The bride was also provided by her future husband with a cloak, which had 120 spangles on the front and a further 100 smaller ones on the embroidered sleeves, with furs and braids, ‘a garland of peacock tails embellished with silver and pearls’, enamelled flowers and gold leaf, corals and eight hundred peacock feathers. ‘When she goes out,’ her mother proudly wrote to the bride's brother in Naples, ‘she will be wearing more than 400 florins.’
Earlier in the century, St Bernardino of Siena, the Franciscan preacher, had roundly condemned such extravagance in one of his Lenten sermons: ‘I know some women who have more heads than the devil. Each day they put on a new one… I see some who wear hats like pieces of tripe and some like pancakes, others like trenchers or flaps, some folded up, some turned down. Some like castles with towers carrying the Devil's own banners… Oh, women! Do take them off! You have made gods of your heads… You look like barn owls!’
But they would not take them off; and the officials appointed to compel obedience to the sumptuary laws found their task almost impossible except with regard to slaves, who were strictly enjoined to wear ‘neither coats, nor dresses, nor sleeves of any kind in any bright colours’, and to limit their head-dresses to linen towels and their footwear to wooden clogs.
With other women, however, the frustrated officials seem to have experienced constant trouble. ‘In obedience to the orders you gave me,’ reported one of them,
I went out to look for forbidden ornaments on the women and was met with arguments such as are not to be found in any book of laws. There was one woman with the edge of her hood fringed out in lace and twined round her head. My assistant said to her, ‘What is your name? You have a hood with lace fringes.’ But the woman removed the lace fringe which was attached to the hood with a pin, and said it was merely a wreath. Further along we met a woman with many buttons in front of her dress; and my assistant said to her, ‘You are not allowed to wear buttons.’ But she replied, ‘These are not buttons. They are studs. Look, they have no loops, and there are no buttonholes.’ Then my assistant, supposing he had caught a culprit at last, went up to another woman and said to her, ‘You are wearing ermine.’ And he took out his book to write down her name. ‘You cannot take down my name,’ the woman protested. ‘This is not ermine. It is the fur of a suckling.’ ‘What do you mean, suckling?’ ‘A kind of animal.’
Florentine women were as celebrated for the care they took over their make-up and their hair as they were for the splendour of their clothes. If their skins were too sallow they bleached them, if too rosy they powdered them. If their hair was too dark they dyed it or wore a wig of white or yellow silk or sat on their roof terraces wearing straw hats with the crowns cut out and their hair spread over the brim to bleach their tresses in the sun. Ludovico Ariosto complained of the paraphernalia they needed to present themselves to the world with the required degree of elegance:
How many little knives and scissors for the nails; and little cakes of soap, and slices of lemon for the hands! They need an hour to wash them and another hour to anoint and rub them until they are perfect. And how many powders and how much work are needed to clean the teeth! I could not count the number of boxes, phials, little bottles and other trifles that they use. One could fit out a ship from stem to stern in less time.
Other writers lamented the passing of the days when an unmarried girl of good family was kept at home, forbidden to walk the streets except on the way to Mass and then heavily veiled, or even not allowed out at all without a chaperone beyond the limits of the family loggia or garden.
Lucrezia Tornabuoni allowed her own three daughters more freedom than this. She saw to it that they were as well educated as she was herself and that they not only had the grace of manner to attract husbands from good families, as all three of them did – a Rossi, a Pazzi and a Rucellai – but that they could hold their own in intelligent conversation. ‘I should never have believed,’ exclaimed a Florentine lawyer upon hearing such wives talk, ‘that the ladies of Florence were so conversant with moral and natural philosophy, and with logic and rhetoric.’
Helped and encouraged by a wife of strong character and by his two young sons, now approaching manhood, Piero de' Medici, ill as he was and worried by the declining fortunes of his bank, and consequently often irritable, faced the crisis precipitated by the death of his ally, the Duke of Milan, with confidence and resolution. He was ill at his villa at Careggi when news reached him that his enemies in Florence had come to terms with the Duke of Ferrara and that troops were on the march across the Tuscan frontier with orders to seize him and his sons and have them all executed upon some trumped up charge. Sending the elder of his sons, the sixteen-year-old Lorenzo, galloping ahead of him, Piero had himself immediately carried back in a litter to Florence where, according to Marco Parenti, ‘those citizens who were his partisans armed themselves and rushed to defend his house‘. Finding himself ‘in financial disorder’, Piero borrowed 10,000 florins from his extremely rich cousin, Pierfrancesco de' Medici, who ‘did not know how to refuse’; and ‘with this money Piero demonstrated great liberality, spending freely for all [his supporters’] needs. First of all he purchased all the bread in Florence's bakeries and had it sent to his house.’ Then he emptied the wine shops and sent his men to buy up all the weapons they could lay their hands on. The Palazzo Medici was surrounded by armed guards, fortified with planks and scaffolding, and ‘furnished with many stones and other stores for battle’. All the gates leading into the city were seized, with the single exception of the Porta San Gallo, which was held open for Medici adherents on the march from the contado.
The Party of the Hill, alarmed by Piero's swift reaction to the crisis, and his urgent call for help from Milan, were thrown into disarray. Niccolò Soderini, galloping up to Luca Pitti's palace, urged his associates there to act immediately to call the people to arms and to treat all who did not respond to the call as enemies. He himself, he proposed, would ride through the city shouting ‘Liberty!’, collecting support, and attack the Medici Palace. But the others held back, fearing that this arousal of the lower orders might endanger their own standing in the city as well as Piero de' Medici's, and lead to an uprising such as that of the ciompi in 1378.
Believing their cause to be already as good as lost, Luca Pitti now came to terms with Piero. Approached by Francesco Sassetti, Piero's business partner, he agreed to abandon his confederates on condition that he and his brother should be appointed to important government offices and that his daughter should be married to Piero's son, Lorenzo. Piero agreed to the first condition; as to the second, he undertook to see that the little girl was married ‘to someone he held most dear’. Choosing to suppose that this someone was Lorenzo, Luca Pitti agreed to the terms.
By now Piero had made arrangements for the election of a strongly Medicean Signoria. In time-honoured fashion this Signoria called for a Parlamento, which, under the eyes of three thousand troops and of the young Lorenzo de' Medici riding up and down in front of them, obediently authorized a Balia, which, in its turn, confirmed the authority of the accoppiatori to supervise the appointment of priori in future, rejecting elections by lot.
The uprising was thus crushed before it had taken shape; the conspirators either fled or were forced into exile, with the exception of the disgraced and humiliated Luca Pitti, whose daughter was married to Piero's brother-in-law, Giovanni di Francesco Tornabuoni, the young and well-respected manager of the Roman branch of the Medici bank.
‘Therefore M. Luca could not complain of having such a son-in-law with such excellent qualities, even though he was not the one he had in mind,’ Marco Parenti commented. ‘Nevertheless he was not left in the position he had thought.’ Both he and his brother were given the offices they sought but neither of them was consulted by their colleagues or by anyone else. ‘M. Luca remained cold and alone at home,’ Marco Parenti continued, ‘and no one visited him to talk about political affairs – he whose house was formerly filled with every kind of pe
rson. Occasionally he ventured out but he could find hardly anyone in the street who would speak a word to him.’
Congratulated by both the King of France, who wrote to say, ‘It pleases me greatly that the lilies have come out victorious for my fine cousin, Piero de' Cosimo,’ and by the new Duke of Milan, who was thanked for his help in ‘putting an end to all civil discord’, Piero found his position in Florence more secure than it had ever been and his reputation so much enhanced that when the exiles, plotting in Venice, succeeded in enlisting the help of the condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni, Captain-General of the Most Serene Republic, Piero had no difficulty in raising a strong army to oppose the Venetians' advance, which was brought to a sudden halt at Imola.
His authority secure in Florence, Piero was able to turn once more to his great pleasure in life, his activities as connoisseur, collector and patron. In his father's lifetime he had often dealt with artists and their commissions on Cosimo's behalf, nurturing Donatello and Fra Filippo Lippi, encouraging Domenico Veneziano and Michelozzo and taking a close interest in the work of Luca della Robbia, founder of the Della Robbia's Florentine studio.4
Another Florentine artist working for the Medici at this time was Paolo di Doni, whose passion for birds earned him the nickname Uccello. Born at Pratovecchio just outside Florence in 1397, Uccello was an apprentice in Ghiberti's workshop by the age of ten and was not yet eighteen when he became a member of the Arte dei Medici e Speziali. ‘He always loved painting animals and in order to do them well he studied them very carefully,’ Vasari said, ‘even keeping his house full of pictures of birds, cats, dogs and every kind of strange beast whose likeness he could obtain, since he was too poor to keep the animals themselves.’ A shy, retiring man, he abandoned a commission at San Miniato al Monte rather than tell the abbot he was fed up with the cheese soups and cheese pies he was always given for his meals, and thereafter he ran away whenever he saw a friar in the streets of Florence.
Uccello had already painted some of the Old Testament scenes in the Chiostro Verde at Santa Maria Novella, designed stained-glass windows for the Duomo and completed the huge heads of prophets around the immense clock there, when he was commissioned by Piero to paint three scenes of the Florentine victory over the Sienese at San Romano in 1432. These three panels, now dispersed, all used to hang in Lorenzo de' Medici's bedroom in the Medici Palace, together with two other Uccellos, a scene from the legend of Paris and a picture of lions fighting dragons.5 Uccello's last work, according to Vasari, was a fresco over the door of the church of San Tommaso in the Mercato Vecchio around which he placed a screen of planks so that none should see the painting until he had finished it.
‘What kind of work is that you've hidden behind a screen?’ Donatello asked him one day.
‘You'll just have to wait and see.’
Then one morning, so Vasari recorded,
Donatello happened to be buying some fruit in the Mercato Vecchio when he saw that Paolo was uncovering his work… Paolo, anxious to have his opinion, asked him what he thought of the painting. After he had closely scrutinized it, Donatello commented, ‘Well now Paolo, now that it ought to be covered up, you're showing it to the whole world.’
Paolo… felt so humiliated that he no longer had the heart to go out of doors, and he shut himself up in his house and devoted all his time to perspective, which kept him poor and secluded till the day he died. He lived to a ripe but disgruntled old age.
Also working for the Medici in Uccello's time were two other leading Florentine artists, Benozzo Gozzoli and Antonio di Jacopo Benzi, who was known as Pollaiuolo because his father was a poulterer.
Gozzoli, born in Florence in 1420, had worked under Ghiberti on one of the Baptistery doors and with Fra Angelico at San Marco, before starting work on his masterpiece, the fresco cycle in the chapel of the Palazzo Medici. Piero took the greatest interest in this painting, which the artist began in 1459, asking him to use the brightest colours and to make the clothes as rich as possible. Gozzoli agreed but, less timid than Uccello, asked for payment in advance to cover the cost of the gold and ultramarine paint which would be needed. He also let it be known that Piero's criticisms of his work were not always well founded:
This morning I received a letter from your Magnificence through Roberto Martegli and I understand that the seraphims I have done do not seem appropriate to you. I have done one in a corner among certain clouds owing to which one only sees bits of the wing and he is so well-hidden and covered by the clouds that far from deforming anything he rather gives beauty. I have done another on the other side of the altar also hidden in the same way. Roberto Martegli has seen them and said there is nothing to make a fuss about. All the same I will do whatever you command me to do: two clouds will make them vanish. I would have come to speak with you myself but I began to apply the blue this morning and the task cannot be abandoned. The heat is great and from one moment to the next the glue might stop working.
When the work was finished, Piero had no cause for complaint about the painting, in which several members of his family were depicted and, so that there should be no mistaking his own identity, the artist included a portrait of himself with his name on his hat.
Caption
A detail of Benozzo Gozzoli's Procession of the Magi (1459 – 60) in the chapel of the Medici Palace. The figure riding the richly caparisoned horse above the black man's bow is supposed to represent Cosimo de' Medici. Between the two bearded figures behind him, Gozzoli has painted himself, with his name on his hat.
Piero's father is shown with the trappings of his horse decorated with the Medici arms and his own emblem of three feathers; near by is Piero himself; and in front of them may be the gorgeously clothed young Lorenzo, ten or eleven years old when the picture was painted, the trappings of his horse too bearing the Medici insignia. Piero's younger son, Giuliano, is perhaps also depicted, riding behind a black page carrying a bow; and Giuliano's three sisters are also here, good-looking girls dressed alike with tall plumes in their hats.6
Soon after Gozzoli's work in the chapel of the Medici Palace was finished, Antonio Pollaiuolo set to work for the Medici on his bronze of Hercules and Antaeus, now in the Bargello; and it was two of the other twelve labours of Hercules, the slaying of the Nemean Lion and the destruction of the Hydra of Lerna, which Piero de' Medici chose as subjects for paintings commissioned from Pollaiuolo for the audience hall of the palace.
Trained as a goldsmith, as so many Florentine artists were, Pollaiuolo was also a sculptor, engraver, enameller and jeweller, as well as a painter. He had worked on the silver altar frontal now in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo and in Ghiberti's bronze foundry. After years of exacting study and hours spent in the dissection of corpses, he had become renowned for his skill in portraying the naked figure, particularly the naked figure in movement, as his murals of nude dancers in the Villa La Gallina at Arcetri, once owned by the Lanfredini family, well illustrate.
The work of Antonio Pollaiuolo and of his brother, Piero, evidently had a strong influence upon an artist about twelve years younger than Antonio, Sandro Botticelli, whose diaphanously robed dancers in his early work, Primavera, painted for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici's palazzo in Florence, are the very epitome of graceful movement.7
Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi was the son of a Florentine tanner in a modest way of business in Via Nuova Borg'Ognissanti. He seems to have derived his nickname, Botticelli, which means little barrel, from an elder brother, a pawnbroker who was also a batiloro – beater of the gold leaf used for picture frames – who took him off his impoverished father's hands. A sickly child, Botticelli remained at school until he was thirteen, and was then sent to work in a goldsmith's shop before being apprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi. Soon afterwards, apparently, he was taken into the Medici household, and by 1470, though he was not yet twenty-six, he had his own workshop, which Filippo's son Filippino Lippi joined as an apprentice two years later.
Already Botticelli, recommended by the
Pollaiuolo brothers, had painted Fortitude for the hall of the Arte di Mercanzia and had been commissioned by the Vespucci family to work in the church of Ognissanti, for which he was later to paint his Saint Augustine. It was evidently the Vespucci who recommended him to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, for whose palazzo in Florence not only the Primavera but also the Birth of Venus were painted; and in both these pictures Botticelli is said to have represented members of the family in whose palace he lived. The lovely features of Giuliano's inamorata, the consumptive Simonetta Cattaneo, wife of Marco Vespucci, were recognized in those of Venus, while Giuliano himself was said to be represented by the figure of Mercury to the left of the three dancing graces. Members of the family were later to be identified in the Profile Portrait of a Lady in a Brown Dress,8 in the Madonna of the Magnificat9 and in the Adoration of the Magi, which, commissioned by Piero's friend, Gaspare di Zanobi del Lama for the church of Santa Maria Novella, contains supposed portraits of Piero, his father, brother and sons, as well as of Botticelli himself standing on the extreme right in a saffron gown.10 And, if the youth in the Portrait of a Young Man with a Medal, now in the Uffizi, is not a member of the family, the face on the medal is certainly that of Cosimo de' Medici.11
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