The House Of Medici

by Christopher Hibbert

  Although the art of printing from movable type had been invented in the middle of the century at Mainz, it had not at first made much headway in Italy where many scholars considered it a rather vulgar process, practised ‘among the Barbarians in some German city’, and many collectors, including Duke Federigo of Urbino, ‘would have been ashamed to own a printed book’. Printing presses had been set up in Naples in 1465, in Rome in 1467, in Venice and Milan in 1469, in Verona, as well as in Paris and Nuremberg, in 1470. In 1476 William Caxton had set up his press at the Sign of the Red Pale in the shadow of Westminster Abbey. But it was not until 1477 that Bernardo Cennini had established his press in Florence. Before that – and, indeed for many years after, so strong was the tradition in the city – whole schools of scribes, illustrators and scriveners were employed by Lorenzo to make copies of his manuscripts so that their contents could be as widely diffused as possible and replicas presented to other libraries and institutions both within and beyond the frontiers of Tuscany, in particular to the libraries of Pisa.

  Well aware that Pisa resented her subjection to Florence almost as much as Volterra, Lorenzo had taken great pains to improve relations between the two cities and to gain credit for the Medici as benefactors of them both. He had developed the port of Pisa, bought land outside the city and a riverside house within the walls where he often took his family to stay, particularly in the colder winter months when the climate there was relatively mild and the wooded Apennines afforded shelter from the bitter east wind that, now unimpeded, blows down from the Romagna. Above all, Lorenzo had sought to reconcile the Pisans to Florence and the Medici by reviving Pisa’s once renowned but now decayed university. In 1472 he had established it as the principal university in Tuscany, and he personally contributed more than twice the amount of the grant of six thousand florins a year that the foundation received from the State.

  He also contributed handsomely to the funds of the University of Florence, which now had the reputation of being the only one in Europe where the Greek language was adequately taught. It employed as teachers and lecturers such scholars as Johannes Argyropoulos, Theodorus Gaza, and Demetrius Chalcondylas who, with Demetrius Cretensis, issued from Florence in 1488 the first printed edition of the works of Homer. Students from all over Europe came here to learn Greek. Thomas Linacre, who was to become physician to King Henry VIII and one of the founders of the Royal College of Physicians, spent a year in Florence in 1485–6 and was allowed to share the lessons given by Chalcondylas to Lorenzo’s sons. Linacre’s friend, William Grocyn, who was later one of the earliest scholars to teach Greek at Oxford, arrived in 1488. In 1489 there came another friend, William Latimer, who helped Grocyn and Linacre to translate Aristotle into Latin.

  Lorenzo shared these scholars’ enthusiasm for Greek philosophers and Latin poets, but he had no patience with those humanists who regarded the Italian language with disdain and caustically belittled the achievements of the Tuscan poets of the immediate past. When Lorenzo wrote poetry as a relaxation from the cares of business and private life, it was not so much the Latin poets whom he chose as his exemplars but Dante and Boccaccio. It was not in Latin that he wanted to write but in that simple, beautiful language which he had learned to speak as a child. Passionate in his devotion to Tuscan, he insisted – as Leon Battista Alberti had insisted – that it could be made far more subtle and pliable if only poets would endeavour to perfect their use of it, if only they could dismiss from their minds Niccolò Niccoli’s absurd contention that Dante was a poet to be read only by common wool workers and bakers. Lorenzo himself wrote in Tuscan with a depth of feeling that might have transformed the mannered poetry of the cinquecento had he had more leisure to develop his remarkable gifts. As it was, he was a worthy successor to the accomplished poets of the late thirteenth century, the precursors of Petrarch.

  Lorenzo’s poetry was of a marvellous verve and diversity, sad and spirited, sometimes hopeful, more often disillusioned, moved by religious sentiment as well as by the desires of the flesh. He wrote devotional poems, as his mother had done, and blasphemous parodies which would have distressed her; he wrote hunting songs and loev songs, exuberant canzoni a ballo, carefree burlesques and libidinous canti carnascialeschi, like the ‘Song of the Fir Cone Sellers’, celebrating the delights of sexual passion and physical love. Above all, his feelings for the beauty of the Tuscan landscape, and for the pleasures and hardships of the life of country people, is expressed with an extraordinarily vivid intensity. He writes of flocks of bleating sheep migrating to upland pastures, the lambs trotting in their mothers’ steps, the shepherds carrying lambs just born and lame sheep on their shoulders; and of these flocks at night, enclosed by lines of poles and nets, with the shepherds snoring in the darkness after their meal of bread and milk; of cranes flying towards the setting sun, and falcons swooping down upon their prey; of olive groves beside the sea, their leaves turning now grey now green as the breeze blows across the shore; of the sparks from a flint in dry autumn leaves lighting brushwood, of flames spreading to the forest trees, burning bushes and lairs from which terrified birds and animals flee in a clatter of wings and pounding hooves; of winter scenes of tall firs, black against the snow, frozen leaves crackling underfoot; of the hunted deer making its last desperate leap; the patient ox struggling with its burden of stones; and the exhausted bird falling into the sea, frightened to settle on the mast of a ship; of the river Ombrone in flood, its yellow waters cascading down the mountainside, carrying trunks and boughs of old ilex trees and the planks of a peasant’s shed across the wide plain; and of the peasant’s wife, her baby crying on her back, running with their cattle from the rising floods.

  By the beginning of 1492 it was clear that Lorenzo, although only forty-three, was already a dying man. For years his intermittent attacks of gout had been increasingly painful and incapacitating; and now his general health was failing fast. He had made it a habit to take the waters each year, at Spedaletto or Porretta, at Vigone where St Catherine had scalded herself in the hot springs to prepare herself for Purgatory, or at Bagno a Morba, south of Volterra, an attractive spa which had been established by his mother. From each visit he returned protesting that he was now quite well again, but within a few months he had relapsed into his former debilitated state. He had to be carried in a litter to his favourite villa at Poggio a Caiano where he could do little but read, admire the frescoes which he had commissioned Andrea del Sarto to paint on the walls, supervise the farming of the surrounding land, or visit the menagerie where, with other exotic animals, was kept the beautiful giraffe – ‘so gentle that it [would] take an apple from a child’s hand’ – which had been presented to him by the Sultan of Babylon.

  In these last years his charm was overcast by outbursts of irritability. As his gout grew more and more painful he was often brusque and sometimes offensive. To a man who unfeelingly criticized the character of Squarcialupo, the musician, he said sharply, ‘If you knew how hard it is to obtain perfection in any art, you would overlook such shortcomings.’ To a Sienese who sympathized with him on his failing eyesight and commented that the air of Florence was said to be bad for the eyes, he retorted, ‘And the air of Siena for the brain.’ In reply to one of his cousins, a rather slovenly man, who spoke complacently of the unfailing water supply at his country villa, he replied, ‘Then you could afford to wash your hands more often.’

  In February 1492 it became known that he was no longer able to attend to business; he could neither walk nor even hold a pen. A slow fever had eaten away ‘the whole man’, Poliziano wrote, ‘attacking not only the arteries and veins, but the limbs, intestines, nerves, bones and marrow’. At the beginning of the next month, having said goodbye to his younger son, Giovanni, who was going to live in Rome, he had to dispel rumours that he was on his deathbed by appearing at his bedroom window. A fortnight later he was taken to the villa of Careggi never to return to Florence.

  He was accompanied to Careggi by Poliziano and some other friends
who sat by his bedside talking to him, and, when he was too tired for conversation, taking it in turns to read aloud extracts from the works of the Tuscan poets he loved so well. He would devote the rest of his life to poetry and to study, he told Poliziano, leaving the government of Florence to his son, Piero. But Poliziano replied, ‘The people won’t let you.’

  A few days after this Lorenzo heard that on the night of 5 April – following a day upon which two of Florence’s lions were killed in a fight in their cage in the Via di Leone – lightning had struck the Cathedral lantern. One of the marble balls on its summit had crashed down into the piazza. On which side? Lorenzo wanted to know – and, on being told, said, ‘I shall die, for that is the side nearest my house’. There were reports of other dreadful portents: she-wolves howled in the night; strange lights appeared in the sky; a woman in Santa Maria Novella was seized by madness during Mass and ran about, screaming warnings of a raging bull with flaming horns which was pulling the church down about her ears; Marsilio Ficino saw ghostly giants fighting in his garden and emitting fearful cries.

  Lorenzo’s own doctor, Piero Leoni, was joined by Lazaro di Pavia, a Lombard physician sent to Careggi by Lodovico Sforza. This man prescribed a concoction of pulverized pearls and precious stones which he noisily prepared himself in a room near Lorenzo’s. ‘Are you there, Angelo?’ Lorenzo called out; and when Poliziano hurried to his bedside he asked him what on earth the doctor was doing. On being told, Lorenzo seemed for a moment to believe that the strange medicine might cure him and, taking both Poliziano’s hands in his own, he gazed eagerly into his face. Poliziano looked away and, returning to his own room, burst into tears.

  Later that day, when Pico della Mirandola came to see him, Lorenzo again acknowledged that he knew himself to be dying. His voice grew weaker as he spoke, but he was heard to say, ‘I only wish that death had spared me so that I could finish helping you collect your library.’

  Growing weaker under his doctors’ ministrations, he sent for a priest to hear his confession and give him communion. For this, he insisted on getting out of bed and being dressed; but the effort was too much for him. He had to be carried back to bed where he fell back against the pillows.

  From time to time Piero went into his father’s room and whenever he did so Lorenzo ‘put on a brave face’, so Poliziano recorded, ‘and so as not to increase his son’s sadness by his own, held back his tears’.

  On 8 April he lapsed into a kind of coma and was given up for dead until a Camaldolensian friar held the lenses of his spectacles to Lorenzo’s mouth. When the story of Christ’s Passion was read to him, though he could frame no words, he moved his lips to show that he understood them. His eyes were fixed on a silver crucifix which was held before his face and which occasionally he kissed, until finally his breathing stopped.

  Piero Leoni had always supposed that Lorenzo’s illness would not prove fatal. Disagreeing with the necromantic cures and potions of his colleagues, he had protested that all would be well provided the patient was kept warm and dry and protected from the night air, ate no pears and swallowed no grape pips. So distressed to have been proved wrong, and heartbroken by accusations of witchcraft and poisoning, Leoni left Careggi and threw himself down a well in the grounds of a villa at San Gervasio.

  Lorenzo’s body was taken to the monastery of San Marco, then to San Lorenzo where he was buried next to his brother, Giuliano, in the old sacristy.

  PART THREE

  1492–1537

  XIV

  PIERO DI LORENZO DE’ MEDICI AND THE FRIAR FROM FERRARA

  ‘Behold! It is the Lord God who is leading on these armies’

  AT TWENTY-TWO Piero had little of his father’s charm. Strong, healthy and athletic, with a mass of light brown hair which lay in a fringe on his forehead and fell to his shoulders, he was not unattractive; but his personality and manner were far from endearing. He had Lorenzo’s ruthlessness without his tact; he was equally unforgiving towards his enemies but did not remain loyal to his friends. His early letters give the impression of an indulged and rather petulant child. ‘Please send me some figs, for I like them,’ he wrote to his grandmother when he was five. ‘I mean those red ones, and some peaches with stones, and other things you know I like, sweets and cakes and little things like that.’ He asked his father to send him ‘the best sporting dog that can be had’; and when that arrived, he wanted a pony and grew impatient waiting for it. ‘I haven’t had that pony you promised me,’ he complained. ‘Everybody is laughing at me.’

  As he grew older his temper became more violent and his manner more arrogant. And, either to avoid comparison with a father universally admired if often envied, or because he chose to believe that the Medicean regime had now acquired such permanence that he could behave without due regard for its supporters’ opinions, he shied away from business and public affairs. Much of his time he spent out-of-doors or in writing poems in poor imitation of Lorenzo’s vivid style, leaving the conduct of public affairs to his secretary, Piero Dovizi da Bibbiena, and the supervision of the disintegrating bank to his not very competent great-uncle, Giovanni Tornabuoni. His unpopularity with the Florentines was greatly increased by his wife, Alfonsina, whom he had married when he was seventeen. An Orsini girl, she made it only too plain in her haughty, narrow Orsini manner that she would have preferred to remain in Rome amongst the true nobilità, an attitude that the Florentines, provincials for the most part themselves, found peculiarly irritating.

  Piero’s reputation in Florence was also much damaged by his continual quarrels with his cousins, Lorenzo and Giovanni, the two sons of Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, both of whom were older, and – despite their guardian’s misappropriation of part of their inheritance – richer than Piero, and neither of whom took any trouble to hide either their animosity towards the senior branch of the family or their intention to abandon it to its enemies in any future struggle for power that might arise. This struggle was not long to be delayed. For years, indeed, it had been predicted by an eloquent, fiery, ascetic Dominican friar from Ferrara whose apocalyptic sermons had filled the congregations in the crowded Cathedral with shame, remorse and fear.

  Girolamo Savonarola was born at Ferrara in 1452. His grandfather, who seems to have been responsible for his education, was a physician from Padua, an acknowledged authority on the curative properties of spa waters and an exponent of the beneficial effects of alcohol which he comfortingly maintained would, if taken in generous measure, help to ensure longevity. His views and reputation secured him a profitable appointment at the Ferrarese court as the Duke’s physician; and, on his retirement, his son succeeded him. His grandson, however, had no taste for court life. After one visit to the Duke’s castle he swore that he would never go there again. Girolamo was an introspective boy, gloomy, pale and withdrawn, given to composing melancholy verses, strumming plaintive, dirge-like strains upon the lute and studying the scriptures. It was later said of him that his demeanour became even more despondent after he had fallen in love with Laodamia Strozzi, the natural daughter of a Florentine exile, who loftily rejected his advances; but he himself maintained that he had never wanted to marry. Certainly his later life was marked by the most rigid austerity. He rarely even spoke to women except to sermonize them; he ate little and forbore to taste those strong liquors by which his grandfather had set such store; his clothes were worn and patched; he slept on a straw mattress laid on a wooden board.

  One feast day in 1475, without telling anyone where he was going, he left his father’s house to seek admittance as a novice in the monastery of San Domenico at Bologna, where he was to remain for seven years. ‘You have more reason to thank God than to complain,’ he wrote to his father, explaining his sudden departure.

  For God has given you a son and has deemed him worthy to become His militant knight. Do you not think it a great grace to have a son who is a cavalier of Jesus Christ?…I was unable any longer to endure the evil doing of the heedless people of Italy…I too am made of f
lesh and blood, and as the instincts of the body are repugnant to reason I must fight with all my strength to stop the Devil from jumping onto my shoulders.

  To help others fight the Devil, Savonarola was sent out by the Dominicans from Bologna to preach elsewhere in Italy, to Ferrara, to Brescia, to Genoa, and many other towns in Tuscany and Lombardy. In 1481 he came to Florence where he was appointed lector at San Marco and asked to give the Lent sermons at San Lorenzo. In 1489 he settled permanently in Florence at the Monastery of San Marco.

  At first he was a far from effective preacher, as he himself well knew, confessing in the days when he could boast that ‘all Italy’ was moved by his preaching that in those early years he did not know ‘how to move a hen’. ‘His gestures and pronunciation pleased none, so that scarcely twenty-five women and children remained to hear him,’ wrote Cinozzi, one of his first biographers. ‘He was so discouraged that he seriously thought of giving up preaching altogether.’ It was not only that his voice was hard and his gestures violent and uncouth; he was a far from prepossessing figure. Small, thin and ugly, with a huge hooked nose and thick, fleshy lips, it was only his eyes that gave any impression of his remarkable personality. Green, intense beneath heavy, black eyebrows, they ‘sometimes gave forth red flashes’.

  Although most people in Florence were inclined to prefer the more graceful, cultured and polished sermons of the Augustinian monk, Fra Mariano, for whose order Lorenzo de’ Medici built a monastery outside the Porta San Gallo, the awkward Dominican gradually acquired a following of devoted supporters prepared to overlook all the faults of his delivery for the extraordinary content of his sermons and his passionate, urgent sincerity. By 1491 his congregations had increased so much that San Marco could no longer contain them; and his Lent sermons that year were delivered in the Cathedral.