Magnifico (39 page)

In Poliziano’s tale, one in which the day’s events are but the thinnest excuse for a flight into realms of fantasy, Lorenzo is cast as the lover, still pining for his cruel mistress Lucrezia and pouring his heart out in verse, while “handsome Julio” cares for nothing but feats of arms and of the hunt. “And you know,” Cupid himself tells the assembled gods,

Though the tournament took place on a chill January morning, the poem floats on the breath of Arcadian groves filled with fragrant blossoms and populated by wood nymphs. Poliziano’s narrative bears little resemblance to contemporary Florence but seems to have been conjured while dreaming in Lorenzo’s library surrounded by the works of Ovid. It is the same gossamer world evoked by Botticelli’s most famous paintings,
Primavera
and the
Birth of Venus
, both of which drew at least some of their inspiration from lines in the poem.
*
Both poem and paintings, in turn, owe their inception to the learned conversations held by Lorenzo in Careggi or his city home, led by the mystical philosopher Marsilio Ficino and with the bust of Plato, their spiritual and intellectual father, looking down approvingly.

With Giuliano’s tournament, at least as it has come down to us through Poliziano’s verses, the classical strain within the Florentine Renaissance is sung most sweetly. Rarely does the God of Jews and Christians intrude upon this idyll, much less any Christian piety. Lorenzo and those brilliant poets, scholars, and artists with whom he liked to surround himself had not rejected Christianity for paganism—the emotional meditations on Christ’s passions and the Virgin Mary that have come down to us from the various confraternities attended devotedly by Lorenzo and his circle belie this simplistic notion. But their infatuation with the art and literature of the pagan world and admiration for its breadth of intellectual inquiry and joyous sensuality led them to reject a narrow version of Christianity in favor of one that was expansive, inclusive, and, frankly, replete with contradictions.
*
In retrospect, this seems like a golden moment before the tragic events of the following years, as unreal a time as it was inspired, as beautiful as it was fragile. But intruding on this idyll is the first premonition of darker days to come. “The air seems to turn dark and the depths of the abyss to tremble,” Poliziano writes near the end of the unfinished poem:

ON THE MORNING OF DECEMBER 26, 1476, GALEAZZO
Maria Sforza awoke from a troubled sleep in the forbidding castle of Porte Giova. Shaking off the effects of a tormented night, he called to his stewards of the wardrobe, who helped him into an ornate doublet of crimson and white (the Sforza heraldic colors) that he was to wear while attending Mass at the Church of Santo Stefano.
*
On this day, whether by design or through carelessness, the duke neglected to put on the armored breast-plate he usually wore beneath his tunic. It was a rare lapse in a man for whom personal safety was something of an obsession. Perhaps he had succumbed to a fatalistic streak. Duke Sforza, like most Renaissance princes, was as likely to place his fate in the hands of his astrologers as to depend on the practical benefits of hard steel. Unlike Lorenzo, whose carelessness for his own safety bordered on irresponsibility, Sforza’s usual behavior might be described as paranoid but for the fact that it reflected the real circumstances under which he lived: he insisted that any well from which he might drink be kept locked at all times, and on his travels he was accompanied by a bodyguard of fifty mounted crossbowmen and fifty foot soldiers. The atmosphere of the ducal court was always thick with rumor and intrigue; many of his ancestors had met violent deaths within the walls of their castles, and the current duke had no wish to uphold this particular family tradition. Even his own flesh and blood was suspect. Some whispered that he had poisoned his own mother, and less than a month earlier Sforza had sent two of his brothers, Lodovico and Sforza Maria, on some obscure mission to France, in part because he feared they might be plotting against him.

Thus it was surprising that on this particular morning he went out unprotected and with only a small contingent of armed guards. His retinue this cold December morning contained mostly foreign ambassadors and a handful of courtiers, most of whom grumbled at the long cross-town journey to the church in the biting wind. Whether one is inclined to believe the reports of various gloomy portents, the duke had every reason to be out of sorts. The generally unhealthy atmosphere of the ducal court had recently grown even more toxic, a situation for which Sforza had only himself to blame. In addition to the cloud of suspicion that normally hung over his intimates, he had alienated many of his friends by seducing their wives, daughters, and sisters. Sforza’s uncontrolled libido managed to offend even in an age not easily shocked. It was not that he kept a mistress, the Countess Lucia—for whom Sforza had begged of Lorenzo a gift of a famous ruby in his possession—a situation that most would have regarded as normal. Less easy to dismiss were the sexual escapades Sforza was in the habit of indulging in, up to and including rape. The incessant preying on respectable girls and women—and, it was rumored, handsome young men—offended even the most jaded sensibilities. He himself confessed to a friend that his greatest sin was “lust—and that one I have in full perfection, for I have employed it in all the fashions and forms that one can do.” But if Sforza regarded his own vices with amused tolerance, others were less forgiving. One father went so far as to accuse the duke publicly of turning his daughters into common whores. To make matters worse, his taste for luxuries he could not afford, much of it provided on credit from the Medici bank in Milan, had thrown the state finances into turmoil. Nor was this fiscal irresponsibility balanced by any notable successes in war or diplomacy. In short, Galeazzo Maria Sforza had done little to win the loyalty of his people while managing to antagonize those who were closest to him.

It was a sorry decline for a young man who had begun with such promise. When Pope Pius II had first met him, the “handsome youth was not yet sixteen, but his character, eloquence, and ability were such that he exhibited a wisdom greater than that of a grown man.” Lorenzo’s roving spy and troubleshooter Benedetto Dei thought that as a boy he appeared to be “the most handsome creature ever seen in our day…so that he seemed the son of the god Mars newly descended.” But by 1476, though Sforza was then still only thirty-two, this same observer was so disillusioned that he concluded, “his misdeeds were such that he deserved to be assassinated by his own people.” Many of the duke’s compatriots agreed, a fact that he seemed dimly aware of—all of which, combined with the general gloom of the season, was certainly sufficient to cause him sleepless nights.

When Sforza arrived at Santo Stefano he found the ancient church already crowded with worshippers. Also present in the church were three young noblemen: Andrea Lampugnani, Gerolamo Olgiati, and Carlo Visconti, part of that vast body of companions, servants, advisors, petitioners, favor-seekers, and hangers-on that swarmed about the duke like flies.

Making his way toward the Point of the Innocents, a large stone at the center of the church stained, it was said, with blood shed during the Massacre of the Innocents, Sforza recognized the three familiar faces. As he approached, Lampugnani threw himself on one knee as if in supplication. The crowd watched as Sforza made an impatient gesture of dismissal. A few sharp words were exchanged. Suddenly Lampugnani pulled a dagger from his belt and, still kneeling, plunged it into Sforza’s groin. As the duke fell, crying “I am dead!,” Lampugnani struck again, this time joined by Olgiati and Visconti, who continued to hack away at the duke as his blood mingled with that of the innocents shed centuries before.

A shocked silence hung in the air for an instant before pandemonium broke out. Few came to the duke’s assistance; most were too busy saving their own skins to tend to their fallen lord. It was, in any case, too late. With the name of the Blessed Virgin on his lips, Galeazzo Maria Sforza breathed his last.
*

Olgiati and Visconti took advantage of the confusion to make good their escape. (Some said they were assisted by those in the crowd who had been in on the plot.) Lampugnani was less nimble, getting tangled up in the skirts of the women in the crowd, where he was caught by one of the duke’s guardsmen, who dispatched him with his sword.

Fear paralyzed the city in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. The surviving conspirators waited anxiously from their hiding places for signs of the revolution they anticipated would arise spontaneously after their heroic deed. But to their despair, instead of “liberta! liberta!” all they heard were the shouts, “Duca! Duca!” The truth is that while the duke was unpopular, the conspirators had done nothing to foster a larger political movement. Only one of them, Gerolamo Olgiati, was motivated by anything resembling a coherent political agenda. A student of the humanist Cola Montano, he had become inspired by the great tyrannicides of the ancient world and hoped by this murder to emulate them.
†
He dreamed of a return to the days of the Ambrosian republic when, following the death of Duke Filippo Maria Visconti in 1447, the people of Milan had proclaimed their own self-government and held out for three years against Francesco Sforza’s attempts to seize the vacant throne. Both Visconti and Lampugnani had more mundane motives: Visconti sought to avenge the duke’s seduction of his sister, while Lampugnani was enraged over the duke’s failure to intervene on his behalf in a property dispute.

In the end, the citizens of Milan were too complacent or simply too cowed to throw off their shackles. Many a Florentine republican echoed, in private at least, the sour verdict of Alamanno Rinuccini, who was happy to advocate the shedding of blood in the cause of liberty as long as he himself was not at risk.
*
“It was a worthy, laudable, manly deed, [he wrote] which should be imitated by all who live under a tyrant or anything similar. But the cowardice and depravity of the men were to blame, that the example bore little or no fruit, and those who had acted well must suffer death. Nevertheless, they freed the earth from the most worthless monster, who was stained with more shameful sins than any in his time and long before.”

Once the threat of revolution had passed, the conspirators were hunted down. Olgiati was captured after his hiding place was revealed by his own father, who later reminded the duchess that he had offered to kill his traitorous son “a thousand times” with his own hands. Visconti and Lampugnani’s servant, who had joined his master in the mayhem, were likewise rooted out and executed in the castle on December 30, strapped to a wheel that slowly tore them in half. Galeazzo Maria’s son, the seven-year-old GianGaleazzo, was proclaimed duke, while Bona, Galeazzo’s widow—joined by his minister Cicco Simonetta—was named regent. In a sign of trouble to come, the deceased duke’s brothers now hurried back to Milan to see how they might profit from the new situation.

Among those who stood to lose the most by Duke Sforza’s assassination was Lorenzo. In 1466 the sudden death of Francesco Sforza had emboldened the Medici’s enemies in Florence, and the situation a decade later was even more precarious. On December 29, the
Signoria
was called into an emergency session, where they voted to send to Milan two of Florence’s most able and respected citizens, Tommaso Soderini and Luigi Guicciardini, to proclaim the republic’s unwavering support in these perilous times. A few days later Lorenzo wrote to the duchess in his own hand, vowing to stand by Milan “as long as he had life in his body, and if that failed, [to] leave instructions in his will for his sons to do the same.”

In Milan a power struggle soon emerged, pitting the seven-year-old duke, his regent mother, and Simonetta against Galeazzo’s ambitious brothers.
*
The contest would absorb the attention and the resources of Milan for the foreseeable future. As the diplomatic situation in Italy continued to deteriorate, Lorenzo could anticipate little help from his most stalwart ally.

The most important consequence of Sforza’s assassination was that it temporarily shifted the balance of power in Italy, weakening the northern alliance and emboldening Sixtus and his allies, who, now more than ever, were determined to rid themselves of the troublesome lord of Florence. But as the conspirators in Rome elaborated their plans, Lorenzo and Giuliano remained strangely oblivious. In the spring of 1476 their attention was riveted by an event that, at the remove of five hundred years, might seem of little consequence—the life-threatening illness of the beautiful Simonetta Vespucci. So consumed were both brothers by news of her failing health that Lorenzo, then residing in Pisa, insisted on receiving daily updates on her condition. As she continued to decline, Lorenzo even sent his own personal physician to her bedside. In the end his ministrations proved fruitless and the young woman died on April 26, much to the grief of the entire city that seems to have adopted her as a kind of minor deity.
†
A clue that Giuliano’s affection for Simonetta was more than just a poetic fiction is suggested by the fact that after her death her father-in-law sent him some of her dresses as a keepsake. Lorenzo’s own feelings are recorded in his
Commento,
where Simonetta’s untimely death provided the material for many a mournful sonnet. As always with Lorenzo’s poetry, so much artifice and intellectual straining lies between the event and the verse as to give it secondhand quality: “As she was thus dead, then, all the Florentine wits, as is fitting for such a public loss, variously mourned, some in verses and some in prose, for the bitterness of this death, and each one felt compelled to praise her according to his ability and talent. Among these, I also set about doing it and about joining my tears with theirs in the sonnets written below, the first of which begins thus…” No doubt Lorenzo’s dismay at the death of the beautiful young lady, so intimately associated with his brother, was real, but by the time he sat down to compose his verses, sufficient time had passed to transform genuine sorrow into literary conceit.

On the international front, renewed quarreling among the Italian powers was sparked by the march of a mercenary army under the
condottiere
Carlo Fortebraccio, who, after spending time in the employ of Venice, had decided to strike out on his own and help himself to Perugia, a city upon which his family had a dubious ancestral claim. The depredations of this aptly named freebooter (Fortebraccio literally means “Strongarm”), whose wild beard and aversion to bathing gave him something of the aspect of a barbarian king, stirred up the pot but did not fundamentally tip the diplomatic or military balance. When this ragtag band turned away from Perugia—a town that, though nominally part of the Papal States, the Florentines considered within their sphere of influence—and began to lay waste to the territory of Siena, many concluded that he was acting with Lorenzo’s knowledge and approval. But Lorenzo remained studiously neutral in the matter, declaring that “having decided not to get involved in this affair, in which we have absolutely no interest at stake, and having maintained this position up until now, we do not see any reason for changing our minds at present.” He proved true to his word, standing on the sidelines while the forces of the pope and the king of Naples laid siege to Fortebraccio’s castle of Montone, forcing his surrender on September 27, 1477. The only significant result of this minor flare-up was to further alienate the Sienese, who now entered into formal alliance with the pope and Naples, thus providing a useful jumping-off point for any future invasion of Florentine territory.

Despite these petty squabbles, to most observers the Italian landscape seemed surprisingly untroubled. The Ferrarese ambassador wrote, “Idleness has so gained the upper hand in Italy that, if nothing new happens, we shall have more to say about the slaughter of fowls and dogs than about armies and deeds of war.” A chronicler in the city of Viterbo, while noting the same lack of news, was less sanguine, as if the drowsy scene was but the lull before the storm. “It seemed as if men were weary of the long peace and took the field for little money.”