The House Of Medici

by Christopher Hibbert

  It was a peace that throughout the last ten years of his life Lorenzo did his utmost to maintain, endeavouring to thwart the Pope’s attempts to embroil Italy in petty conflicts that might be turned to the advantage of his greedy family, and to create a united Italy powerful enough not only to keep the Turks at bay but also to frustrate the designs in Italy of France, Spain and the Empire. It was a policy which required patience and the most expert diplomacy, and was made all the more difficult to achieve by Girolamo Riario’s unsatisfied ambitions to extend his dominions beyond the borders of the Romagna. Twice war broke out; and twice Lorenzo’s personal intervention brought peace. On the second occasion, in August 1484, when the Pope’s representative returned to Rome to report that the terms of the peace treaty denied his nephew the towns of Cervia and Ravenna for which the war had been fought, Sixtus, already excessively ill-tempered because of his gout, was at first so angry that he could not speak. Then he burst out furiously that he would never countenance such humiliating terms. The next day he collapsed, and within a few hours was dead.

  His successor, Innocent VIII, was a far more easy-going and genial man, willing enough to advance his children, whom he complacently acknowledged as his own, but without that obsessive ambition which had dominated the policies of Sixtus IV. One of Lorenzo’s agents referred to him as ‘a rabbit’, and there was certainly something undeniably rabbity about the slant of his rather doleful eyes and in his unassertive manner. Lorenzo, who had followed the course of the election with the greatest interest, had good cause to hope that in due course he might be able to exercise over him a profitable influence. For the moment, however, Innocent’s chief adviser was a rough and bellicose cardinal, Sixtus IV’s nephew, Giuliano della Rovere, whose influence in the Sacred College had been largely responsible for Pope Innocent’s election. But, having pushed the Papacy into a costly and unrewarding war with Naples, the Cardinal began to lose favour. He was further discredited when a certain freebooter, Boccolino Guzzoni, made himself master of Osimo, a small town in the Papal States south of Ancona. The Cardinal was sent as Legate to drive Guzzoni out of the town. He failed to do so, and Lorenzo astutely took advantage of his discomfiture by buying Guzzoni off for a fraction of the cost of the ill-fated military expedition.

  Lorenzo lost no opportunity of increasing the respect which Pope Innocent now felt for him and of gaining his friendship, if possible his affection. He took the trouble to discover the Pope’s tastes and indulged them accordingly. He sent him regular consignments of ortolans; he sent him casks of his favourite wine; he sent him presents of fine Florentine cloth. He sent him courteous, flattering letters in which he assured him, when the Pope was ill, that he felt his sufferings as though they were his own, in which he encouraged him with such fortifying statements as ‘a Pope is what he wills to be’, and in which, as though incidentally, he included his views on the proper course of papal policies. Innocent was gratified by Lorenzo’s attentions and convinced by his arguments; he recognized in Lorenzo a man whom he could trust. So completely, indeed, did he come to share his opinions that, as the disgruntled Ferrarese ambassador put it, ‘the Pope sleeps with the eyes of the Magnificent Lorenzo’. The Florentine ambassador at Naples knew that this was so. ‘It is recognized perfectly well all over Italy,’ he assured Lorenzo, ‘what influence you have with the Pope and that the Florentine ambassador quodammodo governs the policies of Rome.’

  This influence was much increased after 1488 when Lorenzo’s daughter, Maddalena, was married to one of the several sons which the Pope had had before his entry into the Church, Franceschetto Cibò. The bridegroom was almost forty, a portly, boring man, who drank too much and was reputed never to have made a single interesting remark in his entire life; and Maddalena, a rather plain, sharp-featured, round-shouldered girl of sixteen, did not look forward to the match with relish. Nor did her mother, who was so devoted to her that Lorenzo referred to the girl as her mother’s occhio del capo – the eye within her head. But Maddalena was a dutiful child, and her mother was a dutiful wife: marriages were thus arranged in families such as theirs; besides, dull, sottish and addicted to gambling though he was, Franceschetto was said to be kind; and Lorenzo was generous. Since he was at the time in the midst of one of his recurrent financial crises, he found it difficult to pay Maddalena’s dowry of four thousand ducats, there being, as he admitted to the Florentine ambassador in Rome, so many other ‘holes to fill up’. But he did contrive to raise the money in the end. He also gave Franceschetto the Pazzi palace in Florence as well as the Pazzi villa at Montughi, and a fine estate at Spedaletto near Arezzo.

  The Pope was delighted. Lorenzo’s hold on him was confirmed and tightened, and it was now accepted throughout Europe that the policies of the Curia were in future to be directed by Florence, that, as in the time of Cosimo, a Medici was once again to be the virtual arbiter of Italian policy. European rulers sought his advice; Muslim potentates sent him lavish presents. Time and again he intervened to save the peace of Italy, restraining the Pope from venting his obstinate anti-Aragonese prejudices by attacking Naples, maintaining the precarious balance of power in the peninsula by coming forward to preserve the independence of smaller states. It is clear now that Lorenzo’s reputation as a master of diplomacy was largely undeserved, that he was often rash and short-sighted, taking great risk for trivial gains, that Italy was not plunged into a general war rather by good luck than by good management and that foreign intervention would certainly have come earlier than it did had it suited the foreigners themselves. Yet in his own lifetime Lorenzo’s high standing as a statesman was rarely questioned: he was ‘the needle of the Italian compass’. In Florence he won immensely enhanced credit by finding plausible excuses to relieve the Genoese of the city of Pietrasanta and to retake from them the fortress of Sarzana, thus finally atoning for the humiliations suffered during the course of the War of the Pazzi Conspiracy. At both Pietrasanta and at Sarzana, though little-disposed to such activity, he appeared amongst the soldiers on the battlefield, encouraging them in the fight and supervising their entry through the breaches in the shattered walls.

  After his triumphant return from Sarzana, the ‘Republic of Florence’, as Scipio Ammirato said,

  remained free of all troubles, to the great reputation of Lorenzo. The Italian princes also enjoyed peace, so that, with everything quiet beyond her frontiers and with no disturbances at home, Florence altogether gave herself up to the arts and pleasures of peace, seeking to attract thither men of letters, to accumulate books, to adorn the city, to make the countryside fruitful. In short she devoted herself to all those arts and pursuits which caused men to esteem that age so happy.

  XIII

  LORENZO: PATRON, COLLECTOR AND POET

  ‘He had a full understanding of such and all other things’

  MORE THAN once during these years when he was repeatedly called upon to compose some tiresome quarrel between one Italian state and the next, Lorenzo was heard to observe that he longed for the opportunity of burying himself in some remote part of Tuscany where not even a rumour of the troubled affairs of the outside world could reach him. He longed to be able to spend more time with his friends, with that brilliant circle of scholars, writers and artists who gathered when they could at one or other of his country villas – at Fiesole, or at Careggi where every year on 7 November a banquet was given in honour of Plato’s birth; at Poggio a Caiano, twelve miles north-west of Florence where an old villa was transformed by Giuliano da Sangallo;1 or at the remote, fortress-like villa of Cafaggiolo in the valley of the Mugello on the road to Pistoia. Though occasionally overcast by petty quarrels and outbursts of jealous pique among the members of his court, life at these villas was usually delightful and informal. At meal times guests sat down wherever they chose. They might find themselves next to Lorenzo himself, or his dearest friend, Angelo Poliziano, or to another poet, the amusing, sardonic Luigi Pulci, known to their host as ‘Gigi’, or to Giovanni Pico, Count of Mirandola and Conc
ordia, the clever, earnest aristocrat whose influential works, one of which was dedicated to Lorenzo, had been so strongly condemned by the Church. They might meet the entertaining bookseller, Vespasiano da Bisticci; or Marsilio Ficino, who dedicated his Theologica platonica to Lorenzo; or Gentile Becchi, Lorenzo’s former tutor, now Bishop of Arezzo; or the great musician, Antonio Squarcialupi, the Cathedral organist, whom Lorenzo helped to find singers for his choir; or the artists, Filippino Lippi, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Sandro Botticelli, all of whom were at various times employed by Lorenzo on the decorations of the villa of Spedaletto; or Antonio Pollaiuolo, described by Lorenzo as ‘the greatest master in the city’; or, during the last years of Lorenzo’s life, the young Michelangelo Buonarroti.

  The son of a poor Tuscan magistrate of aristocratic stock, Michelangelo had been sent at the age of seven or eight to Francesco Urbino’s school in Florence, and then – much to the distress of his father who lamented his choice of so humble a trade – had been apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio who ran a big painting studio in Florence. Soon after arriving there his precocious gifts had made a deep impression on his master who exclaimed, ‘Why, this boy knows more than I do!’ on seeing a drawing that the thirteen-year-old Michelangelo had done depicting his fellow apprentices at work in the Tornabuoni chapel at Santa Maria Novella. When Lorenzo asked Ghirlandaio to recommend some promising pupils for a new school that he had founded, Ghirlandaio had no hesitation in including Michelangelo among the list of names.

  According to Giorgio Vasari, Lorenzo had founded his school with the purpose not only of providing boys with a training in particular crafts but also of giving them a far wider education than would otherwise have been available to them. He furnished a site, a garden between the Palazzo Medici and San Marco, employed a master, his old friend Bertoldo di Giovanni, a former pupil of Donatello, and lent the school numerous paintings, antique busts and statues to be set up in the studio and around the grounds.2 It was while making a copy of one of these antiquities – the head of an old faun – that Michelangelo is said to have first come to Lorenzo’s notice. ‘Although this was the first time he had ever touched a chisel or worked in marble,’ so Vasari recorded,

  Michelangelo succeeded in copying the faun so well that Lorenzo was amazed. Then, when he saw that Michelangelo had departed a little from the model and followed his own fancy in hollowing out a mouth for the faun and giving it a tongue and all its teeth, Lorenzo laughed in his usual charming way and said, ‘But don’t you know old people never have all their teeth; there are always some missing.’

  As soon as Lorenzo had gone away, Michelangelo broke off one of the faun’s teeth

  and dug into the gum so that it looked as if the tooth had fallen out; and he waited anxiously for Lorenzo to come back. And after he had seen the result of Michelangelo’s simplicity and skill, Lorenzo laughed at the incident more than once and used to tell it for a marvel to his friends. He resolved that he would help and favour the young Michelangelo; and first he sent for his father, Lodovico, and asked whether he could have the boy, adding that he wanted to keep him as one of his own sons. Lodovico willingly agreed, and then Lorenzo arranged to have Michelangelo given a room of his own at the Palazzo Medici and looked after him as one of the Medici household. Michelangelo always ate at Lorenzo’s table with the sons of the family and other distinguished and noble persons, and Lorenzo always treated him with great respect…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 boys in the San Marco garden were paid salaries varying in amount through the generosity of the noble and magnificent Lorenzo who supported them as long as he lived.

  Michelangelo remained at the Medici Palace for four years and during that time ‘he showed the results of his labours to Lorenzo every day’.3

  Far less rich than his father or grandfather, Lorenzo did not commission nearly as many sculptures or paintings; and many of those for which he was responsible have been destroyed, like the frescoes at Spedaletto, or lost. Several others, until recently supposed to have been commissioned by Lorenzo – such as Botticelli’s two most famous works, Primavera4 and the Birth of Venus,5 are now known to have been painted for his namesake, his rich young cousin, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, and to have been hung on the walls of the villa of Castello which the younger branch of the Medici family bought in 1477.6 Botticelli’s Pallas and the Centaur was also hung at Castello and was probably commissioned by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, although it seems to celebrate the elder Lorenzo’s triumph over the Pazzi conspirators and the ending of the Florentine wars.7

  But if Lorenzo did not himself commission much work from Botticelli, he went out of his way to ensure that he was well supplied with orders from other Florentine patrons and seems to have been responsible for his going to work in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Lorenzo was equally active on behalf of Filippino Lippi whom he also sent to Rome, Antonio Pollaiuolo whom he sent to Milan, and Giuliano da Maiano whom he recommended to the Duke of Calabria. For Ghirlandaio he obtained work in Santa Maria Novella and in Santa Trinità,8 and afterwards recommended him for employment in the Sistine Chapel. For Verrocchio, who, according to Vasari, ‘never gave himself a moment’s rest from painting or sculpture’, Lorenzo obtained work all over Tuscany. He also commissioned – though the sculptor’s brother claimed he never paid for – a bronze David9 and a terracotta Resurrection for his own villa of Careggi.10 And for the garden of his school he had Verrocchio restore and complete a badly broken red stone statue of the flayed body of Marsyas as a companion piece to a white marble Marsyas which Cosimo had bought in Rome. Verrocchio, so Vasari recorded,

  made the missing legs, thighs and arms out of pieces of red marble so skilfully that Lorenzo was more than satisfied and was able to place it opposite the other statue, on the other side of the door. This antique torso, showing the flayed body of Marsyas, was made with such care and judgement that some slender white veins in the red stone were brought out by skilful carving in exactly the right places, appearing like the tiny sinews that are revealed when a human body is flayed.

  When Verrocchio left Florence for Venice to work on his last masterpiece, the monument to the condottiere, Bartolommeo Colleoni, which stands in the Piazza di Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Lorenzo let him go with his blessing. He was equally amiable when Leonardo da Vinci decided to move to Milan. It is possible that Leonardo, like Michelangelo, had lived in Lorenzo’s household for a time. It is certain that when, at the age of about twelve, this illegitimate boy from the Tuscan village of Vinci came to work in Verrocchio’s workshop in Florence, Lorenzo took the greatest interest in his precocious genius; and that when Leonardo decided to spread the wings of his astonishing versatility in Milan, where Duke Lodovico Sforza was looking for an artist to make an equestrian statue of his father, Lorenzo, always alive to the political advantages of such generosity, recommended him to Lodovico by sending the Duke a silver lyre, made in the shape of a horse’s head, which Leonardo had made.

  Lorenzo certainly liked it to be known that he was a connoisseur of such things, just as he set great store by his reputation as an expert judge of architecture. It had, indeed, become common practice to consult him when important works were to be undertaken. His advice was sought, for instance, over a disputed design for the façade of Santo Spirito;11 and Filippo Strozzi consulted him about the proportions of the Palazzo Strozzi.12 Lorenzo was also asked to select the better of two models for the Forteguerri tomb at San Jacopo in Pistoia, the one submitted by Verrocchio, the other by Piero del Pollaiuolo, as he had ‘full understanding of such and all other things’. And when a new altar panel for the church of Santo Spirito was commissioned from Ghirlandaio, one of the conditions was that it should be done ‘according to the manner, standards and form’ as would please Lorenzo.

  Lorenzo himself submitted a design for the façade of the
Cathedral which, in 1491, still remained without one. Since Verrocchio, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Filippino Lippi also took part in the competition, together with several other masters, the judges were naturally somewhat embarrassed. To escape their dilemma they asked Lorenzo to choose the design himself. But, having praised all the designs, Lorenzo told them that he could not make up his mind and advised that the matter should be adjourned.13

  If Lorenzo spent far less on paintings and sculpture than his grandfather and left unfinished various buildings which Cosimo had begun – such as the church of the Badia at Fiesole – he continued throughout his life to add to his magnificent collection of bronzes, medals, coins, ancient pottery, antique gems and Roman, Byzantine, Persian and Venetian vases, many of them carved in semi-precious stones and most of them inscribed with his name picked out in capitals: ‘LAUR. MED’. He would, in fact, pay far more for a fine engraved gem, no doubt believing it to be a sounder investment, than he was prepared to pay for a big picture. Many of the gems in his collection were valued at over a thousand florins, while a Botticelli or a Pollaiuolo did not cost more than a hundred.

  Lorenzo also continued to lavish money upon the patronage of writers and scholars and upon the purchase of books and manuscripts for the continually expanding Medici library. His agents were instructed to be perpetually on the watch for likely sources. Giovanni Lascaris – who was twice dispatched to the East at Lorenzo’s expense to seek out manuscripts that might otherwise be lost – brought back to Florence from his second voyage over two hundred Greek works, the existence of almost half of which had not previously been known.