The House Of Medici

by Christopher Hibbert

While defending his family from their rivals within the city walls and the city itself from her enemies outside them, Piero continued the family tradition of munificence. He paid for a splendid tabernacle for the miraculous crucifix in the church of San Miniato al Monte,2 and commissioned an even more magnificent tabernacle for the church of Santissima Annunziata which bore on its base the vainglorious inscription: ‘Costò fior. 4 mila el marmo solo The marble alone cost 4,000 florins’.3 At the same time he added numerous ancient coins to the collection assembled by his father, bought great numbers of rare manuscript books for the Medici Library, and had many volumes copied out for him and brilliantly illuminated. Antonio Averlino Filarete was told that Piero spent hours looking at these books, turning over the pages ‘as if they were a pile of gold’:

  One day he may simply want for his pleasure to let his eye pass along these volumes to while away the time and give recreation to the eye. The next day, then, so I am told, he will take out some of the effigies and images of all the Emperors and Worthies of the past, some made of gold, some of silver, some of bronze, of precious stones or of marble and other materials which are wonderful to behold…The next day he would look at his jewels and precious stones of which he had a marvellous quantity of great value, some engraved, others not. He takes great pleasure and delight in looking at these and in discussing their various excellencies. The next day, perhaps, he will inspect his vases of gold and silver and other precious material and praise their noble worth and the skill of the masters who wrought them. All in all when it is a matter of acquiring worthy or strange objects he does not look at the price.

  Like his father, Piero was anxious to be considered the friend as well as the patron of artists. And just as Cosimo, so Antonio Benavieni wrote, ‘bestowed both honours and countless rewards’ on Donatello during his active life, so Piero continued to honour and reward the sculptor in his old age and at his death. It had been one of Donatello’s last requests that he should be buried near Cosimo in the church of San Lorenzo. Piero ensured that this request was fulfilled and undertook to bear the cost of his interment in the crypt next to Cosimo’s tomb. When the coffin was carried there, it was followed by the Medici and thousands of the mourning citizens of Florence.

  Many of the artists in this long procession were already at work, or were shortly to embark upon work, for Piero de’ Medici. One of these was Luca della Robbia, soon to be elected president of the sculptors’ guild. Born in Florence in 1400 he had achieved lasting fame with the beautiful singing-gallery in the cathedral which he finished in 1428.4 Then, having been commissioned by the Signoria to complete the series of reliefs begun by Giotto and Andrea Pisano on the northern side of the campanile,5 he had been asked to make some oval terracotta reliefs for the walls of Piero’s study in the Medici Palace and some tiles for the floor, ‘a new thing and most excellent for summer’.6

  Another old artist in the funeral procession to San Lorenzo was Paolo di Doni, then aged sixty-nine. He, too, was a Florentine, a shy, withdrawn man with a passion for animals, particularly for birds, pictures of which filled his house and which earned him his nickname – Uccello. Several of his pictures of birds and of other animals, painted in tempera on canvas, were bought by the Medici to hang on the walls of their palace; and, some years before Donatello’s death, Piero asked Uccello to paint a picture in three panels of the rout of San Romano, to commemorate Florence’s victory over the Sienese in 1432 in the days of the Albizzi. This picture, in which the horses seem to dominate the action, was hung in Lorenzo’s bedroom next to two other Uccellos, a scene from the legend of Paris and a picture of lions fighting dragons.7

  Soon after the Rout of San Romano was finished, Piero bestowed his patronage on yet another Florentine artist who was asked to paint three large pictures for the Medici Palace. This was Antonio di Jacobo Benci, known as Pollaiuolo because his father was a poulterer. A sculptor, engraver, jeweller and enameller as well as a painter, he recommended himself to Piero by his skill in portraying the naked figure, a skill which he had perfected by spending hours in the most meticulous dissection of corpses. Piero ordered from him two of the twelve Labours of Hercules – the slaying of the Nemean lion and the destruction of the Hydra of Lernae – and a portrayal of Hercules’s subsequent conquest of the Libyan giant, Antaeus.8 In them Hercules, a symbol of courage on the official seal of the Signoria, was to be shown ‘larger than life’, as a Greek god rather than, in the manner of earlier times, a medieval warrior in shining armour.

  In adapting classical mythology to celebrate the virtues and triumphs of Florence and of her rulers, no artist was more in sympathy with Piero’s ideas than Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, known as Botticelli. At the time of Donatello’s death, he was twenty-two years old. The sickly son of a Florentine tanner in a poor way of business in the Via Nuova Borg’ Ognissanti, Botticelli had probably derived his nickname (which means Little Barrel) from an elder brother, a batiloro – a beater of gold leaf used for picture frames – who agreed to relieve their father of responsibility for him. On leaving school Botticelli had been apprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi; but soon afterwards had been invited to live at the Medici Palace where Piero and Lucrezia Tornabuoni treated him as one of their own family. In the Madonna of the Magnificat, which he painted soon after Donatello’s death, he appears to have introduced both sons of the house as angels kneeling before the Madonna, Giuliano with seraphic features and thick, curly hair shaped so that an appealing curl fell down across his brow, the more swarthy Lorenzo, who was only five years younger than the artist, with his idealized features in profile and in shadow.9

  In the Adoration of the Magi, however, which Botticelli painted as one of those family group pictures with a religious theme so favoured by Renaissance artists, Lorenzo – if the traditional identification can be accepted – appears in a stronger light and more exposed position. This picture was commissioned by Piero’s friend Guaspare di Zanobi del Lama, for the church of Santa Maria Novella, perhaps as a votive offering after the Medici’s escape from the danger of assassination and the threat of exile by the conspirators of 1466.10 Although other members of his family occupy more prominent positions, the picture certainly seems to have been intended as a tribute to Lorenzo, just as Fortitude, which Botticelli afterwards painted for the Council of the Arte della Mercanzia, appears to have been painted as a tribute to Piero.

  Fortitude was one of six panels representing the virtues of Charity, Justice, Faith, Temperance and Fortitude which the commercial tribunal, the Mercanzia, had commissioned for their hall. It was originally intended that all the panels should be done by Antonio Pollaiuolo’s younger brother, Piero, but Piero de’ Medici induced Tommaso Soderini to persuade his colleagues on the Council to give the commission for at least one of the panels to Botticelli. Botticelli responded by producing a Fortitude which was taken to be an allegorical representation of the steadfast character of his friend and patron.11

  Shortly before Botticelli completed this painting, another artist began work at the Medici Palace on a series of frescoes for the chapel on the first floor. This was Benozzo Gozzoli, also a native of Florence, who had worked on the Baptistery’s bronze doors under the direction of Ghiberti and who had later acted as assistant to Fra Angelico. In the Medici chapel for months on end Gozzoli worked by lamplight, gradually producing round the walls of the chancel, above an ornamented border of the Medici device of a diamond ring and the motto ‘semper’, two huge pictures depicting groups of angels rejoicing in the birth of Christ and gazing upon Filippo Lippi’s painting of The Virgin Adoring the Child which was placed above the altar.12

  Around the walls of the main body of the chapel, Gozzoli painted a memorial to the history of the Medici family in what purported to be a representation of the journey of the three Magi to Bethlehem, modelling several of his groups on Gentile da Fabriano’s altarpiece, Adoration of the Magi, which was painted for the altar of the Chapel of Onofrio Strozzi in Santa Trinità.13

  It used to be
confidently asserted that, as a celebration of the great Council of Florence of 1439 which had helped to make Florence a leading centre of European culture, the artist chose as his three Magi John Paleologus, the Emperor of the East, distinguished by his splendid robes, his melancholy bearded face and his unique turbaned crown; the Patriarch of Constantinople, a venerable white-bearded figure, also wearing a distinctive head-dress, and riding a mule; and the ten-year-old heir of the Medici family – whose grandfather was instrumental in bringing these great men from the east to Florence – Lorenzo de’ Medici, gorgeously attired and riding a magnificently caparisoned horse whose trappings are covered with the seven balls of the family’s emblem. It seems more likely, however, that the subject of the painting was suggested to Piero by the great pageants of the Three Kings which traditionally took place in Florence on the feast of Epiphany and in which members of the Medici family habitually took part. In 1446 Cosimo himself had made an appearance in a specially memorable Magi pageant which Michelozzo had helped to design. Certainly many of the men who took part in that spectacular cavalcade are depicted in Gozzoli’s painting, most of them wearing the round, flat-topped cap favoured by scholars of the day and invariably to be seen in portraits of Cosimo Pater Patriae. Mingling with them are the bearded Greek scholars from Constantinople, several of them – like Argyropoulos and Chalcondylas – now settled in Florence at the instigation and expense of the Medici. Between two of these Gozzoli has painted himself, and lest there should be any doubt as to his identity he has boldly inscribed his name upon his hat. Preceding him are other members of his patron’s family – Piero’s younger son, Giuliano, a negro walking in front of him with a bow; Cosimo Pater Patriae, the trappings of his horse decorated with the Medici arms and his own personal emblem of three peacocks’ feathers; Cosimo’s brother, Lorenzo, wearing a conical hat and riding a mule; and his patron, Piero himself, hatless as he is usually depicted. Also there are three handsome girls on horseback, dressed alike with tall plumes in their hats, no doubt intended to represent Piero’s three daughters.14

  As in the case of other pictures which he commissioned, Piero took great interest in the painting of this picture, instructing Gozzoli to use the brightest colours and to make the clothes as rich and brilliant as possible. Gozzoli agreed to do so, adding that he would need a great deal of gold and ultramarine paint, so would Piero advance him the money? When the painting was nearly finished, Piero objected that the angels were too obtrusive. Gozzoli did not think so:

  I have put in only two seraphim, one is in a corner among the clouds; nothing but the tips of his wings is visible, and he is so well hidden and so well covered by clouds that he does not spoil the picture at all, but on the contrary adds beauty to it…The other seraph is on the far side of the altar, also hidden in a similar way. Ruberto Martegli has seen them and said there is no cause to make a fuss about them. However, I will do as you ask. Two small clouds will obliterate them both.

  It is probable that Piero did not live to see this fresco finished. He had been ill since the beginning of 1469, and his last months were troubled ones. Groups of citizens, claiming to be acting on his authority, took to marauding through streets by day and night, ill-treating and threatening passers-by whom they accused of being opponents of the Medici and extorting money from them. Piero acted with that forceful determination which so often surprised those who supposed his ill-health had wasted his spirit, and who mistook for weakness his respect for the constitution of the state. He ordered the ringleaders to be brought to his room and, from his bed, upbraided them for their misdeeds; he warned them that, should their excesses continue, he would have members of various exiled families recalled to Florence to help control them. The violence immediately subsided and the marauding ceased; but before the end of the year Piero was dead. He was buried next to his brother, Giovanni, in the old sacristry of San Lorenzo. Over his body and that of their uncle his sons placed a porphyry sarcophagus, ornamented with acanthus leaves, designed for the Medici by Donatello’s most brilliant pupil, Andrea del Verrocchio.15

  IX

  THE YOUNG LORENZO

  ‘A naturally joyful nature’

  LORENZO WAS now twenty, strong, virile, clever and inexhaustibly energetic, the brilliant paladin of the Medici house, the first such heir it had ever had. His straight, thick, dark hair, parted in the middle, fell almost to his shoulders; his long flattened nose, which had no sense of smell, looked as though it had been broken and badly set; his heavy jaw jutted forward so that his lower lip almost enclosed the upper; the eyebrows above his big, dark, penetrating eyes were irregular and bumpy; he was quite strikingly ugly. His voice was cracked, nasal and high-pitched. Yet when he talked his face was so animated, his manner so arresting, his long slender hands so expressive that few noticed his defects.

  To his every activity he brought a marvellously infectious zest. As Marsilio Ficino, said, he had a ‘naturally joyful nature’. With equal enthusiasm he played calcio, a fast game like football with twenty-seven players on each side, and palloni, a ball-game played in a court with gloved hands. He went out hunting and hawking. In a voice not very tuneful, he sang at table and he sang in the saddle; once, so one of his friends recorded, he kept singing and telling jokes throughout a journey of thirty miles, keeping the rest of the company in spirits as high as his own. He composed many of his songs himself, and some of them were outrageously lewd. He had a strong taste for bawdy, for sexual innuendo and ribald stories. He also shared his contemporaries’ taste for those boisterous practical jokes which later generations were to find so heartless, even cruel. The story is told that one night when a tiresome, bibulous doctor was drunker than usual, Lorenzo suggested that two friends should bundle him off to the country, lock him up in a remote farmhouse and spread the rumour that he was dead. The rumour was accepted as the truth; and when the doctor escaped and returned home, pale and bedraggled, his wife believed him to be a ghost and refused to let him in.

  Yet Lorenzo was renowned amongst his friends for his kindness and consideration. Responsive, affectionate and simpatico, he had a rare gift for friendship and a deep love of animals, particularly of horses. He generally fed his own horse, Morello, himself; and when he did not, the animal, who greeted his master’s arrival by neighing and stamping his feet, would fret so much that he became ill. But although he spent so much time riding and hunting in the country, in gardening at Careggi, in supervising his farms in the Mugello, in raising herds of cows, breeding racehorses for the palio, rearing Calabrian pigs at Careggi and Sicilian pheasants at Poggio a Caiano, breeding rabbits and experimenting in the manufacture of cheeses, he derived quite as much pleasure from the activities he pursued in Florence, reading, writing, talking, studying Plato, playing the lyre, making architectural drawings and making love. He was astonishingly versatile; and he liked it to be known that he was. It had to be admitted that he was vain and intensely competitive. He could be very angry when beaten at a game or outwitted in some intellectual exercise.

  When he was nineteen, it was decided that it was time for him to marry. The bride selected for him was Clarice Orsini, the daughter of Jacopo Orsini of Monterotondo, a sixteen-year-old heiress from Rome. Lorenzo’s mother travelled to Rome to inspect the girl on the pretext of visiting her brothers, Giovanni and Francesco Tornabuoni, who looked after the Medici bank in Rome. Lucrezia caught her first glimpse of Clarice as she and her mother were on their way to St Peter’s. The girl was wearing a lenzuolo in the Roman fashion so Lucrezia could not see her properly, but ‘she seemed to be handsome, fair and tall’. The next time Lucrezia saw her she was still unable to inspect her figure as she would have liked, ‘since Roman women [were] always entirely covered up’; but, so far as she could judge it in its tight bodice, her bosom seemed to be well-shaped; and her hands were ‘long and delicate’. Her face was ‘rather round but not unattractive, her throat fairly elegant but rather too thin’. She certainly had a ‘nice complexion’. Her hair, Lucrezia noticed now, was
not really fair – no women in Rome were so blessed – but reddish.

  ‘She does not carry her head well, as our girls do, but pokes it forward,’ Lucrezia concluded her report. ‘I think she is shy…Yet, altogether I think the girl is a good deal above the average.’ Of course, she added, she could not be compared with her own three daughters who were, indeed, not only better-looking but, as Florentines, far better-educated than any Roman girl could expect to be. Nevertheless, Lucrezia hoped that with her evident modesty and good manners Clarice would soon learn Florentine customs.

  The Florentines themselves did not entirely approve of the match. It had never before been the custom for even the richest merchant families of the city to look outside Tuscany for brides and bridegrooms for their children; and the Medici had previously been content to ally themselves with families of their own sort. Lorenzo was well aware of the advantages of this himself. All his sisters married rich and influential Florentines; and two of his daughters were subsequently required to follow their example, one by marrying a Ridolfi,1 the other a Salviati.2 A third daughter, Luigia, was to be betrothed as a little girl to Giovanni, the younger son of his uncle, Pierfrancesco, with whose branch of the family Lorenzo and his father had quarrelled over the proper division of Cosimo’s fortune. The dispute had been settled by the time of the betrothal; but Lorenzo was determined to strengthen the renewed ties by a marriage within the family. And, although the marriage never took place, as Luigia died before she was twelve, the friendship between the two branches was not broken again so long as Lorenzo lived.

  Yet while Lorenzo understood the importance of marriage alliances between Florentine families, he recognized that there were good reasons for breaking the traditional rule and marrying an Orsini. Not only would he thus avoid arousing any jealousy in Florentine houses where there were marriageable daughters whom he had rejected, but he would be contriving an alliance with a family of far-ranging influence. The Orsini, soldiers and ecclesiastics by profession for countless generations, had huge estates within the Kingdom of Naples as well as north of Rome; they could raise soldiers as well as money; and in Clarice’s maternal uncle, Cardinal Latino, they had a firm foothold in the Curia. Lorenzo would naturally have preferred a better-looking and more intellectual bride from a less feudal and enclosed background. But, having succeeded in catching sight of her one day at Mass, he agreed that she was acceptable; and, once a dowry of 6,000 florins was settled, he married her by proxy in Rome, represented by a distant cousin, Filippo de’ Medici, Archbishop of Pisa.