Magnifico (55 page)

Lorenzo’s well-publicized return to the stage of Florentine life, which began a full decade after the murder of his brother, marked the reversal of a long-term trend. After his youth, in which he had been the star attraction on many an occasion, culminating in his own joust of 1469, he had avoided putting himself on public display. The desire to withdraw from the public eye seems to have been at least partly psychological. In his
Commento
Lorenzo recalled being dragged to a festival by his friends “almost against my will…for I had been for some time rather alienated from such occasions.” But political considerations played a part as well. Even before the Pazzi conspiracy, Lorenzo had sought to diminish the June feast of St. John the Baptist, the traditional celebration of the Florentine commune. His grudging attitude toward this festival is confirmed in a reproachful letter Luigi Pulci wrote him in 1472: “I am a little amazed that you have diminished this
festa
as much as you have. You are after all a citizen and fond of the
patria,
of which the Baptist is protector, and we ought to honor him.” But this was exactly the problem: in a city ever more firmly dominated by one family, such a communal festival seemed at odds with the new reality.

This austerity was more pronounced in the wake of his brother’s murder as if the entire city had entered an extended period of mourning. But as Lorenzo grew more secure, and as the shock and bitterness of that troubled time wore off, he began to relax this ascetic policy and to interject himself more insistently into the public consciousness. This time, however, instead of putting himself on display, he preferred to play a strictly behind-the-scenes role. In June of 1488, partly to celebrate the marriage of Maddalena and Francesco Cibo, Lorenzo breathed new life into the Feast of St. John by allowing the elaborate floats that had once been the glory of the parade. It was as if Lorenzo sensed that he was in danger of losing the hearts and minds of the people even as he gripped more tightly the levers of power. As Machiavelli notes in his
Histories,
the Medici generally followed “bread and circuses” policy meant to keep the people distracted and entertained. “[I]n these peaceful times,” he observed, “[Lorenzo] kept his fatherland always in festivities: there frequent jousts and representations of old deeds and triumphs were to be seen; and his aim was to keep the city in abundance, the people united, and the nobility honored.”

But while the traditional communal festivals were revived, it was with a difference. Lorenzo took a particular interest in Carnival, a peculiar choice since this bacchanal was considered by many to be a “feast of the devil.” Carnival, as opposed to the more civic-minded feast of St. John, had long been an occasion for aristocratic families to show off their wealth and power, and Lorenzo may well have intended to wrest this popular celebration from oligarchic control. Under Lorenzo’s management it shed some of its aristocratic exclusivity and embraced both rich and poor in a symbolic reconciliation of the entire community. The very young and the very poor, groups previously marginalized, were now encouraged to form associations where they gained a sense of pride and common purpose. Lorenzo promoted the formation of new confraternities made up of young boys and of members of the economic underclass, each marching under their own banners, developing their own rituals, and discovering in the process a new sense of identity.

Formation of these new ritual groups eased some of the social tensions that characterized Florentine society. They also provided Lorenzo a means of insinuating himself more directly into people’s lives. A confraternity made up of those who had previously been without a voice, organized under Lorenzo’s aegis, was much more likely to be loyal to him than an institution like the Guelf Party that had deep roots in the oligarchic past. One newly founded group was that of the wool-beaters (
battilani
), among the poorest of the urban proletariat, whose charter was approved by the government in 1488, reversing a century-and-a-half prohibition against such working-class associations. In 1489 Lorenzo inserted himself even more blatantly into the picture when he lent his own personal tableware—emblazoned with the red balls of the Medici crest—for the table of the “king” of the Oltrarno wool-workers during their May Day celebrations.

All of this was part of a larger effort to place himself at the imaginative and emotional heart of the republic. While Lorenzo was always something less than a king in terms of his legal authority, in other ways he went beyond the traditional role of a head of state. Perhaps it was because he did not possess a monarch’s rigid dignity that he was able to participate personally in the rituals of his fellow citizens, designing the floats, choreographing the festivities, scripting the sacred dramas, and writing the words that were sung by choirs as they marched through the streets. In 1491 he composed his play
The Martyrdom of Saints John and Paul,
for one of these newly formed youth organizations, the Vangelista, a boys confraternity in which his youngest son, Giuliano, was enrolled. The same year the Company of the Star was formed to stage the elaborate symbolic programs that Lorenzo was now orchestrating:

The propagandistic intent of such productions is evident, but it would be a mistake to believe that Lorenzo was motivated exclusively by political considerations. “We’re going forth to pleasure all,” sing the lovely damsels in Lorenzo’s “Song of the Cicadas,”

This is not the message of someone who was consumed day and night by affairs of state. One could argue that these simple verses did more to endear him to the people than those more overtly propagandistic efforts, but all attempts to reduce Lorenzo to an exclusively political animal are bound to fail. Clearly this was work that he enjoyed, and these songs were above all an expression of his personality. Earthy and erotic, they convey both his hedonism and the melancholy, never far from the surface, that urged him to flee those darker demons of his soul by throwing himself headlong into sensual pleasures.

In the summer of 1490, word began to spread of a monk recently arrived in Florence from the north. His unblemished character, deep religious passion, and rare oratorical gifts were drawing crowds of admirers to the cloister of San Marco. Florentines, who despite their reputation for paganism always had a taste for fire and brimstone, were clearly entranced. So many showed up that soon he had to move out of the lecture hall and into the cloister’s garden. Here in the shade of a rose bower, the monk urged his audience to renounce the ways of the world and return to the purity of the Apostles. “Why do we not follow Jesus and become like little children, simple, trusting, and pure?” he asked rhetorically.

In a city where even the Sunday sermon was larded with classical allusions and priests vied with each other in building elaborate philosophical confections derived from Plato and Aristotle, such simple piety was both shocking and refreshing. The monk’s fervor captured the vague sense of unease that hung in the air. Florence was a city where the rich lived in luxury while the poor suffered in unimaginable squalor, where the educated preferred the erotic tales of Ovid to the homely parables of scripture. The priests whose job it was to save men’s souls had grown so accustomed to their comforts that they neglected their flocks and set an example of vice that their parishioners were only too happy to emulate. The Dominican’s words tore through the veil of complacency to reveal something rotten at the heart of Florentine society. Both Pico and Poliziano attended his harangues and were moved by his sincerity. Soon he was invited to carry his message to a larger audience in the cathedral of Florence.

It was during the Lenten season of 1491 that Girolamo Savonarola first stood on the pulpit in the
Duomo
and aimed a series of jeremiads at a city he likened to a new Sodom or Gomorrah. He prophesied a storm both great and terrifying that would sweep away the wicked and cleanse a land fouled by sin. His first target was the Church itself, a “false proud whore, the whore of Babylon” so corrupted by simony and steeped in every vice that it offered sinners employment rather than redemption. “If there is no change soon,” he warned, “the Church of Italy shall be punished for not preaching the pure gospel of salvation.”

Then he turned his wrath on his own audience. They thought of nothing but their own pleasure, he railed; they had forgotten Christ’s injunction to care for their fellow men. Turning away, if only momentarily, from metaphysics, he demanded social justice. “The poor…are oppressed by taxes, and when they pay intolerable sums, the rich cry: Give me the rest. Some, with an income of fifty, pay an impost of a hundred, while the rich pay little because their taxes are levied arbitrarily. When widows come weeping, they are told: Go to bed. When the poor complain, they are told: Pay, Pay!” How could a society that spent so much on adorning churches with gilded altarpieces and jewel-encrusted reliquaries turn a blind eye to human misery? How could men build monuments to their own vanity while their neighbors starved in the gutters outside their palace gates? He attacked banking, that most Florentine of professions and the basis of many a great family’s fortune. “No one can persuade you that usury is sinful, you defend it at the peril of your souls,” he declared. As he looked about this most beautiful of cities he found little to praise. The glories of art and architecture, music and literature for which the century is remembered held little attraction for him. They were, in fact, mere vanities, false idols meant to distract men and lead them from the path of salvation.

Only a few years earlier this same Savonarola had come to Florence to preach, but at that time his halting speech, foreign accent, and unpolished prose had caused him to be laughed from the pulpit. It may well be that his violent hostility toward the city’s ruling class and its culture was fueled in part by that earlier rejection. But now after years honing his rhetorical skills in provincial villages, his words rushed forth in a torrent as if guided by the Holy Spirit; those who had earlier laughed at the uncouth monk with the piercing eyes and gaunt cheeks of a fanatic now trembled at his words and begged forgiveness for their sins. “But already famines and floods, sickness and other signs prefigure afflictions and foretell the Wrath of God,” he thundered. “Open, open, O Lord, the waters of the Red Sea and submerge the impious in the waves of Your Wrath!”

There was little, in truth, that was original in Savonarola’s thought, but he delivered his message of penitence and divine judgment with an almost frightening intensity that caused the guilty to repent and the righteous to rejoice. As the crowds swelled to hear his sermons so did his faith in his divine mission. “The chief reason I have entered the priesthood is this,” he wrote to his father: “the great misery into which the world is plunged, the wickedness of every man, the rapes, adulteries, arrogance, idolatry, the cruel blasphemies, to which this century has succumbed so that it is impossible to find even one of good will.”

Less than four years younger than Lorenzo, Savonarola seemed to belong to a different age. Yet something in his preaching captured the spirit of the moment. One can detect in his sermons the beginning of a crisis of confidence that will bring a sudden, violent end to the Lorenzan age. Optimism will soon be replaced by fear, faith in man’s nobility by certainty of his sinful nature, intellectual curiosity by fundamentalist rigidity. The embrace by the Florentine people of this man so hostile to everything Lorenzo stood for—the enlightened patronage of art and literature, the uninhibited enjoyment of carnal pleasures, a restless spirituality that questioned received dogma and sought the divine through intellectual inquiry—signals a sea change in the spirit of the Renaissance itself. Savonarola’s fiery rhetoric of guilt and repentance was a throwback to the ideology of the Middle Ages, but his reformist zeal also pointed to the future. His uncompromising stance against a corrupt Church marks the beginning of a powerful movement of reformation that will culminate with Martin Luther a generation hence and shatter the unity of Christian Europe.

The legendary battle of wills between Lorenzo and Savonarola, a clash of ideologies as well as a confrontation between two of the truly remarkable men of the age, was in fact somewhat one-sided. While Savonarola took direct aim at the lord of the city as the symbol of all that was decadent, Lorenzo was far more ambivalent about the man who had set himself against him. Like his friends Pico and Poliziano, he found much to praise in the passion and sincerity of the Dominican brother. Even in their views on religion they tread common ground for a while before their paths diverge: both, for instance, did not hide their contempt for a corrupt, worldly clergy and both tended to eschew traditional communal forms of worship in favor of a direct experience of God through the individual conscience. The main difference between the two is that while Savonarola only dealt in certainties, Lorenzo was plagued by doubt. Savonarola drew strength from the belief that he was in direct communication with God, while Lorenzo fell easily into despair as his most fervent prayers were met only by silence. “You have kindled a love for Thee in my breast,” wrote Lorenzo to a distant God, “only to vanish, never to be seen.”