The House Of Medici

by Christopher Hibbert

  While spending immense sums on his library, Cosimo also followed his father’s example in lavishing money upon the adornment of Florence. Giovanni di Bicci had never much cared for books. Indeed, according to an inventory of his possessions made in 1418, he only owned three books altogether, a Latin life of St Margaret, a sermon by Fra Giovanni also in Latin, and a copy of the Gospels in Italian. But he had always recognized that the honour of the city, and the personal credit of the rich citizen who cared for honour, demanded donations to public building and to the enrichment of buildings already in existence.

  The first important project with which Giovanni may have become involved was the provision of new doors for San Giovanni Battista. The Baptistery, ‘il mio bel Giovanni’ as Dante called it, was already at least two hundred and fifty years old.3 Its southern doors, depicting scenes from the life of the saint to whom the church was dedicated, were made by Andrea Pisano in 1330; and in 1402, a year of plague, it had been decided to provide new doors for the northern front as a votive offering, a plea to God not to repeat that dreadful visitation of 1348 when so many thousands of citizens had died in a fearful epidemic that had swept northwards across Europe from Naples. The doors were to be cast in bronze of the most exquisite workmanship, and seven of the leading artists of the day had each been asked to submit a design for a competition of which Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici was probably one of the judges.

  The design was to be for a bronze panel representing the sacrifice of Isaac; and, when all the works had been handed in, the judges decided to give special consideration to the submissions of three young artists, all of them in their twenties, Jacopo della Quercia from Siena, Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi, both Florentines. After lengthy deliberations the choice fell upon Ghiberti and Brunelleschi; but when these two were asked to collaborate, the suggestion so annoyed the fiery-tempered Brunelleschi that he stormed out of Florence and went to study architecture in Rome, handing the bronze he had made to Cosimo de’ Medici who afterwards placed it in the old sacristy at San Lorenzo where it was displayed behind the altar.

  Ghiberti, to whom the sole responsibility was now entrusted, was highly versatile, as a true Renaissance artist was required to be. Trained as a goldsmith, he was painter and architect as well as sculptor. He designed windows for the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore as well as golden tiaras for Martin V and Eugenius IV, the gold setting for a cornelian cameo depicting Apollo and Marsyas which belonged to Giovanni de’ Medici, and, for Cosimo, a reliquary for the bones of three now forgotten martyrs. At the time of his first commission for the Baptistery he was twenty-three; he was to be seventy-three before his work there was completed. A most exacting perfectionist, he cast and re-cast panel after panel before he was satisfied that the reliefs were as perfect as he could make them, exasperating his assistants by his exhausting, relentless, wearisome striving ‘to imitate nature to the utmost’. After twenty-two years’ work the doors were finished at last; and, in celebration of so important an event, the Priori came out in procession from the Palazzo della Signoria – an exodus permitted them only upon the most solemn occasions – to pay their respects to the artist and his great work.4 No sooner was the ceremony over, however, than Ghiberti returned to his foundry in the Via Bufalini opposite the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova,5 and immediately began to work on another set of doors for the eastern front of the Baptistery. He settled down to his task with that same determination to produce an unsurpassable masterpiece as he had brought to the earlier commission. After a further twenty-eight years’ work, a frail old man close to death, he was forced reluctantly to conclude that he could make no further improvement. The gilded bronze panels, representing scenes from stories in the Old Testament, were mounted at last, in 1456, in the eastern door of the Baptistery where Michelangelo was later to stand transfixed in wonderment before them and to declare that they were ‘fit to be the gates of Paradise’.6

  Giovanni de’ Medici, himself an old man even before Ghiberti’s first doors were finished, had by then, together with his son, Cosimo, arranged for the Baptistery to be provided with another masterpiece, the monument to his friend, Pope John XXIII.7 He had also concerned himself with the building and endowing of the Ospedale degli Innocenti, a hospital for the foundlings of Florence built for the Arte di Por Santa Maria,8 and with the restoration and enlargement of San Lorenzo which, consecrated by St Ambrose in 393, was now falling into ruins. Eight of the leading men of the parish of San Lorenzo agreed to pay for the building of a family chapel, Giovanni undertaking to pay not only for a Medici chapel but also for the sacristy. This work, as also the Ospedale degli Innocenti, was entrusted to Brunelleschi, who had now returned from Rome anxious to display his newly acquired talents and to show Ghiberti how much more there was to art than the casting of bronze panels. His church of San Lorenzo, which became the family church of the Medici and was later to be enriched with their tombs, is one of the masterpieces of the early Renaissance.9

  Brunelleschi’s most important commission, however, was to provide the massive dome for the cathedral. Men had almost despaired of this ever being done, since the space to be crowned – 138 feet in diameter – was so great. But Brunelleschi, who had made a careful study of the Pantheon and other buildings in Rome, insisted that it could be executed perfectly well and without scaffolding. The committee appointed by the Masons’ guild to consider the problem were highly sceptical, particularly as Brunelleschi, petulant and ill-tempered as always, declined to explain to them how he intended to set about the task, insisting that the matter must be left entirely in his hands and that no board of untrained busybodies should be given the opportunity of interfering with his design. The story is told that at one of the committee’s inconclusive meetings, Brunelleschi produced an egg, announcing that only he knew how to make it stand on its end: when all the others had confessed their failure to do so, he cracked its top on the table and left it standing there. ‘But we could all have done that,’ they protested. ‘Yes,’ replied Brunelleschi crossly, ‘and you would say just that if I told you how I propose to build the dome.’ On a later occasion Brunelleschi became so obstreperous that the committee gave orders for him to be forcibly removed from their presence. Attendants seized him, carried him out of the palace and dropped him on his back in the Piazza. Thereafter people pointed him out to each other in the streets, shouting, ‘There goes the madman!’

  Ultimately, after numerous other architects had been consulted and various ideas, such as a dome made of pumice-stone, had been rejected, the Committee gave way and in 1420 Brunelleschi was entrusted with the complicated task. To his exasperation, however, he was required to accept the collaboration of Ghiberti, whoso assistance in the early stages was probably more useful to Brunellesch than Brunelleschi would ever allow or posterity would recognize.

  Sixteen years later the dome, as much an extraordinary feat of engineering as of architecture, was finished; and on 25 March 1436, the Feast of the Annunciation, the first day of the year according to the idiosyncratic Florentine calendar, it was consecrated in a splendid five-hour ceremony.10 A wooden walk, raised on stilts, hung with banners and garlands and covered by a scarlet canopy, was constructed between the Pope’s apartments in the monastery of Santa Maria Novella and the door of the Cathedral. At the appointed hour the Pope appeared, clothed in white and wearing his jewelled tiara, and began the slow procession along the carpet which had been laid over the raised boards beneath the canopy. He was followed by seven cardinals, by thirty-seven bishops and archbishops, and by the leading officials of the city led by the Gonfaloniere and the Priori. At the sound of the choir singing their hymn of praise many of the spectators were seen to be in tears.

  After his father’s death Cosimo continued to pour Medici money into the building, restoration and embellishment of churches, convents and charitable institutions all over Florence and in the surrounding countryside, as though determined to leave his mark on Tuscany. ‘I know the humours of my city,’ he once
remarked to his friend, Vespasiano da Bisticci. ‘Before fifty years have passed we shall be expelled, but my buildings will remain.’ First of all, as a member of a committee of four appointed by the Arte del Cambio, he had a share in commissioning Ghiberti to make a statue of St Matthew, patron of bankers, for one of the fourteen niches on the outside walls of Orsanmichele which had each been adopted by a guild.11 In paying for the work, Cosimo contributed more than his fellow bankers, as befitted his wealth, but only slightly more, in accordance with his accustomed discretion. After Orsanmichele, the novices’ dormitory and chapel at Santa Croce,12 the choir of Santissima Annunziata,13 the library of the now demolished church of San Bartolommeo, the monastery known as La Badia at San Domenico di Fiesole – where Cosimo had his own room14 – and San Girolamo nei Monti at Fiesole, all appear to have benefited from Cosimo’s munificence and from his undoubted knowledge of architectural matters, to which even the leading craftsmen and designers seem to have deferred. Cosimo was also responsible apparently for the restoration of a college for Florentine students in Paris, the renovation of the church of Santo Spirito in Jerusalem and for additions to the Franciscan monastery at Assisi. The year after the completion of the Cathedral dome he undoubtedly provided funds for Michelozzo to rebuild the monastery of San Marco; this was a charitable enterprise which, according to Vespasiano da Bisticci, Cosimo was induced to undertake by Pope Eugenius IV whom he had consulted at a time when his conscience troubled him. He eventually spent the enormous sum of 40,000 ducats on this Dominican monastery, whose exacting, ascetic and intimidating Prior, Antonio Pierozzi – known as Antonino because he was so small – became Archbishop of Florence in 1445, and in 1523 a saint. Antonino was one of Cosimo’s closest friends, and the two men could often be found talking together, and with other members of the community, in the large cell which Cosimo reserved for his own private use and to which he retreated by himself when feeling the need for quiet reflection. They often talked, so it was said, of usury and how that besetting sin of a banker’s life might be expiated. The Church’s ruling was that the usurer might obtain forgiveness only by restoring during his lifetime, or at his death, all that he had gained unrighteously; and cases were known of penitent bankers who had appalled their heirs by stipulating in their wills that the first charge upon their assets must be the payment of full restitution. The distribution of charity was an insufficient atonement; but practical churchmen were quick to suggest that it was a help; and no doubt Cosimo considered it to be so. Certainly he paid out enormous sums. According to his grandson, who came upon an account book covering the thirty-eight years 1434 to 1471, ‘the incredible sum of 663,755 florins’ had been spent on ‘buildings, charities and taxes’. So generous was Cosimo towards San Marco, indeed, that the friars ‘in their modesty’ felt obliged to protest. But Cosimo passed over their complaints. ‘Never,’ he used to say, ‘shall I be able to give God enough to set him down in my books as a debtor.’ He subscribed money to endow the monastery when the restoration was completed, presented the friars with vestments, chalices and illustrated missals, as well as most of Niccolò Niccoli’s library, and employed numerous scribes to copy out codices to add to their collection.15

  When the work on San Marco was finished, Cosimo decided to build a new palazzo for his own family. He had moved some years before from the Palazzo Bardi to his father’s house in the Piazza del Duomo which he had improved and extended; but while this old family house might have been large enough for his family’s personal needs, it was far too small for his business which urgently required new store-rooms and counting-houses. As the site for the new building he chose the corner of the Via Larga, the widest street in the city, and the Via de’ Gori which lay beneath the northern wall of the church of San Giovannino degli Scolopi.16 The architect he selected was the brilliant, cantankerous Filippo Brunelleschi whose work on the nave of the nearby church of San Lorenzo was now almost completed. But when he saw Brunelleschi’s plans and wooden model he thought them altogether too splendid and ornate, and rejected them as tactfully as he could. All the buildings which he had commissioned, and which he liked to consider as much his own works as those of the architects who had designed them, were quiet, restrained, composed and unemphatic and he wished his own palace to be the same. So, setting Brunelleschi’s plans aside, he turned instead to the younger architect, Michelozzo Michelozzi, a decision which so angered Brunelleschi that, in a bout of fury, he smashed his model ‘into a thousand pieces’.

  Michelozzo was also a Florentine by birth, the son of a tailor whose family originally came from Burgundy. Formerly a pupil of Donatello, Michelozzo had already made a name for himself as a sculptor of exceptional promise, notably as the executor of the tomb for John XXIII in the Baptistery. His designs were less grand than those of Brunelleschi, much more in tune with Cosimo’s taste for spacious simplicity and restraint of colour. Envy, Cosimo used often to say, was a weed that should not be watered; and he was anxious to ensure that the Palazzo Medici should give no offence to any of his critics. Since it was to contain offices and counting-houses for the family’s business interests as well as private apartments it could not, of course, be too small. Cosimo’s enemies, naturally, vastly exaggerating his intentions, condemned the palazzo as a monument to his greed. ‘He has begun a palace which throws even the Colosseum at Rome into the shade,’ wrote one of them. ‘Who would not build magnificently if he could do so with other people’s money?’ Yet when compared with other palaces which were to be built within the next two decades, such as the Palazzo Rucellai and the formidable Palazzo Pitti, the Medici Palace was far from grandiose. In the middle of the fifteenth century it was considered to be worth about 5,000 florins. Certainly, as time passed and it was altered and enlarged by both Cosimo’s descendants and the Riccardi family into whose hands it eventually passed, the palace took on a more imposing appearance; but in the beginning it was remarkable less for its grandeur than for its originality. The days had passed when town houses had also to be fortresses with towers at the corners and machicolated battlements overhanging the street; but not until Michelozzo set to work on the Palazzo Medici had a house appeared in Florence which combined the delicacy of early Italian Gothic with the calm, considered stateliness of the classic taste.17

  The walls of the ground floor were faced with those massive rough-hewn stones which give the effect known as rustica and which Michelozzo used so as ‘to unite an appearance of solidity and strength, with the light and shadow so essential to beauty under the glare of an Italian sun’. Originally, there were no windows at ground level on the Via Larga front, the fortress-like appearance being broken only by a huge arched gateway. But above the gateway, where the family were to live, the sombre effect was softened by rows of arched windows, flanked by columns Doric on the first floor, Corinthian on the second, the whole being overhung by a cornice eight feet high, the top of which towered, like the cornices of classical Rome, in a powerful line over the Via Larga. Facing the Via de’ Gori there was an open loggia, the arches of which were later filled in by those curved, barred windows known as ‘kneeling windows’ which were designed by Michelangelo. On the corner of the loggia was one of those beautiful iron lamps made by Niccolò Grosso, who was known as ‘il Caparra’,18 and above it the Medici arms carved in stone, with Cosimo’s personal device of three peacocks’ feathers, signifying the three virtues he most admired – temperance, prudence and fortitude – sprouting from the shield.

  Before the Palazzo Medici was finished, Michelozzo began work on another house for Cosimo, a new villa in the Mugello. Cosimo never tired of country life. Whenever possible he left Florence to spend as long as he could at Il Trebbio or at his beloved villa of Careggi where he was able to read in peace, go out and perform those country tasks from which he derived such solace, pruning his vines and tending his olives, planting mulberry and almond trees, and talking to the country people from whom he acquired those peasant proverbs and fables with which, on his return to the city, he
enlivened his own conversation. Here at Careggi he could talk to his friends without the irritation of constant interruption; he could summon his young protégé, the little, clever, ugly Marsilio Ficino, to come over from the villa of Montevecchio to keep him company, to have a meal with him, or perhaps to play chess, the only game Cosimo ever did play. He wrote to Ficino in one characteristic letter in 1462,

  Yesterday I arrived at Careggi not so much for the purpose of improving my fields as myself. Let me see you, Marsilio, as soon as possible. Bring with you the book of our favourite Plato, which I presume you have now translated into Latin according to your promise; for there is no employment to which I so ardently devote myself as to discover the true road to happiness. Do come then, and do not forget to bring with you the Orphean lyre.

  Cosimo had no intention of leaving Careggi; but he wanted another villa, more remote, one which would serve as a place of retreat in times of trouble or plague and which would help to bind the country people of the Mugello more closely to his family. He chose a site at Cafaggiolo where the Medici had owned land for generations; and here, to Michelozzo’s designs, a new villa began to take shape in 1451.19