Lorenzo always treated him with great respect.’
GIORGIO VASARI
The Pope's anger was, indeed, fearful, so one of his secretaries said. The Vatican rang with his curses. Lorenzo de' Medici, that ‘son of iniquity and foster-child of perdition’, and all the citizens of Florence who supported him, were ‘anathematized, infamous, sacrilegious, culpable’. Their houses were to be levelled to the ground, their ‘habitations made desolate so that none may dwell therein’; all their property was to revert to the Church. A furious Bull of Excommunication declared that ‘everlasting ruin’ would witness their ‘everlasting disgrace’. War was declared upon them; Siena and Lucca were induced to declare war too; Federigo da Montefeltro was employed as commander of the papal forces, and the King of Naples encouraged to send his son Alfonso, Duke of Calabria, marching towards the Tuscan frontier with a large army and a further instalment of papal curses.
The Florentines were defiant. ‘Remember your high office as Vicar of Christ,’ the Signoria admonished the Pope in replying to his fulminations.
Remember that the Keys of St Peter's were not given you to abuse in this way… You say that Lorenzo is a tyrant and command us to expel him. But most Florentines call him their defender… Florence will resolutely defend her liberties, trusting in Christ, who knows the justice of her cause… trusting in her allies, who regard her cause as their own, trusting especially in the most Christian King, Louis of France, who has always been the patron and protector of the Florentine state.
To Philippe de Commines, Louis XI's envoy in Italy, the Florentines' defiance seemed admirable but foolhardy. The French might lend their moral support but there was no French army to defend Florentine liberties, while Florence's other traditional allies, the Milanese, were too preoccupied with their own troubles since the murder of their Duke, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, to concern themselves with the problems of the Medici. Lorenzo's friend, Giovanni Bentivoglio, offered what help he could from Bologna; the Medici's Orsini relatives raised what troops they could on their estates and offered the services of mercenaries; and the experienced Ercole d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, was employed as Florentine commander. But even when his troops had been augmented by a small contingent sent reluctantly from Milan under Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, the Duke of Ferrara did not apparently reckon his chances of success to be very high.
Certainly, cautious as usual, he did all he could, in those marches and countermarches, those plundering forays and circuitous retreats so dear to Renaissance military commanders, to avoid a confrontation with the Duke of Calabria, who was his brother-in-law. Florence's war committee, the Ten of War, reproached him for his reluctance to fight; but he loftily brushed aside objections like these from ‘mere mechanics who [knew] nothing of war’.
Soon afterwards he gave up his command and rode away, leaving his men to fend for themselves as best they could. They were poorly placed to do so. The wily, cynical Lodovico Sforza – known as II Moro because one of his Christian names was Mauro and he had a very dark skin – having established himself in power in Milan, had come to the conclusion that Florence was a lost cause. Not only were her forces in disarray, still threatened by the Duke of Calabria, who, having taken the town of Colle, less than thirty miles south of Florence, was resting his forces in Siena; not only were gangs of brigands plundering the Tuscan countryside, but plague had broken out in Florence, where the citizens, already suffering from the effects of an economy in decline, were becoming restlessly discontented under the weight of the heavy taxes occasioned by the war.
Lorenzo, encouraged by the Tuscan bishops, who had responded to the papal Bull of Excommunication by excommunicating the Pope – and heartened also by the unanimous support of the Ten of War – had established himself as undisputed master of Florence's destiny; and by the end of 1479 he had made up his mind that he could save the city only by going to Naples and personally negotiating peace. ‘I have decided, with your approval, to sail for Naples immediately,’ he wrote to the Signoria after he had already left Florence for Pisa.
I believe that I am the person against whom the activities of our enemies are mainly directed. I hope, by delivering myself into their hands, I may be the means of restoring peace to our fellow citizens… Perhaps God wills that this war, which began in the blood of my brother and of myself, should be ended by my means… As I have had more honour and responsibility among you than any private citizen has had in our day, I am more bound than any other person to serve our country, even at the risk of my life… I go, praying to God to give me grace to perform what every citizen should at all times be ready to perform for his country. I commend myself humbly to your Excellencies of the Signoria. Laurentius de Medici.
According to Filippo Valori, all the priori without exception were in tears by the time the end of his letter had been read out to them. It was known that the King of Naples was an unpredictable man, devious and vindictive; it was even rumoured that he kept the bodies of his defeated enemies embalmed in a private gallery where he could relish their downfall. But what was not so well known was that King Ferrante's second son, Federigo, and Federigo's sister-in-law, the Duchess of Calabria, were both friends of Lorenzo. Nor was it widely known that one of the King's principal advisers, Diomede Carafa, was deeply in debt to the Medici bank, nor that King Ferrante himself, despite his reputation, was a cultivated man, with whom Lorenzo might be expected to have much in common, with whom, indeed, Lorenzo had been in secret correspondence for some time. The ship in which Lorenzo was to sail had actually been sent from Naples to fetch him.
As it happened, the negotiations in Naples were far longer and more difficult than Lorenzo might have hoped. For weeks on end King Ferrante remained by turns intractable and evasive. It seemed that the immense amount of money which Lorenzo had brought with him, and which he lavished in Naples with apparently carefree generosity, was to be spent in vain. But in the end the King's concern about the Turks, whose ships were sailing ever more closely up the Apulian coast, and about the King of France, whose claims to the throne of Naples were being frequently repeated, weighed upon him to reduce the number of his enemies. The terms of a settlement were agreed; and although these terms – not altogether favourable to Florence – came in for some criticism there, Lorenzo returned to the city in triumph.
His opportunity had now come to strengthen the hold of the Medicean party over its affairs. He and his advisers did so without appearing to do so. Using the financial difficulties and economic problems of the time as an excuse, they arranged for the summoning of a Balìa, which authorized the creation of a Council of Seventy with powers superseding those of the Signoria. This new council, whose members were to hold office for five years, became, in effect, Florence's governing body. It was authorized to assume the right to elect the priori, which had formerly been exercised by the accoppiatori, and to appoint from its own members two new government departments, the Dodici Procuratori, who were to direct home and economic affairs, and the Otto di Pratica, the formulators of foreign policy.
Although it was understood that Lorenzo de' Medici was head of state, no such title was bestowed upon him; nor could he always get his own way with the Council of Seventy, nor overrule the directions of its members. He was not Signore of Florence, he used to say – as his grandfather had done when asked to initiate some unwelcome policy or do something he did not want to do – he was merely a citizen of Florence. Yet his influence was, in fact, extensive and usually decisive, and, in foreign affairs at least, largely unquestioned. He came to be accepted in Florence as the arbiter of the state's foreign policy and in the peninsula generally as ‘the needle of the Italian compass’; and, if it is now accepted that his reputation as a master of diplomacy is not entirely deserved, that he was often rash and short-sighted, taking great risks for trivial gains, he did undoubtedly serve Florence well and displayed in his correspondence with the republic's ambassadors a remarkable understanding of international affairs.
On his return from Nap
les he was faced by many problems: the Pope's nephew, Girolamo Riario, had bought the town of Forli, thus adding to his possessions in the Romagna close to the Tuscan border; the Pope himself, angered by Florence's treaty with Naples, had become more furious with Lorenzo than ever, while the Duke of Calabria had taken advantage of an uprising there to become Lord of Siena. But then help had come from an unexpected quarter: a Turkish army landed at Otranto and threatened to march across the peninsula to Naples, then north to Rome. Alarmed by this threat, which brought the Duke of Calabria rushing home from Siena, the Pope made it clear that he was prepared to forgive Florence for the sake of Christendom. Amity was thus restored; and for the rest of Lorenzo's life, after the withdrawal of Turkish troops from Italy upon the death of the sultan, Mahomet the Conqueror, there was peace in Italy. It was broken but twice, and on both occasions was soon restored by Lorenzo's intervention.
On 12 August 1484 Pope Sixtus died in Rome after an all-too-familiar outburst of rage and was succeeded by the Genoese Giovanni Battista Cibò, who chose to be known as Innocent VIII. An amiable, agreeable man, he allowed himself to be guided by Lorenzo to such an extent that a disgruntled Ferrarese ambassador complained that ‘the Pope sleeps with the eyes of the Magnificent Lorenzo’. Lorenzo cultivated him assiduously, constantly sending him presents, writing him long letters full of flattery and discreet advice, arranging the marriage of his daughter, Maddalena, to one of the Pope's several sons and, incidentally, finding it difficult to raise the money for the girl's dowry, there being, as he confessed, so many other ‘holes to fill up’.
Lorenzo was constantly in financial straits, and he did not hesitate to take money that did not belong to him, both from family trusts and from the public treasury, in order to make up for the rapidly falling profits from the Medici bank. In his grandfather's day, when the bank had been the most profitable organization in Europe, there had been Medici representatives in almost every capital and important commercial centre in Europe. As well
Caption
Lorenzo il Magnifico, a portrait by Giorgio Vasari.
as looking after the affairs of the bank, importing and exporting all manner of spices, fabrics, dyes, furs, fruit and jewellery, supplying their customers with everything from sacred relics and wild animals to slaves and choirboys, the branch managers were also political agents of the Florentine republic; and Cosimo had supervised their activities with the greatest care, reading the long and detailed reports they were required to submit regularly to Florence, sometimes working all through the night.
Lorenzo had no such interest in business. Lacking his grandfather's flair and application, and his father's attention to detail, he allowed the branch managers to conduct their affairs without the close supervision to which they had been subjected in the past. He also relied far too heavily upon the advice of the bank's ingratiating and none-too-competent general manager, Francesco Sassetti, whose family chapel is in the church of Santa Trinita, where Francesco and his four sons, together with Lorenzo and his sons, can all be seen depicted in Ghirlandaio's mural behind the altar.1
When warned about Francesco Sassetti's questionable policies Lorenzo would impatiently brush the advice aside, confessing that he ‘did not understand such matters’. One after the other the bank's branches got into difficulties through mismanagement or excessive loans, and one after the other they closed. The London branch put up its shutters when King Edward IV failed to repay the money advanced to him during the Wars of the Roses; the Bruges bank also collapsed, having lent large sums of money to Charles the Bold of Burgundy, who was killed in battle at Lyons after the death of Louis XI; so did the Milanese branch where the premises – given to Cosimo de' Medici by Francesco Sforza – were sold to Lodovico il Moro. Within the next few years the whole structure, which Philippe de Commines had described as the greatest commercial house there had ever been anywhere, fell to pieces in the general disintegration of Florentine banking. Yet Lorenzo, as a Ferrarese ambassador commented, had to deal with foreign princes, to entertain them and give them presents as though he were a prince himself, as though the title bestowed upon him, II Magnifico, though no more than a title of respect in fifteenth-century Florence, betokened the riches and splendour it seemed to imply.
Far more at home with scholars, writers and artists than with men of business, Lorenzo was most happy when, free for the moment from cares of state and wearing the plain, dark clothes he far preferred to robes of splendour, he could entertain his wide circle of clever and amusing friends at the Palazzo Medici or at one or other of his villas outside the city, at Fiesole or Poggio a Caiano, at Cafaggiolo or at Careggi, where every year on 7 November he gave a banquet in honour of Plato's birth.
He had been brought up in the company of humanists. Educated at first by tutors supervised by Gentile Becchi, the Latinist, by Cristoforo Landino,
Detail from a fresco in Santa Maria Novella by Domenico Ghirlandaio showing a group of humanists, Marsilio Ficino, Cristoforo Landino, Angelo Poliziano and Gentile Becchi.
translator of Aristotle and commentator on Dante, and by his grandfather's protégé and friend, Marsilio Ficino, Lorenzo had never tired of the company of such men. He talked with them, read aloud with them, listened to music with them, discussed classical texts and philosophical mysteries with them, supported them in times of need, protected them from ecclesiastical censure. He was, indeed, as one of them said, ‘the laurel who sheltered the birds that sang in the Tuscan spring’.
Often to be seen in his company, besides his close friends, the poets Angelo Poliziano and Luigi Pulci, were the bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci, and the musician Antonio Squarcialupi, the cathedral organist; Giovanni Pico, Count of Mirandola and Concordia, the aristocratic author of De hominis dignitate oratio, whose works were so strongly condemned by the Church; Paolo Toscanelli, author of works on mathematics, medicine, astronomy, philosophy and cosmography; and even the now aged Francesco Filelfo, who had fled from Florence after the failure of the Albizzi coup d'état against the Medici and who, despite the slanderous abuse he had heaped upon the Medici from Siena, had been allowed in 1481 to return to Florence.
Also to be seen in Lorenzo's company in these contented days were numerous painters and sculptors then working in Florence, amongst them Botticelli and Filippino Lippi, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Antonio Pollaiuolo, whom Lorenzo considered ‘the greatest master in the city’. Lorenzo did not himself commission much work from these men, since he had so little money to spare and preferred to spend what he could afford on antique gems and vases, on medals, coins and ancient pottery, believing, no doubt, that these were a safer investment than a big picture, that the thousand florins and more at which many of his gems were valued were more wisely expended than the hundred florins or so paid for a Botticelli or a Ghirlandaio. He was a connoisseur of gem carving, and employed in his household the sculptor, Bertoldo di Giovanni, to produce small bronzes and medals for the Medici collections; and it was probably Lorenzo himself who commissioned from Bertoldo the two fine reliefs, the Crucifixion and the Battle Scene, now both in the Bargello.
While in no position to be a generous patron in the manner of his grandfather, Lorenzo did take great pains to ensure that Tuscan artists were given commissions in other states, both for their own sakes and for the greater glory and benefit of Florence. Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Filippino Lippi were all found work in Rome, Antonio Pollaiuolo in Milan, Giuliano da Maiano and Andrea del Verrocchio in Naples; and when Leonardo, an illegitimate boy from the Tuscan village of Vinci, who had come as an apprentice to Verrocchio's workshop in Florence, evinced a desire to spread the wings of his astonishing talent, Lorenzo recommended him to Lodovico il Moro, a generous patron in Milan.
While it is possible that Leonardo lived in the Medici Palace for a time, it is almost certain that another young artist, some twenty years younger, did so. This was Michelangelo Buonarroti, son of an impoverished Tuscan magistrate of aristocratic stock.
Michelangelo's frien
d, Giorgio Vasari, suggested that the place and time of Michelangelo's birth were no mere accidents, since
the benign ruler of heaven graciously looked down to earth [and]… chose to have Michelangelo born a Florentine, so that one of her own citizens might bring to absolute perfection the achievements for which Florence was already justly renowned. So in the year 1474 [1475] in the Casentino, under a fateful and lucky star, the virtuous and noble wife of Lodovico di Leonardo Buonarotti gave birth to a baby son…
Now when he had served his term of office [as Mayor of Caprese] Lodovico returned to Florence and settled in the village of Settignano, three miles from the city, where he had a family farm. That part of the country is very rich in stone, especially in quarries of grey stone which are continuously worked by stonecutters and sculptors, mostly local people; and Michelangelo was put out to nurse with the wife of one of the stonecutters… When Michelangelo was old enough he was sent to the grammar school… but he was so obsessed by drawing that he used to spend on it all the time he possibly could. As a result he used to be scolded and sometimes beaten by his father and the older members of the family, who probably considered it unworthy of their ancient house for Michelangelo to give his time to an art that meant nothing to them.
His disinclination to other study, however, and his obvious talent for drawing, persuaded his father to allow Michelangelo to become an apprentice in Domenico Ghirlandaio's workshop and afterwards, perhaps, a pupil of the marble carver, Benedetto da Maiano. In any event, in about 1490, Michelangelo caught the attention of Lorenzo, who arranged with the boy's father to have him given a room of his own at the Palazzo Medici and for him to be found a place in a school which had been founded for such promising boys in a garden near San Marco.2 ‘Michelangelo always ate at Lorenzo's table with the sons of the family and other distinguished and noble persons,’ Vasari recorded,
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