R. J. W. Evans has characterized the early modern Habsburg Empire as “not a state but a mildly centripetal agglutination of bewilderingly heterogeneous elements,” and this conception of agglutination may also be extended beyond the core kingdoms and principalities of Central Europe. The early modern monarchy, especially following the abdication of Charles V in 1556, became a cousinly enterprise, not just in Spain and the Spanish possessions but also in Tyrol and Styria. Tuscany came late to the family agglutination, following the death of the last Medici grand duke, Gian Gastone, in 1737, when the principality fell to the house of Lorraine—that is, to Franz Stefan, who had married Maria Theresa in 1736. At Franz Stefan's death in 1765, Joseph succeeded his father as Holy Roman emperor and co-ruler with his mother in the family lands, but it was Leopold, the second son, who succeeded by “secundogeniture” as grand duke of Tuscany; he governed there for the next quarter century in what became perhaps the most exemplary demonstration of enlightened absolutism in Europe. There is no doubt that the two brothers, Joseph and Leopold as emperor and grand duke, respectively, between 1765 and 1790, must be understood as working in tandem on parallel enlightened projects, and there is a double portrait by Pompeo Batoni in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, dating from 1769, that strongly conveys precisely this sense of personal and political interrelation. The Habsburgs would in fact continue to reign in Florence right up to the unification of Italy in 1860, but the whole history of Habsburg Tuscany—indeed of the whole Habsburg presence in Italy—has tended to play a larger role in Italian historiography than in Habsburg historiography.

The 2020 volume Florence after the Medici: Tuscan Enlightenment, 1737–1790, edited by Corey Tazzara, Paula Findlen, and Jacob Soll, affirms the need to refocus on this historical subject, with the contributors frequently noting the long lapse in English-language historiography since Eric Cochrane's study, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527–1800, published in 1973. In fact, fundamental treatments of the eighteenth century date back to an even older generation: from Italy, Franco Venturi's Settecento Riformatore, and from Austria, Adam Wandruszka's Leopold II—both Venturi and Wandruszka born in 1914. It should be noted that while Leopold reigned only for two years in Vienna, he had a much longer and larger historical impact in Florence—under the name of Pietro Leopoldo. Furthermore, while the Habsburgs are often regarded as the enemies of Italian national unity in the national historical narrative, Pietro Leopoldo is generally celebrated, to this day, as a positive presence in Florence. Florence after the Medici focuses on both the absentee reign of Franz Stefan and then the very present reign of Leopold, demonstrating continuities between father and son, while there are even some bold hints of continuity dating back to the much-maligned reign of the last Medici grand duke, Gian Gastone, whose reign was dramatically chronicled by Harold Acton.

The introductory essay by Tazzara and Findlen uses the figure of Filippo Mazzei as a focus for appreciating the Tuscan Enlightenment, noting his role in England as a commercial agent (tutoring Gibbon in Italian for reading the Tuscan prose of Machiavelli) and as a friend of Jefferson in America (contemplating the introduction of Tuscan viticulture)—though, curiously, Mazzei's long and crucial enlightened role in Poland goes undiscussed. Renato Pasta provides an exceptionally important contribution on Leopold's never-executed blueprint for a Tuscan constitution, devised in the 1780s with his Florentine adviser Francesco Maria Gianni. The draft indicates that the grand duke contemplated the explicit limitation of his own absolute power with the establishment of local and regional representative bodies, an annual assembly in Florence; he looked to the idea of “natural freedom” and the principle of consent for new taxation—without ever using the word “citizens.” Pasta's excellent account of the hypothetical constitution is followed aptly by Emmanuelle Chapron's detailed account of the fully executed consolidation and opening to the public of libraries in Tuscany. She titles her contribution “The Politics of Libraries” and argues that the opening of libraries should be understood as an enlightened initiative “to transform subjects into sympathetic partners in a total reform of the grand duchy's social, economic, and religious foundations” (64). The libraries were thus envisioned as shaping a public that might become worthy of the constitution, and indeed the hypothetical local assemblies of Tuscany were paralleled by small-town libraries that opened during Leopold's reign. In a somewhat provocative epilogue to the volume, Jacob Soll suggests that Leopold's opening of libraries and museums to the public might be seen as “propaganda” (325), while his project of enlightened absolutism constituted not a forerunner of liberal politics but a “proto-police state” (330). The darker side of the Enlightenment thus receives its due.

In an intriguing Foucauldian essay, Rebecca Messbarger writes about Leopold's famous abolition of torture and the death penalty in 1786, in the spirit of Cesare Beccaria's enlightened text On Crimes and Punishments. Messbarger connects this new penal regime with a new scientific focus on the modern body as exemplified in the marvelous wax anatomical structures that were commissioned and displayed in the Museum of Physics and Natural History (known today as La Specola) that opened to the public in 1775. While the Medici collected art—for instance, the Hellenistic sculpture of the “Medici Venus” and Titian's “Venus of Urbino” in the Uffizi—Leopold's museum presented a wax Venus who demonstrated the anatomy of human pregnancy. As in the case of library books, so, according to Messbarger, the human body became an instrument for the enlightenment of the Leopoldine public. The new science museum absorbed the natural history collection of the Uffizi, and contributions by Heather Hyde Minor and Callum Reid explore the reorganization of the Uffizi art collection. They both observe a return to Vasari's sixteenth-century account as a guide for understanding a specifically Tuscan art history, thus giving the Uffizi a civic pedagogical role, while Reid further explores the sorting of the collection into geographical schools. Reid's is one of the essays that is most interesting for correlating Florence and Vienna because he considers comparatively the roughly simultaneous reorganization of the Habsburg collections in the Uffizi and in the Belvedere.

The volume includes contributions on hospitals and healthcare in Tuscany, on commerce in the Tuscan coastal port of Livorno, and on forestry in the grand duchy. The most fascinating piece, however, is Paula Findlen's brilliant exploration of the rediscovery of Galileo in eighteenth-century Florence. Beginning with his exhumation and reburial in the monumental tomb in Santa Croce in 1737 during the final months of Medici rule under Gian Gastone, the rehabilitation of his public reputation took place in the enlightened decades framed by Franz Stefan's reform of censorship in 1743 and Leopold's suppression of the Roman Inquisition in Tuscany in 1782—the Inquisition that had brought Galileo to his knees in Rome in 1633. The transfer of Galileo's remains involved cutting off some of his fingers and making them into relics of the Enlightenment, eventually placing them on public display (and they are still on display in the Galileo Museum in Florence). Findlen describes the complexities of the establishment of a documentary Galileo archive (at a time when his letters were being used to wrap slices of mortadella) and the writing of his life along with the republication of his writings. In 1775, the year of the opening of the Museum of Physics and Natural History, which included Galileo's instruments, Paolo Frisi's Elogio del Galileo was published with a dedication to Leopold. Findlen observes that such a dedication subtly paralleled Galileo's own dedication of the moons of Jupiter as Medicean stars, and her research helps us to understand, more generally, how the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century was incorporated into the new cultural and political context of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The volume as a whole enormously enhances our understanding of the eighteenth-century importance of the Habsburgs for the history of Florence, while also illuminating our understanding of Habsburg power and culture across the family's broader European domain.