Magnifico (6 page)

But the attractions of the countryside were, ultimately, merely a respite from more serious work that could be done only in the city. As the Florentine statesman and military leader Gino di Neri Capponi wrote in a poetic homily to his sons, “Honor does not reside in the woods…/Worthy men are made in the city, nor indeed can he be called a man/whose measure is not taken there.”

It was from the heart of the city that Cosimo and his two sons managed the vast and profitable Medici bank. The Medici firm maintained a table on the Via Porta Rossa in the vicinity of the New Market, where businessmen could deposit their coin or redeem bills of exchange. But this business represented only a small portion of a much larger and more varied operation encompassing both small manufacturing establishments (silk and woolen shops in Florence) and international trading cartels. The Medici bank maintained branches in Rome (usually the most profitable because the pope’s finances were handled largely by the Medici bank there), Naples, Milan, Venice, Bruges, Avignon, Geneva, London, and other centers of trade and finance.

Management of this vast business empire was conducted largely out of the family home. Four large rooms on the ground floor of the new palace—into which the family moved probably sometime in 1458—served as counting house and office space for scores of secretaries, clerks, and assistants. As in most Florentine
palazzi,
the ground floor was a semi-public space, but in the Medici palace it also included accommodations for both Cosimo and Piero, who had difficulty negotiating the stairs to the main living quarters above.
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The new palace must have been a pleasant change for the nine-year-old boy after the cramped, crowded quarters of the old house. Not least of the attractions were an airy courtyard and a garden, the latter filled with exotic fruit trees. With indulgent, often distracted parents, the spacious and bustling palace offered plenty of opportunities for undiscovered mischief. It was, perhaps, a little too commodious for a family used to living one on top of another. Some years later, after the death of his younger son, the aged Cosimo was heard to lament, “Too large a house for too small a family!”

The palace as it exists today differs significantly from the one Lorenzo knew. First of all, it was considerably smaller in the fifteenth century, seven bays of windows having been added in the seventeenth century by the Riccardi family, who evidently found it too cramped for their needs. A loggia opened out onto the busy street, making the building less forbidding than it now seems. During Lorenzo’s lifetime this arcade was always crowded with petitioners, visitors, and even tourists armed with letters of introduction. The Milanese envoy Niccolò de’ Carissimi da Parma, visiting the master of the house in 1459, complained that he was “obliged to leave because of the multitude who arrived wishing to see the aforesaid magnificent Cosimo.”

Even more deceptive is the austere interior we see today. Walking through its largely empty rooms and corridors one gets little hint of its former opulence. It was Piero who took the lead in furnishing the new family home with paintings, sculptures, and decorative objects, a collection to which Lorenzo continued to add after his father’s death. Gone is Piero’s private study, whose walls were covered floor to ceiling in elaborate patterns of inlaid wood and whose collection of objets d’art so impressed visitors, including the architect Filarete, who has left us a vivid description of the master at his ease:

It is impossible to overestimate the impact such an environment had on the formation of Lorenzo’s tastes and his character. Even among Florentines, accustomed to being surrounded by works of art and architecture of the highest quality, his circumstances were unique. The immense Medici fortune was harnessed to acquire work from the greatest artists and artisans of Europe; from their branches in northern Europe employees were told to be on the lookout for the finest tapestries and the latest works in oil by masters like Jan van Eyck;
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agents in Rome and southern Italy sought out antiquities, and scholars on the Medici payroll rummaged through the monastic libraries of Europe seeking lost works by the ancients. Galeazzo Maria Sforza, who as son of the duke of Milan was a youth not easily impressed, was awed by the Medici’s fabled treasures. “[T]he aforesaid count,” noted his chief counselor,

Sforza’s visit highlights an important function of the palace: it was an essential tool of Medici statecraft. As private citizens, Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo possessed none of the titles needed to impress those with whom they negotiated on behalf of the republic. But by building this grand residence and furnishing it with famous works of ancient and modern art they showed that they belonged in the company of the greatest feudal lords.
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So successful was this strategy that close acquaintance with the Medici lifestyle could foster a not altogether unintended sense of cultural inferiority. On a later visit Galeazzo Maria Sforza admitted its collections far outshone his own, and when his brother, Lodovico, lured Leonardo da Vinci away from Florence it was partly in an attempt to redress the cultural deficit.

Ordinary Florentines alternated between feelings of pride and resentment at the opulent lifestyle of their leading family. The treasures of the palace were celebrated in verse and song, one anonymous poet declaring “nothing in the world [is] more an earthly paradise than this.” But it could also be a tempting target for those who believed the government had been hijacked by private interest; during one politically tense moment, the family awoke to find the threshold of the palace smeared with blood.

For the most part, however, the public understood that the honor of the city was tied to the honor paid to its leading family. Florentines were painfully aware of their lack of pedigree and took every opportunity to demonstrate that, despite the absence of hereditary nobility, they were men of refinement. The pageantry of Florentine life was in large part an expression of cultural insecurity, and the Medici palace was a key element in this self-promotion. It is a notable trend in Florentine history—one that helps explain Medici success in subverting the city’s republican institutions—that men who otherwise jealously guarded their prerogatives accorded the Medici an almost princely standing if only in order to seem more worthy in the eyes of foreigners.

The one room that still hints at the
palazzo
’s former splendor is the small private chapel on the second floor. In 1459, Benozzo Gozzoli began work on the frescoes that have since made this one of the most beautiful rooms in Florence or, indeed, in all of Europe. Under the close supervision of Piero, Gozzoli depicted the Adoration of the Magi, a theme he had already tackled for the family when, as an assistant to Fra Angelico, he had painted a modest version on the walls of Cosimo’s private cell in San Marco. No expense was spared to create a jewel-like effect, including an intricately inlaid floor (designed by Andrea del Verrocchio) and elaborately coffered and gilded ceilings. As for the frescoes themselves, Piero insisted on the finest materials, generous amounts of lapis lazuli (for the deep blues of the sky) and sheets of silver and gold leaf that would cast an otherworldly gleam in the light of flickering candles.

Piero took a strong interest in the painting’s day-to-day progress. A series of letters between Piero and the artist suggests that this was a commission particularly close to his heart. “This morning I had a letter from Your Magnificence,” wrote Gozzoli to Piero, “and I learnt that it seems to you the seraphs I have done are out of place. On one side I did one among some clouds, and of this you hardly see anything except the tips of the wings…. Nevertheless I will do as you command, two little clouds will take them away.” This supervision—even micromanagement—of an artist’s work was not unusual. Renaissance patrons were often intimately involved in the smallest details of the works they commissioned. In their own eyes they were the true agents of the work of art, and they regarded the craftsmen they employed as, at best, collaborators, and at worst skilled servants whose role was simply to carry out the vision of their employers.

One should not dismiss such attitudes as mere snobbery. Art in Renaissance Florence was the serious business of serious men, inextricably bound up with politics and religion. Later in his career Lorenzo employed the greatest geniuses of the Florentine Renaissance—Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Leonardo—as his own personal emissaries, sending them the length and breadth of Italy in hopes of cementing alliances and maintaining his city’s prestige abroad. If Florence was not the most powerful state on the peninsula, it abounded in artists and craftsmen coveted by foreign courts. By exporting Florentine culture, Lorenzo and his predecessors tried to achieve through the dazzle of art what they could not hope to win through strength of arms.

Nor was the role of art connoisseur the effete pursuit of the idle rich. Every Florentine patrician, not least the Medici themselves, spent countless hours serving on the boards (
operaii
) that supervised the great building and artistic projects in the city, making decisions on matters that now would be considered the creative province of the artist. Brunelleschi, himself a member of the ruling class, was exasperated by the constant interference of amateurs who thought they knew more about engineering than he did, but most artists understood that their role was to bring the client’s ideas to fruition. Discernment in matters of art was the mark of a true gentleman, as a popular fifteenth-century treatise on education reminds us: “The beauty and grace of objects, both natural ones and those made by man’s art, are things it is proper for men of distinction to be able to discuss with each other and appreciate.” Cosimo, in a letter to his cousin Averardo, makes an explicit connection between judgment in matters of art and the kinds of judgment demanded of those in positions of political leadership. “Although we do not have the expertise in feats of war of those who practice it continually,” he wrote, “nevertheless, seeing what others do, we are able to judge who does it better. I believe that although you are not a great painter, nevertheless you would judge the figures of Giotto to be better than those of Balzanello.”

In a very real sense, Piero, as much as Gozzoli, must be regarded as the author of the
Adoration.
The dynastic and political ambitions of its patron are closely woven into the sacred scene. While the fresco ostensibly commemorates the birth of the Savior a millennium and a half earlier, the magnificent procession Gozzoli conjures—in a Tuscan landscape complete with rural castles based on the Medici villas at Trebbio and Cafaggiolo—is couched in terms that would have been familiar to contemporary Florentines. Even the elaborate costumes of the kings and their retinues are based on the gaudy processions that the Medici sponsored every three years on the Feast of the Epiphany.
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Gozzoli’s painting is both a sacred narrative and, perhaps more important, a portrait of the Medici regime at the height of its power. Here, in a private setting, Piero could indulge to the full his taste for opulent display, disguising his ambition through an appropriately pious theme. If the political message were not obvious enough, Gozzoli—with Piero supplying the roster of names—painted in the scene all the leading figures associated with the Medici
reggimento,
including, in the entourage of the old king Melchior, many of those who would soon turn against him—Luca Pitti, Niccolò Soderini, and Dietisalvi Neroni.