Machiavelli

by Miles J. Unger

  Machiavelli quickly shook off the cobwebs that clung to him after years of forced retirement and showed he had lost none of his acerbic wit. He was made much of by the mostly younger gentlemen he began to call his “noontime friends” (presumably to distinguish them from the more disreputable companions of the midnight hour), who regarded him as something of a mentor, while he was reinvigorated in their youthful company. With their encouragement he picked up The Discourses, begun a couple of years earlier and then set aside, dedicating it to his newfound friends of the garden Cosimo Rucellai and Zanobi Buondelmonti.

  In exchanging the low company of Donato del Corno’s shop for the more rarefied atmosphere of the Rucellai gardens, Machiavelli was moving up in the world. Not only was he now warmly received by Florence’s cultural elite, but he found himself nearer the centers of power than he had been for years. Drawn to this luminous oasis of thought and culture as a moth to a flame, Machiavelli discovered the pleasures and the perils of hovering too close to the light.

  The Orti Oricellari, as the Rucellai gardens were called, had for decades stood at the heart of the city’s intellectual life.v The piece of land, near the Porta al Prato just inside the city’s western walls, had originally been purchased by Bernardo Rucellai at the end of the previous century. At the time, the wealthy Bernardo had been among the most influential citizens of Florence, promoted to the highest ranks after marrying Lorenzo the Magnificent’s sister, Nanina. But his political fortunes waned with the expulsion of his wife’s family and with the rise of the popular government, to which he was vehemently opposed. Disillusioned with politics, Bernardo turned his energies toward less practical pursuits. Behind the high walls of his impeccably landscaped garden he created a green retreat in the bustling urban center, and established an informal academy where the best philosophers and writers could converse while wandering arm in arm among the exotic shrubs and drawing inspiration from the antique statues scattered among the foliage.

  But while Bernardo withdrew from active participation in government, he had not entirely abandoned politics. In Florence the line between intellectual theorizing and political action was always porous, and those humanists who congregated in Bernardo’s gardens naturally tended to reflect their host’s oligarchic prejudices. During the final years of the Soderini government, the Orti Oricellari became a hotbed of pro-Medici agitation. Bernardo and his friends, in fact, were instrumental in facilitating the Medici’s return, secretly funneling funds to Giovanni, Giuliano, and their allies.

  Given the fact that no one was more closely associated with the departing Gonfaloniere than Niccolò Machiavelli, it is not surprising that for years he was shunned by the luminaries who congregated in the Rucellai gardens. But by 1516 the mood in the city had changed and the nature of the conversations at the Orti changed along with it. Bernardo had died in 1514 and his role as cultural impresario was assumed by his grandson Cosimo, a more amiable and broad-minded man.vi As Machiavelli described him, the frail Cosimo appeared to have been a scholarly and courteous host. “I never met anyone,” he recalled some years after Cosimo’s death, “whose heart was more disposed to great and generous actions.”

  Perhaps more importantly, the resentments that smoldered in the first days following the overthrow of the Soderini government had cooled with time. The Medici, with Giovanni now sitting on the papal throne, were so firmly ensconced that the ottimati, the Rucellai included, no longer felt threatened by a rising tide of populist feeling. In this more relaxed atmosphere, under the aegis of the urbane Cosimo, thoughts turned from contemporary politics to more arcane matters.

  It is unclear exactly how Machiavelli first fell in with his “friends of the cool shade.” Many, like Anton-Francesco degli Albizzi and Zanobi Buondelmonti, belonged to the great magnate families of the city, and in their company the middle-aged former Second Chancellor must have cut a somewhat shabby figure. But by now his writings, which had been circulating for years among his friends—particularly the manuscript of the still unpublished Prince and perhaps a rough draft of The Discourses—were attracting a wider audience and exciting comment among a new generation of intellectuals. While wealth counted for something among the habitués of the Orti, a brilliant mind more than made up for a suspect pedigree. Machiavelli was welcomed into their lunchtime gatherings where, in his threadbare robes, he held forth surrounded by an admiring crowd of fashionable youths—no longer the disgraced civil servant but a modest legend, a brilliant conversationalist, wit, and provocateur.

  Machiavelli’s attendance at these largely literary gatherings also reflects a subtle change in his own expectations. Though he continued to angle for a government job—and believed his well-connected friends might prove useful in this regard—the fact that he became such a regular at the Rucellai gardens shows he had come to terms with his role as a man of letters. It was as a writer and intellectual, rather than as the former Second Chancellor (a part of his résumé that might have hurt more than it helped), that Machiavelli was included in this sophisticated company.

  • • •

  Machiavelli has left us a description of these gatherings in The Art of War, which purports to be an account of a conversation between the commander of the papal army, Fabrizio Colonna, and Cosimo Rucellai that took place in the Orti Oricellari in the summer of 1516vii:

  Fabrizio freely accepted the invitation and came to the gardens at the appointed time, where he was received by Cosimo, and some of his most intimate friends—among whom were Zanobi Buondelmonti, Battista della Palla and Luigi Alamanni. These young men—whose virtues and good qualities are so well known to everybody that it would be altogether unnecessary to say anything here in praise of them—were very dear to Cosimo, were of the same disposition, and were engaged in the same studies.

  To be as brief as I can, then, Fabrizio was regaled there with every possible demonstration of honor and respect. But after the end of the entertainment and usual formalities, which generally are few and short among men of sense who are more desirous of gratifying the rational appetite, and since the days were long and the weather intensely hot, Cosimo under a pretext of avoiding the heat, took his guests into the most retired and shady part of the gardens. Then, when they had all sat down—some upon the grass, which is very green and pleasant there, and some upon seats placed under the loftiest trees—Fabrizio said it was a most delightful garden.

  While the conversation that follows—in which Machiavelli uses Colonna as the mouthpiece for his own theories of modern warfare—is pure invention, it was based on those afternoons spent in the shade of Cosimo’s garden.

  As a denizen of the Orti, Machiavelli reinvented himself. He greeted the change in career with a rueful smile and a shrug. The writer’s life was not his first choice, but after years of frustration at least it offered him an outlet for his talent and ambition. A most revealing insight into his state of mind comes at the beginning of The Discourses, dedicated “not to those who are princes, but [to] those who, on account of their innumerable good qualities, deserve to be; not those who might shower on me rank, honors and riches, but those who, though unable, would like to do so.”

  How different this is from the dedication to The Prince! All hints of servility vanish as Machiavelli addresses his colleagues rather than his master. These were men with whom he had a relationship based on mutual respect rather than on need. In fact, in praising Rucellai and Buondelmonti, Machiavelli takes a swipe at the de facto lord of the city. We are living in a topsy-turvy world, he suggests, in which private citizens are fit to be kings, while those who actually rule deserve to molder in obscurity.

  Machiavelli’s disillusionment with Lorenzo de’ Medici, following a similar disappointment with his cousin Giuliano, was not based merely on personal frustration. True, the arrogant princeling had spurned all his overtures. (There is even a story, probably apocryphal, that when Machiavelli finally worked up the nerve to present The Prince, the Medici lord ignored him in favor of a client who had come with a
pair of hunting dogs.) More importantly, by 1517 the man whom Machiavelli had imagined as Italy’s savior had demonstrated he was as selfish, arrogant, and incompetent as his father, the hapless Piero. In 1514, shortly after completing The Prince, Machiavelli wrote that the Medici heir “has filled the entire city with high hopes,” but in the space of only a year or two Lorenzo had squandered all that goodwill. While his uncle the Pope urged him to act modestly, he paraded about the city surrounded by a large entourage of equally arrogant young men. He preferred to go hawking rather than attend to state business, and otherwise did his best to make himself obnoxious to his compatriots. Disgusted with the current state of his beloved republic, and disappointed in his own hopes, Machiavelli, like most of the men who enjoyed the hospitality of Cosimo Rucellai, turned inward, meditating on the vast cycles of history while leaving the here and now to take care of itself.

  Inspired by the witty conversations of the garden Machiavelli composed a satirical poem (based loosely on a novella by the Roman writer Apuleius) titled The Ass, which he read aloud at their meetings as the verses flowed from his pen. Though a decidedly secondary work, The Ass captures Machiavelli’s mordant wit better than his more learned treatises. Placing himself in the character (and the body) of a beast, the author offers his insights on the human animal. “And our ass,” he writes in a barely disguised autobiographical allegory, “who has trodden so many of the stairs of this world to observe the mind of every mortal man . . . heaven itself could not prevent him from braying.”

  A letter he wrote to one of his new friends, Luigi Alamanni, in December 1517, shows just how much he had begun to relish his new role as a literary wit: “These days I have been reading Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. The poem on the whole is fine, with many marvelous passages. If you see him there [in Rome], give him my regards and tell him that my only complaint is that, having mentioned so many poets, he has left me out like a dog, and that he has treated me shabbily in his Orlando, something I would never do to him in my Ass.” Of course Machiavelli’s complaint is made in jest, but like his ironic barb in the first of his prison sonnets (“so the poets are treated!”) his self-deprecating humor carries a real sting. By now he was well acquainted with disappointment—as he said in his poem, “I do not mind bites or blows as much as I did, having come to resemble the [ass] I sing”—and if Ariosto chose to overlook his contribution to letters, he had come to expect nothing better.

  Machiavelli’s literary gifts were comic rather than tragic, which might seem odd given his bleak view of the human condition. But comedy is the art of low expectations. While tragedy implies at least the potential for nobility in human nature, comedy traffics in the baser human instincts, territory with which Machiavelli was intimately acquainted. Machiavelli would not have been a comic genius had he thought well of people, but he would also have failed to elicit laughter had he condemned them too harshly. The comedian must be attuned to human frailty, but also possess the gift of empathy. The characters Machiavelli creates in his literary works are all flawed, to say the least. But so is he—and so are we. To say that his conception of the world is comic does nothing to minimize the seriousness of his message. Machiavelli’s pessimism is tempered by acceptance, his illumination of the dark corners of the human heart accompanied by an appreciation for the richness and unpredictability of our shared experience. Even his most scholarly essays have a satirical edge, and his most farcical satires a serious point. In all his writing cynicism is married to a generosity of spirit; the foibles of the human animal are exposed, but his response to this parade of deformities is not outrage but rather amused affection.

  Machiavelli’s skepticism feeds his humanity. Even his harshest prescriptions are of limited scope since he has no faith in utopian schemes. Those who have used Machiavelli’s concept raison d’état to justify gulags and concentration camps misunderstand the nature of his theories. States, he insists, function best when they allow for dissent and accept the legitimacy of competing interests. In attempting to improve the human condition we can at best effect only marginal and temporary changes. Machiavelli is the natural enemy of anyone who, like Savonarola or Lenin, would seek to perfect the human condition.

  Machiavelli’s genius shines through in his comedic masterpiece La Mandragola (“The Mandrake”), often called the greatest comedy in the Italian language. In this sex farce Machiavelli’s sharp wit is on full display, but also his humanity, his ability to probe the depths of the human soul and find both good and bad. We laugh at the ridiculous antics of the characters onstage, and the laughter is more heartfelt because we recognize ourselves and our neighbors in their weakness and self-deception. Better him than us, we think as we watch Messer Nicia, the foolish husband of the beautiful Lucretia, unwittingly facilitate his own cuckolding with Callimaco, her handsome young lover. The old man is crass as well as gullible, but his motive—to have his wife bear him a son who will carry on the family name—is one we can all sympathize with. Siro, the clever servant, and Frate Timoteo, the corrupt priest, are stock comic types, and the plot, hinging on the supposedly miraculous properties of a potent but deadly fertility potion (concocted from the mandrake root), is formulaic, but Machiavelli weaves the tale so deftly and molds his characters with such skill that the play pulses with life.

  La Mandragola is both hugely entertaining and sharply revealing of the man who wrote it. Machiavelli begins by speaking directly to the audience, a strategy that makes the author a character in his own play:

  The writer is not very famous, yet if you do not laugh, he will be ready to pay for your wine. A doleful lover, a judge by no means shrewd, a friar living wickedly, a parasite the darling of Malice will be sport for you today.

  And if this material—since really it is slight—does not befit a man who likes to seem wise and dignified, make this excuse for him, that he is striving with these trifling thoughts to make his wretched life more pleasant, for otherwise he doesn’t know where to turn his face, since he has been cut off from showing other powers with other deeds, there being no pay for his labors.

  Having exposed himself to the potentially jeering crowd, he then proceeds to caution his listeners that he can give as good as he gets:

  Yet if anyone supposes that by finding fault he can get the author by the hair and scare him or make him draw back a bit, I give any such man warning and tell him that the author, too, knows how to find fault, and that it was his earliest art; and in no part of the world where sì is heard [i.e., where Italian is spoken] does he stand in awe of anybody, even though he plays the servant to such as can wear a better cloak than he can.

  Here is Machiavelli as he must have appeared in life, in Donato del Corno’s shop or in the garden of the Rucellai—both pugnacious and self-deprecating, telling tales at his own expense the better to disarm as he aims a few well-timed blows in your direction. His life is wretched, he admits, and his art little better. He has been reduced to hack work, forced to traffic in low comedy since he has found no market for his pearls of wisdom. But don’t think for a minute that because he’s down on his luck he’ll stand for any nonsense. Finding fault was his earliest art and, like writers in every age, he knows how to wound and even kill with the sharp point of his pen.

  Machiavelli’s world is chiaroscuro, a shadowy landscape redeemed by sporadic incandescence. He begins the play with a song that captures his tragicomic view of life:

  Because life is short

  and many are the pains

  that every man bears who lives and stints himself,

  let us go on spending and wasting the years as we will,

  for he who deprives himself of pleasure

  only to live with labor and toil

  does not understand the world’s deceits,

  and what ills and what strange events

  crush almost all mortals.viii

  He was no mindless hedonist, but Machiavelli was even more scornful of those ascetics who thought that the solution to all life’s problems was to mo
rtify the flesh. Life is hard enough, he insists, without denying yourself the pleasures it offers. When the virtuous Lucretia finally yields to her lover, she offers a telling rationale. “Your cleverness,” she explains to Callimaco, “my husband’s stupidity, my mother’s folly, and my confessor’s rascality have brought me to do what I never would have done myself.” Like the clever prince, Lucretia applies a flexible morality to a corrupt world. For Lucretia to honor her marriage vows when her husband is both stupid and inconsiderate makes no more sense than a prince keeping his word with enemies who have no intention of keeping theirs.

  Among the most memorable characters in the play is the greedy Frate Timoteo. Happy as he is to sell his services to the highest bidder, Timoteo is not simply a caricature. In a rare moment of self-awareness he confesses that “[I] put my finger in a sin, then . . . my arm and my whole body.” Machiavelli, with his usual psychological penetration, depicts the monk as a man who is aware of his errors but lacks the will to correct them. Wondering aloud how he got himself in this predicament he concludes, in words that echo certain passages in The Prince, “many times one comes to harm by being too accommodating and too good, as well as by being bad.”ix

  Despite the vast difference between The Prince and La Mandragola—not the least of which is the fact that one is meant to instruct, the other to entertain—they reflect the same worldview. In each work deceit triumphs and old-fashioned virtues are portrayed as either naive or destructive. If the prince is justified in using every means, including cruelty and lies, to preserve his state, and the lover is rewarded rather than punished for his duplicitous scheme, this is because the author is concerned with the world as it is rather than as it should be. He is above all a realist, and what he sees when he wipes away the obscuring film of piety is a world in which each seeks his own advantage and uses any means necessary to achieve his ends. Neither work makes any sense unless the human animal is conceived of as self-serving. To put it another way: with subjects who behave like the characters in La Mandragola, any prince who is not equally clever will quickly lose control of his kingdom.