The Seal of Peace

Paolo Penko reproduces the Seal of Peace of Florence

After centuries of oblivion, the seal of the Florentine Commune from 1429 to 1530, the last 100 years in which the city of the Lily experienced its glorious independence before surrendering, after a long siege, to the Medici and transforming itself from a free Commune into a Seignory, has been rediscovered, reconsecrated and relaunched to transmit its message of freedom and peace to the whole world, more topical than ever.

The seal, adopted in recent times by the decemvirs of peace and freedom as an extreme message in defence of the republican institutions and which disappeared forever from government documents after the end of the Republic, was discovered during research in the archives of a very old Florentine family – the Guadagni family – by a municipal councillor, the lawyer Anton Luigi Aiazzi, a passionate scholar of the history of Florence.

The seal appeared on a document containing a government measure dated 4 August 1505. The seal, used to authenticate public acts, shows a dove with open wings holding an olive branch in its mouth and between its legs another branch of the same plant, traditionally a symbol of peace. Around it the legend S. PAX ET DEFENSIO LIBERTATIS (SACRED OR HOLY PEACE AND DEFENSE OF FREEDOM).

In view of the universal relevance of the message, Mr Aiazzi immediately proposed that the Municipality of Florence should relaunch this glorious symbol, which the Florentine Municipality used 500 years ago to reaffirm the values to which the hopes of people all over the world are still directed, as an alternative to or in conjunction with the Fiorino d’oro.

The proposal was immediately accepted by Mayor Giorgio Morales, who had the seal reconstructed in precious metal in an old workshop in the town by a master goldsmith, Paolo Penko, as a testimonial message.

The seal was made by lost-wax casting and engraved by hand according to the best Florentine goldsmith’s tradition. With this initiative,” said the mayor, “Florence intends to bear witness to the continuity of its commitment as a city that works for peace and proclaims the values of freedom. The symbol will be offered to those political and cultural personalities who have contributed to the affirmation of these two great values with their commitment in every place.

During his recent visit to the USA, Morales presented a first copy of the seal to New York’s Mayor Giuliani. Another copy was offered to Gorbachev on the occasion of his visit to Italy.

A specimen of the seal can be found in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, which has a rich collection of civil, private and religious seals. Of particular interest is a group of nine objects on the same subject, a dove in flight holding an olive branch.

At number 509, a specimen is inventoried with the motto PAX ET DEFENSIO LIBERTATIS limited to a limited period and not repeated in the following production, which covers a period between the 15th and 17th centuries. The generic wording PACIS ET FINIUM TUTELA appears in fact to have been used during the Medici Principality as an outward symbol of a magistracy by then tamed to the demands of oligarchic power. Seal 509 was an expression of the “Conservators of the Law of Florence”, a republican magistracy instituted in 1429 and initially intended to oversee the oath of internal peace, as well as the regularity of administrative action.

In a short time, the primitive function was transformed into a control of the administrators themselves, until it became the guarantor of the rules of public law and the organ of judgement for crimes against the State. In the final stages of the Republic, this office also came to safeguard the legal orthodoxy of the State, transforming itself during the Grand Duchy into a simple bureaucratic verification. In the Lorraine era, the Magistracy of the Conservators was converted into the Office of the Censors, while retaining its ancient symbolic image.

This figure was momentarily abandoned in the early years of the Duchy and replaced with a generic icon of Justice (depicted with traditional instruments), later recovering the usual dove, accompanied however by a less liberating motto. A similar metamorphosis of content can also be seen in the famous republican seal of Hercules, which Cosimo’s iconography transforms into “Hercules and Antaeus”, i.e. the Force that annihilates irrationality.

The exemplar in question is mainly linked to the political guidelines of the first ‘whining’ chancellery, which took office at the top of the state in 1498. Domenico Marzi notes that this government ‘had to seek justice and peace […] with well-ordered laws, so that the good of all could be achieved’.

It was at this time that Machiavelli began his career in the Republican bodies as Secretary, sometimes delegated to undertake demanding missions abroad. The clear message of the seal is probably due to the direct influence of the great politician, the thinking soul of the Florentine Chancellery at this end of the 16th century: the concept of Liberty associated with the energy to defend it appears in fact central to the drafting of the “Prince” and evokes Machiavelli’s eloquent exhortation: “in order to preserve freedom, the people must keep their hands on it”. A concept on which the Secretary of the Florentine Republic would often return in the course of his political commitment, as is testified by the unpublished text of a speech he gave in front of the “Signori di Balia”, which concluded with these words: “Free Florentines, be in your freedom, to which I believe you will have the respect that those who were born free and wish to live free have always had”.

The triumphal entry of Giovanni de’ Medici, however, thwarted the political process of the previous period in 1512, until the marked oligarchic turnaround that ended in 1527 with the family’s new exile and the restoration of the broadest democratic guarantees. In this yearning for continuity, the Republic reproposed the motto PAX ET DEFENSIO LIBERTATIS, which was definitively abandoned in 1530 with the surrender of the city and its institutions.

However, the seal was donated to Senator Carlo Strozzi and assembled in a vast collection that included numerous symbols of ancient institutions and the ruling family. The exceptional material was organised according to scientific criteria by Domanico Maria Manni, who drew up a comprehensive catalogue in 1733. Inventoried under number 150, the specimen in question subsequently passed into the hands of Tommaso Gherardi and then into the Bargello collections from 1872, where it was classified by Pellegrino Tonini and Umberto Rossi. The museum’s curators thus joined the singular eighteenth-century scholar as fundamental pioneers of sphragistics.

In bronze, the seal has a perforated spool 65 mm high supporting at its extremities the circular typario in question, 45 mm in diameter. The motto S. PAX ET DEFENSIO LIBERTATIS is bordered internally and externally by a beaded fillet. At the other end is the wax seal, 25 mm in diameter and of more modest construction. A similar specimen is catalogued in the Roman museum of Palazzo Venezia.

No commentary on this discovery can be more incisive than that fragment of Heraclitus that says: “The people must fight to save the law as to defend the walls of the City”.

Text by Giancarlo Bianchi in Cronaca Numismatica n. 60