Dr Donatella Lippi calls it a ”terrible problem”. She and other researchers who have spent the past 10 months prising open the tombs of one of Europe’s most illustrious families, the Medicis of Florence, have got more than they bargained for.
They have found the remains of eight children they cannot place on the family tree. Worse still, some of the bodies appear to have been switched around or muddled up over the centuries.
The resulting confusion is making yet more difficult an already immense and challenging undertaking that is shining light into the recesses of the Renaissance.
The aim of the project, which reached the end of its first phase last week, is to build up a picture of the lives, and deaths, of the members of a family that ruled Florence for more than 300 years and funded many of Italy’s greatest artists.
Lippi, a lecturer at the University of Florence, said it could be decades before the last conclusions are wrung from the evidence being discovered. Last week, team members received their latest shock when they opened the tomb of Filippino, son of Grand Duke Francesco I, who ruled Florence from 1574 until 1587.
”We know, from historic evidence, that Filippino was four years and nine months old when he died,” said the leader of the project, Dr Gino Fornaciari. ”But what we found were the remains of a one-year-old child. Now, there is a margin of error. But it is only plus or minus four months. So, clearly, it was not the body of Filippino.”
But who is, or was, it? The same question can be asked of bones found in another eight tombs, most of them in a previously secret crypt discovered below the Church of San Lorenzo last July.
”It cannot be ruled out that at least some of these children were illegitimate,” said Lippi, the team’s historian.
Fornaciari, a lecturer at the University of Pisa, said he expects that some of the mysteries surrounding the crypt will be cleared up when the team creates a ”DNA map” of the Medicis at a later stage in the project.
”It was always going to be done, but now it has become even more important,” he said.
But Lippi is sceptical that DNA tests could provide all the answers. They might be able to show which children were born of which parents, but they cannot distinguish between siblings without documentary evidence that, in some cases, might not exist.
”You have to remember that, in earlier times, the rate of infant mortality was extremely high,” she said.
Visual and radiological examination of the remains has shown some of the apparently hard facts about the Medicis to be untrue.
Francesco’s predecessor, Cosimo, was said by his doctors — and thus by historians — to have been crippled by gout. In fact, Fornaciari and his fellow palaeopathologists have established that he suffered from a form of arthritis called diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis, or Forestier’s disease.
Two of Cosimo’s children were rumoured to have met violent ends. Yet no trace of a violent death was found on the remains of either.
Another legend, yet to be disproved, has it that Francesco and his second wife, who died within a short time of each other, were poisoned by his brother and successor, Cardinal Ferdinando.
But the wife, a Florentine noblewoman called Bianca Cappello, does not have a tomb in the church of San Lorenzo and, according to some versions, her body was thrown into a common grave.
As for Francesco himself, according Lippi, an earlier researcher threw away the most vital clue.
”His body was exhumed in 1947 by an anthropologist. Being an anthropologist, what interested him was the shape of the skull. So what did he do? He took away the scalp.
”Arsenic residues end up in the nails and hair. But it would be difficult to find any in the four hairs we found left in Francesco’s tomb.”
One of the most tantalising puzzles of Florence’s history looked like remaining a mystery forever. But, just in the past few days, Dr Lippi said, she has found a document that could help to solve it.
”This document suggests that Bianca Cappello was not buried in the Medici chapels, nor in a common grave. And it is trustworthy.”
It indicates that, until the 19th century, a tomb elsewhere — for obvious reasons, Lippi will not say where — bore a plaque with Bianca Cappello’s name.
”It could be that she still has her hair,” she said.
The making of a Florentine dynasty
he Medici family held power in Florence and much of Tuscany for more than three centuries. Florence, the capital of Tuscany, was one of the greatest cities in Europe from the 11th to the 16th centuries, and birthplace of the Renaissance.
Coming from an obscure background, the Medicis slowly gathered immense wealth as merchants and bankers, and through marriage they established unions with the major houses of Europe. The genealogy of the clan is complex owing to many offspring and the random brutality with which members disposed of each other by assassination.
The family produced three popes (Leo X, Clement VII, and Leo XI), two queens of France (Catherine de’ Medici and Marie de’ Medici), and several cardinals of the Catholic Church.
Though a republic, Florence was in reality a tight-knit oligarchy with Lorenzo (Cosimo’s grandson) as its uncrowned head. In 1469, at the age of 20, Lorenzo (Lorenzo il Magnifico) became head of the Medici clan. Under his control, Florence prospered, becoming the most important city-state in Italy and reputedly the most beautiful city in all of Europe.
Florence’s cultural blooming was accompanied by great economic prosperity and expansion, reaching a climax in the 16th century.
Under the Medici family in the 15th century, many of the greatest names in Italian art flourished, including Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Donatello and Brunelleschi and, in the 16th century, Leonardo da Vinci. — Guardian Unlimited Â