Magnifico (50 page)

Contemporaries offers vivid, if sometimes contradictory, glimpses of an influence that was pervasive but never absolute. Florentines employed various imprecise terms to convey the nature of their relationship to the first citizen. They called Lorenzo
maestro della bottega
(master of the shop) and sometimes simply
il padrone,
the boss. Unlike the first term, which emphasizes the benevolent, paternalistic nature of his role, the second conveys a certain toughness appropriate to those less squeamish times. It conjures up gangs of enforcers roaming the streets, of rough justice meted out in dark allies, of secret torture cells in the palace of the
Podestà,
of bruises and broken bones. This is not an entirely inaccurate picture. There is no doubt that Lorenzo, backed by the secretive Eight of the Watch (not to be confused with the
Otto di Pratica,
which conducted foreign affairs), intimidated his opponents. “That office,” explained Guicciardini, “had been created long ago and given great authority in criminal affairs. In its judgments, though not in its procedure, it was subject to the laws and statutes of the city; but in crimes concerning the state it had free and absolute powers, beyond all laws. This freedom had been given to it by the men who were in power back at that time, in order to have a stick in their hands with which to strike down those who wanted to criticize or overthrow the government.” But Guicciardini, while uneasy about the Eight’s unrestrained power, believed they were a necessary evil, concluding: “Although its origin, then, was in violence and tyranny, it turned out to be a most salubrious measure. For, as anyone expert in the affairs of this country knows, nobody could live in Florence if evil minds were not restrained through fear of the Eight—a fear born of their promptness in finding out and punishing crimes.”

It is clear that Renaissance Florentines, like Americans today, struggled to find the right balance between security on the one hand and civil liberties on the other, and though there were many who applauded the strongarm tactics of the government, there were perhaps an equal number who feared that their ancient liberties were under assault. Many Florentines noted the chilling effect of Lorenzo’s network of spies and informers and waxed nostalgic for an earlier age, only partly imagined, when Florentines were free to speak their minds. But some of the disaffection was less a matter of basic principles than disagreement over who should wield the club and who should receive the blows. Many of those who criticized Lorenzo, for instance, would not have hesitated to use the most brutal means to suppress any impoverished worker who had the temerity to strike for higher wages.

Lorenzo ruled Florence with a firm hand but, as Guicciardini suggests, Florentines, particularly after the revolt of the
Ciompi
in the mid-fourteenth century, generally preferred authoritarian rule to chaos. This was an age when violence, both criminal and state-sponsored, was commonplace. Luca Landucci records the hanging of a man for the crime of removing silver ornaments from a statue of the Virgin and the execution of a Venetian accused of stealing a few florins off a money-changer’s table. In a society where torture was routinely practiced in the city jails and where brutal executions were carried out for relatively minor offenses, the tactics Lorenzo used against his political enemies were unremarkable. The ambassador from Ferrara recalled one striking scene in which Lorenzo faced down an angry crowd intent on saving the life of a young man who had killed one of the servants of the Eight. To those who begged for clemency

Nowhere is there a suggestion that Lorenzo had acted improperly; indeed the ambassador seems to admire his courage in confronting the dangerous mob and defusing their anger. Evidence suggests that if his fellow citizens were inclined to criticize Lorenzo in such matters it was because he was sometimes perceived as being too lenient. Alamanno Rinuccini, for instance, complained that men “condemned by the Committee of the Eight to perpetual imprisonment are removed from jail on the whim of a private person, or rather of a tyrant.”

Unlike modern democracies with their anonymous bureaucracies and mass media, Florence was a state in which all politics depended on personal relationships. If his father’s authority suffered because of his inability to get along with his fellow oligarchs, Lorenzo owed much of his success to what we today would call “people skills.” Without the support of a working majority within the
reggimento,
an inner circle consisting of forty or fifty men from prominent families, Lorenzo could not have dominated the state.
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Behind each of these men, in turn, lay a dense but largely invisible web of mutual obligation, of clients and patrons, of debts owed and debts paid, of loyalties going back generations and tied to neighborhoods and to rural homesteads, that formed the basis of his standing in the community. Lorenzo, as the uncrowned head of state, could not stand aloof from politics at this grassroots level. Indeed, as his power increased, more and more of the patronage upon which the Florentine political system floated now streamed through the Via Larga.

In 1465 one of the signs of his father’s political jeopardy was the dwindling crowd outside his palace and the growing throng outside Luca Pitti’s. Lorenzo never had to worry that the entrance to his house would be deserted. As the preeminent figure in the government he was constantly hounded by office-seekers and petitioners, as well as those in need of advice on business or personal matters. Some of those filling the courtyard and anterooms of the palace came because they genuinely valued Lorenzo’s wisdom, but many came out of fear of offending the powerful boss of the city. A vivid account of Lorenzo’s modus operandi was left by Tribaldo de’ Rossi, a businessman who owned a small copper mine in the countryside. Fearing his isolated property was an easy target for roaming bandits, he wished to place himself under the great man’s protection. “It occurred to me to reveal [the existence of the mine] only to Lorenzo de’ Medici,” he wrote, “and not to trust a single other father’s son, and to commend myself freely to him, in his hands only.” After collaring Lorenzo’s assistant,
Ser
Piero da Bibbiena, in the cathedral one day, he managed to extract an invitation to meet with Lorenzo at his palace.
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But when he arrived he found “such a large group of citizens waiting to talk to him” that he was forced to return home. His second attempt, six days later, was only slightly more satisfactory. “Lorenzo put on his coat and came down into the courtyard and gave audience,” Tribaldo recalled.

The situation was clearly frustrating for the petitioner, but how much more taxing for Lorenzo, who could not leave his house without running a gauntlet of needy citizens. His writ extended from the courthouse to the bedchamber. No prominent citizen who hoped to climb the social ladder could think of marrying off his daughter without first consulting Lorenzo. “In making marriages you should incline towards citizens who are in the
reggimento,
” advised Giovanni Morelli in his memoirs. “You should always attach yourself to those who have influence in the halls of government and in the
Signoria.
” While some citizens, like Lorenzo’s great-grandfather Giovanni di Bicci, preferred to avoid political entanglements, most took this advice to heart. Thus, for instance, when Averardo Salviati wished to find a husband for his daughter, he first sought out Lorenzo. The father of the bride first suggested the groom—Filippo, son of Bartolomeo Valori, an ally of Lorenzo’s—but it was Lorenzo who made the arrangements and set the dowry (at 2,000 florins). The term “father of his country,” originally applied to Cosimo, became almost literal with Lorenzo. “No one so much as moves a piece of paper without the consent of the Master,” wrote a foreign observer.
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Politics in Florence, as Lorenzo understood as well as anyone, was not confined to the Palace of the Priors. It shaped every human transaction in the city, from the social networks of neighbors built around the local parish church to more mercenary arrangements involving the exchange of financial or political favors. Neither the great merchants, who kept an anxious watch on the gyrations of tax policy, nor the poorest of the poor, who depended on the charity distributed by religious confraternities that were often political parties in disguise, were above the fray. The authority Lorenzo wielded in the
Palazzo della Signoria
radiated outward into the streets and piazzas of the city, and beyond the walls to the various communes subject to Florentine rule, through the kind of retail politicking that we see in the cases of Tribaldo de’ Rossi or Averardo Salviati. There were literally thousands of citizens, both rich and poor, whose livelihoods depended on Lorenzo’s ability to find government or ecclesiastical sinecures for them or their relations. The
reggimento
was kept in a constant state of agitation by bitter turf wars because one’s standing ultimately rested on how many followers could be provided for. Much of Lorenzo’s earliest correspondence concerns matters of patronage—often involving even menial jobs that would seem to be beneath the attention of the Medici heir—and the number of those looking to him for support merely increased with time. These “creatures” of Lorenzo multiplied in the corrupting, hothouse climate of Florence, but they were a hungry breed whose loyalty to their master would continue only as long as they were fed.
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Lorenzo regarded the whole process with distaste and viewed many of his most loyal servants as little better than leeches. It is not surprising if there were moments, and more of them every day, when he felt like fleeing the “narrow seas and storms of civic life” for “some clear and running water…in the shadow of some lovely tree.” It was in one such fit of exasperation that Lorenzo wrote to his secretary, “Get these petitioners off my back, because I have more letters from would-be Priors than there are days in the year and I am resolving not to want everything my way and to live what time I have left as peacefully as possible.”

For Lorenzo, power alone could not bring contentment. At best, the successful conclusion of the Pazzi war and elimination of most internal opposition provided the security that allowed him to pursue the things that mattered to him most. “For when the arms of Italy, which had been stayed by Lorenzo’s sense and authority, had been put down, he turned his mind to making himself and his city great,” wrote Machiavelli. Ultimately Lorenzo could not become the man he wished to be through statesmanship alone, but it is certain that without the blessings of peace and prosperity he worked so hard to achieve, he would not have earned the title by which he is known to history—
il Magnifico,
the Magnificent.

SOMETIME IN THE 1460S OR EARLY 1470S LORENZO PURCHASED
a small plot of land adjacent to the monastery of San Marco, a few blocks north of the palace on the Via Larga, for use as a private garden. Though only one of literally hundreds of similar patches of greenery within the encircling walls, Lorenzo’s garden was apparently considered by at least one contemporary, the artist Piero del Massaio, to be one of the notable attractions of the city. The image of the garden is contained in his abbreviated view of the city made to illustrate a manuscript of Ptolemy’s
Cosmography.
Shown as a walled plot fringed with cypress trees and labeled “Ort[us] L[aurentii] de medicis,”
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its prominence demonstrates the importance contemporaries attached to it (which has sometimes eluded modern scholars). It is not, however, the shrubbery that deserves our attention, but the industrious activity of those who spent their time learning their craft behind its high stone walls. Among the regular visitors to this oasis was Leonardo da Vinci, who, according to one contemporary account, “stayed as a young man with the Magnifico Lorenzo de’ Medici, who, giving him a salary, made him work for him in the garden on the piazza of San Marco, Florence.”

While little is known of how Leonardo spent his time in the garden—it may well have been to work alongside his master, Verrocchio, on Piero’s tomb—a decade or so later another young artist was a frequent visitor. His exploits here are better chronicled:

From this and other similar accounts grew the legend of Lorenzo’s sculpture garden, a veritable school of the arts under the aegis of
il Magnifico
that served as the nursery of the greatest talents of the Renaissance.
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It was here among the cypresses and umbrella pines, under the supervision of Lorenzo’s friend the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni that talented young men came to learn their craft, aided in their studies not only by the fine examples of ancient sculpture the lord of the city had collected but by drawings of more recent masters.

The ancient statues that served as models for aspiring sculptors were later dispersed, but the memory of Lorenzo’s garden has survived in the collective consciousness as one of the high points of civilization. Any site that served as the training ground for both Leonardo and Michelangelo would have a special place in the history of art, but some modern scholars dismiss these stories as largely the figment of Medici propaganda, the fruit of his descendants’ efforts to legitimize their rule by depicting Lorenzo’s reign as a golden age of art and literature. But while Vasari may certainly be accused of a pro-Medici bias—his chief patron was Grand Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, a man whose legitimacy rested largely on the prestige of his family name—there is no reason to doubt the basic narrative, confirmed at key points in other contemporary sources. This scholarly skepticism is part of a larger pattern in which exaggerated claims made for Lorenzo’s role in fostering the Florentine Renaissance have led to exaggerated counterclaims in which Lorenzo’s contributions have been marginalized or eliminated altogether. The idea that Lorenzo single-handedly brought forth this unparalleled flowering of human creativity, popular among some Enlightenment and nineteenth-century authors, is surely off the mark, but denying the obvious fact that Lorenzo dominated this most fruitful moment in cultural history through the force of his character, the generosity of his patronage, as well as his own creative talents, is equally misleading. Lorenzo’s influence in the realm of culture, as in politics, was pervasive and inescapable, and while many of the works once thought to have been directly commissioned by him turn out to have been made for others, his presence was felt everywhere and his spirit is visible in almost every major painting and sculpture to issue from the many workshops of the city in the last two decades of his life.
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Attempts to belittle Lorenzo’s contribution to the culture of the Renaissance Florence are often prompted by uneasiness about his political agenda and by a conviction that he was motivated by selfish, dynastic ambitions rather than by the disinterested pursuit of art for art’s sake. It is certainly true that Lorenzo used art as a tool of propaganda, but an art free from worldly taint didn’t exist in fifteenth-century Florence. Art was not then the exclusive province of an ultra-rarefied elite but was thoroughly entwined in the religious, economic, and civic life of the community. Florentines were all intensely chauvinistic and took understandable pride in their unparalleled cultural genius. Lorenzo saw it as his mission to promote the city’s fame as a center of European culture, knowing that his own prestige was linked to that of Florence. When he fostered such obviously patriotic projects as turning the cathedral into a pantheon of Florentine greats, commissioning a portrait bust of Giotto and seeking to have the remains of Dante returned to his native city, his efforts were applauded by his fellow citizens. Even his own writing can be seen as part of this project. In an age when Latin was the preferred idiom of the cultured man, Lorenzo went out of his way to write in the vernacular in order to show that “this Tuscan tongue” should not be despised but appreciated as “rich and refined.” Florentines as a whole, and Lorenzo in particular, were far more effective as cultural than as military or political imperialists.

Even a brief survey of contemporary documents reveals the extent to which Lorenzo took an interest in what was happening in the studios and workshops of his native city. The countless times he was consulted on aesthetic matters, not only by his fellow citizens but by men of taste and learning across Europe, demonstrates that he was universally regarded as an authority on all matters artistic. When Lodovico Sforza wished to find painters to decorate the great monastery of Certosa in Pavia, he asked his agent in Florence to look only at those artists Lorenzo had employed in his villa at Spedaletto because he knew Lorenzo to be an authority in such matters.
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Sforza was not alone in his reliance on Lorenzo’s judgment. Through queries like this from the courts of Europe, Lorenzo’s taste left its imprint far from his native Florence. Lorenzo, for his part, proffered such advice not only because he was genuinely interested in such matters and because it flattered his ego, but because he knew that by these means his influence and fame spread far and wide.

A similar dynamic was at work domestically. Even when Lorenzo was not personally paying for the work, his opinions were usually canvassed on important projects, as in the crucial design of a new facade for the Duomo, where he was asked to pass judgment on the competing proposals because of his “very great architectural expertise.” A contract from May 1483 spelling out the terms under which Ghirlandaio was to paint an altarpiece for the chapel of the
Palazzo della Signoria
noted that it should be completed in that “quality and that manner and form as should seem good to, and please, the Magnificent Lorenzo di Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici.” Similar instances can be multiplied almost indefinitely. Sometimes Lorenzo is literally present in the work, as in the Sassetti chapel frescoes at Santa Trinità or Botticelli’s
Adoration of the Magi,
commissioned by the obscure Medici follower Guasparre del Lama, where he and his family are prominently featured in the scene. But even when he did not appear in the company of saints his spirit hovered over the creation.

Lorenzo was unrivaled in Florence and Florence was unrivaled in Europe as the supreme arbiter of taste. Whether at home in his palace on the Via Larga or in one of his many villas, Lorenzo was surrounded by a coterie of talented men. This peripatetic entourage formed a literary and cultural court whose brilliance made it a trendsetter for the rest of society. As the guiding light of this intellectual world, Lorenzo’s interests and obsessions seeped into the artisans’ workshops crowded near the Duomo and into the scattered classrooms of the Florentine university. The result was that the art of the 1470s and 1480s bears the stamp of his personality—cerebral, sensual, and refined. His weakness for esoteric philosophical allegory (expounded at length in poems like
The Supreme Good
) and love for all things ancient set the prevailing literary and intellectual fashions of the day and influenced artistic practice, not only locally but throughout Europe, where even mediocre Florentine artists were in high demand.

It is not a stretch, then, to speak of an Age of Lorenzo, shaped by the tastes and ambitions of one man. That Lorenzo was well aware of his role in the cultural revival of the age is illustrated by his personal motto, inscribed in pearls on his shield in the joust of 1469—
Le temps revient,
the time returns. In fact it was just this kind of suffocating presence that families like the Pazzi found so demeaning. This was partly a matter of policy, but it was also a product of Lorenzo’s fiercely competitive nature, which made him insist on having a say in everything and made it difficult for him to accept that he had been bested in any matter, no matter how trivial. His sometimes overbearing personality comes through in accounts from those courageous enough to match their horses against his in the races to which he was passionately attached. Luca Landucci recalls one race in which his brother’s Barbary went head-to-head with Lorenzo’s champion: “And when he went to race at Siena, there was a tie between his horse and one belonging to Lorenzo de’ Medici, called Fire-fly, that of Gostanzo [my brother] being in reality one head’s length in advance of the other. And the people who were present declared that he had won, and told him to go to the magistrate, and they would bear witness. Gostanzo, however, refused to do this, out of respect for Lorenzo, and as it happened, Lorenzo was proclaimed the winner.” It is clear that Florentines were growing ever more accustomed to habits of deference to the lord of the city.

The manner in which Lorenzo left his mark, even when he had no hand in commissioning a particular artwork, can be illustrated in a couple of well-known examples. Two of the most famous works of the period, Botticelli’s
Primavera
(1482) and
Birth of Venus
(1485), are no longer believed to have been made for Lorenzo himself but for his cousin Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici. But despite attempts to sever the cord linking these works to the first citizen of Florence, they are undeniably products of the cultural and literary environment that grew up around Lorenzo and that found expression in the refined eroticism of his own verse. Of course Lorenzo’s cousin was in general terms very much within Lorenzo’s orbit but, more significant, the painter seems to have drawn his intricate program from Lorenzo’s protégé Angelo Poliziano.
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Some have even attempted to find passages in Lorenzo’s own poetry that directly inspired these paintings, but it seems more accurate to say that a similar spirit, hedonistic and erudite, flows through both, as in these lines from his carnival song “The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne”:
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The Renaissance love affair with ancient literature did not begin with Lorenzo, but through his learning, tastes, and poetic gifts he epitomized the age in which centaurs, nymphs, and dryads were as much a part of the imaginative life of the educated class as holy saints and martyrs. After his death this literary culture, more pagan than Christian in the eyes of its critics, was so closely linked with Lorenzo that reformers like Savonarola waged war with equal fervor on the corrupt political and cultural pillars of his regime.

Lorenzo’s contribution was as much practical as inspirational: through his avid collecting of ancient cameos and statues, which he made available to visiting connoisseurs and talented young artists, he provided a treasure trove of models for them to study, while his greed for ancient texts helped build a library filled with volumes by Ovid, Lucretius, and Horace that were mined by writers like Poliziano. One of the criticisms of Lorenzo was that he was a greater collector than patron, an amasser of ancient manuscripts and cameos—like the famous
Farnese Cup,
purchased from Sixtus IV—rather than a commissioner of new art. But, as the tale of the sculpture garden illustrates, the two roles were mutually reinforcing. Lorenzo did not squirrel away his prized possessions but proudly showed them off to anyone who wished to see them, thereby providing an invaluable resource to artists and scholars. (It is telling that the Pazzi conspirators counted on Lorenzo’s eagerness to show off his collection to help them plan their ambush.) In May 1490, Lorenzo wrote to his son in Florence: “Piero—Enclosed is a letter from Baccio [Ugolini]; the bearer is the man of whom he writes, who is passing through Florence. He seems to me clever and one who loves to see antique things. I wish you to show him all those in the garden, and also what we have in the study; in short, whatever seems best to you, and thus to give him pleasure.”