Florence

by Christopher Hibbert

  and Lorenzo always treated him with great respect. During that period, as salary and so that he could help his father, Michelangelo was paid five ducats a month; and to make him happy Lorenzo gave him a violet cloak and appointed his father to a post in the customs. As a matter of fact, all the young men in the garden at San Marco were paid salaries… This place was full of antiques and richly furnished with excellent pictures collected for their beauty, and for study and pleasure. Michelangelo always kept the keys to this garden, as he was more earnest than the others… For example, he spent many months in the church of the Carmine making drawings from the pictures by Masaccio; he copied these with such judgement that the craftsmen and all the others who saw his work were astonished, and he then started to experience envy as well as fame.

  It was at this time that Michelangelo, a difficult man, critical, impatient and sardonic, had his celebrated quarrel with the Florentine sculptor, Pietro Torrigiani, who was to make his reputation in England. ‘This Buonarroti and I from boyhood used to go to study in Masaccio's chapel in the church of the Carmine,’ Pietro Torrigiani told Benvenuto Cellini; ‘and because Buonarroti was accustomed to make fun of all those who were drawing there, one day when he was annoying me among the rest, he aroused in me more anger than usual, and clenching my fist I gave him so violent a blow upon the nose that I felt the bone and the cartilage break under the stroke as if it had been a biscuit; and thus marked by me he will remain as long as he lives.’

  Lorenzo took great pride in recognizing Michelangelo's genius, as he did in appreciating the virtues of all of Florence's great artists. Indeed, he

  Bronze bust of Michelangelo in the Bargello by Daniele da Volterra, his near contemporary (1509 – 66).

  liked to be considered, and came to be considered, the city's foremost arbiter of taste, an expert in architecture as well as in sculpture and painting. It became common practice to consult him when important works, both public and private, were to be undertaken. He was, for instance, asked for his advice by those responsible for the building of the new church of Santa Maria delle Carceri at Prato, recommending Giuliano da Sangallo as architect; and he was invited to become a member of the opera of Santo Spirito and again recommended Giuliano da Sangallo as architect for the new sacristy. Even foreign rulers and princes sought his advice. Both King Ferdinand II of Naples and the Duke of Calabria consulted him about new palaces in their domains. And no one would have considered building a palace in Florence in his day without showing him the plans or asking him to suggest the name of an architect who might draw them.

  According to Filippo Strozzi's son, his father manipulated Lorenzo when he wanted to build a palace larger and more magnificent than might otherwise have been considered appropriate. The plans for the palace had at first been rejected by Filippo, who protested that they were far too grandiose; but he had had second thoughts when told that Lorenzo would prefer a design that would grace and honour the city. So he consulted Lorenzo, who approved the grand design. Filippo, still feigning modesty, demurred, while praising Lorenzo's taste and discernment, and eventually gave way on the grounds that Lorenzo understood these matters of space and style far better than he did himself. So, without risk of censure from the Palazzo Medici, he got the palace he had always wanted, making provision in his will for his heirs to keep at least fifty workmen employed on the site at all times and, in the event of the palace not being finished within five years of his death, for Lorenzo de' Medici to become supervisor of the work.

  Not only was he consulted as a matter of course, Lorenzo was occasionally invited to submit designs himself. He did so, for instance, when a competition was held for the facade of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, which had long remained without one. Filippino Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Verrocchio were among the several artists who also submitted designs, so that the judges were placed in an embarrassing position, from which they endeavoured to extricate themselves by asking Lorenzo to choose the design himself. Lorenzo in turn escaped by praising all the designs which, he declared, were of such comparable merit that he could not pronounce any one of them to be the best. The problem was, therefore, shelved; and the cathedral was left faceless until a temporary facade was erected in 1515. In the later sixteenth century and the seventeenth century other competitions were held, but these, too, were inconclusive, and the front of the building was covered instead by a canvas curtain. When this was blown down in a gale in the 1690s it was decided to cover the bare stone with frescoes painted by foreign artists brought down for this purpose from Bologna, which would have been inconceivable in Lorenzo's time. These frescoes slowly crumbled away and it was not until the late nineteenth century that the present facade of marble and mosaics was completed.

  When the first competition for the cathedral's facade was held in 1491, Lorenzo was forty-two. He had become recognized as one of the greatest of Italian statesmen as well as a patron and collector and a poet of outstanding versatility. He had contributed large sums to the University of Florence, now famed for the lectures given there by his friends, Landino, Ficino and Poliziano, and for its courses in Greek which, supervised by Demetrius Chalcondyles, were attended by students from all over Europe, including Thomas Linacre, who was to be one of the founders of the Royal College of Physicians, and William Grocyn, who was to be one of the first scholars, perhaps the first, to give public lectures in Greek at Oxford University.

  Lorenzo had also revived the once renowned but now rather decayed university at Pisa, encouraging the expansion of its faculty of law and thus astutely gaining credit for having the interests of Pisa and Tuscany at heart, while at the same time removing from Florence those interfering legal pundits who were only too ready to question the validity of Medicean policies.

  He had become a passionate champion of the Italian language, deriding those humanists who regarded it with disdain and who belittled the Tuscan poets of the immediate past, and arguing strongly against men like the precious Niccolò Niccoli, who had contended that Dante was a poet to be read only by bankers and wool-workers. He had added numerous volumes to the Medici library and had encouraged the printing of books in Florence, where the first printed work had not appeared until 1471 and Bernardo Cennini had not established his press until 1477. This was several years after presses had been set up in Naples, Rome, Venice, Milan and Verona, so strong was the tradition in Florence that printing was rather a vulgar process and that manuscripts should be copied by hand, as they were so beautifully and carefully by the scribes and illustrators in Vespasiano da Bisticci's bookshop.

  Much as Lorenzo had achieved, however, there remained much to do and it was feared that he would have little time left in which to do it. He was already ill when he returned from Naples to Florence, suffering from increasingly painful attacks of uricaemia which the waters of the spas at Vigone, Spedaletto, Porretta and Bagno a Morba alleviated for a time but did not cure. At the beginning of 1492 he was taken to the villa of Careggi and was never to return to the Palazzo Medici. From Florence reports of strange portents reached him: a woman in Santa Maria Novella had gone mad during Mass and had rushed about the church, screaming of a raging bull with flaming horns; two of the city's lions had been killed while fighting in their cage in Via dei Leoni; Marsilio Ficino had had visions of giants struggling in his garden; lightning had struck the cathedral lantern and one of its marble balls had crashed down into the Piazza del Duomo. Lorenzo asked on which side it had fallen, and on being told, said, ‘I shall die, for that is the side nearest my house.’

  His doctor assured him that he would soon recover and, when proved wrong and accused of witchcraft and poisoning, the poor man threw himself down a well at San Gervasio. Another doctor sent from Milan prescribed a concoction of pulverized pearls and precious stones which he noisily banged about in a pestle in a nearby room. Lorenzo seemed to have faith in this remedy and, taking the hands of his old friend Angelo Poliziano into his own, he gazed searchingly into his face. Poliziano looked away an
d, returning to his own room, burst into tears.

  Having lapsed into a kind of coma, Lorenzo de' Medici died on 9 April 1492, speechless, his eyes fixed on a silver crucifix.

  *

  Caption

  Bronzino's portrait of Lorenzo de' Medici's son, Piero (1472 – 1503).

  ‘The people wouldn't stand for it!’ Angelo Poliziano had protested when the dying Lorenzo had told him that he wanted to devote the rest of his life to poetry and study, and to leave the government of Florence to his son, Piero.

  Piero was, indeed, although far better looking than most of his family, an unattractive young man, as much disliked in the city as was his haughty Roman wife, an Orsini like his mother. Indulged as a child both by his parents and his grandmother, Piero was impatient, arrogant and spiteful. He was also extremely lazy, content to leave the tiresome details of public affairs in the hands of his secretary and the administration of the rapidly disintegrating family bank to his mother's by-no-means-efficient uncle, Giovanni Tornabuoni. He was far from being capable of dealing with the threat to the Medicean regime precipitated by the accession to the French throne of Charles VIII, an ambitious, restless young man determined to renew the claims of the House of Anjou to the Kingdom of Naples. Nor did he know how to meet the ferocious attacks upon the Medici by a Dominican friar from Ferrara, a man whose fiery, apocalyptic sermons filled the cathedral to overflowing. These sermons greatly impressed Michelangelo, who was to say as an old man that he could still hear the friar's harsh voice ringing in his ears; they alarmed the neurotic Botticelli and so frightened Pico della Mirandola that the philosopher felt his hair standing on end. The name of this unnerving preacher was Girolamo Savonarola.

  13

  THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES 1492 – 8

  ‘Repent, O Florence, repent while there is still time!’

  GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA

  Savonarola's father and grandfather had both been physicians at the Ferrarese court where, although of the strictest moral principles, they had advocated the consumption of large doses of alcohol in the interests of health and longevity, a prescription not in the least to the taste of Girolamo, notorious for his asceticism. He ate as little as he drank; he rarely spoke to women except to preach at them; he forswore all comfort, wearing coarse cloth next to his skin and sleeping on a straw mattress thrown over a board. When leaving home for a Dominican monastery at Bologna he told his father that he ought to thank God for having given him a son ‘deemed worthy to become His militant Knight’, a son who would fight with all his strength to stop the Devil jumping on to his shoulders.

  After several years in Bologna, Savonarola was sent by his Order to preach elsewhere in Italy, arriving in Florence in 1481 to become lector at San Marco.1 He was then a small, spare, ugly man of twenty-nine, with sunken cheeks, an immense hooked nose, thick red lips and intense green eyes that seemed to flash with fire. His voice was harsh, his gestures violent and clumsy; but, although at first a far from impressive preacher, not knowing, as he himself confessed, ‘how to move a hen’, he gradually acquired so terrible a power that congregations – who had waited for hours outside for the doors to open – sat horrified and spellbound by his vivid images, his imprecations and exhortations, his warnings of the horrors to be faced by those who did not repent of their sins.

  In sermons delivered at San Marco, and afterwards – when that church could no longer hold the congregations that flocked to hear them – in the cathedral, Savonarola thundered against the iniquities of the Florentine people, their dissolute carnivals, their passion for gambling, their extravagant

  A portrait of Savonarola in San Marco by his fellow Dominican Fra Bartolommeo (1475 – 1517).

  clothes, their scent and powder, the sensual pleasures which were destroying their souls and making it impossible for them to reach the Kingdom of God. They must beat virtue into prostitutes, who were nothing but ‘pieces of meat with eyes’; they must burn sodomites alive; they must destroy those wanton pictures that made the Blessed Virgin look like a harlot; they must trample underfoot the pagan works of Aristotle and Plato, who were now rotting in hell, and must return to the austere simplicity of the early Christian Church. They must attend to the warnings of the Old Testament prophets if they were to gain eternal life. They must reject the spectacles offered them by the present regime, which were like the bread and circuses offered to the Roman people by the emperors, and they must replace their present tyranny with a true republic.

  After long periods of fasting, Savonarola was vouchsafed visions of a terrible future, of plague and famine, tempests, flood and war. ‘Repent, O Florence, he cried, ‘repent while there is still time! Clothe thyself in the white garments of purification!’ It was not he who spoke, he said. It was God who spoke through him.

  ‘The Lord has placed me here,’ he declared, ‘and he has said to me, “I have put you here as a watchman in the centre of Italy that you may hear my words and announce them to the people.”’ The people listened to his words in silent fear, waiting for the fall of the sword of the Lord which hung so threateningly over them, for the foreign armies which, they were told, would soon pour across the Alps, like ‘barbers armed with gigantic razors’.

  ‘A Dominican Friar has so terrified all the Florentines that they are wholly given up to. piety,’ the Mantuan envoy reported to his master sardonically. ‘Three days a week they fast on bread and water, and two more on wine and bread. All the girls and many of the wives have taken refuge in convents, so that only men and youths and old women are now to be seen in the streets.’

  Certainly, when the foreign enemies, as forecast by Savonarola, crossed the Alps in the shape of an immense French army under King Charles VIII of France, on the march to claim his Neapolitan inheritance, the Florentines seemed too stunned to offer resistance. Nor, indeed, were the other Italian states prepared to stand in his way.

  In Milan, Gian Galeazzo Sforza had come of age, but his uncle, Il Moro, determined not to give up the powers of regent and, concerned that Gian Galeazzo's forthright wife, who was a granddaughter of the King of Naples, might force him to do so, had promised Charles VIII his support. Venice announced her neutrality. The Papal States offered no resistance. Piero de' Medici, who had at first announced his support for the King of Naples, now declared that Florence would, like Venice, remain neutral; and, although he displayed a flurry of unwonted activity when the French, in need of fortresses in Tuscany to give security in their rear while advancing south, attacked and sacked the stronghold of Fivizzano, other leading citizens of Florence made no comparable efforts to prevent the French marching any further south into Tuscany.

  ‘Behold!’ declaimed Savonarola in the cathedral. ‘The sword has descended. The scourge has fallen. The prophecies are being fulfilled. Behold, it is the Lord God who is leading on these armies… Behold, I shall unloose waters over the earth… It is not I but God who foretold it. Now it is coming! It has come!’

  Many in the cathedral's congregation were persuaded that the French troops were, indeed, instruments of God sent to shock Florence and Italy into obedience to his commands. Many more were convinced that resistance was useless. Piero de' Medici's two rich cousins, Lorenzo and Giovanni, sons of Pierfrancesco de' Medici, sent messages to the French headquarters assuring the King of their full support in what he called his ‘enterprise’, offering money to support it and undertaking to use all their influence in Florence to gain the citizens' sympathy for the invading army. Their message was intercepted and Piero ordered them to be held under house arrest; but they soon escaped and made their way to King Charles at Vigetano to deliver their assurances of support in person.

  Deserted by most members of the Medicean party and badgered and anathematized by Savonarola, Piero concluded that he must make his own submission. He rode off to the French camp now at Santo Stefano to do so, dispatching to the Signoria a letter clearly inspired by the one his father had written after his departure for Naples fifteen years before.

&nbs
p; The French King received Piero de' Medici with haughty condescension. Charles VIII was a poor figure of a man, small, crooked and ugly, with a nose of monstrous size and loose, thick lips partially concealed by a wispy beard. His features were further distorted by a convulsive tic; his hand also twitched disconcertingly; he was extremely short-sighted; he limped crouchingly on large, misshapen feet. On occasions uneasily affable, he was more usually silent, muttering his words rather than speaking them. Even so he commanded respect, and not only as King of France: there was a force in his personality that made men wary in his presence.

  Piero, evidently in awe of him, was only too ready to give way on every point, so the French staff later told Philippe de Commines. He offered to concede to him the right to occupy all the Tuscan strongholds he needed as well as the towns of Pisa and Leghorn.

  Hearing of this abject capitulation, and thankful to have a scapegoat for their own helpless inertia, the priori ordered the main gate of the Palazzo della Signoria to be shut against him when Piero returned to Florence the next morning to make his report. Later they sent a message telling him they would admit him through a side door provided his guard remained outside; but by now huge crowds had gathered in the Piazza, cursing him and throwing stones. He thought it as well to ride away while he still could for the relative safety of the Medici Palace, from which that night he fled with his wife, his two young children, his younger brother, Giuliano, and his cousin Giulio, then sixteen years old, the illegitimate child of his uncle Giuliano. Piero's other brother, Giovanni, aged eighteen, also fled from Florence, having tried to gather support for the family by riding up and down the streets shouting their rallying cry, ‘Palle! Palle! Palle!’