The next element in Lorenzo’s system was the exploitation of religion. Though a mere private citizen of ignoble ancestry, he affected sacrality almost as if he were a king. His love poems are justly renowned. His religious poetry was of greater political importance, which is not to say that it was insincere; to become a great saint, it is no bad first step to be a big sinner. Indeed, there is something convincing about Lorenzo’s lines, with their yearning for “repose” with God and “relief” for the “prostrated mind”: the intelligible longings of a heart bled by business and a conscience stirred by the responsibilities of power. In “The Supreme Good,” he confronts this issue:
How can a heart that avarice infects
And saturates with such outrageous hopes
And such unbounded fears discover peace?8
Confraternities to which he belonged chanted his calls to repentance. He invested heavily in adorning the religious foundations his family had endowed and boosting their prestige. In particular, he nurtured the Dominican house of San Marco in Florence—a nursery of greatness, where Fra Angelico painted. San Marco struggled to survive financially and recruit postulants until Lorenzo poured wealth into it. His motives were not merely pious. He saw San Marco as a venue for supporters: it was at the heart of the quarter of the city that had the longest associations with the Medici family. He tried to make it the dominant house for the Dominicans of Tuscany and a source of wider influence over the affairs of the Church. He also tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to organize the canonization of Archbishop Antonino of Florence, the pet churchman of his house in his father’s day. When Lorenzo died, his supporters portrayed him as a saint.9
Finally, and hardly consistently with saintly aspirations, he made an art of intimidation. Wealth bought power in its crudest form: toughs and bravos to bully fellow citizens within the city; and mercenaries and foreign allies to cow Florence from without. Lorenzo cultivated allies—sometimes the popes, sometimes the kings of Naples, always the Dukes of Milan. Invariably, part of the deal was that they would send troops to his aid in the event of an attempted coup or revolution in his city. It was not just that everyone knew he could afford to crush opposition with mercenaries or foreign troops if he wished. He practiced the politics of terror to overawe opposition. The city of the Florentine enlightenment was a cruel, savage, bloody place, where the body parts of condemned criminals strewed the streets and revengers mimed ritual cannibalism to round off vendettas. Lorenzo impressed his enemies with horrifying displays of terror and implacable campaigns of vengeance.
The participants in the conspiracy of 1478 suffered the most vicious—but not unrepresentative—violence Lorenzo ever unleashed. Normally, criminals died on gibbets just outside the walls so as not to pollute the city, but Lorenzo had the conspirators tossed screaming from the windows of the palace of the governing council. The crowds in the main square could watch them dangle and twitch, convulsed by their death throes, before slaking their vengeance by literally tearing the bodies to pieces when they hit the ground. Lorenzo made vindictiveness a policy, harrying his victims’ survivors into beggary. For a while, the government of Florence even made it an offense to marry one of the conspirators’ orphaned or bereft womenfolk: this was equivalent to condemning the women to starve to death.
Lorenzo was magnificent, of course, in art as well as power. As art patrons, the ruling branch of the Medici were never leaders of taste. For them, art was power and wealth. Lorenzo was not, however, the boor modern scholarship has made out. He was a genuine, impassioned aesthete. His poetry alone is ample evidence of a replete sensitivity and a perfect ear. He had, perhaps, a less than perfect eye. His aim was to collect objects of rarity and stunning visual effect: jewels, small-scale antique triumphs of bronze and gold work and gem work. The courtyard of the Medici palace was lined with ancient inscriptions—a display of fashion and wealth.
He was not a builder on the lavish scale of his Medici predecessors. Politics, perhaps, constrained him. He remained actively interested in all public building projects and quietly embellished many of the grand buildings and religious foundations his family traditionally patronized. But there was a touch of vulgarity and ostentation even about the architecture he favored: the cathedral’s golden topknot was a conspicuous reminder of that, especially when the prophetic thunderbolt struck it down. The paintings Lorenzo favored—it was a trait apparently heritable in the ruling line of the house of Medici—were old-fashioned by Renaissance standards: the hard, gemlike colors of the works of Gozzoli and Uccello, the rich pigments—gilt and lapis lazuli and carmine—that glowed like the fabulous collection of jewels Lorenzo assembled. His taste for battle paintings was part of his pursuit of the cult of chivalry. Tournaments were among his favorite spectacles, and he assembled gorgeous ritual armor in which to appear in the lists. But goldsmiths’ work, jewelry and small, exquisite antiquities, constituted his biggest expenditure: wealth that could be handled for tactile satisfaction and moved quickly in case of a change of political fortune—the potential solace of exile, such as befell Lorenzo’s father and son.10
Still, whatever the deficiencies of his taste or the selectivity of his spending, he was the greatest Maecenas of his day. His death not only brought down his political system; it also threatened with extinction the great artistic and cultural movement we call the Renaissance.
The Renaissance no longer looks unique. Historians detect revivals of antique values, tastes, ideas, and styles in almost every century from the fifth to the fifteenth. The West never lost touch with the heritage of Greece and Rome. Nor did Islam. The culture of classical antiquity and all its later revivals were in any case products of large-scale cultural interaction, spanning Eurasia, reflecting and mingling influences from eastern, southern, southwestern, and western Asia. Nor does the reality of the Renaissance match its reputation. Scanning the past for signs of Europe’s awakening to progress, prosperity, and values that we can recognize as our own, we respond to the excitement with which Western writers around the end of the fifteenth century anticipated the dawn of a new “golden age.” As a result, if you are a product of mainstream Western education, almost everything you ever thought about the Renaissance is likely to be false.
“It was revolutionary.” No: scholarship has detected half a dozen prior renaissances. “It was secular” or “It was pagan.” Not entirely: the church remained the patron of most art and scholarship. “It was art for art’s sake.” No: it was manipulated by plutocrats and politicians. “Its art was unprecedentedly realistic.” Not altogether: perspective was a new technique, but you can find emotional and anatomical realism in much pre-Renaissance art. “The Renaissance elevated the artist.” No: medieval artists might achieve sainthood; wealth and titles were derogatory by comparison. “It dethroned scholasticism and inaugurated humanism.” No: it grew out of medieval “scholastic humanism.” “It was Platonist and Hellenophile.” No: there were patches of Platonism, as there had been before, and few scholars did more than dabble in Greek. “It rediscovered lost antiquity.” Not really: antiquity was never lost, and classical inspiration never withered (though there was an upsurge of interest in the fifteenth century). “The Renaissance discovered nature.” Hardly: there was no pure landscape painting in Europe previously, but nature got cult status in the thirteenth century, as soon as St. Francis found God outdoors. “It was scientific.” No: for every scientist there was a sorcerer. “It inaugurated modern times.” No: every generation has its own modernity, which grows out of the whole of the past. If modernity, for us, becomes discernible at around the time Lorenzo de’ Medici died, we have to look all around the world to see it stirring.
Even in Florence, the Renaissance was a minority taste. Brunelleschi’s designs for the Baptistery doors—the project widely held to have inaugurated the Renaissance in 1400—were rejected as too advanced. Masaccio, the revolutionary painter who introduced perspective and sculptural realism into his work for a chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine in
the 1430s, was only the assistant on the project, supervised by a reactionary master. In Italy generally, the most popular painters of the age were the most conservative: Punturicchio, Baldovinetti, and Gozzoli, whose work resembles the glories of medieval miniaturists—brilliant with gold leaf and bright, costly pigments. Michelangelo’s design for the main square of the city—which would have encased the space in a classical colonnade—was never implemented. Much of the supposedly classical art that inspired fifteenth-century Florentines was bogus: the Baptistery was really a sixth- or seventh-century building. The church of San Miniato, which the cognoscenti mistook for a Roman temple, was actually no earlier than the eleventh century.
So Florence was not really classical. Some readers may think that that is too easy to say. By similar logic, after all, one could claim that classical Athens was not classical, for most people there had other values: they worshipped Orphic mysteries, clung to irrational myths, ostracized or condemned some of their most progressive thinkers and writers, and favored social institutions and political strategies similar to those of today’s “silent majority”: straitlaced, straight-backed “family values.” The plays of Aristophanes—with their lampoons of louche aristocratic habits—are a better guide to Greek morality than the Ethics of Aristotle. Florence, too, had its silent majority, whose voice resounded in the 1490s in the blood-and-thunder sermons of the reforming friar Girolamo Savonarola and in the bloodcurdling cries of the street revolutionaries his words helped to stir a few years later.
The principal states of Italy in 1492.
Savonarola was born in 1452 to a life of prosperity, even luxury. Why he turned from it is a mystery—inspired, perhaps, by his pious grandfather, or repelled by his worldly father. There was a hint of reproach or defiance in the language he used when he wrote to his father with the news of his religious vocation.
The reason that moves me to enter a religious order is this: first the great misery of the world, the iniquity of men, the carnal crimes, adulteries, thefts, pride, idolatry, and cruel blasphemies, all present on such a scale that a good man can no longer be found…owing to which I prayed daily to my lord Jesus to pull me up out of this slime…. I want you to believe that in all my life I have had no greater pain, no greater affliction of mind, than in abandoning my own flesh and blood and going out among people unknown to me, to sacrifice my body to Jesus Christ…. I have a cruel struggle on my hands to keep the Devil from jumping on my shoulders, and all the more so the more I think about you…. These times with their fresh wounds will soon pass away, and I hope that in time you and I will be consoled through grace in this world, and then in the next one through glory.11
Homosexuality and whoredom were the sins that preoccupied him most. He was relatively inexplicit about most others. By the age of twenty, he was convinced that he would be “the enemy of the world.” He joined the Dominicans—an order of friars with a strong vocation for preaching and a mission to the poor. He belonged to the strictest tendency in the order, renouncing even the most trivial of personal possessions.
But he was not yet a Bible-thumping thunderer. On the contrary, he was a scholar among scholars, with a distinguished career as a teacher of logic in the schools of his order. The audiences that attended his early sermons consisted of “simpletons and a few little women.” He discovered his talent as a popular preacher in the late 1480s. Public adulation began to turn his head. He started believing that “Christ speaks through my mouth.” He often vaunted a claim to madness, calling it the folly of God. His views, which were always trenchant, became increasingly fanatical. Rome was a perversion. The true Church was of the poor and known to God alone. His tirades against the sins of the rich became increasingly politically subversive as he established the role of an apostle to the desperate and discontented. “The Devil,” he declared, “uses the great to oppress the poor.” He denounced the greed and egotism of those who could “buy anything with money.” Engravings show what his performances—to call them “sermons” somehow does not capture their function—were like at the time he returned to Florence in 1490 after three years of study in Bologna: the friar flings dramatic, demonstrative gestures at packed audiences, with one hand stretched in rebuke, the other pointing heavenward.12
By then, according to his later recollections, he was reading the Bible, beginning with Genesis, “but then I did not know the reason why”—which was tantamount to saying that his readings were inspired by God. “When I came to the Flood,” he wrote, “it was impossible to go further.” The sense of impending doom, of a new punishment due to a wicked world, was paralyzingly strong. He turned to prophecy suddenly. On the second Sunday of Lent, 1491, he gave a sermon that, he said, terrified even him. After a sleepless night, he predicted the end of extravagance and its replacement by a new regime of poverty and charity and “Christ in men’s hearts.” 13
Recurrent images began to characterize his visions, recycled in his sermons. He kept seeing swords and knives raining down on Rome, a golden cross above Jerusalem. The hand of God poised to strike the wicked, while angels distributed crosses to those willing to undertake a spiritual crusade to save the Church and the city from corruption. The angels returned with brimming chalices and gave sweet wine to those who took the cross, bitter dregs to those who refused. In an engraving his admirers bought in bestselling numbers, the people of Jerusalem appeared, stripping for baptism, while Florentines averted their gaze. A medal struck to exploit the market for Savonarola memorabilia showed contrasting scenes of divine vengeance and abundance. “I saw,” he wrote, in recollections that capture the flavor of the sermons,
through the power of the imagination, a black cross above Babylonian Rome, on which was written “THE WRATH OF GOD,” and upon it there rained swords, knives, lances, and every weapon, a storm of hail and stones, and long, awesome streaks of lightning in dark and murky skies. And I saw another cross, of gold, which stretched from heaven to earth above Jerusalem, and on which was written “THE MERCY OF GOD,” and here the skies were calm, limpid and clear as could be; wherefore on account of this vision I tell you that the Church of God must be renewed, and soon, for God is angry…. Another image: I saw a sword over Italy, and it quivered, and I saw angels coming who had a red cross in one hand and many white stoles in the other. There were some who took these stoles, others who did not want them…. All at once, I saw that sword, which quivered above Italy, turn its point downward and, with the greatest storm and scourge, go among them and flay them all…. Be converted, Florence, for there is no other remedy for us but penitence. Clothe yourselves with the white stole while you still have time…. for later there will be no room for penitence.14
Critics of his fanaticism leveled predictable charges. “I am not mad,” Savonarola retorted. At first, he refused to say where he got his prophecies from, because “in the past I, too, would have laughed at such things…. I am not saying, nor have I ever told you, that God speaks to me. I say neither yes or no. You are so far from the faith that you do not believe. You would rather believe in some devil who spoke with men and foretold future things.” Nor did Savonarola make the mistake of claiming any personal merit or pretending, blasphemously, that God’s favor was evidence of God’s grace. “This light,” he admitted, referring to the gift of prophecy, “does not justify me.” By January 1492, however, he was getting less cautious. “It is God,” he began to claim, “not I, who says these things.” 15
In as far as they referred to Florence rather than to the Church, Savonarola’s rages against wealth and corruption and the general moral state of the city seem unmistakably directed against Lorenzo the Magnificent. Lorenzo, however, showed no resentment or anxiety. He had expelled Bernardo da Feltre, another tub-thumper whom he suspected of political subversion, but he treated Savonarola with indulgence. Lorenzo cherished much devotion for the Dominicans. He regarded their house in Florence as a special project of his dynasty. He hoped to use reformers’ programs and arguments to augment his own family’s influence
over the Church.
Nevertheless, it was becoming obvious that Savonarola was shaping up to defy Lorenzo openly. The ground he chose was not solely or even chiefly that of politics, but rather matters of philosophy and taste, and he bade for the support of intellectuals as well as the mob. He prefaced his own prophecies with an anatomization of the falsehood of astrology—which was one of the esoteric enthusiasms of Lorenzo’s circle. Another ground of conflict concerned the usefulness of reason and science. One of the most powerful books to appear in print in 1492 was Savonarola’s ruthlessly masticated digest of logic (Compendium Logicae), in which he denounced reason as diabolical. The idea that pagans like Aristotle and Plato had anything to teach readers of scripture was, to him, revolting. He denounced the specious arguments of classically inspired theologians who had tried to fit the ancient Greeks and Romans into God’s scheme of salvation. He pointed out how dodgy their etymologies were that linked Jove and Jehovah. He deplored the way classical scholars made pagan deities double as personifications of Christian virtues, and he lampooned their solemn invocations of Virgil as a supposed prophet of Christianity. He scorned humanists’ cherished notion that ancient Greeks had experienced a partial revelation from God.
Savonarola denounced astrology, the humanists’ favored means of political forecasting, as “contrary not only to holy scripture but also to natural philosophy.”
Girolamo Savonarola, Tractato contra li astrologi (Florence: Bartolommeo di Libri, ca. 1497). Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Library.
In November, Politian hit back with Lamia. The title alluded to a classical commonplace—a mythic queen who, thwarted in love, lost her reason and turned into a child-murdering monster. In Renaissance scholars’ learned code, she represented hypocrisy: Politian was accusing Savonarola of abusing learning against learning. At a time when Europe was convulsed by fear of witches, he likened his adversary to hags who reputedly plucked out their eyes at night in a diabolic ritual, or to old men who remove their spectacles along with their false teeth and become blind to self-criticism. Philosophy, Politian insisted, is the contemplation of truth and beauty. God is the source of our soul and our mind. He gives them to us for the scrutiny of nature, which in turn discloses God.
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