Magnifico (10 page)

Lorenzo’s observance was not merely a case of social conformity (and political expedience) but was guided by a deep, if sometimes unconventional, spirituality. A profound religious anxiety comes through in his writing, which reflects not the certainty of conventional piety but the struggle of a man trying to reconcile his spiritual longing with his skeptical intellect. “The soul is only avid for the good that yields the God we cannot know,” he wrote in “The Supreme Good,” revealing the kind of doubt that has always plagued rational men who thirst for communion with the divine.

Faith in Lorenzo’s case went hand in hand with a streak of anticlericism, something he shared with many Florentines who had learned from bitter experience that the Church, and especially the pope in Rome, could be a formidable and unscrupulous adversary. “Do not meddle with priests, who are the scum of the earth,” wrote the Florentine patrician Gino di Neri Capponi, “in matters either of money or of the Church…. The divided church is good for our commune and for the maintenance of our liberty but it is contrary to the good of the soul.”

The fact that the two central Italian powers were neighbors did not make them friends. On the contrary: disarray in the Papal States gave Florence a free hand in central Italy; a united, expansionist papacy, however, meant cramped horizons for the republic, a fact of life that often brought Florentines into conflict with their spiritual father.
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Something of this anticlerical attitude can be detected in an anecdote recounted by Angelo Poliziano involving Lorenzo’s brother, Giuliano. Once, so the poet recalled with relish, when Giuliano was informed that the pope and his entourage were passing on the street, the six-year-old, apparently unimpressed, replied, “Let him pass, I’m going to shit.”

Lorenzo reserved some of his harshest gibes for priests and learned from firsthand experience that those who professed to speak for God were no better, and often a good deal worse, than the run-of-the-mill sinners whose confessions they heard. In his satirical poem “The Symposium,” many of the drunks who populate the city are men of the cloth (up to and including the bishop of Fiesole), and in his lecherous tale “Giacoppo” a young man’s efforts to cuckold an old Sienese merchant are aided and abetted by a Franciscan monk.

As Lorenzo entered his teenage years he impressed those around him with his talents and driving energy. Described by one family friend as “growing rapidly in all directions at once,” Lorenzo continued to excel in all matters of the mind and body. This was an age that prized the well-rounded man more than the specialist: excellence, honor, and virtue were the attributes that marked the noble spirit, and Lorenzo’s parents had reason to believe that he possessed those qualities so necessary to inspire loyalty in others. He was, however, still too young to take his place among the sober, elderly gentlemen who ran the government of Florence. And given Piero’s health it was unlikely he would attain that age before he was called upon to take up a position of responsibility. His evident abilities and accomplishments would have to compensate for his lack of years, earning him the respect of those who were inclined to doubt the competence of youth. Lorenzo had already made a good start. He was not only conversant with the literary classics—crucial weapons to be deployed in any debate in the
Palazzo della Signoria
—but also in those other skills the mastery of which were so important to a young nobleman: manly arts like riding, the handling of arms, and archery, as well as such gentler pursuits as dancing and playing the lyre.

Lorenzo and Giuliano were both avid sportsmen. Giuliano in particular was a fine athlete, compensating for an intellect that could not match his brother’s. With his easy grace, winning personality, and natural athleticism, Giuliano soon won the nickname “The Prince of Youth,” a title that Lorenzo, with his growing responsibilities and wide-ranging interests, was all too happy to cede to his younger brother.

Lorenzo’s passion for, and knowledge of, all things equestrian was legendary. A number of letters from him survive whose main purpose is to procure for him the finest horses for his stable: “Our Lord the King has ordered two fine horses to be sent to your Magnificent Lorenzo,” reported a Neapolitan count, “and says if he wishes for others he is to say so, for finding that he takes pleasure in them, the King intends to keep him supplied.” As the lord of Florence, his stable of racehorses became famous, but his affinity for these animals began early. He preferred when he could to care for them himself, though a full-time staff was also always on hand. His chief groom, Apollonio Baldovini, has left a vivid description of Lorenzo exercising his four horses in the cold morning air. It was later said of his most famous racehorse, il Morello, that it would refuse food from any hand but his.

During these years, Lorenzo’s rangy frame began to take on muscle, his physical presence to take on a new authority. “Lorenzo was of above average height,” Valori records, “broad in the shoulders, his body solid and robust, and so agile that he was never second to anyone.” He was not without flaws, which included not only his homely face but his weak eyesight and an almost complete lack of the sense of smell. The latter defect Lorenzo dismissed with a jest, declaring that “for this he was much obliged to nature, since among those odors she offered there were far more that offended than delighted the senses.”

His homeliness, however, did not make him less attractive to those of both sexes. His charisma was, perhaps, only enhanced by his famous temper. As generous as he was to his friends, those who opposed him could expect to face the withering blast of his rage. One such storm was witnessed by the Milanese ambassador when, following a diplomatic setback, the young leader of Florence “showed himself in a temper, such as I have never seen in one of his high standing.” His was a personality of lights and darks, of fiercely passionate friendships and equally passionate hatreds. He could be loyal to a fault, protecting those who had done little to earn it, while pursuing those who had turned against him with vindictive thoroughness.

Many of the more conservative elements in the city complained that Lorenzo and his circle of friends strutted about the city as if they ruled the roost, raising a ruckus and paying little respect to their elders. Not all of this was the spontaneous exuberance of youth. Indeed there was a conscious attempt by Cosimo and Piero to build around the young Medici heir and his brother something of a cult of youth. Allowing these adolescents a greater role in the affairs of state was one way to counteract the influence of more entrenched elites by creating a class of men loyal to and dependent on Medici favor.

But it is clear that the circles in which Lorenzo traveled were not necessarily of the sort to bring credit to his family. Two of his closest friends, his traveling companions on his trip to Pistoia and fellow members of his
brigata,
were Braccio Martelli (seven years his senior) and Sigismondo della Stufa, sons of Medici neighbors in the
gonfalone
of the Golden Lion. Martelli in particular seems to have been his companion in many a disreputable escapade. “My dear Lorenzo,” Braccio wrote to his young friend, who was away in Rome to meet with the pope, “I recommend myself to you, and I encourage you to receive with devotion all those pardons, and beg that you send along a small portion, however much you think would be sufficient penance for the sins we have committed together.”

Though Martelli does not elaborate, it is likely that among those sins were those “unnatural” sexual acts for which Florence was notorious throughout Europe. Humanist schools and religious confraternities were often rife with sin, and homosexual encounters, even assaults, were common in the back alleys of Florence.
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Lecherous older men arranged trysts with boys who sold their bodies to the highest bidders in the Via tra’ Pellicciai (where the furriers had their stalls). Then these youths, with money in their pockets, headed to the taverns and brothels near the Old Market, where they whored and gambled through the night, stumbling home to bed as the sun rose above the Arno. St. Bernardino of Siena paints a portrait of the Florentine upper classes in which parents turned a blind eye to, if they didn’t actually encourage, their children’s misdeeds: “You don’t make your sons work in a shop, nor do they go to school to learn any virtues. Instead you send them out in a
giornea
[a richly appointed tunic] with their long hair and revealing hosiery, and they go around polishing the benches with their falcons and their dogs on leash; they’re good for nothing but lusting with sodomites, shameful acts, indecent talk.” This effeminate caricature does not exactly fit the young Lorenzo, a robust, athletic and rough-and-tumble boy not likely to be found posing coyly on a bench, but it is also improbable that he remained immune to habits that were common among Florentines of all classes. In fact the names of both Martelli and Luigi Pulci turn up in court records of the Officers of the Night, the officials who attempted, without much success, to curb this “abominable vice.” Some of their letters to Lorenzo hint at feelings that were more than platonic.

To conclude from this suggestive evidence, however, that Lorenzo was a covert homosexual who concealed his true nature beneath a more conventional lifestyle would be a mistake.
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There is ample evidence for Lorenzo’s sexual relations with women, both in and out of marriage, including some lurid testimony from Martelli’s own letters. But the larger issue is that the term “homosexual” is an anachronism when applied to men of Renaissance Florence. Florentines occasionally celebrated relations between those of the same sex, though more often such acts were condemned as contrary to God and nature, and those apprehended could be brutally dealt with. Antonio Beccadelli’s obscene book of verses,
Hermaphroditus
—dedicated, interestingly enough, to Cosimo, who was said to have read it with pleasure—praised in impeccable Latin meters the joys of both heterosexual and homosexual lust. Often homosexuality was considered little more than a youthful indiscretion, a rite of passage like visiting a prostitute or getting drunk and learning moderation from the ensuing hangover. Sodomy—which included homosexual as well as other illicit sexual activity—was a vice produced by unbridled sensuousness, a shameful indulgence like gambling or keeping a mistress. It reflected poorly on the character of those incapable of controlling their sexual impulses, but it did not distinguish the practitioner in any fundamental way, save that of virtue, from his more conventional peers. It was acknowledged that some men became so attached to this particular vice that they refused to take a wife or, if they did, failed to do their duty by her, but these were the exceptions and their sin was not so much that they were of a different, perverse nature but that they failed to avail themselves of the sole licit means society provided to satisfy their appetites.

The probability that at one time or another Braccio Martelli, Luigi Pulci, or Angelo Poliziano was Lorenzo’s lover should take its place alongside the better documented liaisons he had throughout his life with women, which included consuming passions and numerous casual encounters. A rounded picture of Lorenzo as a young man reveals that alongside his precocious sociability he pursued his pleasures with almost reckless abandon. Like most males of his class and time, Lorenzo saw no need to confine his sexual activity to the approved bounds of holy matrimony. Nor, indeed, was Lorenzo very different in this respect from either his father or grandfather, both men of sterling reputation in their private lives who nonetheless each fathered an illegitimate child with a slave girl. In Lorenzo’s story “Giacoppo,” he declares, showing a certain familiarity with the subject, that mature women often make the best lovers “because when they are younger they are most often filled with shame and of little spirit; when they are past this age…they have cooled to the point that they have no need of lovers.”

As both Gentile Becchi and Braccio Martelli attest, Lorenzo was not above frequenting the seedier locales where sex of all variety was for sale, and the names of at least some of his various mistresses seem to have been common knowledge among Florentines. Even when he was older his reputation for licentious behavior sometimes cost him the respect of important men. At one point, when Lorenzo was already a married man and ruler of Florence, Gentile Becchi felt it necessary to reprimand him for “going out at night wenching and engaging in buffoonery that shames those who must have dealings with you the following day.”

Emotional if not overtly sexual bonds played a role in the formation of the tight-knit circle of poets, artists, and scholars that grew up around Lorenzo. “If you were with me,” Luigi Pulci wrote to Lorenzo while he was away in Venice, “I should produce heaps of sonnets as big as the clubs they make of the cherry-blossoms for May-day. I would recite such things that the sun and the moon would stop in their orbits to hear them, as they did for Joshua…. Then I say to myself: ‘My Lorenzo is not here—he who is my only hope and refuge.’ Only this holds me back.” As in ancient Athens, whose combination of democratic institutions and creativity served as a model for many Florentine intellectuals, male bonding was encouraged by educational inequalities between the sexes. Even in progressive Florence there was a pervasive misogyny—shared by Lorenzo himself, despite his evident admiration for his mother and lasting friendships with women of real intellectual attainment—that encouraged friendships among men that were often richer than those they forged with the opposite sex.
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But no matter how intimate, most friendships were marked by the same attention to status and power as all other relationships. There was no one in Florence who could afford to consider himself Lorenzo’s equal. Letters from friends like Luigi Pulci and Braccio Martelli express a deep attachment on their part that Lorenzo rarely returned. Lorenzo, glamorous, charming, brilliant, and, above all, powerful, was never the seeker but always the sought.