Magnus Dux Etruriæ

Throughout the fifteenth century the Medici did not enjoy noble titles, the enormous fortune accumulated first by Giovanni di Bicci and then by Cosimo the Elder, had indeed handed power into the hands of the family but only de facto. With the accession to the Petrine throne of Giovanni, son of the Magnificent, things changed. The Medici Pope immediately formed an alliance with the King of France, ensuring the title of Duke of Nemur to his brother Giuliano, and that of Duke of Urbino, taken from the Della Rovere family, to his nephew Lorenzo. From the union between Lorenzo and a princess of French blood a single female was born, Catherine, destined by Clement VII, according to Pope Medici, to marry the future king of France. Catherine was the first of two queens of France to come from the House of Medici. In the meantime, in Florence, Alessandro, the Pope's illegitimate son, had assumed power with the title of Duke of the Florentine Republic, after a long siege of the city won thanks to the support of Emperor Charles V. In 1537, the death of Duke Alessandro at the hands of his cousin Lorenzino, since then remembered as Lorenzaccio, opened an institutional void filled with the appointment of eighteen-year-old Cosimo, the first exponent of the Cadet Branch of the dynasty to rise to power. The second duke of Florence proved to be anything but a maneuverable young man, having routed his opponents, Cosimo conquered Siena in 1554. Now, duke twice, Cosimo I was able to demand a new title that elevated him to a higher rank than all the others sovereigns of Italy. It was Pope Pius V who agreed and so, in 1569, Cosimo was appointed the first Grand Duke of Tuscany and solemnly crowned in Rome the following year by the Pope himself. The room houses the holographic reproduction of the grand ducal crown in its main evolutionary phases, the original no longer exists, the crown stolen at the end of the eighteenth century, dismantled and melted down. The large volume wanted by the Electress Palatine to pass down to posterity the history of the seven grand dukes of Tuscany, an account of the coronation ceremony of Cosimo I and two sixteenth-century engravings of that event, is preserved in the shrine. Finally, a French glazed ceramic crown dating back to 1530, the work of the Della Robbia family, attributable to the lost Madrid Castle that belonged to Catherine de' Medici's husband, King Henry II. On the left wall is an allegory of Florence, a copy of a fresco by Giovanni da San Giovanni, now lost, which was one of the first artistic commissions of the young Cosimo II. On the other hand, Ligozzi's sketch which was presented to Ferdinand I for the creation of one of the large blackboards to complete the Salone dei Cinquecento. The episode set at the court of Boniface VIII, enhances the Florentine reputation, and celebrates the grand duchy, depicted in the background as a woman on a throne among the other continents of the world.