The Venetian Senate on their part consented willingly to permit the ambassadors at Francesco's request to perform this ceremony in their name, but were quite awake to the same probability of error, and were anxious that their crowning of their daughter should be known to be their deed, and the dignity one of their bestowing. So the letter, by which they authorise Tiepolo and Michiel to comply with Francesco's wish enjoins, that in placing the crown on her head, "it shall be proclaimed in a loud voice, that it is in sign of her being a true and particular daughter of our Republic." And a second letter charges them to take care, that those words are so said "as to be distinctly heard by all around, and in such a manner that they be not drowned by any noise of trumpets or otherwise."[193]
But there was also another person in Florence, who pricked up his ears, and had a word to say in the matter, when he heard a talk of crowning going on. This was the Pope's nuncio, who protested that all crowning appertained to his master. And it was necessary to quiet him by pointing out and declaring explicitly, that what was proposed was no crowning of a Grand Duchess, but merely a token of the daughtership of St. Mark. And he also was anxious that this fact should be clearly avowed and understood.
Notwithstanding all this, however, many chroniclers contemporary and other, have written that Bianca was crowned Grand Duchess of Tuscany.[194] Perhaps the Florentine trumpets and shoutings contrived to make the words of the Venetian functionary inaudible despite his efforts to obey the senate and make himself heard.
The ceremony began on the appointed day in the great hall of the _Palazzio Vecchio_—the same hall in which Capponi had persuaded the Florentines to elect Jesus Christ for their king, and Savonarola had instructed the great council of the nation to abstain from debating, in order the more swiftly to act on his suggestion. In that famous old hall, once the very cradle of Italian freedom, and the heart of the popular life, a throne was built for the prince by right divine;—right truly and absolutely divine of those eternal laws, which make such princes the natural result of the lack of wisdom and worth, and excess of evil and unruly passions which had been exhibited in the councils of that council–chamber. The ungainly irregularity in the form of the enormous hall may have in some measure marred the symmetry of the upholstery magnificences. But Francesco and Bianca should have been well content to pardon any such eyesore. For the fashion all awry of that home of the old Republic, in which no wall makes a right angle with its neighbour, commemorates literally, as well as typically, the implacable internecine party hatreds of the Florentines.[195] And had that stone embodiment of the spirit of the old Italian commonwealths been able to be built straight, Florence would not have had that day to stand abject, vicious, and degraded to bow before a despot and his ... _cosa_.