A few years after writing La Mandragola, Machiavelli returned to the stage with another comic offering. Written to please his latest mistress, the singer and actress Barbera Raffacani, Clizia is a broad sex farce adapted from a play by Plautus and set in contemporary Florence (rather than ancient Athens). In his prologue Machiavelli justifies the shift of time and locale by returning to a point he made repeatedly in The Discourses: “If into the world the same men should come back, just as the same events come back, never would a hundred years go by in which we should not find here a second time the very same things done as now.” Futile repetition, a predicament brought about by the inability to learn from our mistakes, is the essence of comedy.x It is also an essential ingredient in Machiavelli’s political philosophy. Try as we might, we cannot overcome our nature, and when faced with the same situation, we will fall into the same errors.
The plot of Clizia revolves around the rivalry between the elderly Nicomaco and his son Cleander for the love of the beautiful Clizia, Nicomaco’s ward. The hilarious picture of a middle-aged husband turning his life upside down as he lusts after a young beauty comes uncomfortably close to Machiavelli’s own situation. Like The Ass and La Mandragola, Clizia contains a large element of self-mockery. “It remains for me to tell you,” says Machiavelli,
that the author of this comedy is a man of great refinement, and he would take it badly if you should think, as you see it acted, that there is anything immodest in it. Comedies exist to benefit and to please the audience. It is certainly very helpful for anyone, and especially for young men, to observe an old man’s avarice, a lover’s madness, a servant’s tricks, a parasite’s gluttony, a poor man’s distress, a rich man’s ambition, a harlot’s flatteries, all men’s unreliability.
Despite the contrast in form and in tone, Machiavelli is revisiting themes set down in grander form in The Prince, showing men as they are in order to teach us how to live in the real world. In neither case does the author promise to lead his audience to the Promised Land, but by taking to heart what he has to say, we can achieve some small measure of control over Fortune’s wheel.
In his prologue to La Mandragola Machiavelli claims he was forced to turn to farce since he could not make a living by more honorable means, but it seems unlikely that he wrote any of his plays for money. Theater in Italy at this time was rudimentary, confined for the most part to a few aristocratic courts where amateur productions were occasionally staged to entertain the local nobility. The author profited, if at all, by pleasing his patron, who might then find more remunerative work for him to do. Machiavelli wrote La Mandragola for the denizens of the Orti Oricellari. The Prologue where he steps onstage to address the audience has the feel of an inside joke meant for friends who knew him well and would appreciate the humor without taking offense at the more pugnacious barbs. The first production was staged for Carnival in 1520 in the Rucellai gardens, with the parts acted out by his “noontime friends” and the scenery painted by Andrea del Sarto and Bastiano (Aristotle) da Sangallo (who had worked with Michelangelo on the Sistine ceiling). Though it was an instant success, it netted him little in the way of material profit. Typical is the response of the artist and art historian Giorgio Vasari, who calls La Mandragola “a most amusing comedy” but can’t be bothered to provide the name of the man who wrote it.
The first performance of Clizia (in 1525) was an equally modest affair, staged in the country villa of Jacopo Falconetti, a wealthy friend of Machiavelli who attracted a diverse crowd to his sumptuous banquets. Known as Il Fornacciaio (the baker),xi Falconetti was a less sophisticated host than Cosimo Rucellai. Food and wine, both good and plentiful, were the inducements to make the journey to his retreat outside the San Frediano Gate, and Machiavelli, who appreciated both but could not afford to splurge himself, was grateful for his host’s generosity. It was here also that he met the voluptuous Barbera Raffacani, a woman whose charm and youth renewed his own animal spirits.
As a patron, Falconetti proved equally generous to his new friend, plowing under part of his garden to build a stage and calling on Bastiano da Sangallo once again to decorate the sets. The play was as great a success with the public as its predecessor, and the citizens of Florence flocked through the Porta San Frediano in large numbers to attend performances. Among those who made the journey to the countryside were the current leading men in the Florentine government, Ippolito and Alessandro de’ Medici. According to Vasari, however, it was the painter rather than the playwright who turned the success of the production into florins in his pocket. After painting the scenery for Clizia, Vasari recorded, Sangallo “acquired so great a name, that it was ever afterwards his principal profession.”
Still, if Machiavelli could not replace his lost civil service salary with income from his plays, other, less tangible benefits accrued. The popular success of La Mandragola and Clizia confirmed Machiavelli’s status as a man of letters. Forgotten was the bureaucrat whose misplaced faith in his citizen army had led to disaster, replaced by the image of the gadfly who held up a funhouse mirror to his fellow citizens, allowing them to laugh at themselves and each other—a cathartic release in which no one, least of all the author himself, was spared.
The fame of Machiavelli’s plays, if not the name of their author, quickly spread beyond the walls of Florence. The Venetian Marin Sanudo attended a performance of La Mandragola in his native city where “[t]he stage was so full of people that the fifth act was not performed; it was impossible to do so with so many people.” Machiavelli accepted his new-won fame with the cautious pleasure of one who has seen too many highs and lows to let the momentary adulation of the crowd go to his head. In any case, he never took his literary endeavors too seriously. When he signed a letter to Francesco Guicciardini with mock pretentiousness “Niccolò Machiavelli, Historian, Comic and Tragic Author,” he expected his friend to get the joke.
Ironically, his burgeoning fame as a comic writer opened doors that had long been closed to him. Shortly after La Mandragola’s initial run at the Orti Oricellari, Pope Leo heard a firsthand account of the brilliant new comedy, which piqued his interest. It was Machiavelli’s friend from the Rucellai gardens, Battista della Palla, who brought the work to Leo’s attention. Soon La Mandragola was staged for the Pope and his cardinals in the Vatican, a performance that, della Palla told the author, “everyone admires . . . much more than anything else I have brought to Rome with my own hands”—which perhaps says as much about the tastes of the Holy City as the merits of the play.
It is not actually surprising that a racy sex comedy should have won over the Pope when so many of Machiavelli’s more serious efforts had failed to make an impression. Leo, like most of his immediate predecessors, was a man of the world who appreciated a fine bottle of vernaccia far more than the finer points of theology. When he had first gone to Rome as a thirteen-year-old cardinal, his father had offered him some sensible advice: “Eat plain food and take much exercise, for those who wear your habit, if not careful, easily contract maladies”—advice that the pleasure-loving Giovanni ignored. Raphael’s famous portrait reveals a man who did not stint himself; his sharp, shrewd features have been softened by years of indulgent living, the sagging pockets beneath his narrowed eyes hinting at an unhealthy lifestyle. Seated next to his cousin, the brooding Cardinal Giulio, the Pope appears massive yet only half present in the room, his eyes glancing somewhere unseen, his brow furrowed as if he is too preoccupied by pressing matters to remain long. Raphael captures something unsettling about the man, a conspiratorial quality remarked on by his contemporaries who, after a few years of Leo’s surreptitious scheming, looked back with nostalgia on the straightforward violence of Julius.
According to popular legend, upon taking his seat upon Saint Peter’s Throne Leo remarked to his brother, “Giuliano, now that God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it.” The sybaritic lifestyle of the Pope and his court, and the practice of selling indulgences to help fund it, contributed to the decision by a German Aug
ustinian monk named Martin Luther to nail his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, ushering in the Protestant Reformation. Like Savonarola, Luther was a man who felt an almost physical revulsion at the fallen state of mankind. Machiavelli, no less critical of humanity than the two monks, sought to accommodate man’s flaws rather than fight them, to devise practical schemes to deal with impulses that were natural to the human animal.xii
With the success of La Mandragola, the campaign Machiavelli had begun in prison with the humorous sonnets he composed for Giuliano de’ Medici finally began to pay dividends. During those agonizing weeks in his dank cell Machiavelli tried to portray himself as a harmless buffoon rather than a mortal threat to the new regime. Now the Pope himself seemed to be coming around. He appreciated clever men as long as they accepted the party line, and Machiavelli was now vouched for by men Leo trusted.
In fact a large part of the credit goes to his friends at the Orti Oricellari, many of whom had close ties to the Medici. Battista della Palla was but one of many distinguished Florentines who took up Machiavelli’s cause in Rome, promoting him in ways that Francesco Vettori, for all his affection, never would. Activity on his behalf in Rome was more than matched by efforts in Florence where many of the “friends of the cool shade” were in close contact with the influential Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, the Pope’s cousin, who, after the death in May 1520 of Lorenzo de’ Medici, was Leo’s man in Florence. On March 20, 1520, Lorenzo Strozzi, one of Machiavelli’s friends from the Rucellai gardens, brought him to the palace on the Via Larga and introduced him to the Cardinal. After hearing of the meeting, Strozzi’s brother Filippo expressed his satisfaction: “I am very glad you took Machiavelli to see the Medici, for if he can get the masters’ confidence, he is a man who must rise.”
Giulio de’ Medici was the illegitimate son of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s brother, Giuliano, who had been murdered in the Cathedral during the Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478. Raised in the family palace on the Via Larga after his father’s death, the intelligent Giulio had, like his cousin Giovanni, been destined from early in life for holy orders. He had joined his cousins in exile following Piero’s expulsion in 1498, serving as Cardinal Giovanni’s aide and confidant throughout those difficult years. When Giovanni was elected Pope in 1513, the faithful Giulio reaped his reward, receiving the title Archbishop of Florence and gaining a place in the College of Cardinals. He can be seen in Raphael’s portrait standing at the side of the seated Pontiff, his dark, hooded eyes suggesting his introspective and melancholy cast of mind.
With the death of the Pope’s nephew Lorenzo in 1520, the capable Giulio was sent back to Florence to run the city on behalf of the Medici family. Unlike the last two candidates for the job, Giulio was a thoughtful and deliberative man, attuned to the sensibilities and prejudices of his people. The feckless Giuliano and the arrogant Lorenzo had soured the populace on Medici rule, and Cardinal Giulio was anxious to restore the family’s good name. His uncle, the beloved (at least in retrospect) Lorenzo the Magnificent, had pulled the strings while preserving republican forms, an arrangement that Florentines, attached to their ancient liberties but always fearful of the potential for civic violence, accepted as the price of peace. Lorenzo’s son Piero and grandson Lorenzo had failed to grasp this basic element of statecraft, offending their compatriots with their high-handed ways.
Part of Giulio’s strategy to improve morale in the city was to solicit proposals for the reformation of the government from the city’s leading intellectuals. A cultivated, scholarly man, the Cardinal served as head of the Studio, Florence’s university, earning the respect and friendship of many who might otherwise be expected to lead any opposition to Medici rule. Among those he turned to were the habitués of the Orti, Machiavelli included, who, like most of their fellow citizens, had grown disillusioned with a regime marked by extravagance, corruption, and incompetence. “[H]e willingly conversed in his leisure time with men learned in any profession,” noted one of Machiavelli’s friends approvingly. Whether Giulio’s calls for open debate about the republic’s future were sincere or part of some subtle scheme to smoke out potential opposition has long been debated. Filippo de Nerli, a frequent guest at the Rucellai gardens, was among the first to ascribe sinister motives to the Cardinal: “Zanobi Buondelmonti and even Niccolò Machiavelli showed their minds very plainly in this way; for I saw their writings, and all went into the hands of the Cardinal, who pretended to value them very highly . . . . He abused the good faith of certain, perhaps over-credulous, citizens, who were all the more easily tricked by seeing that he gave no ear to the complaints and remonstrances of trusty adherents, by who he was warned that he was playing a dangerous game.” Despite Nerli’s testimony, it is more likely that the Cardinal initially welcomed a free exchange of ideas, and that he reversed course only when he felt his authority was threatened.
Questions about the future of the Florentine government had arisen in part because, with the untimely deaths of Giuliano and Lorenzo, the two most prominent members of the reigning family were men of the cloth, who technically could not serve as rulers of a secular state.xiii Before Lorenzo’s death, Leo’s policy, like that of Pope Alexander before him, had been to use his office to carve out a powerful principality for his family in central and northern Italy. “The Pope and his Medici have no other thought than of increasing the fortunes of their house,” wrote the Venetian ambassador to the Holy See, “and his nephews, unsatisfied with dukedoms, pretend that one of them ought to be king.” Pursuing this nepotistic project, Leo had brokered his younger brother Giuliano’s marriage to a French noblewoman and tried to acquire on his behalf the cities of Modena, Piacenza, and Reggio. It was this venture that first inspired Machiavelli to conceive of a revitalized Italian state with Florence as its capital, a dream eloquently conjured in the last chapter of The Prince.xiv When Giuliano’s early death caused Leo to pin his hopes instead on his nephew Lorenzo, Machiavelli transferred his loyalty as well, though by now even he must have suspected it would come to nothing. The project reached a climax when Leo drove out the ruling Montefeltros of Urbino and brought the strategic duchy under Medici rule. But Lorenzo proved as flimsy a foundation upon which to build a dynasty as his uncle, disappointing both the Pope and Florentine nationalists like Machiavelli who could contemplate a revived Italian nation only as long as their beloved republic stood at its head.
Lorenzo’s death not only ended Pope Leo’s dreams of a powerful Medici state at the heart of Italy, but also threatened to undercut the family’s authority in its native city. It was in this context that Cardinal Giulio commissioned Machiavelli’s “Treatise on the Reform of the Florentine Government,” written in 1520 and dedicated to Pope Leo. Machiavelli was elated at finally being able to return to the problems that consumed him, and he took up the topic with his usual gusto, even if he knew his ideas were unlikely to be put into practice. Throughout the brief text Machiavelli walks a diplomatic tightrope, flattering his patrons while trying to nudge them in the direction of true republican rule. After praising the prudence of the Pope’s ancestors, particularly Cosimo and his grandson Lorenzo (Il Magnifico), Machiavelli gets in a subtle dig at the more recent representatives: “The Medici who were governing then, since they had been educated and brought up among the citizens, conducted themselves with such friendliness that they gained favor. Now, they have grown so great that, since they have gone beyond all the habits of citizens, there cannot be such intimacy and consequently such favor”—a tactful way of saying that Giuliano and the younger Lorenzo had been insufferable and squandered much of the goodwill their ancestors had built up. Machiavelli’s larger point, however, is that given Florentines’ love of liberty it would be next to impossible to impose princely rule on them. “[T]o form a princedom where a republic would go well is a difficult thing and, through being difficult, inhumane and unworthy of whoever hopes to be considered merciful and good.”
The bulk of the treatise is taken up by Machiavelli
’s blueprint for a republican government to be established once the Pope and the Cardinal pass from the scene. It follows the familiar three-part structure he normally favored: “there are three sorts of men,” he declares, so “there [should] be also three ranks in a republic.” Here Machiavelli takes the theories he had developed at greater length in The Discourses and applies them to the specific needs of a small republic with a thriving middle class and a history of communal strife. His study of history, both Roman and modern Italian, had convinced him that the most successful governments were those that internalized and accommodated the inevitable clash of competing interests—the kind of controlled chaos that obtains in modern democracies. Again he displays the basic unity of his thought, from comic play to his serious political tract. If comedy is the art of low expectations, democracy is its political counterpart, a system that substitutes an achievable equilibrium for unobtainable perfection.
• • •
Nothing came of Machiavelli’s proposals or those of his colleagues who had heeded the Cardinal’s call to action. In a pattern that would repeat itself throughout the course of Giulio de’ Medici’s life, boldness was followed by timidity; the promise of a new beginning dissipated in a return to the status quo. It was a pattern that guaranteed disillusionment. Giulio was one of those well-meaning men who know what’s right in the abstract but who wilt in the face of harsh reality. When it became clear that he had no intention of restoring the citizens’ cherished freedoms, he stoked the very resentment he had hoped to quell.
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