Magnifico (71 page)

* Lorenzo’s homeliness was proverbial among Florentines. When Machiavelli was describing to a friend an encounter with a particularly hideous prostitute, he could think of no better insult than to compare her appearance to that of Lorenzo de’ Medici.

* According to the Florentine calendar Lorenzo was born in 1448; Florentines began the new year on March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation.

* It is not clear whether Piero and Lucrezia contemplated an ecclesiastical career for Giuliano. This would have made it all the more important that Lorenzo quickly produce heirs of his own to carry on the family name.

* The author has been tentatively identified as Piero Parenti, the nineteen-year-old son of Marco.

† For example, see Chapter XII for a description of Cardinal Pietro Riario’s banquet.

* Tommaso had used his positions on important financial committees, including as director of the state-funded debt, the
Monte,
and as one of the twelve officers of the
Pratiche et Banchi,
to boost his own private fortunes. This was not an unusual practice in a system where the wall between public and private finance was so porous, but Tommaso seems to have been more than usually diligent in using public office to line his own pockets.

* The Papal States comprised much of central Italy, bounding Florentine-controlled Tuscany on the north, south, and east. The pope’s temporal realm derived from multiple sources, including grants from the Carolingian and Byzantine empires. In the Middle Ages a document known as “The Donation of Constantine” was fabricated to establish a more ancient and holy title to these territories. The fraud was exposed by the Renaissance humanist Lorenzo Valla, though not acknowledged until much later.

† Like many of the Renaissance’s most unpleasant characters, Sigismondo was a refined patron of the arts. He filled his time between murderous rampages commissioning refined works of art and architecture. The Temple of San Francesco he had built in Rimini by Leon Battista Alberti is one of the masterpieces of Renaissance architecture. Its serene sense of order belies the violence of the man who conceived it.

* The alliance among Milan, Florence, and Naples had been the chief diplomatic triumph of Lorenzo’s grandfather Cosimo, cemented by the Peace of Lodi in 1454.

* Galeazzo Maria did not acquire his full authority until January 1469, when he turned twenty-five. Before that the government was in the hands of his mother, Bianca Maria, and her minister Cicco Simonetta, who continued to serve in a similar capacity with the young duke.

* Lorenzo’s second trip to Milan that summer, where he stood godfather to Galeazzo’s firstborn son, was in part an attempt to rebuild the Duke’s shaken confidence in the Medici. While there, Lorenzo reminded his guests of the benefits of Medici friendship by presenting the Duchess a necklace of gold and diamond valued at 2,000 ducats. He in turn was received “with much honor, more so than the others who came for the same purpose”(see Ross, chapter 7).

* According to Sacramoro, seven hundred attended the meeting, while Marco Parenti claims that there were only five hundred, though they were “citizens of every sort” (see Parenti,
Lettere,
no. 75). Another participant counted only four hundred.

* The Medici palace was situated toward the end of the journey on the Via Larga. In later years viewing stands were set up outside the palace.

† In his
Florentine Histories
(vii, 25), Machiavelli places Lorenzo and Giuliano at the meeting, but contemporary accounts don’t seem to support this.

* The extent of Giuliano’s power and influence in the government has been much debated. In the beginning, at least, Lorenzo was the dominant figure while his brother was a valuable assistant.

† Michelangelo’s now lost
Hercules
was a posthumous tribute to his friend and patron.

* The magnificent tomb that Lorenzo and Giuliano commissioned to hold the remains of Giovanni and Piero was created by Verrocchio with help from his assistant Leonardo da Vinci. Work on the tomb was begun shortly after Piero’s death.

* Though set in 1468, the work was probably written in 1472, shortly after the death of the main protagonist, Leon Battista Alberti. (See the introduction to the
Disputationes Camaldulenses
by Peter Lohe, especially xxx–xxxiii, for a full discussion of the controversies surrounding the dating of the manuscript.) Published in 1480, the work was dedicated to Federico da Montefeltro.

* According to Giovanni Cavalcanti, a contemporary of Cosimo’s, during the Albizzi oligarchy the government was in the hands of some seventy or so
principali
who rotated through the various
pratiche
(committees) where policy was debated and legislation proposed. Within this group, certain key figures like Maso degli Albizzi or Niccolò da Uzzano dominated through their prestige and force of personality. In the Medici era, various attempts to enshrine a reliable inner core in such councils as the One Hundred, the Seventy, and the Forty give some idea of the small number of men whose loyalty and prestige entitled them to a permanent place in the inner circle. By contrast, those constitutionally eligible for high office—and who, if the constitution were followed to the letter, could expect to serve at numerous times in their lives—numbered in the thousands. In theory anyone matriculated in one of the Major Guilds or Minor Guilds should have played his part in the government of the city. In reality, most found themselves on the outside looking in.

† He lists twelve whom he calls “principals” of the government. Another group, which includes, interestingly, Jacopo de’ Pazzi, a man regarded as Lorenzo’s enemy, he refers to as belonging to the “second tier of the state”(see Dei,
Cronica,
35v).

* Medici opponents like Alamanno Rinuccini feared this social mobility. He described del Nero as “a base rag dealer…most iniquitous, most rapacious, bearing enmity toward all upstanding citizens”(see Rinuccini,
Ricordi Storici,
cxxxvii).

* Public television recently ran a series titled
The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance.

* To some extent these differences can be ascribed to the different disciplines of the scholars who study the Medici: political historians tend to focus on the way they undermined the republican institutions of earlier centuries; art historians who focus on their role as patrons tend to be more forgiving of the stratagems they used to maintain themselves in power. While in earlier centuries historians dazzled by the achievements of the Florentine Renaissance were often too uncritical of the family that presided over its golden age, contemporary scholars have gone too far in the other direction by underestimating the role Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo played in fostering the artistic achievements of these years.

* Lorenzo is the dark-haired young man on the right of Botticelli’s
Adoration of the Magi
(now in the Uffizi Gallery), a row or two in front of the artist himself.

* Strange as the Florentine system might seem, contemporary Americans should feel a certain twinge of recognition. It was the same suspicion of too much power concentrated in too few hands that led to the American system of a government by “checks and balances.” Though Florentines singularly failed to strike the right balance, their goals were essentially the same as those of James Madison and the other Founding Fathers.

* According to Sacramoro’s analysis, the course Soderini chose over the coming months (initially portraying himself as a partisan of Milan while moving inexorably into the camp of the king of Naples) was determined by his belief that in times of war “the offices and affairs…must be entrusted to a smaller number in order to be kept more secret” (see Clarke, 185).

* It is no surprise that this same city gave birth a generation hence to Niccolò Machiavelli, the first modern political scientist and a man whose name has become, rather unjustly, synonymous with the cynical scheming for power.

* A
Pratica
was a special committee convened to resolve particularly weighty issues.

* The role of the
Accoppiatori
is generally misunderstood. Even when elections were held
a mano
(by hand) as they were for much of the Medici reign, the
Accoppiatori
could not actually hand pick the candidates for office. Rather they culled from the
scrutinio,
the five-year census of Florentine citizens, those believed to be politically reliable and placed only these into the bags. Whose name was ultimately drawn from the bag remained a matter of chance so that the
Accoppiatori
could not completely control the makeup of the government at any particular moment. Given the fact that any individual was barred from holding the same office for five years and that there were restrictions placed on the number of family members holding office at the same time, the
Accoppiatori
were still obliged to place a large number of names into each bag. This ensured a wider, more representative, and more unpredictable cross section of the Florentine citizen body continued to rotate through the Tre Maggiori. It represented a compromise between the evident need to place some controls on the system while at the same time retaining the element of randomness that Florentines believed was essential to the functioning of their democracy.

* A
Balià
was an extraordinary council called in times of emergency authorized to reform the government. It was distinct from the
pratiche,
which were largely advisory. The most extreme option was to call a
parlamento,
an assembly of the entire citizen body in the
Piazza della Signoria
, convened only in moments of gravest danger, as in September of 1466.

† Originally the One Hundred were chosen from among a group known as the
veduti,
or “the seen.” By a curious Florentine process, those whose names were selected for the office of
Gonfaloniere
—that is whose presence in the electoral bags was confirmed by having their names read out at the bimonthly election but who had not necessarily served in that capacity—constituted a privileged political caste. Even those not eligible to serve—either because they were too young, or owed taxes, or had other family members serving in important positions—still reaped the benefits of having been named. Lorenzo never reached the age where he was eligible for the office of
Gonfaloniere,
but he was frequently among the
veduti.
To be “seen” was the surest sign that one had made it in Florentine society.

* The Italian word for such parochial loyalty is
campanilismo.
It derives from the word for bell tower,
campanile,
and describes the fierce attachment Italians feel toward that patch of territory from which the tolling of the cathedral bell can be heard.

† The splitting of the Guelfs into the two rival camps of Whites and Blacks, for example, which was to have such a profound impact on Dante’s life (he belonged to the defeated Whites and was forced into exile), began in the neighboring city of Pistoia, where the terms were used to denote two branches of the ruling Cancellieri family. In 1296, Florence took over the divided town, only to find that it had thereby contracted the sickness that now set the leading families at each other’s throats.

‡ Though long dominated by Florence, Prato was officially purchased by the commune in 1350.

† In fact the Medici had a none-too-savory reputation for violence and political unreliability. A distant relative, Salvestro de’ Medici, had been among the leaders of the
Ciompi
uprising, which made all the Medici suspect in the eyes of the ruling oligarchy. See the
Chronicles of the Tumult of the Ciompi
(reprinted in the Monash Publications in History) for further details on Salvestro de’ Medici’s role in the disturbances.

* Volterra’s
Palazzo dei Priori
is contemporary with the Bargello in Florence, the first seat of the city’s communal government. Volterra’s capital was built by 1239. The Bargello, completed in 1261, was quickly outgrown by the burgeoning republic, which set about building more suitable headquarters. The
Palazzo della Signoria
was ready for use by 1299.