Magnifico (22 page)

Lorenzo himself was realistic about the day’s events. “[A]nd although I was not highly versed in the use of weapons and the delivery of blows,” he later recalled, “the first prize was given to me; a helmet fashioned of silver, with Mars as the crest.” As a warrior he had acquitted himself passably. More important, he had supplied the Florentine people with an entertainment they would not soon forget. While some may have complained that the event was rigged, most went away with a greater appreciation of Medici wealth and of their willingness to spend it on behalf of the city. On this day, at least, Lorenzo had earned much goodwill that he might soon be forced to draw upon.

LORENZO’S JOUST MARKED A SYMBOLIC END TO HIS
youth. Along with his armor and the silver helmet shaped in the image of the war god Mars, he put away the last vestiges of a life of irresponsibility and donned instead the plain robes denoting a man of substance in the republic. His grandfather had once remarked that a few yards of scarlet cloth were all it took to make a citizen, and Lorenzo now usually appeared in public in that quintessential uniform of the Florentine burgher. The part of romantic hero, the Prince of Youth, now fell exclusively to his brother, Giuliano, who could act the part with effortless grace.

A revealing, if obviously exaggerated, portrait of the two brothers and their very different personalities comes in Angelo Poliziano’s
Stanzas on the Joust of Giuliano.
Poliziano describes Lorenzo as a lovesick wretch whose pain can only be assuaged by writing verses to his cruel mistress: “For in starkest winter I have seen/him, his hair, shoulders, and face full of frost,/complain to the stars and moon of her, of us, of/his cruel fortune.” “Handsome Julio,” by contrast, is a natural hunter and an athlete, powerful on horseback and so “ferocious in the hunt that the woods seem afraid of him.” It is only with difficulty that Cupid turns him from these violent exertions to more tender passions. Of course these are romanticized portraits, but there is no doubt that Poliziano based his mythological fantasy on the real characters of two men he knew and loved, particularly since the contrast is confirmed by countless other contemporary sources. Unlike the introspective, melancholic, and cynical Lorenzo, Giuliano was an extrovert who played the role of the glamorous prince without ambivalence.

That Lorenzo regretted the passing of his youth is clear from his own poetry in which he revels in sensual pleasures even as he mourns their passing. “How beautiful is youth,” he wrote in his most famous Carnival song, “that quickly flies away. / He who would be happy, let him, / Since of tomorrow none can say.” Written after many years in which he was burdened by having to care for both his family and the state, these lines record his resentment at time stolen from him, at the devouring of irresponsible youth by the demands of adulthood. The hedonism of his nature was always clouded by mortal thoughts, as if he knew that the enjoyment of life’s carnal delights came at a cost.

For Piero, Lorenzo’s entry into adulthood could not come quickly enough. At twenty Lorenzo might have anticipated many more years of carefree bachelorhood, but this was not a luxury permitted the Medici heir. With the survival of the entire clan resting on his procreative powers and its fortune dependent on his political and financial skills, it was vital that Lorenzo establish himself immediately as a full-fledged member of the community.
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Not only would the upcoming union with the Orsini secure the Medici’s position among Europe’s ruling elite, but it was hoped married life would also serve as a steadying influence. A man with a family to care for was a man focused on the important things of life. It was marriage, above all, that marked the passage from youth to manhood, and though few expected the married man to completely discard the vices of his irresponsible adolescence, he was permitted to indulge in them only as long as doing so did not interfere with the crucial task of producing heirs and providing for their future.

It was Archbishop Filippo de’ Medici who broke the welcome news from Rome. “I know not where I shall begin in order to inform your Magnificence that I have today espoused the noble and illustrious Madonna Clarice degli Orsini in your name,” he wrote to Piero: “according to my opinion, a maiden of such physical gifts, appearance, and manners, that she deserves no other bridegroom than him whom, I believe, heaven has destined for her.” While it might seem strange that Lorenzo was not present at his own wedding, this was not unusual in cases where the bride and groom came from different cities. The espousal was a formal contract with the bride’s family, not to be confused with the wedding feast, which would be celebrated in the groom’s hometown. When Galeazzo Maria Sforza married Bona of Savoy, the wedding was “consummated” by Galeazzo’s half-brother Tristano, who ceremonially kissed the bride and climbed into her bed where they “touched one another’s bare leg…according to the custom.” A similarly quaint ceremony, with Filippo doing the honors, probably also solemnized Lorenzo’s marriage.

The legal niceties observed, Lorenzo’s new mother-in-law wrote to him: “How glad I should be to see you before sending my daughter, I cannot express, but I am sure the Magnificent Piero knows best…. At all events I hope you have the wish to know me and all your relations here.” But despite repeated pleas, Piero decided he could not afford to be without Lorenzo for any extended period. Instead, in May 1469, he sent a distinguished delegation of fifty citizens—led by Giuliano, along with his cousin Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, brothers-in-law Bernardo Rucellai and Guglielmo de’ Pazzi, and the faithful Gentile Becchi—to Rome to fetch Clarice and escort her back to her new home. By the beginning of June she had arrived in Florence, where she was lodged at the house of the merchant Benedetto degli’ Alessandri.

If Clarice had any concerns that this less-than-triumphal entry was a signal of Lorenzo’s continued indifference, the next few days allayed her fears. However tepid his feelings for his bride-to-be, neither he nor his parents would let such an important occasion pass without extracting the maximum propaganda benefit. A few days before the festivities were set to begin, the streets were crowded with columns of mules and carts bearing gifts from the principal towns, villas, and castles of Tuscany. “Calves 150,” recorded one anonymous chronicler. “More than 2000 couples of capons, geese, and fowls. Sea fish and trout in large quantities. I do not yet know how many. Sweet things in abundance; sugar plums as big as artubus berries, almonds, pine-seeds, sweetmeats.” This bounty from the cities and territories subject to Florentine rule was an impressive display of the power of the Medici name.

On Sunday morning, June 4, Clarice, dressed in a white, hooded gown sparkling with gold thread and riding Lorenzo’s horse Falsamico, proceeded from the Alessandri palace to the Via Larga, accompanied by trumpeters and fifers along with thirty matrons representing the leading families of Florence. As she dismounted before the palace, decorated with tapestries and awnings displaying the Medici and Orsini crests, a live olive tree was hoisted into the palace through a second-story window to serve during the feast as a symbol of abundance and fertility.

The marriage festivities, though not officially a public occasion, managed nonetheless to embrace the entire city. During the three days of banqueting more than a thousand people passed through the doors of the palace, though there were limits to the Medici’s hospitality: “In the house here, where the marriage feast was, every respectable person who came in was at once taken to the ground-floor hall…. The common folk were not invited.”

For those not fortunate enough to be allowed inside, there was plenty to see on the streets surrounding the palace. The eating, drinking, and dancing spilled out onto the Via Larga, where a platform had been set up to accommodate the overflow guests. For the most part the weather cooperated, allowing the family to seat the crowds in the open air, though a sudden downpour on Monday turned expensive silk and brocade gowns, worked on for months, into damp, unsightly rags—much to the delight of those censorious moralists who felt that Florentine women spent too much money on their clothes and far too much time before the mirror.

Most Florentines of the better sort clamored to be included on the guest list, but the honor could also have its drawbacks. Alessandra Strozzi recounted how her daughter-in-law, the attractive Fiametta, had been repeatedly importuned by Lucrezia Tornabuoni to attend, but had tried to excuse herself on the grounds that she had recently given birth. “She doesn’t want to go,” Alessandra wrote to her son Filippo, “first because you’re not here and also because if she does go we’ll have to spend several hundred florins. I must tell you that they are having a lot of brocade gowns and robes made, and we’d have to have them made for her as well, and she doesn’t have much jewelry.”

Others, however, were only too happy to make it inside the palace where they could gawk at the damask-covered tables piled high with roasts, trays of sweetmeats, marzipan, jellies, and sugared pine nuts. Donatello’s bronze
David
served as the centerpiece of an elaborate refreshment stand with four huge copper vessels filled with iced water and wine ladled out by a team of liveried attendants. In the adjacent garden, where Donatello’s
Judith
stood as a model of female virtue, Clarice dined with fifty maidens chosen for their beauty and grace. Older matrons, less able to withstand the June sun, dined in the loggia above at tables presided over by Lucrezia.

Much of the information on Lorenzo’s wedding comes from an anonymous chronicler who heard it, he tells us, from “Cosimo Bartoli, one of the principal Directors of the Festival, particularly as regards Sweetmeats and sugar-plums, and also what I saw myself.”
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Despite the five banquets spread over three days, served up on gleaming silver and glittering crystal and staffed by an army of servants, musicians, and entertainers, Lorenzo’s wedding was in fact deliberately understated. “[T]here was never more than one roast,” the chronicler noted approvingly. “I think it was done…as an example to others not to exceed the modesty and simplicity suitable to marriages.” Given the opulence he describes, such a comment might strike one as facetious until one considers other fifteenth-century banquets that rivaled the worst excesses of pagan Rome.
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In fact, Lorenzo’s wedding was a relatively low-key affair. Particularly when foreigners were present, Florentines went out of their way to demonstrate their republican austerity. When Galeazzo Maria Sforza stayed at the Medici villa at Careggi in 1459, for instance, he was particularly struck by the fact that Giovanni, Cosimo’s younger son, did not dine with him but waited on tables, and that after dinner Lucrezia herself joined some local peasant girls to perform a charming rustic dance. Foreigners often misunderstood the Florentine taste for simplicity. Years later, when Lorenzo’s son-in-law Franceschetto Cibo paid a visit, he was insulted by the frugality of the repast; Lorenzo was forced to explain that far from being an insult, this meant he was to think of himself as a member of the family.

The Medici were always most successful when they maintained the proper balance between ostentation and simplicity. Everyone knew they could have done more, and appreciated the reserve that paid homage to their communal traditions. The wedding was elegant but not excessive; in distributing alms they were generous, but never to the point that their generosity could be construed as a demagogic attempt to purchase the loyalty of the masses.

But if none could fault them in the way they conducted the ceremonies, there were many who grumbled that they had erred in their choice of a bride. On Tuesday morning, as Clarice brought the festivities to a close by attending Mass in San Lorenzo, the populace awoke to the uncomfortable fact of a foreign bride in the
Palazzo Medici
. Her simplicity of manner and modesty of demeanor could not conceal the fact that she was the daughter of a haughty, aristocratic, and, most damning of all,
foreign
family; the Orsini name would be a constant reminder of the Medici’s dynastic ambitions. Years later, when considering a match for one of his own children, Lorenzo remarked, “It would be a burden and a danger to me if I were to contract a marriage, so contrary to custom, with great lords and men, whose condition in life is quite different from mine.” Guicciardini later attributed the arrogance of Lorenzo’s firstborn son to his “bastardized” blood that made him “too insolent and haughty for our way of life.” Who among the prominent families attending the banquets at the Via Larga could have failed to conclude that none had been judged good enough to furnish a bride for the Medici son? To even the most loyal of followers, the snub must have left a bitter taste that no amount of sweet wine could wash down.

At the time, however, Piero and Lucrezia appeared well pleased with the match. Of more immediate concern was Piero’s steadily declining health. Wracked by pain in his joints, he was now barely able to lift himself from his bed. Foreign ambassadors and leaders of the
reggimento
who shuttled back and forth between the
Palazzo della Signoria
and the
Palazzo Medici
now openly prepared themselves for a future without Piero.

Foremost among the supporters of the regime, and a man who over the years had built a following second only to Piero himself in the government, was the sixty-five-year-old Tommaso Soderini, whose loyalty in the crisis of 1466 had earned him a place at the Medici leader’s right hand. Known as a man of ability, but also disliked by many for the ruthlessness with which he exploited his position for personal gain, his voice would carry enormous weight in the period of transition.
*
Would he stick by the Medici as he had done in the past or would he follow the example of men like Luca Pitti, Dietisalvi Neroni—or even his own brother, Niccolò—whose pent-up ambition had burst forth after the death of their leader?

As the torpor of the Tuscan summer gave way to the bustle of fall, time for the harvest of the grape and olive, Piero’s hold on the affairs of state began to slip. The “absent senator,” once consulted on every important matter, was largely sidelined as the more vigorous members of the
reggimento
jockeyed for position or tried to squeeze out one last florin of profit before Piero’s death threw everything into confusion.