Magnifico (57 page)

Everywhere Lorenzo looked he saw complexity and ambiguity. Even his celebrated hedonism was no mindless surrender to the sensual side of life. Enjoy your youth, he instructed the lads and lasses dancing in the Carnival, not because life is an endless parade of pleasures but because old age and death will quickly rob you of your ability to enjoy them—May blossoms will soon wither in the autumn frost. He was equally skeptical of any vision that predicted heaven on earth or the coming of the Millennium. He filled his poems with detailed observations of both the natural world and of human nature because he believed these solid facts to be worthy of respect and discovered in them an endless source of delight.
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He saw no reason to assume that things would not continue, for good or ill, pretty much as they had always done. He was a restless seeker of something finer, but doubtful that he would ever find what he was looking for.

By the time Lorenzo penned this letter he was in almost constant pain. Poliziano describes the near constant fevers that had consumed him, “attacking not only the arteries and veins, but the limbs, intestines, nerves, bones and marrow.”
†

“The illustrious Lorenzo suffers so acutely that it is hard to understand how he can hold out,” reported the Ferrarese ambassador. On March 18, Lorenzo, though still ailing, felt well enough to travel to Careggi. This modest villa had been the scene of much joy and sorrow. It was here that Cosimo purchased for his friend Ficino a farm so that he could have the pleasure of the philosopher’s company while taking a break from business in the city. Careggi was also the starting point for Lorenzo’s memorable ride that August morning in 1466 when he barely escaped capture by the conspirators lying in wait for his father. And it was to Careggi that both Cosimo and Piero traveled when it was time to die. There is little doubt that Lorenzo was consciously retracing their final journey. Here among familiar fields and meadows he would end his days, removed from the crowds and commotion of the palace in the city.

Lorenzo was accompanied on this short trip by his sister Bianca. Soon Lucrezia and Piero hurried to their father’s side, accompanied by a few of Lorenzo’s closest friends. Always in the background in these final days were two or three distinguished physicians who rushed about trying desperately to appear useful. Lorenzo continued to follow their instructions faithfully (which in one case called for him to drink a concoction of pulverized pearls), more to keep up the spirits of his grieving companions than from any belief that they would delay the inevitable.

Calling Piero to his bedside he passed on such words of encouragement as he could, reassuring him that he was to be recognized as his successor but also urging him to “follow that course which appears to be most honorable” in order not to alienate those who put him into power. The ever faithful Poliziano described the final vigil in a letter written little more than a month after the fact, providing the only reliable account of Lorenzo’s last days. Most striking, perhaps, is how little thought Lorenzo seemed to give in his final hours to politics. Some months earlier he had told his friend that, should God spare him, he would dedicate the rest of his life to poetry, and it was with poets and scholars that he chose to surround himself in the little time that remained. “Pico came and sat by the bed,” Poliziano recalled,

A more surprising visitor to Careggi was Girolamo Savonarola. Arriving shortly after Pico, he had apparently come at Lorenzo’s request. Some years later, one of the preacher’s followers—Fra Pacifico Cinozzi, who heard the story from Fra Silvestro, who in turn heard it from Savonarola—penned a dramatic narrative of the meeting. In this version, Lorenzo’s summons was the result of a guilty conscience:

The story quickly became incorporated into the mythology surrounding the Dominican martyr, but it was apparently an invention, either of Savonarola himself or his disciples. A more plausible, and contemporaneous, account was furnished by Poliziano. According the poet, the viaticum was administered by another priest before Savonarola’s arrival:

Having just received the sacrament, it is unlikely that Lorenzo sent for Savonarola just so he could repeat the process. It is also highly unlikely that Savonarola, whatever he thought of Lorenzo’s policies, would have denied a dying man last rites. Poliziano’s less dramatic telling, written only weeks after the fact, no doubt provides a more accurate picture of their final encounter:

In Lorenzo’s final hours, evil portents and ominous signs abounded. The gardens of Careggi were populated by strange apparitions that chilled men’s hearts with their mournful groans. In the city below, two of the lions on public display that served as the republic’s mascots tore each other to death in their cages, while a bolt of lightning struck the Duomo, sending marble blocks crashing to the street below. When Lorenzo heard what had happened, he was reported to have sighed, “Alas! I shall die because [the stones] fell toward my house.”

On April 8, Lorenzo descended into his final illness. Still he did his best to keep up the spirits of those around him: “To the last he had such mastery over himself that he joked about his own death,” wrote Poliziano.

Later that night his body was carried in a solemn torchlight procession along the road to Florence and brought to the monastery of San Marco. The next day the citizens of Florence streamed through the monastery to bid farewell to their leader. On the evening of April 10, his coffin was carried the few blocks to the church of San Lorenzo, where in a quiet ceremony attended only by close friends and relatives he was lowered into the ground beside his brother, Giuliano, in the family chapel. In a mournful reprise of the symbolism that had attended his baptism forty-three years earlier, Lorenzo’s coffin was borne on the shoulders of the brothers of the Confraternity of the Magi.

As on those earlier occasions when the deaths of Cosimo and Piero had left the city in a state of uncertainty, Lorenzo’s passing meant a period of anxiety for the people of Florence. The uneasiness was all the more pronounced because Lorenzo had dominated the age as no Florentine before him. “This man, in the eyes of the world, was the most illustrious, the richest, the most stately, and the most renowned among men,” mourned the apothecary Luca Landucci. “Everyone declared that he ruled Italy; and in very truth he was possessed of great wisdom, and all his undertakings prospered.”

Shortly after his death, the
Signoria
of Florence offered the official epitaph in the name of the people of Florence:

A more moving tribute, and more personal, was penned by the inconsolable Poliziano:

IN THE WEEKS FOLLOWING LORENZO’S DEATH, A STRANGE
story began circulating among the citizens of Florence. “It was said,” a contemporary reported, “when this darkness descended upon Florence, that it was because of Lorenzo di Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici who had released a spirit that he had entrapped in a ring; which, it was said, he set free and this was what caused [the stones to fall from the cathedral]. This spirit, it was said, he had kept for many years in that ring; and he liberated it because at that time he was gravely ill.” Whether this spirit was malevolent or benign the story does not say, but the supernatural tale testifies to the long shadow cast by the man known as
il Magnifico
and vividly conveys the anxieties that inevitably crowded into the void left by his passing.

As news of his death spread, more prosaic, but equally powerful, eulogies were delivered by the great lords of Europe. “The peace of Italy is at an end!” cried Pope Innocent, and King Ferrante was hardly more sanguine: “That man’s life has been long enough for his own deathless fame, but too short for Italy. God grant that now he is dead that may not be attempted which was not ventured in his lifetime.”

What Ferrante feared was the long-anticipated invasion of the mighty armies of the French king that hung like Damocles’ sword over the collective heads of the Italian city-states. It was largely to avoid such a catastrophe that Lorenzo labored in the last decade of his life to preserve the peace of Italy, hoping thereby to deny an opening that the covetous king might exploit.
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But the system of alliances he had cobbled together from proudly independent states could not long survive without him. Lorenzo was a master tactician, but he was unable to reverse centuries of historical development in which each locality jealously guarded its independence and fought its neighbors for supremacy. There were occasional hints in his writing of a grander vision in which an Italy united, at least culturally, under the lead of the city on the Arno would challenge the great nation states arising to the west, but political unification would have to wait until centuries of common oppression by foreigners forged a common sense of national identity. Lorenzo’s foreign policy was too dependent on his own personal qualities to lead to enduring peace.

Piero, known to history as “the Unfortunate,” inherited his father’s position but none of his qualities as a leader. Where Lorenzo had known how to stroke the egos and flatter the vanity of potential opponents, Piero managed to step on every toe and to alienate even his natural allies. It took less than two years for Piero, more interested in horse racing and fine clothes than affairs of state, to squander all the goodwill his father had amassed. Under normal circumstances he might have been granted more time to grow into his job, but under the pressure of events his shortcomings were immediately and cruelly exposed. Lorenzo had not been in his grave many months when the fragile system of alliances that he had put in place began to crumble.

Without the soothing hand of Lorenzo on their shoulders, the tension that always existed between Milan and Naples grew into open antagonism. The immediate cause of the conflict was Lodovico Sforza’s refusal to hand over the reins of power to the legitimate duke, his nephew GianGaleazzo, who also happened to be married to Ferrante’s granddaughter. Knowing his claim to the ducal throne would never be secure as long as the Neapolitan king continued to agitate on behalf of GianGaleazzo, Lodovico invited the French king to renew his family’s claim to the Neapolitan throne. Late in the summer of 1494, Charles VIII, overruling his more cautious advisors, led his sixty-thousand-strong army across the Alps. At first Piero tried to rally a coalition to challenge the French advance, but when this massive force, equipped with artillery the likes of which the puny Italian forces had never seen, swept all before it, he panicked and reversed course. In October, with the French bearing down on Florence, Piero rode out to Charles’s camp, hoping to forestall a siege of the city by throwing himself on the mercy of the king. Piero’s adventure is a classic example of drawing the wrong lessons from history. Hoping to repeat his father’s bold gambit of sailing to Naples, Piero made a fatal blunder. Without so much as a shot being fired in anger he conceded to the French all the republic’s most important fortresses, including Pietrasanta and Sarzana, which Lorenzo had won with such difficulty. Florence was left defenseless, a fact immediately grasped by the Pisans, who seized the opportunity to declare their own independence. Upon his return to Florence in early November, the entire city, instead of greeting him as a hero, rose up against the arrogant, foolish, and now treasonous Piero. Waiting only long enough for dark of night to cover his flight, Piero, along with his two brothers, Giovanni and Giuliano, snuck through the gates and fled the city.

Thus, ignominiously, ended the reign of the Medici in Florence after six decades in which they had ruled over the city in her years of greatest glory. It was not the end of the association of the Medici with Florence, but it was the end of that special relationship between the family and an independent republic that could count itself as one of the powers of Europe. Humiliated by the capitulation, galled by the loss of Pisa, and furious at the man who had allowed it to happen, the people of Florence plundered the palace on the Via Larga, dispersing the treasures amassed by generations of cultivated men. Some, like the statues of
David
and
Judith
by Donatello, were set up before the Palace of the Priors as symbols of the revived republic, while others were dispersed to the winds. On November 17, 1494, King Charles rode through the gates of the city accompanied by his army, his lance at rest, symbolizing the seizure of a conquered city.

The man to whom Florentines now turned in their moment of crisis was the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola. As surely as Lorenzo captured the confident spirit of the Renaissance, Savonarola captured the troubled spirit of this age of anxiety. Someone of Savonarola’s messianic outlook could flourish only in unsettled times, and as Italy became the battleground for the great powers of Europe, frightened men and women turned in ever greater numbers to the preacher who seemed to have foretold their woes. In fact, Savonarola welcomed the humiliation and trauma of the French invasion. It was he who rode out to Charles and negotiated his peaceful entry into the city, and it was he whose calming influence narrowly averted a violent confrontation between a nervous population and French troops in the weeks that followed. “O most Christian King,” he addressed Charles, “you are an instrument in the hands of the Lord who has sent you to cure the ills of Italy, as I have long predicted.”

Once Charles’s army departed to pursue dreams of glory in the south of Italy, Florentines set about reconstituting their broken system of government. Savonarola’s moral influence was decisive in the political reforms that followed. In the struggle between the oligarchs and the republicans, he threw his considerable prestige behind the latter, reversing the trend toward an increasingly restrictive franchise that had been underway since the time of the Albizzi. The new government’s boldest innovation was the establishment of a Great Council, drawn from a pool of three thousand eligible citizens whose ancestors had held one of three leading offices, which served as the ultimate legislative authority in the state. This was hardly a true democracy in the modern sense, but through this new body more citizens participated in the government than at almost any time in Florentine history.
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Thus Savonarola’s name became inextricably bound up with the progressive movement in Florence. But while he became a hero to the little people, he made many enemies among the former ruling elites. The general disgust with Piero’s high-handed ways that led to a wholesale dismantling of the Medicean system did not translate into social harmony. The loss of Pisa, combined with the instability ushered in by the French invasion and years of economic decline, heightened tensions in the city and contributed to bitter political factionalism. Savonarola’s followers, known as the
Piagnoni
(weepers), frequently clashed with the
Arrabbiati
(the angry ones) and the
Compagnacci
(the companions), made up largely of aristocrats who agitated for a return to the ancient oligarchy.

From the beginning Savonarola was a divisive figure. With the zeal of a visionary, he sought to turn the city from its wicked ways and set it on the path of righteousness, a course that discomfited many who preferred to wallow in their vices rather than adopt the friar’s austere virtues. Savonarola’s attacks on the decadence of his adopted compatriots, and his even more bitter denunciations of the Church, kept passions boiling and created a climate of perpetual crisis in which his millennial pronouncements gained greater force.

As Italy descended into chaos, the preacher’s apocalyptic vision fell on receptive ears. A wholesale dismantling of the previous age began as men and women examined their uneasy consciences and discovered that in pursuing material things they had neglected the word of God. The worst excesses of the prior age were embodied in Lorenzo’s Carnival, and Savonarola set about eradicating the memory of those almost pagan bacchanals through a ritual purging. Instead of joining in suggestive songs and revels, Savonarola commanded the citizens of Florence to march into the
Piazza della Signoria,
where huge bonfires had been kindled. Into these “Bonfires of the Vanities” they tossed their jewels and silks in a symbolic rejection of the snares of the world. But Savonarola had more ambitious goals. “My lords of the Eight,” Savonarola declared, “I would like to see you make a lovely fire or two or three there in the piazza, of those sodomites male and female—women too pursue that criminal vice. Make, I say, a sacrifice to God, which He will accept as incense [honoring] His life. Make a fire which the whole of Italy will smell.” These flaming pyres came to embody the Savonarola era as surely as the great jousts and pageants had symbolized that of Lorenzo—an age of ash to follow an age of gold.

In order to enforce his austere ideal, the Dominican monk organized bands of fanatical youths who roamed the streets seeking out those who had violated the strict sumptuary laws. “Here come the boys of Fra Girolamo!” went the cry when one of these gangs approached, and women covered up their jewels and lace frills. Savonarola’s efforts were not all pernicious. He worked hard to feed and clothe the poor and his religious fanaticism was combined with a genuine zeal for democratic reform. “We must…conclude,” he wrote, “that…civil government or democracy is the best government for the city of Florence.”

But Savonarola was a man of passionate faith not reason, a man who courted martyrdom and welcomed cataclysm, and a state that took its cues from such a mystic could never know peace. The representative government he established proved unstable, prone to faction, and woefully inefficient. As the years passed, citizens looked back nostalgically on the days when Lorenzo had ruled with such skill and tact.

Savonarola might have averted disaster had he been willing to make the compromises required of a politician. With every passing year, however, he grew more convinced of his divine mission; he welcomed the French army as the instrument of God sent to punish the sinning Italians, only to hurl bitter denunciations at them when they failed to chastise the wicked as he had hoped. His insistence on backing Charles long after the rest of Italy turned against him left Florence diplomatically isolated, and his campaign to reform a corrupt Church—in which the City of the Baptist, now purified under his ascetic rule, was seen as a new Jerusalem—inevitably put him on a collision course with Rome. He began to see himself in messianic terms and to rail ever more bitterly against clergy in the Vatican, now led by the sensual Alexander VI, the epitome of the worldly Renaissance prelate, who openly acnowledged his children, the infamous Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia. For a time the pope tried to seek an accommodation, but when Savonarola defied his order that he cease his preaching, a confrontation was inevitable. In April 1498, the people of Florence, now thoroughly fed up with his histrionics, arrested the friar and many of his followers. On May 23, after enduring weeks of torture, Savonarola and his chief lieutenants, Fra Silvestro and Fra Domenico, were led to a scaffold erected in the
Piazza della Signoria
and hanged before a bloodthirsty crowd. In order to prevent their bodies serving as the focus of a martyrdom cult, their still suspended corpses were consumed by flames in a gruesome reenactment of the bonfires that they themselves had made a symbol of their rule.

Florence’s experiment in democracy lasted another fourteen eventful years. Whatever the defects of the Medicean system, the more representative government that replaced it proved incapable of managing the affairs of state. In the chaos that followed the French invasion, the quarreling factions that made up the new Great Council found it impossible to pursue coherent policies. Florence’s standing in the world plummeted. In 1502, in order to stabilize the chaotic situation, Piero Soderini—son of Tommaso and Lorenzo’s aunt Dianora Tornabuoni—was appointed
Gonfaloniere
for life, the very title that Lorenzo’s critics accused him of aspiring to. In ridding themselves of a potential tyrant, Florentines now granted to one man sweeping powers that Lorenzo never possessed.

The troubled times that nurtured Savonarola’s unique gifts also gave rise to another remarkable figure, but one whose understanding of the world could not have been more at odds with that of the Dominican friar. No one worked harder on behalf of the republic than Niccolò Machiavelli, who served for much of the period as the secretary for the Ten of War and who struggled, ultimately without success, to make the government work. Years of thankless toil on behalf of weak, corrupt, and vacillating leaders, as well as his exposure to some of the most ferocious tyrants of the age—including, most notably, Cesare Borgia—gave Machiavelli a thoroughly jaundiced view of the human condition. But it was only after the collapse of the republic to which he had dedicated himself heart and soul that, in bitterness and defeat, he wrote his most notorious work,
The Prince,
a treatise for the would-be despot on how to achieve and retain power. It is above all this tract that has made this Florentine civil servant’s name synonymous with cynical scheming and deviousness. But this label is largely undeserved. Machiavelli was in fact a disappointed idealist. His unsparing vision of human nature scandalized his own and subsequent generations, but he understood that only by depicting men as they really were could any progress be made toward building a better form of government. Strip-ping away all pieties to lay bare the darkest recesses of the soul, Machiavelli took the first halting steps toward modern political theory, in which society is viewed as the product of fallible human beings rather than the elaboration of a divine plan.