Magnifico (12 page)

AMONG THE PAPERS COLLECTED AT THE STATE ARCHIVES
of Florence is a document in Piero’s hand setting down the costs associated with his father’s funeral: twenty-five
braccie
*
of cloth in mourning black for Lorenzo and Giuliano; another thirty for Contessina, while his wife, Lucrezia, required only fourteen, along with two veils. Nothing was too insignificant to be set down, including the ten
braccie
of black woolen cloth for each of Cosimo’s four slave girls (one of them, perhaps, the mother of Cosimo’s illegitimate son, Carlo). It details such trivial expenditures as 43
^1
/2
lire for wax candles and additional outlays to pay for thirteen small torches to be carried by priests attending the body. The neat columns in which expenses were parsed to the last soldo offer a revealing glimpse into the mind of the man who would now lead the government of Florence. Piero was a Florentine merchant through and through, and the frugal, orderly habits of the species showed even in moments of great emotional turmoil. These qualities could prove to be a virtue, as they were during his father’s lifetime, when his organizational skills were placed in the service of a regime that had at its head a shrewd and charismatic leader. But in times of crisis simple competence was not sufficient.

After three decades of Cosimo’s rule there was a restlessness among the populace, a desire for change that was held in check only by fear of the chaos change might bring. Cosimo had ruled the city well but at the expense of the people’s cherished liberties. The always well-informed Alessandra Strozzi noted that “this death has given many of the citizens some new ideas about how the land should be governed,” innovations that could come only at the expense of the Medici and their cronies.
*

Whatever their political affiliation, all Florentines could agree that one age had come to an end and another was about to begin. Some found this prospect disconcerting, while others saw in Cosimo’s passing a golden opportunity to restore republican institutions that had long been supressed. A typical representative of this latter group was Marco Parenti, who, after admitting that his native city was rarely more peaceful or more prosperous than it had been under Cosimo, concluded that “despite this, upon his death there was universal rejoicing, such is the love and desire for liberty, because it seemed to them that they were under subjugation and servitude in government and that his death would set them free.”

It was not, however, from modest merchants like Parenti that Piero had most to fear. These small-time merchants and artisans could not hope to wrest the government from the grasp of the narrow directorate that had grown up around Cosimo. The ranks of the disenchanted had recently been swelled by a general economic downturn brought about largely by Turkish advances in the Mediterranean and the subsequent disruption in international trade. Many businesses went under; prosperous merchants saw their capital vanish, while their employees, barely scraping by in the best of times, were forced to beg or to starve. That the causes of the economic downturn were beyond the control of anyone in Florence was beside the point. The ruined and the hungry are never the most dispassionate judges of their circumstances, and in their suffering they turned against those in power. Piero was the most obvious target of the people’s wrath; protestations that he, too, was hurting were met with derision, and when he announced (possibly on the advice of Dietisalvi Neroni) that his own losses would force him to call in many of the loans his father had made, that laughter turned to outrage.

The greatest threat to the Medici, however, came from among those
principali
whom Cosimo had lifted from obscurity to the heights of power, but who, forgetting what they owed the family, now hoped to supplant them. Only an alliance between the disenfranchised many and the discontented few would be sufficiently powerful to drive the Medici from their perch—though, once this was accomplished, it was not at all clear whether men like Marco Parenti and Luca Pitti could agree on anything else. It was in an attempt to effect just such an alignment that the city’s religious confraternities became the rallying point of secret cabals. In interludes between prayer and the singing of hymns, men plotted strategy and debated the future of the republic.

Piero was hard pressed to halt the momentum for change. His first task as the presumptive head of the
reggimento
was to lay to rest its former leader. The manner in which he orchestrated Cosimo’s funeral reveals not only his cautious nature but an understanding of the public mood. Now was not the time to offend his fellow oligarchs by a lavish public display; modesty and understatement would soothe bruised egos and win him much needed friends. It had been his father’s dying wish, he announced to the world, “to be buried without pomp or show” in the family’s private crypt in San Lorenzo, wishing “neither more nor less wax torches than were used at an ordinary funeral.” He airily declined any special consideration from the government, since, for all his services to the republic, his father was merely a private citizen. Though Machiavelli later claimed that all the citizens of Florence poured out onto the streets to follow Cosimo’s coffin, eyewitnesses describe a much more modest affair. On the second day of August 1464, accompanied only by the priests and friars from the churches and monasteries he had patronized and a few close relatives and friends, Cosimo was lowered into his unpretentious tomb beneath the tribune of San Lorenzo.

No native-born Florentine would have viewed this understated affair as a sign of weakness, any more than he would have regarded a grander spectacle as a guarantee of strength; Medici power was often most effective when least visible. “[Cosimo] refused to make a will and forbade all pomp at his funeral,” Lorenzo later recalled. “Nevertheless all the Italian princes sent to do him honor and to condole with us on his death; among others H. M. the King of France commanded that he should be honored with his banner, but out of respect for his wishes our father would not allow it.”

Piero could expect to ride the swell of sympathy for a short while, but it was clear that the struggle for power could not be long delayed. Thus it was more important than ever that Lorenzo be ready to take up his role as First Citizen of the Republic. Among Medici partisans Lorenzo was now referred to openly as “the hope of the city,” suggesting both the promise they saw in the boy and their less than sanguine expectations for the sickly Piero.

While Piero was referred to as “the absent senator,” a man rarely seen but whose opinion needed to be canvassed on any important matter, his son was increasingly the public face of the regime. Lorenzo took responsibility for many of the ceremonial functions that were critical to maintaining the family’s prestige. In 1465, while Lorenzo was out of town on an important diplomatic mission, Piero wrote to him, “I have consulted with the citizens here, and they all agree I must receive the princes in our house on their return, and the
Signoria
has commanded me to do so: I obey willingly, but it would have taken much trouble off my hands had you and Guglielmo [de’ Pazzi] been here; however, we will do the best we can.” Lorenzo had the gift for social occasions that his father lacked; throughout his life he would be a master at staging brilliant spectacles that enhanced his reputation for magnificence and added luster to the Medici name.

Increasingly, Lorenzo and Giuliano became the center of a society of boisterous adolescents who imparted to the regime a youthful tone, much to the chagrin of the conservative elite, who thought they brought shame to the city. All those who wished to be close to the center of the action flocked to the Medici heir. To be a member of Lorenzo’s
brigata
was to enjoy a privileged place in the city; to be seen in his company was as good as credit in the bank. The various Medici villas were the site of frequent gatherings of young men brought together to hunt or to indulge in less strenuous pastimes. Braccio Martelli records a visit in the spring of 1465 to the villa of Lorenzo’s reputed mistress, the beautiful Lucrezia Donati, where she and the young men of his
brigata
passed the time listening to the music of the famous lutenist known as “the Spaniard” and dancing the
gioiosa,
the
chirintana,
and the
moresca.
It is a scene straight out of Boccaccio, filled with good cheer, good food, and ripe sensuality. On this occasion a certain decorum was maintained until one unnamed youth, undoubtedly under the influence of too much wine, emerged from Lucrezia’s chambers dressed
al travestito
in one of her gowns, a performance that sparked much juvenile hilarity.

Even after he had succeeded his father as head of the family and of the republic, Lorenzo’s youth and inexperience were a cause for concern. “Lorenzo was young,” wrote a visiting French diplomat disapprovingly, “and he was governed by young men.” The loyal Marsilio Ficino hinted that Lorenzo had perhaps come too far too fast, suggesting at one point that the opposition he faced was due to the envy always aroused by any display of “youthful virtue.”

It was not, however, an excess of virtue that troubled the elderly men who usually ran things in Florence. “[H]e delighted in facetious and pungent men and in childish games, more than would appear fitting in such a man,” scolded Machiavelli. Wild behavior that would hardly have been noticed in his companions generated gossip and reflected poorly on the regime. At one point Alessandra Strozzi complained that while her own exiled son could not return to the city, despite a good word put in on his behalf by the king of Naples, Niccolò Ardinghelli, cuckolded husband of “Lorenzo’s lady,” Lucrezia Donati, magically gained approval on short notice from the
Signoria
. “Perhaps,” she concluded bitterly, “it is better to have a pretty wife than the prayers of a king.” Such blatant favoritism tended to confirm suspicions that the Medici were beginning to see themselves as royalty rather than as citizens.

While the Medici’s enemies played up Lorenzo’s faults, their friends praised him as a prodigy of wisdom and virtue. Encomiums from Medici partisans, like Nicolò Valori, who concluded that Lorenzo “was worthy of being included among those rare miracles of nature,” must be taken with a grain of salt, but these words found a curious echo even among those with no reason to love him or his family. “No one even of his enemies and critics denied that he had a brilliant and outstanding mind,” declared Francesco Guicciardini.

Intriguing evidence of Lorenzo’s growing reputation comes from Alamanno Rinuccini, a man who outwardly acquiesced in the Medici ascendancy but prayed in secret for their destruction in the belief that the family had usurped the government of his beloved republic.
*
Like Marco Parenti, Rinuccini idealized a past that was never as democratic as he believed while exaggerating the despotic tendencies of the age in which he lived. Rinuccini denounced Lorenzo because he believed a republic simply could not contain a man of such stature and vaunting ambition. “Lorenzo was endowed by nature, education and training with such great genius and foresight that he was in no way inferior to his grandfather Cosimo, certainly a most able man,” Rinuccini wrote in his secret memoirs. These are words that could have come from the pen of Valori himself. But Rinuccini goes on to form a very different conclusion from the same facts:

To be named a Caesar in a culture filled with would-be Brutuses was disconcerting, even if the accusation was only whispered in private. Learned Florentines had long meditated on the career of the Roman general while drawing opposing lessons from the tale of his meteoric rise to the height of imperial power and his catastrophic fall. A millennium and a half after his death the story of his triumph and violent death at the hands of Brutus and his co-conspirators still aroused passions. Dante, for one, had placed Brutus in the lowest circle of hell reserved for betrayers, but other humanists continued to revere the tyrannicide as a political martyr. As an old-style republican, Rinuccini clearly belonged to this latter school of thought, and events would show he was not above advocating violence against those he regarded as betrayers of the people’s liberty. That he, and at least some of his bookish colleagues, should already be comparing the young Florentine to the Roman dictator foretold disaster.

In Rinuccini’s eyes Lorenzo’s native abilities combined with his hereditary position to make him doubly dangerous. These suspicions were only strengthened by the manner of Lorenzo’s upbringing in which Rinuccini detected a concerted effort to invest the young man with a prestige unsuitable to a simple citizen of a republic. He and other Medici critics were alarmed by the transformation, slow but inexorable, of the citizen-ruler, first among equals, into the uncrowned prince of the land.

There was, in fact, a conscious strategy on the part of Medici partisans to place before the public an image of a man whose unique status was justified by his native genius. In Medici propaganda he was the paragon of the virtuous citizen. If he could not be king he could at least be
il Magnifico,
a man who used his immense wealth for the greater good and who embodied all the virtues and talents of the ideal gentleman. It was a point picked up by Savonarola, the Dominican monk who in later years became the Medici’s most relentless opponent. Savonarola certainly had Lorenzo (among others) in mind when he wrote, “[T]he tyrant needs to show himself superior in everything…in small things, as in sport, in conversation, in jousting, in horse racing, in doctrine and in all other things…he seeks to be first; and whenever he is not able through his own powers he seeks to through fraud and trickery.” Lorenzo’s gifts were real, but Savonarola had hit upon an important fact of Italian despotism in the fifteenth century and of Medici authority in particular: without legitimacy built on hereditary title enshrined in law, the would-be despot needed to project a self-confident image thoroughly at odds with the insecure underpinnings of his power.