tunis, Algiers, or Tripoli, their heads and beards were shaved and they were placed in leg irons.41) Between the galley row- ers and other privately held servants, slaves made up as much as 8 percent of Livorno’s population at any one moment in the early seventeenth century; the number would drop by about 1.5 percent by the end of the century. By contrast, in two of Italy’s other major ports, Venice and Naples, slaves

typically formed about 4 percent of the population in the early seicento, although both were much larger cities than Livorno.42

Tuscan galleys of the early seventeenth century had a much higher percentage of Muslim slaves than other European fleets of this or any other era; in 1617, they comprised over 60 percent of the rowers on the Grand Duchy’s ships.43 The rest of the crew were Christian forzati, criminals condemned for life or some long period to serve on the galleys, and buonavo- glie, free men compelled into service to pay off debts, usually from gambling.44 In the early seicento, a Tuscan galley crew was usually a little less than one-third forzati and about 10 to 15 percent buonavoglie.45 The rest were slaves taken at sea. The structure most noteworthy to the rebuilding of

Livorno in the late cinquecento and early seicento was the complex known as the bagno dei forzati, finished in 1605 and meant to house galley crews overnight in prisonlike condi- tions (Fig. 10).46 This quadrangular, fortresslike barracks held separate ships’ crews in individual dormitories and enabled both the galleys’ captains and the state administra- tion to keep an eye on foreign slaves while on land. The Livornese structure, while certainly the largest, busiest, and most active bagno on the Italian peninsula in the seventeenth century, drew inspiration from earlier buildings around the Mediterranean. The oldest known slave barracks of this type, dating probably to the early fifteenth century, was a con- verted public bathhouse (hence the derivation of the term bagno, typically used to refer to public baths) in Constantino- ple.47 The only other structures of this kind in Christian lands could be found in Malta, but the two bagni there were much smaller than their equivalents in Muslim territories.48

The North African regencies of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli each had bagni boasting thousands of Christian slaves; proba- bly the largest slave population in the Mediterranean, averag- ing about twenty-five thousand, could be found in Algiers.49

No such structure had been built on the Tuscan coastline prior to 1600, but the Medici court certainly possessed an awareness that such structures existed. Writing in Florence in 1598—that is, immediately before construction of the Livorn- ese bagno was initiated—Giorgio Vasari the Younger (nephew

9 The Harbor of Livorno and the Galleys of the Order of St. Stephen, 18th century, oil on canvas. Archivio di Stato, Pisa (artwork in the public domain; photograph by Scala, provided by Art Resource, NY)

8 Stefano della Bella, “I Quattro Mori” and the Harbor of Livorno, 1654–55, etching, 10 £ 14⅜ in. (25.4 £ 36.6 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)

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of the famous author of the Lives of the Artists) described and illustrated a prototype for such a building in his architectural treatise La citt�a ideale (Fig. 11):

Many great princes (that maintain vessels in the sea and have slaves) have a large place to hold slaves while their boats are in port. This place is usually called bagno, or serra- glio, or slave prison; in that place they are made to work, sew, and everything else that will then serve for navigation. There is one such bagno in Malta, one in Algiers, and [also] in other places. But we have made up our own plan without ever having seen one of them. . . .50

He continues by explaining how his idealized rectangular compound separated out forzati from slaves and allowed spe- cial or highly respected slaves (schiavi di qualit�a �o di rispetto) better quarters than those allotted to the ordinary galley ranks. A hospital wing, a biscotteria (a place to make provi- sions), and a well (located in the center of the bagno’s court- yard) are important elements of the design, as are apartments to house officers of the docked ships.51 Vasari

notes that he has outlined simply the most basic elements of such a structure, and that other workshops and stalls would almost certainly need to be added.52

Vasari’s text contains page after page of designs for ideal- ized fortifications, palaces, and religious structures, and his conception of the bagno resembles a combination of all three: symmetrical, regularized, easy to close off, and featuring cer- tain privileged zones. Drawing from his knowledge of the many accounts written by Christian slaves held in Barbary captivity, Vasari thinks practically in terms of how the build- ing might function but little about the question of religious worship; nowhere does he include designs for a church, a chapel, or a mosque. Such matters would eventually become critical to the functioning of the bagno of Livorno, especially around the time of the casting of the Quattro Mori. The many returning former slaves held in these buildings helped Vasari and the Tuscan court sketch out other practicalities for the new building on the Livorno port, and Medici ambassador Bastiano Fabbroni, who had served the Medici in its slave exchanges with the Ottoman state, also provided information on the slave prisons he had seen firsthand in Constantino- ple.53 Soon after the bagno’s completion by a crew of five thousand forced laborers and two thousand slaves, Fabbroni was nominated as its first captain.54

In the Livornese structure built soon after 1600, each wing of the bagno was closed off from the others and housed the

11 Giorgio Vasari the Younger, plan for a bagno, from La citt�a ideale, 1598, pen and ink on paper. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, MS cat. dis. 4529–94 (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the Gabinetto Fotografico, Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della citt�a di Firenze)

10 Plan of the ground floor of the bagno of Livorno, last quarter of the 17th century. Archivio di Stato, Florence, Piante dello Scrittoio delle Fortezze e Fabbriche 148, fol. F (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici e Storici per le Provincie di Firenze e Pistoia)

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crew of a single ship, meaning that rather than being sepa- rated out by religion or race, slaves, forzati, and buonavoglie all bunked together in a single dormitory.55 In most other Ital- ian ports, the crew would sleep in tight quarters on their ships, breeding disease and interpersonal tensions. Accom- modations in the Livornese bagno were still terribly spartan: nothing was given to sleep on aside from two flat boards, so any sort of straw or cushioning had to be provided by each individual or, if lucky, by his ship’s captain.56 But witnesses of the time—both slaves who slept there and others who com- mented on it—indicate that a night in the bagno was defi- nitely better than a night on a galley. There they had fresh water for drinking and wash water for laundry, and they received three bread rolls a day and vegetable soup three times a week—a better ration than that doled out on the Tus- can ships.57 The entire structure covered three floors and a basement, with a maximum capacity of three thousand slaves, larger than the free population of Livorno at the time it was built.58 It occupied nearly 65,000 square feet (6,000 square meters), nearly a quarter of the space within Ferdinando I’s new fortifications.59 Much of the interior space was given over to dormitories lined with bunks for each ship’s crew. As shown in Vasari’s idealized plan, captains and local adminis- trators had separate apartments; in the Livorno bagno’s plan they are on the top floor, while the ground floor (visible in Fig. 10) featured a mixture of dorms, offices, and work- shops.60 A sizable church space on the second floor, accessi- ble from the courtyard via an outdoor staircase, was set up for forzati and other Christian crew members; some of the individual wings on other floors had smaller internal chapel spaces.61 Initially, there was no mosque anywhere in the com- pound, although all the early accounts of the bagno reveal that Muslims were regularly permitted to gather for their own services.62 There appears to have been little attempt by the authorities in Livorno to convert the Muslims of the bagno to Christianity. Most likely the shipowners and authori- ties were against such conversions, since it would have granted the new converts higher status and better rations of food and clothing aboard the galleys and, ultimately, would have cost more to house them; additionally, such catechizing campaigns in the bagno might have made settling in Livorno less attractive to free Muslims and Jews.63 By the mid-seven- teenth century, the bagno’s wings had small internal mosques at one end of each dormitory, and the compound also now included a slightly larger mosque accessible to all crews.64

The small number of Jews and Protestants held in the bagno over its century and a half of operations had no fixed place to worship, but they were allowed to practice their own faiths.65 The very small number of women recorded in the ledgers of the bagno were mostly Jewish or from Slavic territo- ries; none was Arab or Turkish.66

Forzati and slaves in good standing could also pay a small fee to set up counters to sell food, clothes, or tools, either inside the structure’s courtyard or, during daylight hours, to a larger public from stalls set up against the bagno’s exterior walls (the botteghe degli schiavi to the right side in the plan). Beginning in 1630, freed slaves earned the right to open stalls selling food and goods directly along the port, in some cases within sight of the monument; they also could work doing manual labor (hauling goods) or practice a simple

trade (such as shaving or cutting the hair of other slaves).67

The bagno itself was centrally situated, within a block of both the city’s duomo and the Palazzo del Governatore; the Quattro Mori stood close to 500 feet (about 150 meters) to the south- west, along the harbor.68 In Stefano della Bella’s print, we see how such commercial activity melded with the daily life of Livorno: a slave with a topknot in the right middle ground fills barrels with water from a spigot just behind the monu- ment, probably to carry elsewhere in the city to sell (Fig. 8). According to a visitor of the early eighteenth century, the slaves and the rest of the crew were permitted to walk around the city during the day to work, although the bagno would be locked and guarded at night.69 The right to circulate in Livorno had to be earned, however. On arrival in the city for any extended stay, a slave usually remained in the bagno for up to two weeks before his leg irons were removed. At that point, he was then conducted first to the guards of the city’s gates and harbors to register, so that he could be recognized should he try to escape.70 Even with the leg irons removed, the slaves were often forced to wear handcuffs.71 It could hardly be called open movement around the city, but during times when the Mediterranean was rough or there was some other delay going seaward, the slaves had the opportunity to circulate under these limited conditions, and many would gather in the harbor during the day. The bagno ceased functioning in 1750, following a peace

treaty signed with the Ottomans in 1747 that returned all state-owned Muslim slaves to their native lands.72 The struc- ture was repurposed as a barracks, a printer’s shop, and a hospital before it was razed in 1930 to make way for the Palazzo del Governo.73 The lost complex was, nonetheless, one of the defining structures of the city and port during the city’s moment of explosive growth and commercial vitality. In early modern Tuscany it stood as a multivalent symbol of state control of land and sea, couched as a project of munifi- cence toward the galley slaves and the ships they served. It should be noted that beyond the galley slaves, whose ranks changed regularly depending on the weather and the condi- tions of the seas, there was also a permanent Livornese popu- lation of freed slaves and Muslim converts to Christianity living outside the bagno. Their numbers are hard to quantify, but the visible numbers of slaves and Muslims in the early years of the city’s expansion was undoubtedly very high, espe- cially during the daylight hours. As the English diarist John Evelyn noted in 1644, “Here is in Ligorne . . . such a con- course of Slaves, consisting of Turkes, Mores and other Nations, as the number & confusion is prodigious; some buy- ing, others selling; some drinking, others playing, some work- ing, others sleeping, fighting, singing, weeping & a thousand other postures & Passions; yet all of them naked, & miserably Chayn’d, with a Canvas onely to hide their shame.”74

Because of their interdependence, the development of the port and the slave trade in Livorno occurred simultaneously and rapidly, with this previously obscure and little-used har- bor town rapidly transforming into the center of mercantile and naval operations for the Tuscan state. The modern city’s operations depended largely on court functionaries from Florence, but for the most part Livorno’s free population was largely foreign—whether coming for work from other states in Europe or fleeing religious persecution abroad. With the

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exception of a few Christian convicts or debtors, the slaves who either passed through the bagno or were forced to stay in Livorno for some longer period came from elsewhere. For- eign labor, provided by captive Turks, Maghrebi, and (to a much smaller degree) sub-Saharan Africans and Eastern European Muslims, essentially built the port and the city’s fortification network and powered the oars of the Tuscan fleet. Because of its massive bagno and the high percentage of Muslims and Africans in the city, Livorno from its beginnings became closely identified with slavery—an efficient, regi- mented, highly organized center of operations for non-Chris- tian captives.

The Development of the Monument

The Quattro Mori was created against the backdrop of a recently constructed bagno and a thriving trade in slaves in the newly expanded port city. Once installed, the monument stood outside the city walls at the end of the recently con- structed Via Ferdinanda, named in tribute to the sovereign depicted in the monument. Placed about thirteen feet off the ground, the effigy of Ferdinando faced all entering water traffic and surveyed the harbor that had been greatly expanded under his rule (Fig. 4). Ferdinando carries the baton of command (familiar from nearly all official portraits of Medici dukes and grand dukes), while his chest bears the cross of the Knighthood of St. Stephen etched on the tunic beneath his cape, emphasizing the grand duke’s role as gran

maestro of the crusading order dedicated to fighting Muslim piracy. (The emblem of the order comprises four narrowing, arrow-shaped points converging in the center to form a Greek cross.) The monument simultaneously celebrates Medici authority, control of the seas, and defense against the Ottoman threat, and it was directed to all who arrived in the Tuscan state from the sea. The development of the composite monument began in

the first decade of Ferdinando’s rule and continued through the reign of his grandson. The original conception fit squarely within a series of honorific monuments to the grand duke installed during his reign, including those in Pisa and Arezzo designed by Giambologna and executed by Pietro Francavilla (both 1594) and the equestrian monument for the Piazza Santissima Annunziata in Florence, begun by Giambologna in 1601 and completed by Pietro Tacca in 1608 (Fig. 12).75 While Ferdinando’s father, Cosimo, had diffused his portrait in busts and painted likenesses throughout Tuscany, his son went a step further in this campaign of self- honoring monuments: for the first time in early modern Italy, a sovereign undertook a coordinated set of similar pub- lic monuments throughout his domain, bringing visual unity to the public spaces of his subject cities.76 Following the installation of the Pisa and Arezzo monuments, the court commissioned the marble effigy now atop the Quattro Mori from Florentine sculptor Giovanni Bandini (or Giovanni dell’Opera, as he was frequently known) and assigned him a studio near the harbor in Livorno to make it.77 Bandini died in April 1599, immediately after completing the statue, which carries a signature and date from that year on the columnar block touching the hem of Ferdinando’s mantle, faintly visi- ble only from the side, just below the bottom of his sword’s sheath.78

The positioning of a ruler facing out to sea in a command- ing militaristic gesture was not especially novel; two decades earlier, a similar monument to the Lepanto commander (and half brother of the Spanish king Philip II) Don Juan de Austria was installed facing the port in Messina, although it featured only the decapitated head of a Turk beneath the sword of the commander rather than fully embodied slave figures.79 Even earlier, the theme of prisoner and captive became central to the work of the goldsmith and sculptor Leone Leoni. At about the age of thirty, Leoni himself had been sentenced to galley slavery as punishment for attacking the papal jeweler.80 In return for his service, Genoese admi- ral Andrea Doria helped free the artist after about a year at sea on one of the pope’s ships. Despite this experience, his own later use of slave tropes is mostly conventional and flat- tering to his patrons, as in Charles V as Virtus Subduing Fury (Fig. 13) and Ferrante Gonzaga Conquering Envy (Piazza Roma, Guastalla, begun in the early 1560s and completed by the sculptor’s son Pompeo in 1594).81 In Charles V, the emperor stands elegantly in Roman armor astride a splayed, bound male nude and trophies of war. By further using massive, shackled herms as attributes of his own success on the facade of his own palace and studio, the Casa degli Omenoni in Milan (1565–67), Leoni projected such figures as those whom he himself had eclipsed in his rise to imperial patron- age, likening the artist to a military-minded prince.

12 Giambologna with Pietro Tacca and studio, equestrian monument to Ferdinando I de’ Medici, 1601–8, bronze. Piazza Santissima Annunziata, Florence (artwork in the public domain; photograph by Alinari, provided by Art Resource, NY)

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In its original configuration, the Bandini marble of Ferdi- nando most likely would have stood alone without any tro- phies or subsidiary figures. Although completed in 1599, it remained unexhibited and covered over in a corner of the harbor square until 1617.82 The reasons for this are not entirely clear; it is possible that Ferdinando chose to direct his attention closer to home to the Piazza Santissima Annun- ziata equestrian monument, or that the major construction taking place throughout Livorno (especially the develop- ment of the bagno and harbor) delayed its installation. In either case, only after Ferdinando’s death in February 1609 did his eldest son and successor, Cosimo II, begin to think seriously about completing and unveiling the monument to face the port, probably as a complement to the completion of other fortification projects in the city.83 The initial plans under Cosimo II were relatively modest, with Tacca asked to design a marble pedestal to elevate the statue in late 1615 or early 1616. With no thought to adding figures to the base in this initial phase, Tacca designed a plinth that narrowed from a stepped square base at the bottom to a rectangular pedestal on the top.84 He completed work by April 1617, and the new pedestal with Bandini’s Ferdinando on top was dedicated in the presence of Cosimo and his court on May 29, 1617.85

The design of the base was a modest job for one who had risen from the large Florentine studio of Giambologna to become one of the most important sculptors in Europe.86

Born to a family of marble merchants in the Tuscan coastal city of Carrara (site of the famed quarries that supplied the stone for many of Michelangelo’s greatest works), Pietro Tacca (1577–1640) would become best known for his works in bronze. Tacca came to Florence in 1592 to apprentice with Jacopo Piccardi, a master sculptor who often assisted Giambologna in larger projects; by 1598, he was working directly for Giambologna and, together with other assistants, helped sculpt the bronze reliefs on the first of the large equestrian monuments dedicated to Cosimo I in the Piazza della Signoria (1594–98).87 Tacca became the leading assis- tant to Giambologna in the last years of his life, the moment at which the bronze equestrian monuments for Ferdinando I (1601–8; Fig. 12) and Henri IV (1604–11; Fig. 2) were pro- duced. He played important roles in casting the horse and rider for both, and after the master’s death in 1608 took charge of the equestrian monument for Philip III of Spain (1606–16; now in the Plaza Mayor, Madrid).88 Throughout his career, Tacca would continue to specialize in horse-and- rider groups for the sovereigns of Europe; the most notable of his surviving later works is that of Philip IV of Spain (1634–40; Plaza de Oriente, Madrid).89 Tacca consciously modeled himself as the “heir” of Giambologna’s court style and maneuvered to occupy the role, shrewdly moving into Giambologna’s Borgo Pinti studio in Florence after the mas- ter’s death and continuing on as the leading salaried sculptor during the transition to the reign of Cosimo II.90 He also directly inherited from Giambologna some land as well as a number of works and architectural models to serve for his own designs for monument bases. By the time Cosimo II asked him to build the pedestal in Livorno, Tacca was a celebrated sculptor of public memorials both at home and abroad, especially well known for elegant yet severe portraits of masculine authority.

The Livorno base was a quick job for Tacca compared with the lengthy gestation periods for his equestrian monuments. Yet within a decade of the pedestal’s dedication, the monu- ment would be massively recontextualized with a separate sculptural campaign, also by Tacca, adding the four bronze slaves. Some early Livornese historians conjectured that Tacca’s original base created unexpected problems—that the marble of Ferdinando looked too tall or isolated, or that the proportions of Bandini’s sculpture seemed askew when raised so high.91 It is conceivable that Tacca suggested add- ing slaves while the pedestal was in progress and was able to proceed only after the official unveiling of the first phase, but no serious progress was made until after the death of Cosimo II in February 1621. The addition of slaves to such a monument was not novel,

and the choice to add them in Livorno followed closely on Giambologna-trained artists adding similar figures to the

13 Leone Leoni, Charles V as Virtus Subduing Fury, 1549–64, bronze, 98¾ £ 56¼ £ 51¼ in. (251 £ 143 £ 130 cm). Museo del Prado, Madrid, E00273 (artwork in the public domain; photograph � Museo Nacional del Prado, provided by Art Resource, NY)

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Henri IV monument in Paris. Dedicated in 1618, the Parisian group was produced in two phases, the first in Florence and the second in France. Soon after Marie de M�edicis commis- sioned the project from Giambologna in 1604, Tacca took over as supervisor and did all of the modeling and casting of the horse and rider between 1607 and 1611, sending the completed bronzes to France in 1613.92 The four slaves, always part of the general conception, were modeled sepa- rately in Paris by Giambologna’s former assistant Francavilla and, after his death in 1615, were cast by Francesco Bordoni (Fig. 3).93 Filippo Baldinucci, the Florentine author of Notizie de’ professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua (1681–1728), credits Medici court artist Ludovico Cardi (il Cigoli) for the concep- tion of the base of the Henri IV monument and especially for the positioning of the slaves, and several drawings by Cigoli’s hand map out a general idea followed somewhat freely by Francavilla and Bordoni in the four Louvre bronzes that survived the Revolution (Fig. 14).94 In Cigoli’s drawing, two European-featured male slaves are stationed on shallow ledges at the corners, each chained lightly to a harpy and per- forming Michelangelesque contortions. Presumably, the reverse of the monument would feature two more slaves in similar contrapuntal poses. The rectangular pedestal needed for the horse above allows space for battle reliefs and, at the center of each of the long sides, seated youths bearing swags.95

The Paris bronzes resemble Cigoli’s drawing in terms of their features rather than their poses. All four male figures have their arms bound directly behind their waists, and their feet rest on shields, armor, and helmets, symbols of a struggle brought to an end by the ruler above. In the completed mon- ument on the Pont-Neuf, they occupied ledges at the corners and rose a little more than half the height of the mon- ument’s pedestal (Fig. 2). Of the four slaves, only one could plausibly be posited as non-European, the youngish man with headband and short beard resting his toes on a rounded shield made from a tortoiseshell (on the left in Fig. 3).96

Cigoli’s drawings bear no notation to specify including Turks

or Africans in the project, but the earliest interpretations of the slave group saw this figure as a black African. Unlike the slaves of the Quattro Mori, however, the “African” of the Pari- sian group rarely was read as a portrait or as literally repre- senting a modern slave; early interpreters tended to read this figure in more allegorical terms. For example, historian Henri Sauval (writing in the mid-seventeenth century) described the grouping as representing each of the four continents (and hence this figure as standing in for Africa),97 a reading that continued to hold sway through at least the Revolution.98

Although his work on the Henri IV monument appears to have been primarily concerned with the horse and rider, Tacca may have played an early role in the slaves as well, since sources indicate that Ferdinando planned to send Tacca to Livorno at the early date of 1607 or 1608 to circulate among the slaves and make firsthand a wax model after “a robust slave.”99 Despite some historians claiming that Tacca entered the bagno at the time, there is no concrete evidence proving that he actually went in 1607/8. The plan to send him at that time, however, has led to some questions about the ori- gins of the dating of the Quattro Mori and whether in fact the Giambologna circle was formulating additions to the Bandini marble even before the statue was unveiled and dedicated in 1617. Considering his busy slate of major projects, this seems improbable; much more likely, Tacca would have been sent to Livorno to prepare studies for either the Parisian project or, perhaps, for an unrealized set of slaves that might have been projected for one of the equestrian monuments in Flor- ence, either the Piazza della Signoria monument to Cosimo I or the Piazza Santissima Annunziata monument to Ferdi- nando I.100 The authorization to study slaves in 1607/8 has a twofold importance: it originated with the grand duke, and it insisted on using actual slaves taken by Florentine ships as the inspiration for sculptural figures. This is a new conceit in the history of monuments featuring slaves. As a result of the Livornese port expanding and the Tuscan galleys taking so many new slaves in these years, their visibility in the city and their symbolic meaning in Medici sea power transformed an existing motif into a newly relevant one that could readily draw from actual captives. Whatever the intended project, nothing immediately resulted from Ferdinando’s directive to send Tacca to the bagno, and he had no further involvement with the project until asked to make its marble base a decade later.101

Not until 1621, soon after the death of Ferdinando’s son and successor, Cosimo II, did Tacca approach the Tuscan sovereigns with a plan to expand the monument. Recogniz- ing that the eleven-year-old heir, Ferdinando II, possessed lit- tle knowledge of these affairs, Tacca wrote directly to the Granduchesse Tutrici—Christine of Lorraine and Maria Maddalena of Austria, the widows of the two previous grand dukes and regents of the new sovereign. In his letter, Tacca recommended revitalizing the monument by keeping the marble base, adding four bronze slaves at its corners, and replacing Bandini’s statue atop the pedestal with a new alle- gorical figure in marble representing the order of Saint Ste- phen (della Religione di Santo Stefano).102 The removal of the Ferdinando statue was not taken seriously by the Tuscan court, but it is clear that the idea of adding slaves to the base had already been considered.103 Once approved, Tacca

14 Ludovico Cardi (il Cigoli), Study for the Base of an Equestrian Monument, ca. 1608, pen and ink with watercolor on paper, 8 £ 8¼ in. (20.2 £ 20.8 cm). Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, 1766 Orn. (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the Gabinetto Fotografico, Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della citt�a di Firenze)

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immediately set to making the first two slaves (Fig. 15)—one of which was definitely the older figure in the southwest cor- ner, the other of which was probably the figure discussed below as “Morgiano.”104 Cast in Florence in late 1622 and early 1623, they arrived in Livorno in March 1623 and were immediately installed on the base, which in the interim had been slightly rebuilt and raised to support the new figures.105

The second pair was begun most likely in 1624 and put in place in late 1626 or early 1627 (Fig. 16).106 Also during this period, Tacca produced a pair of matching bronze fountains featuring maritime creatures to flank the monument. The two fountains were cast by Tacca in 1626–27, immediately after the second pair of slaves, but the court never sent them to Livorno, choosing instead to keep them for Florence and installing them in 1639 in the Piazza Santissima Annunziata, where they accompany the equestrian monument to Ferdi- nando I (Fig. 17).107

The last additions undertaken by Tacca for the Quattro Mori, the bronze trophies (ca. 1633–34), provided a visual transition between the standing Ferdinando and the slaves below.108 Melted down during the Napoleonic period under Miollis, the trophies consisted of fictive Ottoman and Magh- rebi weapons and clothing signifying Ferdinando’s triumph in warfare and the onset of peace under his rule.109 Fallen weapons at the feet of a military victor constituted a familiar trope in Renaissance imagery, in much the same way that bronze itself often called to mind the repurposing of a cap- tured weapon—as was stated on the inscription to the Ferdi- nando I monument in the Piazza Santissima Annunziata (“De metalli rapiti al fero trace”), declaring it made from for- mer Turkish weapons.110 Indeed, Tacca’s use of bronze itself for both the trophies and the bodies of the slaves in Livorno suggests military triumph and a new state of peace, the weap- ons of war converted to art. (There is, however, no evidence

15 Pietro Tacca, I quattro Mori, two slaves on the south side of the base (“Al�ı” and “Morgiano”), 1621–23, bronze. Piazza Micheli, Livorno (artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author)

16 Pietro Tacca, I quattro Mori, two slaves on the north side of the base, 1624–26, bronze. Piazza Micheli, Livorno (artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author)

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that the bronze used in the Quattro Mori actually came from Turkish weapons; rather, viewers of the era were primed to read in the medium itself the possibility of such a transforma- tion.111) The Livornese trophies are visible in prints from the

period (Fig. 8) and in a fresco by Volterrano at the Villa della Petraia outside Florence, part of a cycle of frescoes dedicated to the deeds of Ferdinando I (Fig. 18).112 Painted soon after the completion of the Quattro Mori under the patronage of Ferdinando’s youngest son, Don Lorenzo de’ Medici, the fresco freely interprets the monument by rotating Ferdi- nando to face away from the sea; the four figures of the base are repositioned accordingly. To the right stands a crowned woman in a golden robe topped by a mantle bearing the cross of the Knighthood of St. Stephen, flanked by allegories of Pisa and Livorno, identifiable by their shields; all three look toward Ferdinando as well as the chariot of Neptune arriving in the harbor. Ferdinando on his pedestal receives the crown of victory from above. Other liberties taken include the lowering of Ferdinando’s baton arm and inscrip- tions added between the slaves in place of the red marble slabs. The slaves and trophies—already oxidized in color, their greenish tint indistinguishable from the Mediterranean Sea beyond—barely draw the viewer’s attention, indicating that its Medici patrons, unlike later viewers, saw the monu- ment as undoubtedly about Ferdinando and his control of the sea and protection of the land.

I Quattro Mori

Even without the installation of the intended fountains, the completed ensemble made a spectacular impression on visi- tors arriving in Livorno. Conditioned by viewing similar auto- cratic imagery throughout Italy and Europe, early viewers understood the monument as commemorating Ferdinando above all else. Yet by the end of the seventeenth century, well after Ferdinando and his heirs were dead, more attention was being paid to the captive figures, which (unlike their predecessors) appeared to be—and perhaps, in fact, were— modeled on real people, the slaves of the nearby bagno. Because the monument itself was glimpsed daily by a polyglot population of merchants, religious refugees, and bound and unbound servants, viewers increasingly recognized these

17 Pietro Tacca, maritime fountain, cast 1626–27, installed 1639, bronze. Piazza Santissima Annunziata, Florence (artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author)

18 Baldassare Franceschini (il Volterrano) with Giovanni da San Giovanni, Sea Triumph of Ferdinando I de’ Medici, 1637–46, fresco. Villa della Petraia, outside Florence (artwork in the public domain; photograph by Scala, provided by Art Resource, NY)

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slaves as grounded in the experience of contemporary Livorno rather than simply resorting to type. It would exag- gerate matters to imply that Tacca, working in the 1620s, wished to subvert Medici sovereignty through his portrayal of the Quattro Mori; his many other monuments upheld rather than challenged his patrons’ authority. Nonetheless, the nat- uralistic immediacy of these slaves, so unlike any other sculp- tural treatment of the subject in early modern Europe, undoubtedly broke with tradition in their approach. Most monuments featuring slaves used generalizing features, but Tacca deliberately depicted each as an individual, allowing viewers to project their own stories on to these specific fig- ures, something eagerly done by later viewers.

Considering that all four figures were cast in the same (now heavily oxidized) bronze, distinctions of race could not depend solely on surface color. A number of techniques— most notably, dark-colored marble for skin contrasting with white marble for costume—were the norm for representing sub-Saharan Africans in sculpture but were not possible here for the (most likely) black figure on the monument’s south- east corner.113 Questions about the origins and race of the other three slaves of the base also arise. As Paul H. D. Kaplan has shown, the racial coding for Ottoman subjects in Western European art was complex and rarely based on skin color or a standardized physiognomy and body type, relying instead on costume (such as turbans), weapons (such as the scimitar), or banners with the Muslim crescent as the figures’ defining attributes.114 In all four figures of the Quattro Mori, their sparse clothing, topknots, and heavy chains identify them clearly as slaves, but beyond that Tacca allows the details of their differentiation, rather than the typical physiognomic polarities of the period, to emerge subtly.

Portraits (or supposed portraits) of slaves appeared with some regularity in early modern Europe, usually absorbed into larger compositions or, in rare cases, isolated as indi- viduals. The dark-skinned household servant (possibly a slave) probably appears first in Titian’s Portrait of Laura Dianti (ca. 1523–29) and became a common supporting player in aristocratic portraiture well into the eighteenth century.115 Portraits of Turkish or North African Muslim slaves were considerably rarer, even if generalized images of Turks regularly appeared to play symbolic roles as defeated enemies (Fig. 19). Whether or not they should be considered portraits, the four slaves of the Quattro Mori present a racially mixed group that could actually be found in this port city, a place with one of the largest slave populations in Italy.

As we have seen, in 1607 or 1608 the grand duke wanted Tacca to make studies after real slaves, probably for inclusion in an earlier project, yet undoubtedly a result of the massive growth in the slave population in Tuscany during the preced- ing decade. Even though Tacca’s involvement in direct life study for the Quattro Mori cannot be further documented, many viewers of the mid-seventeenth century and after—that is, beginning a generation after the monument was com- pleted—understandably read them as portraits. In his vita of Tacca (originally published in 1702), Baldinucci even claims to have met and recognized the inspiration for one of the fig- ures on the monument years after the Quattro Mori was installed. Likely referring to the young, withdrawn figure

with sub-Saharan features on the monument’s southeast cor- ner (Fig. 20), Baldinucci writes:

[Tacca] had liberty to avail himself of as many slaves as he found there, those with the most graceful muscles and most suitable to be imitated in the formation of a most perfect body, and he studied the best parts of many, many of them. One of them was a Moorish Turk Slave known by the nickname Morgiano, who through his great physical size and all of his features was most handsome; and he was a great help to Tacca in producing the beautiful figure, with its effigy from life, that we see today. And I, who write these things, in my childhood at the age of ten I saw and recog- nized him, and I spoke to him willingly, although I was so young, because I recognized from the portrait [in the statue] that I was face to face with the handsome original.116

A second identification came later, in the late eighteenth century—just before Miollis’s arrival, in fact. A Livornese chronicle by the Augustinian monk Mariano Santelli identifies the older, completely nude captive on the southwest corner as a “robust older Saletin man named Al�ı.”117 No similar names or legends became attached to the second pair facing north. By contrast to the oft-quoted identifications by Baldinucci

and Santelli, many of the other early commentators, often vis- itors from abroad familiar with the expectations of viewing captives, did not comment on them individually but thought about them as progressive figures in an allegory. “These are the 4 slaves that would have stoln [sic] away a galley and have

19 Titian, Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto, 1573–75, oil on canvas, 131⅞ £ 107⅞ in. (335 £ 274 cm). Museo del Prado, Madrid, P00431 (artwork in the public domain; photograph by Erich Lessing, provided by Art Resource, NY)

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rowed here themselves alone; but were taken in their great enterprize,” writes the English traveler Richard Lassels in 1670.118 Others have interpreted its allegorical content dif- ferently; in the mid-seventeenth century, Dutch traveler Jan Janszoon Struys, ignoring the obvious racial differences among the various slaves and the problematic spread of ages among the quartet, read them as a father and three sons, as did many commentators of the following centuries.119 Condi- tioned by reading seicento ensembles like Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi in Rome, others were tempted to identify the four figures as standing in for the continents or as representing the ages of man, though for good reason, neither of those associations took hold.120 The monument intended to honor Ferdinando, but later visitors found different interests, even new protagonists, in the work.

Whatever the legitimacy of the stories by Baldinucci and Santelli as documentary evidence, when comparing Tacca’s bronzes to earlier slave monuments, there can be little doubt that they suggest, even demand, their recognition as contem- porary slaves similar to those held in the bagno. The charac- terization of the slaves as individuals rather than types jolts even the modern viewer into questioning just whom we are looking at and why they resist conforming to convention. As in the Parisian slaves by Francavilla and Bordoni, Tacca presents the slaves with hands bound behind their backs, but

beyond that, their postures and physiognomies expressively contrast with each other. Nor do the two bronzes on the water side of the monument face incoming traffic, unlike Fer- dinando above, who is characterized in the conventional manner of his contemporary Tuscan effigies. As the only one of the four figures with recognizably sub-

Saharan features, “Morgiano” has attracted the greatest attention, with good reason (Fig. 20). Sub-Saharan Africans usually arrived in Livorno after being captured alongside lighter-skinned Muslims aboard Maghrebi ships traveling from North African ports. Livornese slave records rarely dis- tinguish between black Africans and Muslim North Africans, making it hard to know the exact percentage of sub-Saharan slaves present in the city at any time.121 In Italy, a majority of black African captives originally came from two different locations: the Sudanese regions of Africa closest to Chad or the sub-Saharan territories of the Songhai Empire in West Africa, the latter region heavily attacked and ravaged by Morocco’s Saadi rulers in the late sixteenth century.122 These black Africans may well have already been slaves in the Bar- bary regencies of the North African coast before being trans- ported to Italy via Algiers, Tripoli, or another coastal port. A smaller percentage were brought by Spanish or Portuguese ships from the West African coast, and from there by some circumstance (being captured aboard a Turkish mercantile ship, for example) arrived in Italy.123 Many black African slaves (or former slaves) ended up in domestic service in the major cities of Italy; they had an especially strong presence in Venice, where since the fifteenth century many served as waiters, household slaves, and gondoliers.124

This powerful slave on the southeast corner, though, remains bound and chained. Lips pursed and heavy-lidded eyes casting a rueful sidelong glance, “Morgiano” leans for- ward, resigned to his captivity rather than vitally struggling against it. He sports a head of close-cropped hair, crowned by a topknot smaller and flatter than those of the other three slaves. Unlike the features of the Parisian monument’s sup- posed sub-Saharan slave, those of “Morgiano” do not con- form to the classical ideal nor become simply reduced to a foil for normative whiteness. Unlike other contemporary cap- tive figures, he communicates inward sorrow at his condition, making him, like his companions, worthy not of contempt but empathy.125 Joseph Spence, the English historian and traveler, was especially taken with this figure on seeing the monument in 1732: “In the statue of the four slaves their affliction is admirably varied according to their age, the Afri- can seems to look as if he had nobody to tell his grief to.”126

Installed at the same moment as “Morgiano” in 1623, “Al�ı” provides a striking visual contrast—an older, mustachioed, hunched, less graceful nude man straining his brow in an earthbound gaze (Fig. 21). Arms and legs both crossed, “Al�ı” reads as a series of hard, sharp angles, some jaggedly projec- ting out from the pedestal, others internal to the body— most notably, his distended neck veins and sucked-in stom- ach. Santelli refers to “Al�ı” as Saletino—from the Mediterra- nean city of Sal�e, part of the Moroccan sultanate ruled by the Saadi dynasty, which at the moment of the sculpture’s mak- ing was in the throes of major succession battles. Sal�e was not a traditional target of the Knights of St. Stephen nor a major Tuscan trading partner, and its mention as the place of

20 Pietro Tacca, I quattro Mori, “Morgiano,” southeast corner, 1621–23, bronze, 98½ £ 45¼ £ 68⅞ in. (250 £ 115 £ 175 cm). Piazza Micheli, Livorno (artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author)

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origin for one of the Quattro Mori has often puzzled viewers. It seems almost certain that Santelli borrowed his identifica- tion from elsewhere. “Al�ı, corsaro saletino” is one of the fea- tured villains in Venetian dramatist Carlo Goldoni’s tragicomedy La dalmatina, first staged in 1758—that is, a decade or so before Santelli wrote his sketch.127 In the play, Goldoni’s pirate Al�ı openly embodies heathen menace and libido, threatening to capture the female protagonists for his own harem. He represents the threat of enslavement rather than standing in as its victim. Tacca’s chained figure, signify- ing the reverse, carries much greater ambiguity: his ruffled brow and slightly cocked head gaze downward, the only one of the four making an appeal toward the viewer.

One of the most striking aspects of Tacca’s portrayal of “Al�ı is his nudity (Fig. 22). Despite the angular positioning of limbs and the drawn-back chest, the open-legged positioning exposes “Al�ı”’s notably circumcised penis. Beyond the many obvious precedents stretching back to antiquity for male nudity, whether heroic or tragic, Tacca’s figure reveals a fasci- nation with—and not necessarily a horror of—difference, just

as other accounts of Muslim circumcision at the time often discuss it with almost exotic interest.128 By contrast, the cin- quecento colossi of Florence’s Piazza della Signoria appeared proudly uncircumcised, even Michelangelo’s David, a subject where it would have been appropriate. In Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus, the hero is so positioned to emphasize the parallel between his sword and his projecting phallus, while in Barto- lomeo Ammannati’s Fountain of Neptune—a work that shares a link to the Quattro Mori as a testament to Medici patronage of the Knighthood of St. Stephen—the god bears his baton of command at waist level to further draw attention to his genital area. Tacca’s master Giambologna explicitly associated male virility with creation, signing his Rape of a Sabine Woman in the Loggia dei Lanzi on a rock directly below the penis of the crouching male figure (Fig. 23). Hands bound, legs spread apart, and body pushed onto a narrow ledge, “Al�ı” of the Quattro Mori does not carry his nudity as a brave savage or classical god. The detail of his circumcision is visible only from directly in front of the figure; the difference of his nudity is revealed, but discretely. No early (or recent) viewers commented on this aspect of Tacca’s sculpture, yet it strengthens the reading of these works as based on real-life models from the bagno rather than the traditional icono- graphic models for captives. Certainly, it distinguishes this

22 Pietro Tacca, I quattro Mori, detail of “Al�ı.” Piazza Micheli, Livorno (artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author)

21 Pietro Tacca, I quattro Mori, “Al�ı,” southwest corner, 1621–23, bronze, 78¾ £ 59 £ 68⅞ in. (200 £ 150 £ 175 cm). Piazza Micheli, Livorno (artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author)

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characterization of a Muslim from other depictions of the time, such as the principal (uncircumcised) figure in Bernini’s Fontana del Moro (Fig. 24)—a work that, despite its name, scarcely attempts Tacca’s naturalistic, empathetic treatment. Muscular though he is, Bernini’s spiraling Moor bears a face closer to that of a classical comic actor’s mask than that of an African or a Turk. The unheroic nudity of “Al�ı” further contributes to his misery: crouching, splayed, contorted, and (in the conception of Tacca and his patrons) brought to this state by the power of the Medici and the Knights of St. Stephen.

Soon after casting and installing “Morgiano” and “Al�ı,” Tacca set about working on the second pair of slaves, proba- bly the two on the north flank. They consist of a young, upward-looking figure on the base’s water side (Fig. 25) and an older Muslim man with heavy brows on the northeast cor- ner (Fig. 26). The older man has much in common with “Al�ı”: both have similar mustaches, wide eyes, furrowed brows, and heads directed down at the viewer. Unlike “Al�ı,” he bears a cloth across his thighs, and his posture, though also bent, implies a greater potential for power, the soles of both feet poised to allow the body to rise. His lips slightly parted, this slave evokes speech, as if lamenting his situation. No legends have been attached to this sculpture, although he bears an obvious similarity to “Al�ı” in terms of age and physiognomy. Because Santelli’s claim of “Al�ı” as Saletin (that is, Moroccan) proves dubious, the question of whether

to consider these two similar figures as North African or Turkish remains open. Both slaves bring to mind the captive in Titian’s Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto (Fig. 19), an unam- biguous representation of a Turkish prisoner. In any event, both represent light-skinned Muslims, whether Turkish or North African—a group that made up a majority of slaves in the local bagno. One heavy leg planted on the upper step of the lower ped-

estal and the other splayed out along its harbor face, the younger man sharply pivots his head upward, as if to suppli- cate the heavens above. Seen from directly in front of the monument, this figure’s body reads as a series of pinwheel- ing, cascading angles below narrowing into a muscular hulk above; from below its corner position, the broad and sweep- ing torso resolves into a soft and graceful profile capped by an unshaven tuft of hair and the back of the skull. Barely cov- ered by a cloth stretching across his genitals, he symbolizes both power curtailed (the familiar meaning of monuments involving slaves) and the physical majesty that built the city of Livorno. His struggle reads as simultaneously heroic and hopeless, his plea directed to a different faith than that of Ferdinando above, clad in his cross of St. Stephen. With their hands bound behind their backs and legs

splayed or contorted on the steps of the monument, each of

24 Gianlorenzo Bernini, Fontana del Moro, 1653–55, travertine and marble. Piazza Navona, Rome (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY)

23 Giambologna, Rape of a Sabine Woman, 1580–82, marble, detail showing the signature. Loggia dei Lanzi, Piazza della Signoria, Florence (artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author)

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the over-life-size slaves in the Quattro Mori suggests interiority, thought, sadness, and, importantly, life. Their sole attributes are their poses, their physiognomic features, and the very fact of their captivity. Compared to the stiff, immobile sover- eign surveying the harbor above, these robust figures, regis- tering as based on directly observed features, strongly signal that Tacca and his patrons saw this monument as communi- cating not just in the tradition of past art but also in the lan- guage of contemporary political and social conditions.

Although on their installation they may not have been intended as purely sympathetic, later generations under- standably took them to be the most meaningful aspect of the work, especially considering the role of slavery in Livorno. Even today, the four bronzes do not offer easy solutions to the viewer’s conflicted feelings. One striking aspect of the four slaves of the Quattro Mori is that there is no collective response—each figure makes his own appeal in different directions, without recognition of the others nor of the sover- eign above. Despite their monumentality (something that della Bella’s print emphasizes), they remain caught in their own personalized captivity. Nor do their poses evoke spiritual transcendence or ecstatic torment, as in Michelangelo’s Dying Slave or in Cigoli’s design for a similar monument. The slaves here remain much more painfully grounded. Yet what Tacca intended to signify as miserable servitude has come to look like commiseration. The slaves stand in for the teeming

galley crews imprisoned a thousand feet away, but because each of the bronzes is so personalized beyond the icono- graphic imperatives of slave figures, their torment reads as practically existential—a response not simply of being cap- tured by Tuscan galleys or the Knights of St. Stephen but a meditation on the conditions of defeated servitude itself. They call up such strong reactions in the viewer precisely because they resist conforming to the tradition. Especially in the context of early modern Livorno—a recently expanded city without a long history, filled with merchants, travelers, expatriates, and religious and political refugees—they reflected directly a large contingent of the population, those captured at sea and forced into service. Even if they wanted to (and there is little evidence they did), locals could hardly ignore the fact of slavery in the city; between those moving from ship to shore and those performing manual labor and others with or without irons circulating through the city, slaves were everywhere. Tacca certainly recognized that local viewership would see the bronze figures of the Quattro Mori surrounded by the real thing, and that the monument would loom large in the city’s own image. One final detail is worth noting. While Bandini signed his

effigy of Ferdinando discretely, Tacca prominently placed his signature on each of the Quattro Mori slaves on the metal cuffs binding his wrists (Fig. 27).129 On one obvious meta- phoric level, it is a tasty joke calling attention to their

26 Pietro Tacca, I quattro Mori, figure on the northeast corner, 1624–26, bronze, 98½ £ 68⅞ £ 53⅛ in. (250 £ 175 £ 200 cm). Piazza Micheli, Livorno (artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author)

25 Pietro Tacca, I quattro Mori, figure on the northwest corner, 1624–26, bronze, 98½ £ 78¾ £ 53⅛ in. (250 £ 200 £ 135 cm). Piazza Micheli, Livorno (artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author)

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fictionality: the bronze caster references his trade by signing the irons that bind his figures, separating out the materiality of flesh from metal, reminding viewers of the levels at play in his creation. But a cruel joke, too. Tacca’s obvious sympathy with the plight of his captives elsewhere curdles into its reverse; his name becomes aligned with those curtailing their power, binding the irons, and keeping these beautiful speci- mens in order. While Giambologna signed alongside a defeated Sabine’s genitals by carving his name into a rock (a similar metarumination on the sculptor’s medium), Tacca places his name on a symbol of control, in this case govern- mental control—much as slaves had to wear not only shackles but also clothing specified by the state as they circulated. Cer- tainly, this signature offers several levels of commentary, and like the monument overall, it carries mixed, sometimes con- flicting messages that seem even more pronounced to mod- ern viewers of the monument.

Most of the other traces we once might have had to visual- ize the bagno and the conditions of slavery in early seicento Livorno have disappeared—the slave prison no longer exists and the city today is largely a postwar architectural jumble. It is helpful to remember that for most of its early history the Quattro Mori spoke to a population of refugees, traders, foreigners, and, indeed, slaves, few of whom had deep roots in the city. In fact, it seems likely that Tacca and his Medici patrons conceived of the sculpture to imply sev- eral ideas at once: that Ferdinando’s legal interventions in Livorno had allowed many of the monument’s viewers to escape tyranny, at the same time that his patrolling of the seas had brought external threats under control through the capture of new slaves to serve the Tuscan fleet. Volterrano’s fresco (Fig. 18) illustrates that the Medici and the Knights of St. Stephen read it that way. Perhaps owing to the naturalism of the slaves on the base, however, that top-down reading was lost to subsequent viewers—or rather, the rendering of these particular slaves in this particular environment so oversteps the bounds of their iconographic roots that they inspire different questions about meaning and viewership, as General Miollis indicated. What other- wise might have been just one more triumphalist

monument of many becomes a way to reflect on social con- ditions in this port city, both for viewers of the early sei- cento as well as those of our own time.

Mark Rosen received his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and teaches the history of early modern art and cartography at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is the author of The Map- ping of Power in Renaissance Italy: Painted Cartographic Cycles in Social and Intellectual Context (Cambridge University Press, 2015) [School of Arts and Humanities, University of Texas at Dallas, 800 West Campbell Road, Mail Stop JO.31, Richardson, Tex. 75080, [email protected]].

Notes Parts of this essay were presented at early stages at the Sixteenth Century Soci- ety and Conference in Fort Worth (October 2011), the Renaissance Society of America Conference in Washington, D.C. (March 2012), at a scholars’ day for the exhibition Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore (January 2013), and at the USC–Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute Colloquium on Ephemerality and Durability in Early Modern Visual and Material Culture (Los Angeles, September 2013). My gratitude goes to all who organized and participated in those panels for helping shape the direction of this essay. For suggestions, comments, and invitations to present the work in progress, I would like to thank Steven Ostrow, Paul H. D. Kaplan, Stephanie Nadalo, Jessica Keating, Sean Roberts, Kirk Savage, Joaneath Spicer, The Art Bulletin’s anonymous reviewers, the Medici Archive Project (especially Director Alessio Assonitis), the Associa- zione Culturale Livorno delle Nazioni (particularly Matteo Giunti), and my colleagues in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

1. Prior to the first Napoleonic invasion of 1796, Livorno belonged to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, then under the rule of Ferdinand III of the house of Habsburg-Lorraine. Along with this letter, Miollis demanded a remarkable 150,000 scudi as a settlement for war-related damages. See Henri Aur�eas, Un g�en�eral de Napol�eon: Miollis (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1961), 68–75; and Giuseppe Piombanti, Guida storica ed artistica della citt�a e dei dintorni di Livorno, 2nd ed. (Livorno: Fabbreschi, 1903; reprint, Bologna: A. Forni, 2003), 34–35.

2. Sextius Alexandre François Miollis to the Municipio of Livorno, April 21, 1799, quoted in Piombanti, Guida storica, 432: “Un solo monumento esiste in Livorno ed �e un monumento della tirannide, che insulta l’umanit�a. Quattro sventurati, cento volte pi�u valorosi del feroce Ferdi- nando che li calpesta, incatenati al suo piedistallo, offrono, da trecento anni, spettacolo affliggente appena si mette piede sul porto. I sensi del dolore, dello sdegno, del disprezzo e dell’odio, devono,

27 Pietro Tacca, I quattro Mori, detail of handcuffs on the figure on the northeast corner. Piazza Micheli, Livorno (artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author)

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necessariamente, agitare ogni anima sensibile che ivi s’avvicini. Vendi- chiamo l’ingiuria fatta all’umanit�a. Compiacetevi, cittadini, d’ordinare che la statua della libert�a sia sostituita a quella di questo mostro. Con una mano spezzi le catene dei quattro schiavi, coll’altra schiacci, colla picca, la testa a Ferdinando disteso al suolo. Salute e fratellanza. Miollis.”

3. Erika Naginski, Sculpture and Enlightenment (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2009), 25–30, 167–68; and Anne Wagner, “Outrages: Sculpture and Kingship in France after 1789,” in The Consumption of Culture 1600– 1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (Lon- don: Routledge, 1997), 295–96, 302–3. Miollis’s proposal has much in common with one put forward by Jean-Claude Simonne during the Rev- olution to replace the Parisian monument to Louis XIV in the Place des Victoires, a work obviously inspired by the Henri IV prototype and fea- turing four captive figures at the base. See Simonne, Lettre d’un citoyen �a M. le pr�esident de l’Assembl�ee nationale sur l’enle�vement des statues de la place des Victoires (Paris: C. Volland, 1790), 5–6.

4. Jean Michel Massing, From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition: Europe and the World Beyond, vol. 3, pt. 2 of The Image of the Black in Western Art, ed. David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 195.

5. The Henri IV group was begun by Giambologna and, after his death, completed by his Florentine assistants—the horse and rider by Pietro Tacca, the slaves below by Pietro Francavilla (often known by his Flemish name, Pierre de Francheville) and Francesco Bordoni; see nn. 92, 93 below.

6. Cesare Venturi, “Il monumento livornese detto dei ‘Quattro Mori,’” Liburni Civitas 7, no. 5 (1934): 18. The trophies are visible in images of the monument from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (such as Fig. 8).

7. Anthea Brook, Pietro Tacca a Livorno: Il monumento a Ferdinando I de’ Me- dici (Livorno: Comune di Livorno, 2008), 32; and Piombanti, Guida sto- rica, 35–41.

8. On its restorations and the relocation of the monument, see Brook, Pie- tro Tacca a Livorno, 19; Giovanni Morigi, “Monumenti e bronzo sono un binomio inscindibile,” Percorsi Didattici 1 (1991): 8–15; Carlo Papini, “Relazione al Sindaco di Livorno sul restauro dei Quattro Mori opera del Tacca,” Arte e Storia 7, no. 30 (1888): 245–48; and Venturi, “Il monu- mento livornese,” 22–23. In addition to moving the monument closer to the harbor, the restoration campaign of 1888 replaced nearly three quarters of the stone in the original pedestal. At that time the plinth was raised by 4¾ feet (1.45 meters; the additions were made at the very bot- tom step and in the rectangular section just below Ferdinando’s feet) and eight slabs of red Campiglia marble were inserted on the base between the slave figures, replacing lighter-colored panels from the original design.

9. Brook, Pietro Tacca a Livorno, 14; Michael Cole, Ambitious Form: Giambolo- gna, Ammanati, and Danti in Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 34, 253–55.

10. See, for example, Francesco Bonaini, Memoria sopra il monumento inalzato al granduca Ferdinando I. in Livorno: Estratta dalla filza degli affari della dire- zione del R. Archivio Centrale di Stato in Firenze, anno 1855, e Relazione sulla presa di Bona, ed. Francesco Pera (Livorno: Raffaello Giusti, 1888); and Piombanti, Guida storica, 333–36.

11. Among the most important recent scholarship addressing the work is Brook, Pietro Tacca a Livorno; Jessica Mack-Andrick, Pietro Tacca: Hofbild- hauer der Medici (1577–1640): Politische Funktion und Ikonographie des fr€uhabsolutistischen Herrscherdenkmals unter den Grobherz€ogen Ferdinando I., Cosimo II. und Ferdinando II. (Weimar: VDG, 2005), esp. 101–66; and Ste- ven F. Ostrow, “Pietro Tacca and His Quattro Mori: The Beauty and Iden- tity of the Slaves,” Artibus et Historiae (forthcoming).

12. Edward Wright, Some Observations Made in Travelling through France, Italy, &c. in the Years 1720, 1721, and 1722 (London: Tho. Ward and E. Wick- steed, 1730), vol. 2, 374.

13. Stendhal, Journal, vol. 10, pt. 5 of Oeuvres compl�etes de Stendhal, ed. Henry Debraye and L. Royer (Paris: H. Champion, 1934), 112: “Ce la est bien peu ideal d’environner un prince de l’�eternelle image de la doleur”; and Rembrandt Peale, Notes on Italy (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1831), 245. See also Ostrow, “The Beauty and Identity of the Slaves,” for further historiography. Many travelers praised the bronzes’ technical quality and expressiveness; for example, John Raymond, An Itinerary Contayning a Voyage Made through Italy in the Yeare 1646, and 1647 (London: Hum- phrey Moseley, 1648), 25: “Before [the harbor] stands that best of moderne Statues, the Duke Ferdinand in Marble, and the Colosses of foure slaves under him, in brasse in divers Postures, so lively repre- sented, that if the Statuary could have fram’d a voice as well as those bodies, he might have conquerd nature.”

14. Anthea Brook, “From Borgo Pinti to Doccia: The Afterlife of Pietro Tacca’s Moors for Livorno,” in The Slave in European Art: From Renaissance Trophy to Abolitionist Emblem, ed. Elizabeth McGrath and Jean Michel Massing (London: Warburg Institute–Nino Aragno Editore, 2012), 166.

15. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ pi�u illustri pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. Gae- tano Milanesi (Florence: Sansoni, 1878–1906), vol. 7, 164.

16. As the project of the Julius tomb dragged on, Michelangelo’s references to servitude in his letters and poetry took on a further self-reflexive dimension and suggested a less top-down reading of the plight of the captives. See Deborah Parker, Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 98–101.

17. Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 8.

18. Piombanti, Guida storica, 12–14.

19. Cornelia Joy Danielson, “Livorno: A Study in 16th Century Town Plan- ning in Italy” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1986), 10.

20. Piombanti, Guida storica, 19.

21. Pisa received some of the same concessions in these early edicts. It is likely that Cosimo was responding to Pope Paul III’s invitation of Portu- guese Jews to Ancona, the papal port on the Adriatic coast, in early 1547, although few Jews came to Livorno until the 1590s. See Danielson, “Livorno,” 10–23; Elena Fasano Guarini, “Esenzioni e immigrazione a Livorno tra sedicesimo e diciassettesimo secolo,” in Atti del convegno “Livorno e il Mediterraneo nell’et�a medicea” (Livorno: U. Bastogi, 1978), 57–58; Giuseppe Laras, “I marrani di Livorno e l’inquisizione,” in ibid., 84; and Piombanti, Guida storica, 19.

22. Danielson, “Livorno,” 13.

23. Ibid., 18–19; and Ryan E. Gregg, “Panorama, Power, and History: Vasari and Stradano’s City Views in the Palazzo Vecchio” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2009), 265–66, 296, 363.

24. Danielson, “Livorno,” 43–44.

25. Ibid., 37; and Piombanti, Guida storica, 19–20.

26. Piombanti, Guida storica, 20–22.

27. Ibid., 20–21; Stephanie Nadalo, “Negotiating Slavery in a Tolerant Fron- tier: Livorno’s Turkish Bagno (1547–1747),” Mediaevalia 32 (2012): 274– 75; and Laras, “I marrani di Livorno,” 82.

28. “A tutti voi mercanti di qualsivoglia natione levantini e ponenetini, spag- nioli, portoghesi, Greci, todeschi, et Italiani, hebrei, turchi, e Mori, Armeni, Persiani, et altri saluto. . .” See Nadalo, “Negotiating Slavery,” 305 n. 2. Several handwritten copies of the edicts survive; see, for exam- ple, Ferdinando de’ Medici, “Livornina” manuscript, University of Penn- sylvania Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, Philadelphia, Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image, MS ljs379, dated June 10, 1593.

29. Laras, “I marrani di Livorno,” 89.

30. Piombanti, Guida storica, 23; and Fasano Guarini, “Esenzioni e immigrazione,” 60–62.

31. Among those who served in both capacities was William Davies, a Lutheran from Hereford captured by grand-ducal galleys while traveling aboard a mixed Turkish and Christian mercantile ship departing Tunis in 1598. He may well have aided in the construction of the Livornese bagno (slave prison) itself. Davies describes the first three years of his captivity spent working “chained in a Cart like a horse, receiving more blowes than any Cart-horse in England, our diet being bread and water, and not so much Bread in three daies as we might have eaten at once, thus we were used to go fortie or fiftie Carts together, being all slaves: our lading would be Sand, or Lyme, or Bricke, or some such like, and to draw it whither the Officers appointed us, for their buildings. . . .” See Davies, A True Relation of the Travailes and Most Miserable Captivitie of Wil- liam Davies, Barber-Surgion of London, under the Duke of Florence (London: Nicholas Bourne, 1614), chap. 4, fol. C[1]r.

32. Salvatore Bono, “Schiavi musulmani sulle galere e nei bagni d’Italia dal XVI al XIX secolo,” in Le genti del mare Mediterraneo, ed. Rosalba Ragosta, vol. 2 (Naples: Lucio Pironti, 1981), 839. There were some exceptions, however, notably Venice, where slaves (usually sub-Saharan Africans) could be sold in public, with the usual state regulations guiding the transactions; see Kate Lowe, “Visible Lives: Black Gondoliers and Other Black Africans in Renaissance Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly 66 (2013): 419–21.

33. Bono, “Schiavi musulmani,” 839.

34. Ibid., 840, 846; and Robert C. Davis, “The Geography of Slaving in the Early Modern Mediterranean,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37 (2007): 62. Many slaves also went to work in some other aspect connected to the construction or maintenance of the fleet.

35. The knighthood was approved by Pope Pius IV on February 1, 1562; see Katherine Poole, “Medici Power and Tuscan Unity: The Cavalieri di Santo Stefano and Public Sculpture in Pisa and Livorno under Ferdi- nando I,” in A Scarlet Renaissance: Festschrift for Sarah Blake McHam, ed. A. Victor Coonin (New York: Italica Press, 2013), 239–42.

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36. Ibid., 239–42; and Salvatore Bono, Corsari nel Mediterraneo: Cristiani e musulmani fra guerra, schiavit�u e commercio (Milan: Mondadori, 1993), 45–48.

37. Bono, Corsari nel Mediterraneo, 192; and Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 12, 73–74.

38. Bono, “Schiavi Musulmani,” 841–42; and Vittorio Salvadorini, “Traffici con i paesi islamici e schiavi a Livorno nel XVII secolo: Problemi e sug- gestioni,” in Atti del convegno “Livorno e il Mediterraneo,” 221. The actual number is probably greater than indicated by the official documents (which number 6,175 in those years). Salvadorini counts 10,115 known cases of captured slaves between 1568 and 1688, with the busiest activity by far concentrated between 1600 and 1620. That more than half of the slaves captured by Tuscan ships come during the years in which the bagno was built should indicate what a significant presence they had in Livorno during those years. The major campaigns were against Bône (present-day Annaba, Algeria) in 1607 and, in 1610, a coastal fort west of Algiers referred to in the documents as “Bischeri,” about which little is known today. The siege of Bône was regularly cited by Ferdinando’s court as one of Tuscany’s great contemporary military triumphs. See Camillo Manfroni, “La marina militare del Granducato mediceo, Parte II,” Rivista Marittima 29 (1896): 507 n. 1.

39. Lucia Frattarelli Fischer, “Il bagno delle galere in ‘terra cristiana’: Schiavi a Livorno fra Cinque e Seicento,” Nuovi Studi Livornesi 8 (2000): 71.

40. See, for example, the account of Davies’s capture in 1598 (A True Rela- tion, chap. 3, fol. B4v): “We were all shaven both head and beard, and every man had given him a red coate, and a red cap, telling of us that the Duke had made us all Slaves, to our great woe and griefe.” He also notes that while he was at sea as a galley slave his head and beard were shaved every eight to ten days. See also Frattarelli Fischer, “Bagno delle galere,” 71.

41. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, 59.

42. Naples had as many as twenty thousand slaves at any one time in the early seventeenth century. Malta also had a larger population of slaves than Livorno. See Davis, “The Geography of Slaving,” 65; and Nadalo, “Negotiating Slavery,” 278–79, 281.

43. Bono, Corsari nel Mediterraneo, 111.

44. Bono, “Schiavi Musulmani,” 846.

45. Ibid., 848–49.

46. The main architect and engineer involved with its building was Alessan- dro Pieroni. The date construction began is not exactly clear; a model had been prepared in May 1598, but work probably did not start until 1600 or so. The bagno was built partly along the northwest bastions of Livorno Vecchia, the remains of the city before Ferdinando I’s expan- sions. See Danielson, “Livorno,” 146–47, 150, 275; Giorgio Mandalis, “Quattro Mori e il Granduca: Per rileggere la storia di un monumento,” Erba d’Arno 99 (2005): 29; and Cesare Santus, “Il ‘Turco’ e l’inquisitore: Schiavi musulmani e processi per magia nel bagno di Livorno (XVII Secolo),” Societ�a e Storia 133 (2011): 453–54.

47. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, 13–15, 110. In the mid-seven- teenth century, there were six bagni in Algiers, nine in Tunis, and at least one large one in Tripoli, none of which survives.

48. Bono, Corsari nel Mediterraneo, 198.

49. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, 13.

50. Giorgio Vasari the Younger, La citt�a ideale: Piante di chiese (palazzi e ville) di Toscana e d’Italia, ed. Virginia Stefanelli (Rome: Officina, 1970), 182: “Si trovano molti Principi grandi (che tengono vascelli in mare, e che hanno stiavi) havere un’ luogo grande p. tenere schiavi mentre che i loro legni sono in porto, quale luogo si chiama comunemente Bagno, �o Serraglio, o Prigione di Schiavi, nel quale luogo sono fatti lavorare, tes- sere, e tutte le altre cose, che poi servano alla navicatione, de quali Bagni ne �e uno �a Malta, uno Algieri, et in altri luoghi. Per�o ne haviamo fatto una pianta d’uno �a n’ro capriccio no vi havendo mai visti nessuno. . . .” Vasari’s original handwritten manuscript is in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, cat. dis. 4529–94.

51. Vasari the Younger, La citt�a ideale, 182, describes a plan “pi�u dis- tinto, e comodo che si poteva, havendo p. i Forzati fatto uno stan- zone da p. se, et un’altro p. li schiavi, cos�ı p. i malati, e vecchi un’altro capacissimo nominato spedale. [E] se p. avventura vi fus- sino schiavi di qualit�a, �o di rispetto, anco p. questi haviamo fatto luogo distinto. cos�ı la casa p. il Capitano, e in s�u torrioni delle can- tonate haviamo fatto stanze p. le guardie, dovendosi simil luogo guardare come una fortezza, p. le quali guardie anco sopra le loggie si potranno bisognando fare stanze. Cos�ı haviamo distinto la cucina dalla cantina, e il luogo da riporre il biscotto, separato da quello delle legne, una fontana in mezzo mi ci pare necessarissima, no solo p. bere, ma p. potere lavare panni, ed altre loro cose.”

52. Ibid., 182: “�E per venire oramai alla fine di questo ragionamento, no h�a dubbio niuno che infinite altre piante si sariano potute fare p. case bot- teghe, alberghi, taverne e cose simili, ma bastino queste poche, p. no trascorrere in una infinit�a di minutie, p. architettore delle quali possono servire i muratori, i legnaiuoli, e gli scarpellini, oltre che no sar�a mal ve- runo il lasciare da far qualcosa aqualcun’altro, il quale sappia pi�u di noi, e da Virtuosi si accetti il buon animo mio, e il desiderio che ho di gio- vare �a tutti.”

53. Frattarelli Fischer, “Bagno delle galere,” 79–80.

54. Danielson, “Livorno,” 108; and Santus, “Il ‘Turco’ e l’inquisitore,” 453.

55. These details are drawn from the 1706 account of the Capuchin monk P. Filippo Bernardi da Firenze (hereafter P. Filippo), “Descrizione del bagno di Livorno,” in Curiosit�a livornesi inedite o rare, ed. Francesco Pera (Florence: Giusti, 1888), 242–44.

56. Ibid., 243: “Il Bagno non somministra che le due tavole pel riposo: chi poi ha il mezzo di potersi provvedere di qualche strapuntino, o mate- rassa, o almeno saccone di paglia, non vi �e ordine in contrario, che ne possa impedire l’esecuzione.”

57. Ibid., 243. Filippo notes that in addition the buonavoglie often received a small ration of meat, as well as a salary of ten lire per month, which he complained was often spent gambling.

58. Frattarelli Fischer, “Bagno delle galere,” 70.

59. Ibid., 80.

60. Nadalo, “Negotiating Slavery,” 287–88.

61. See, for example, Archivio di Stato, Florence, Scrittoio delle Fortezze e Fabbriche, 148, fol. F, in which the Posto del Bagno S. Antonio denotes a miniature chiesa in the middle of one wall. P. Filippo (“Descrizione del bagno,” 243) refers to the bagno’s large church as la chiesa grande comune and says it was dedicated to the Holy Cross.

62. P. Filippo, “Descrizione del bagno,” 244; and Piombanti, Guida storica, 339–40.

63. Bono, “Schiavi Musulmani,” 857–59.

64. Nadalo, “Negotiating Slavery,” 299; and Santus, “Il ‘Turco’ e l’inquisitore,” 454. Nadalo (320–21 n. 101) includes the 1689 testimony of the Capuchin friar Luca da Caltanissetta that describes the interior of the mosque, making clear that the authorities in Livorno allowed Mus- lim worship because the bagni in North Africa allowed Christians to practice their own religion: “[L]a Moscova dei Turchi . . . �e una piccola casa, nella quale i Turchi non entrano se non a piedi scalzi e ben limpi d’ogni sporchezza, in cui vi �e una catedra con due scale, il libro del suo Alcorano ed altri libri della sua legge, in una parte vi sta indornata una cappa, in un altra un trobante et altre coselle quali sono da loro adorati e quivi facciono i loro esercittii della loro maumettana legge. Questa muscova gli si permette perch�e anche i turch permettono a Christiani nei loro bagno il fare le loro segrete chiese.”

65. Frattarelli Fischer, “Bagno delle galere,” 83.

66. Ibid., 87.

67. P. Filippo, “Descrizione del bagno,” 242: “Intorno al cortile, ma non per tutto, sono stese molte botteghe fornite di varie cose commesti- bili da’ forzati e da’ turchi, i quali si aiutano come possono per gua- dagnar qualche cosa, vendendo tali robe all’altra ciurma, con pagar la pigione per�o al padrone Serenissimo. Anche dalla banda di fuori il bagno ha buon numero di simili botteghe, nelle quali vendonsi panni, scarpe, ferramenti, oppure sono accommodate per uso di barbiere, o di altre arti esercitate dagli schiavi turchi, da’ quali pure il Granduca ritrae emolumento.” See also Salvadorini, “Traffici con i paesi islamici,” 232–34.

68. Nadalo, “Negotiating Slavery,” 286.

69. P. Filippo, “Descrizione del bagno,” 242: “Tanto i turchi quanto le buo- nevoglie escono il giorno liberi per Livorno, aiutandosi a guadagnar la giornata per mezzo delle suddette arti o botteghe, e con partar colli di mercanzie, vender acqua per la citt�a, e fare altri servizi alle case dei parti- colari, dai quali ricevono infine la mercede delle loro fatiche. La sera poi a una cert’ora devon tutti costoro tornare a dormire nel Bagno, il quale viene assicurato con triplicate porte fortemente serrate, e fedel- mente guardate da persona libera, onorata, che addimandasi il custode del Bagno.” The rules concerning circulation described by Filippo had been greatly eased in the mid-seventeenth century, although previously many slaves had “bought” the right to circulate through bribery; see Nadalo, “Negotiating Slavery,” 294.

70. Nadalo, “Negotiating Slavery,” 294; and Salvadorini, “Traffici con i paesi islamici,” 231.

71. Danielson, “Livorno,” 204.

72. Nadalo, “Negotiating Slavery,” 303.

73. Frattarelli Fischer, “Bagno delle galere,” 80; and Santus, “Il ‘Turco’ e l’inquisitore,” 455. Piombanti (Guida storica, 339), writing in the late

54 A R T B U L L E T I N M A R C H 2 0 1 5 V O L U M E X C V I I N U M B E R 1

nineteenth century, describes it as being in a semiruined state, sur- rounded by the Via della Banca, Via dei Magnani, and Via della Rosa Bianca (the latter two streets were demolished in an early twentieth-cen- tury reconstruction of the area).

74. John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, rev. ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), 103, entry of October 21, 1644.

75. Giambologna designed all three marbles and had his workshop execute them. The Arezzo monument (Piazza Duomo) is similar in conception to the Livornese figure, while the Pisa statue (Piazza Carrara) is joined on its pedestal by a kneeling allegory of the city of Pisa, nursing two babies and looking up toward Ferdinando in supplication. See Brook, Pietro Tacca a Livorno, 5–6; and Cole, Ambitious Form, 34, 253–56.

76. On Cosimo’s images, see Kurt W. Forster, “Metaphors of Rule: Political Ideology and History in Portraits of Cosimo I de’ Medici,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 15 (1971): 65–103.

77. Ferdinando first approached the Roman sculptor Giovanni Caccini to make this statue but ultimately refused Caccini’s asking price. The commission was given to Bandini, a marble specialist trained in Florence by Baccio Bandinelli, in 1595, when he was in the service of Duke Francesco Maria II della Rovere in Urbino. He began work on this statue in 1597. See Charles Avery, “Giovanni Bandini (1540–1599) Reconsidered,” in La scultura: Studi in onori di Andrew S. Ciechanowiecki (Turin: Allemandi, 1994), 25; Brook, Pietro Tacca a Livorno, 13–14; Cole, Ambitious Form, 66–67; Ulrich Middeldorf, “Giovanni Bandini, detto Giovanni dell’Opera,” Rivista d’Arte 11 (1929): 515–16; and Eike Schmidt, “Giovanni Bandini tra Marche e Toscana,” Nuovi Studi 3, no. 6 (1998): 69.

78. The signature reads “JOH.ES BANDINUS FLORENTINUS, F. 1599.”

79. Danielson, “Livorno,” 200–201; and Poole, “Medici Power and Tuscan Unity,” 254. Although in bronze rather than marble, the work by Andrea Calamech (installed 1572) showed the prince in a theatrical pose and the billowing outfit of a courtier, one hand holding the baton of com- mand and the other gently fingering a sword whose point presses down- ward into the bodiless head of his defeated Turkish enemy.

80. Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio, Leone Leoni and the Status of the Artist at the End of the Renaissance (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2011), 5.

81. Although Charles V was not publicly exhibited until long after the Quattro Mori was installed, Leoni’s palace, the Casa degli Omenoni, and Fer- rante Gonzaga were well known in Tacca’s time. See ibid., 15–17, 25, 73– 76, 107–31; and Michael P. Mezzatesta, “The Façade of Leone Leoni’s House in Milan, the Casa degli Omenoni: The Artist and the Public,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 44 (1985): 233–49.

82. Brook, Pietro Tacca a Livorno, 14.

83. Ibid., 15.

84. Ibid., 19; and Venturi, “Il monumento livornese,” 32.

85. Brook, Pietro Tacca a Livorno, 15; Mack-Andrick, Pietro Tacca, 111; and Venturi, “Il monumento livornese,” 111.

86. The many other sculptors trained or assisted in the workshop in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries included the Dutchman Adriaen de Vries, the German Hans Reichle, and the Florentine Anto- nio Susini. See Filippo Baldinucci, Notizie de’ professori del disegno da Cima- bue in qua, vol. 5 (Florence, 1702), 355.

87. On Tacca’s early career, see Francesca Petrucci, “La formazione di Pie- tro Tacca: Dal marmo di Carrara al bronzo di Firenze,” in Pietro Tacca: Carrara, la Toscana, le grandi corti europee, ed. Franca Falletti (Florence: Mandragora, 2007), 23–39.

88. Simonetta Lo Vullo-Bianchi, “Note e documenti su Pietro e Ferdinando Tacca,” Rivista d’Arte 13 (1931): 142.

89. Ibid., 146–47, 153–54. In 1619, the duke of Savoy, Carlo Emanuele I, ordered an equestrian monument after Tacca had sent models from Florence, but the artist ultimately refused the invitation to move to Turin, or perhaps he was pressured by the Medici court not to serve a competing sovereign. Although there is some debate about the attri- bution, he may also have been involved in the monument of King Louis XIII of France in the Place Royale, a sculpture that, like that of Henri IV, was destroyed in the Revolution.

90. Baldinucci, Notizie, vol. 5, 356; and Dimitrios Zikos, “Giambologna’s Land, House, and Workshops in Florence,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistori- schen Institutes in Florenz 46 (2002): 389.

91. Brook, Pietro Tacca a Livorno, 20–21 n. 19; and Venturi, “Il monumento livornese,” 8.

92. Brook, Pietro Tacca a Livorno, 25; Vanessa Montigiani, “Frammenti dal monumento di Enrico IV,” in Franca Falletti, Pietro Tacca, 150–53; and Wagner, “Outrages,” 296, 309. Some fragments of Henri and the horse survive in storage at the Mus�ee Carnavalet in Paris; they consist of parts of the king’s right forearm (grasping a baton), left hand, and left leg, as well as a piece of the rear left hoof of the horse. A replacement horse

and effigy of Henri IV, reasonably faithful to the original Tacca bronzes, with some additions taken directly from the king’s death mask, were made after the Revolution by Fr�ed�eric Lemot and installed on the Pont- Neuf in 1818.

93. Brook, Pietro Tacca a Livorno, 24. On Francavilla (born in Cambrai as Pierre Franqueville), see Donatella Pegazzano, Il Giasone di Palazzo Zan- chini: Pietro Francavilla al Museo del Bargello (Florence: Giunti, 2002); and Stella Seitun, “Giambologna e Pietro Francavilla a Genova,” in Genova e l’Europa atlantica: Opere, artisti, committenti, collezionisti; Inghilterra, Fiandre, Portogallo, ed. Piero Boccardi and Clario Di Fabio (Milan: Silvana, 2006), 143–49.

94. Baldinucci, Notizie, vol. 5, 357: “Diciamo dunque, che il detto Cavallo per Francia bene accomodato in casse, fu in Livorno per l’imbarco il d�ı 30 d’Aprile 1613, ma noi tragghiamo da Lettere orig- inali di Francesco di Bartolommeo Bordoni Fiorentino Discepolo del Francavilla, e che seguitatolo in Francia vi fu dichiarato Scultore del Re, ed a cui anche tocc�o ad ornare di bei Getti la Basa stata fatta con Disegno del Cigoli, ove poi fu posato esso Cavallo. . . .” A few years earlier, Cigoli had also been involved, together with Gregorio Pagani, in drawing plans of the horse for Giambologna’s Cosimo I; see Cole, Ambitious Form, 245.

95. Brook, Pietro Tacca a Livorno, 35.

96. Massing, From the “Age of Discovery,” 195. Paul H. D. Kaplan, who has writ- ten extensively on the depiction of black-skinned Africans in European art, believes that the figure’s features do not conclusively suggest sub- Saharan origins (personal communication, August 2013). On French responses to slavery, see Gillian Weiss, Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).

97. Henri Sauval, Histoire et recherches des antiquit�es de la ville de Paris, vol. 1 (Paris, 1724), 236: “Ce gros cheval foule aux pieds les quatre parties du monde, represent�ees par quatre captifs de bronze, grands comme nature, & li�es aux quatre angles du pied d’estal; captifs qu’on peut appeller des squelettes, tant ils sont maigres & d�echarn�es, aussi ceux qui s’y connoissent soutiennent que s’il n’y en avoit point du tout, cela n’en seroit que mieux.”

98. See Alexandre Lenoir, Mus�ee des monuments français, vol. 4 (Paris, 1805), 130–31. Lenoir includes an inscription, originally intended for the mon- ument but apparently overruled by Cardinal Richelieu, that he claims to have found in an unnamed chronicle dating from the time of the mon- ument’s unveiling in the early seventeenth century and that identifies the figure as African.

99. Secretary Lorenzo Usimbardi’s letter, dated February 6, 1607, was once found in the Societ�a Colombaria of Florence but was destroyed during World War II. It is unclear whether the letter used Florentine dating (in which the new year began on March 25) and should thus be considered written in 1608 rather than 1607; on this point, see Veronica Carpita, “Postille ai monumenti seicenteschi con prigionieri a Parigi e a Livorno,” in Lo sguardo archeologico: I normalisti per Paul Zanker, ed. Fran- cesco De Angelis (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2007), 262–67. Before its destruction, the letter was transcribed by Niccola Ulacacci, I Quattro Mori: Opera stupenda di Pietro Tacca (Livorno: Meucci, 1874), 44: “Mandando S. A. [Sua Altezza] Pietro Tacha a Livorno per vedere uno stiavo di bella vita et havere comodo di formarlo con la cera senza danno alcuno . . . vuole et comanda S. A. che il Commissario delle Galere . . . glene dia comodit�a qual senza rischio di detrimento come sopra, li domander�a.” Carpita, 264, has discovered traces in a nineteenth-century chronicle of an undated letter by Ferdinando to Paolo Rucellai, who is described as “Provveditore Generale delle Galere della Religione di S. Stefano” (that is, in charge of the knighthood’s galleys). According to this note, Rucellai was instructed to allow Tacca to model the entire body of a “well-formed slave that in that time was in the Bagno of Livorno to then serve for the four bronze slaves on the statue of the Grand Duke in the Harbor [di dare comodo a Pietro Tacca scultore, che getti la maschera di tutto intero uno schiavo ben formato, che sia in quel tempo nel Bagno di Livorno per formarne poi i quattro schiavi di bronzo, che sono alla statua del G. D. nella Darsena].” This undated document does not specify Ferdinando as the grand duke sending this command, and since Rucellai died in 1626, it could have been written any moment up until the years of the work’s casting. A second indication that Tacca may have studied models from life before 1621 derives from the eighteenth-century chronicler Mariano Santelli (see n. 101 below), who claims that according to the notes of one “Capitano Santini di Livorno” (presumably from the early seven- teenth century), Tacca went to the bagno in 1617 to find models for the first two slaves. This is possible, but we know that work on the bronzes did not begin in earnest until after Cosimo II’s death in early 1621. How- ever one reads the dating of these visits or the monument they were intended for, they all carry the important suggestion from the period that Ferdinando wanted Tacca to study slaves from life with the inten- tion of portraying them on a high-visibility public monument, and hence that Tacca was expected not to rely simply on received

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iconography or traditional expectations in forming his slave figures. On these sources and some hypotheses concerning their meaning, see Car- pita, 264, 268; Mandalis, “Quattro Mori e il Granduca,” 35–36; and Ostrow, “The Beauty and Identity of the Slaves.”

100. Brook, Pietro Tacca a Livorno, 24–25, skillfully reviews the possible options, concluding (as I do) that the 1607/8 visit was unrelated to Tacca’s commission for the Quattro Mori, although he may have utilized those models over a decade later when the official commission arrived. Also worth mentioning regarding the initial modeling after real-life slaves are the four gesso figures in the Museo Civico Giovanni Fattori (previously the Villa Mimbelli) in Livorno, sometimes attributed to Tacca as preparatory studies although only two of the figures match fea- tures with the finished bronzes (see Emilia Bartolotti, “Bozzetto per i Quattro Mori,” in Franca Falletti, Pietro Tacca, 122–25). Brook (“Afterlife of Tacca’s Moors,” 171–73) has convincingly shown that, rather than serving in the process of making the Livornese monument, these gesso works are almost certainly related to G. B. Foggini’s later compositions descended from the Quattro Mori.

101. It is possible, and has been conjectured, that Tacca made further studies from life of Livornese slaves while installing the base in 1617. The source of this claim is the “Santelli manuscript,” a handwritten chronicle with entries by year written by the Augustinian friar Mariano Santelli, now in the Biblioteca Labronica in Livorno (“Mss. dello stato antico e moderno overo origine di Livorno in Toscana osia cronaca di Livorno di Niccola Magri frate romito agostiniano dal XVI secolo fino a tutto l’anno 1646, e fino a tutto l’anno 1770 fornita dal prete Mariano Santelli dottore in sacra Teologia”). As the title indicates, the manuscript has an unusual history; Santelli himself created it while editing a new edition of the sev- enteenth-century friar Nicola Magri’s Discorso cronologico della origine di Livorno in Toscana dall’anno della sua fondazione, fino a 1646 (Naples, 1647; edited and expanded by Santelli as Stato antico e moderno ovvero ori- gine di Livorno in Toscana, dalla sua fondazione, fino all’anno 1646, 3 vols. [Florence, 1769–72]). However, despite these titles, neither of the pub- lished editions covered anything past the mid-sixteenth century. The Santelli manuscript, compiled most likely about 1770 when the other editions were being edited, contains annual entries dating back to the late sixteenth century, with those entries prepared by Santelli in the late eighteenth century in consultation with primary and secondary docu- ments he found in the Livornese archives. It is unclear why the Santelli manuscript itself was never published, but it remains the source of some important and occasionally questionable commentary on the Quattro Mori and seicento slavery in Livorno. Part of the manuscript’s entry con- cerning the monument (Santelli manuscript, vol. 4, fol. 261; quoted in Venturi, “Il monumento livornese,” 8) is borrowed from the earlier text of Baldinucci (see n. 116 below), but Santelli believes that Tacca was already planning ahead to cast the slaves during the months in 1617 when he was working on the marble base: “Perch�e doveva esser questo colosso [Bandini’s Ferdinando I] corredato e ornato di quattro statue di bronzo rappresentanti quattro schiavi turchi, nudi, incatenati e seduti cadauno a uno de’ quattro lati del fusto o base, in esecuzione delle cose gi�a progettate in Firenze, a tal fine Pietro Tacca si porta, prima di partire per Firenze, nel ‘Bagno’ di Livorno a vedere e considerare da vicino, uno ad uno, tutti li schiavi turchi. . . .” No further documentary evidence survives to prove that Tacca made his studies of slaves beginning in 1617, but it is certainly possible, and some responsible scholars (such as Mack-Andrick, Pietro Tacca, 113) believe that work on the bronzes began as early as that year. While acknowledging that Tacca may have begun studies in 1617, I adopt a starting date of 1621 for the first pair of slaves since no official commission for the sculptural figures came before the death of Cosimo II in that year.

102. Tacca waited less than two weeks after Cosimo II’s death (on February 28, 1621) to make his proposal, leaving little doubt that he thought he would have better odds to get his idea approved under the new regime. See Venturi, “Il monumento livornese,” 9, with the text of Tacca’s letter (Archivio di Stato, Pisa, Archivio dell’Ordine di S. Stefano, 1120, Sup- pliche ed informazioni, fol. 20, parte 2a, c. 440), which Venturi claims is dated March 8, 1621 (Mack-Andrick, Pietro Tacca, 112, dates it two days later): “[I]n cambio della statua di marmo del Gran Duca Ferdinando, che si trattava di metere sopra la base delli schiavi che io fo per Livorno, io ci facessi la statua similmente di marmo della Religione di S. Stephano . . . in essecutione di che, vengo con questa mia a supplicare V. S. Ill.ma a farmi gratia di procurare da Lor A. A. detta resolutione, acci�o io possa dar principio al modello di detta Statua, e far cavare il marmo, et andare ad abbozarlo prima che venghino li caldi. . . .”

103. Brook, Pietro Tacca a Livorno, 16, offers several reasons why the Religione di Santo Stefano sculpture was rejected, including Tacca’s lack of experi- ence in marble and the recent criticism he had received from the knights for a proposed commission in the order’s church of S. Stefano in Pisa.

104. There has been some debate on which were the first two to be installed, descending from the unreliability of the Santelli manuscript (see n. 101 above). Brook (“Afterlife of Tacca’s Moors,” 166–67 n. 7) notes that the

older nude figure (referred to here as “Al�ı”) was definitely among the first pair. There is no conclusive evidence to identify the other figure installed at this time, but I here follow Brook, who believes the slave with black features is of a much higher quality than either of the other two remaining figures and must have been among the initial pair installed, making him (not the skyward-looking youth) “Morgiano.” Ostrow (“The Beauty and Identity of the Slaves”) concurs, based in part on the associa- tion of the world morgiano with a dark grape used in the production of wine, and also on the fact that Filippo Baldinucci, in Vocabolario toscano dell’arte del disegno (Florence, 1681), identifies the word “Moro” with black skin “come sono gli Etiopi.” I would caution that the language in Baldinucci’s vita of Tacca (notably the phrase “Schiavo Moro Turco,” as seen in n. 116 below) and in the Santelli manuscript remains too vague to draw definitive conclusions.

105. Brook, Pietro Tacca a Livorno, 16–17. The additions to the configuration of the base in 1622 (made by Tacca’s assistant Taddeo di Michele di Car- rara) indicate that Tacca had not yet received the commission for the bronze slaves when designing the marble base five years earlier. A draw- ing by the German sculptor Georg Petel of the older figure positioned in the southwest corner (Staatliche Museen, Berlin, inv. no. KdZ 9950) carries a date of August 1623, meaning that the first two bronzes were definitely on display by then.

106. Baldinucci, Notizie, vol. 5, 359; and Brook, Pietro Tacca a Livorno, 17. Bal- dinucci (ibid., 371) also names Tacca’s assistants in casting the monu- ment: Cosimo Cenni, Michele Lucherini, Cosimo Cappelli, Lodovico Salvetti, Bartolommeo Cennini, and Andrea Bolgi.

107. Brook, Pietro Tacca a Livorno, 38. Copies of those fountains, cast by the Fonderia Marinelli in Florence in 1956, stand a few blocks east of the monument among Livorno’s postwar construction in the Piazza Colonnella.

108. Ibid., 18; and Lo Vullo-Bianchi, “Pietro e Ferdinando Tacca,” 210–13.

109. The Santelli manuscript describes the contents of the trophies as “Manto Reale barbaresco disteso come per strato, il Regio Turbante, la scimitarra, l’Arco, il Turcasso, le Freccie, etc. . . .” (quoted in Brook, Pie- tro Tacca a Livorno, 22 n. 49). Santelli wrote this description before the trophies were destroyed.

110. Dietrich Erben, “Die Reiterdenkm€aler der Medici in Florenz und ihre politische Bedeutung,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Flo- renz 40 (1996): 337.

111. For an example of the legend of the work being made from captured weapons, see Giuseppe Vivoli, Annali di Livorno dalla sua origine sino all’anno di Ges�u Cristo 1840, vol. 3 (Livorno: Giulio Sardi, 1844), 478.

112. Malcolm Campbell, “Family Matters: Notes on Don Lorenzo and Don Giovanni de’ Medici at Villa della Petraia,” in Ars naturam adiuvans: Fest- schrift f€ur Matthias Winner zum 11. Marz 1996 (Mainz: P. von Zabern, 1996), 505–13. The bronzes also play a central role in a much later image romanticizing the moment of the monument’s unveiling, Anni- bale Gatti’s Ferdinando II de’ Medici Presenting Pietro Tacca to Vittoria della Rovere, a ceiling fresco (1874–75) in the Museo Civico Giovanni Fattori, Livorno. Here the statue of Ferdinando is barely visible, cut off at the ankle, while the ceremonial presentation of the artist and his work to the Medici sovereigns focuses attention entirely on the slaves. (A sec- ond, much smaller oil-on-canvas version by Gatti is in the collection of the Camera di Commercio, Livorno.)

113. Paul H. D. Kaplan, “Italy, 1490–1700,” in From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition: Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque, vol. 3, pt. 1 of The Image of the Black in Western Art, ed. David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 158–87.

114. Paul H. D. Kaplan, “Black Turks: Venetian Artists and Perceptions of Ottoman Ethnicity,” in The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750, ed. James G. Harper (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2011), 44–49.

115. Kaplan, “Italy, 1490–1700,” 107–10. The servant or slave in Laura Dianti seems to be the first surviving image of a serving person of color in an independent European portrait, although sometimes such figures appeared earlier in broader contexts (as in the oculus of Andrea Man- tegna’s Camera Picta in Mantua). See also Kate Lowe, “The Lives of Afri- can Slaves and People of African Descent in Renaissance Europe,” in Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, ed. Joaneath Spicer (Baltimore: Walters Art Museum, 2012), 14–19.

116. Baldinucci, Notizie, vol. 5, 359: “[Q]uivi ebbe facolt�a di valersi di quanti Schiavi vi avesse riconosciuti, de’ muscoli pi�u leggiadri, e pi�u accomo- dati all’imitazione per formarne un perfettissimo corpo, e molti e molti ne form�o nelle pi�u belle parti. Uno di costoro fu uno Schiavo Moro Turco, che chiamavasi per soprannome Morgiano, che per grandezza di persona e per fattezze d’ogni sua parte era bellissimo, e fu di grande ajuto al Tacca per condurne la bella figura, colla sua naturale effigie, che oggi vediamo; ed io che tali cose scrivo, in tempo di mia puerizia in et�a di dieci anni li vidi, e conobbi, e parlai con esso non senza gusto,

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benche in si poc’et�a; nel ravvisar, che io faceva a confronto del Ritratto il bello originale.” This passage also makes clear that Baldinucci (1624– 97) believed the commission for the four bronzes to have come in 1615. He was incorrect; as the letter to the Granduchesse Tutrici in 1621 makes clear, no work had begun on the bronzes until after that date. Regarding Baldinucci’s racial terminology, the terms Turco and Moro often were used interchangeably; here they are both used. In more tech- nical documents, such as the slave records of the Tuscan state, Turco refers to anyone from Ottoman territory in Europe and Asia (and some- times, though not always, Egypt), while Moro typically referred to Afri- cans, whether dark- or light-skinned. Those from Maghrebi lands, including present-day Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Morocco, were often indiscriminately placed into either category (see, for example, n. 117 below), although sometimes they were referred to specifically by their place of origin (di Algeria, di Tripoli, and so on). See Bono, “Schiavi musulmani,” 849; Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, xxviii; and Kaplan, “Black Turks,” 41–66.

117. On this source, see n. 101 above. Santelli (quoted in Venturi, “Il monu- mento livornese,” 8–9) further draws on and expands Baldinucci’s description of Morgiano, identifying him as a native of Algiers: “[E] finalmente [Tacca] prende l’idea e il modello del primo de’ due, da get- tarsi (perocch�e in due tempi fatti furono e fissati sotto il colosso) da certo Turco shiavo, nativo d’Algeri, di giovanile et�a, forte, ben piantato, meglio muscolato, insomma perfettissimo in ogni sua parte e di non comune altezza, detto ‘Morgiano’; e del secondo, da un robusto vecchio Saletino detto ‘Al�ı.’. . .” [Finally, Tacca took the inspiration and the model for the first of the pair (since they were made and attached to the base in two campaigns) from a certain Turkish slave called “Morgiano.” He was a native of Algiers, young in age, strong, well-built; in short, he was perfect in every way and unusually tall. For the second, he modeled from a robust older Saletin man named “Al�ı.”. . .]

118. Richard Lassels, The Voyage of Italy, or a Compleat Journey through Italy, vol. 1 (Paris, 1670), 233. This is echoed in a sonnet by the eighteenth-cen- tury poet Bartolommeo-Gaetano Aulla (in Else Lewy, Pietro Tacca: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Florentiner Skulptur [Cologne: Bachem, 1927], 107).

119. Jan Janszoon Struys, The Voiages and Travels of John Struys, trans. John Morrison, vol. 2 (London, 1684), 68. This interpretation lingers still; see, for example, Piombanti, Guida storica, 334–35: “Il Tacca venne a Livorno, dopo la conquista delle ricchissime galere, fatta nell’Arcipe- lago l’anno 1602, a prendere il modello dei pi�u belli schiavi; e dicono fosse un padre con tre figli, poi li fuse in bronzo adoperando i conquis- tati cannoni.” (After the conquest of the very rich galleys in the Archi- pelago in the year 1602, Tacca came to Livorno to find a model for the most handsome of the slaves. And they say of the sculpture that it was a father with three sons, and that Tacca cast them in bronze taken from the captured cannons.)

120. In the eighteenth century, Edward Wright (Some Observations, vol. 2, 342) noted, “Some imagine the four Slaves to represent four several parts of the Turkish Dominions,” while French playwright Victor Joseph �Etienne de Jouy (The Hermit in Italy, or Observations on the Manners and Customs of

Italy, vol. 1 [London, 1825], 232) claimed they represented allegories of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. On the various interpretations, see Ostrow, “The Beauty and Identity of the Slaves.” Brook, “Afterlife of Tacca’s Moors,” 165–91, discusses some later compositions by G. B. Foggini and his workshop that descend from the Quattro Mori, several of which were identified as referring to the continents.

121. Bono, “Schiavi musulmani,” 849–50. Some other port cities specified the origins or race of the slaves in more detail; a Neapolitan register from 1568 lists 210 slaves, comprising 61 Maghrebi (of whom four were black Africans), 132 “Turks” (meaning from Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, and Egypt), eight moriscos from Spain, and nine converts. The fact that the black Africans were listed with the Maghrebi is common, but the detail- ing of their number is more unusual.

122. Bono, Corsari nel Mediterraneo, 194–95; Chouki El Hamel, Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 145–52; and Ostrow, “The Beauty and Identity of the Slaves.”

123. Bono, Corsari nel Mediterraneo, 194–95.

124. Kaplan, “Italy, 1490–1700,” 95–99.

125. On treatments of black skin and physiognomy in the period, see Joa- neath Spicer, “European Perceptions of Blackness as Reflected in the Visual Arts,” in Spicer, Revealing the African Presence, 35–59.

126. Joseph Spence, Letters from the Grand Tour, ed. Slava Klima (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1975), 119.

127. Carlo Goldoni, La dalmatina, in Raccolta completa delle commedie di Carlo Goldoni, vol. 19 (Florence, 1829), 255–319. On this play, see Larry Woolf, Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 25–75.

128. The English traveler William Davies (A True Relation, chap. 2, fol. B3r–v) discussed ceremonies of adult male circumcision in his own account of captivity, casting it mostly in a positive light: “A Turke is Circumcised after this manner. The better Gentleman he is, the lon- ger he stayes afore he be Circumcised, but the time being come, then is he put upon a very faire white horse, being very costly attired, and before him goeth two or three hundreth by two and two in purple coates, bearing waxe candles in their hands, and after them followeth a great many playing on diffused Instruments making of a great noise, then followeth a Bull covered with very faire Arras, and his hornes gilded, and next rideth he that shall be Circumcised, with all his friends following, and thus he rideth to the place of Circumci- sion, where they cut off the foreskinne of his yard, naming of him Morat, Shebane, or Hosan, or some such like name: then will they take the Bull, and turne his head to to the East-ward, then cut his throat, saying, this day wee have done a good deed, then they cut the Bull in yeeces, and distribute it among his friends, and kindred, and so they returne home where they doe feast with great ioy.”

129. Mack-Andrick, Pietro Tacca, 118; Morigi, “Monumenti e bronzo,” 8–10; and Simonetta Taccini, “Monumento a Ferdinando I, detto dei Quattro Mori,” in Livorno: Progetto e storia di una citt�a tra il 1500 e il 1600 (Pisa: Nis- tri-Lischi e Pacini, 1980), 282. Tacca usually did not place his signature on the bodies of his figures but rather on some accompanying item; the monument to Philip III in Madrid, for example, is signed on the horse’s saddle.

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