Magnifico

by Miles J. Unger

  [I]t was through the sound judgment of Lorenzo, though still young, that the life of Piero his father was saved; learning that awaiting him as he returned from Careggi were many conspirators who planned to kill him,[Lorenzo] sent word to those who were carrying [Piero] by litter (unable, sick as he was with gout, to travel any other way) not to continue by the usual route, but through a secret and secure way return to the city.[Lorenzo], meanwhile, riding along the usual path, let it be known that his father was right behind him; and having thus deceived the plotters, both were saved.

  Francesco Guicciardini supplies some additional information, including the precise spot where the ambush took place. “[W]hen Piero went off to Careggi,” he wrote, “his enemies decided to murder him on his return. Armed men were placed in Sant’Ambrogio [sic] del Vescovo, which Piero usually passed on his way back to the city. They could avail themselves of that place because the archbishop of Florence was messer Dietisalvi’s brother.” Interestingly, Guicciardini ignores Lorenzo’s role in the drama, attributing their escape simply to “the good fortune of Piero and of the Medici.”*

  Lorenzo himself never offered a full retelling of the day’s events, though it is possible that Valori’s version is based on Lorenzo’s recollections. References to the ambush must be teased from his own cryptic comments or from the equally oblique remarks of his friends. Lorenzo’s silence can be explained by his reluctance to talk about, or even admit the existence of, the many attempts made on his life. In 1477, when his life again appeared under threat from invisible assassins, he dismissed a warning from the Milanese ambassador: “and thanks to God, though I have been told by many: ‘watch yourself!,’ I have found none of these plots to be true, except one, at the time of Niccolò Soderini.” Thus the traumatic events of 1466 appear in Lorenzo’s correspondence only at the moment when an even more dangerous conspiracy was taking shape, and largely to make light of current threats. From this same period comes another suggestive letter, written by Lorenzo’s friend and tutor Gentile Becchi. Urging him to take the rumors of threats on his life seriously, he warns Lorenzo not to heed the counsel of “new Dietisalvis who will advise you to go to your villa like your father.”

  Given Lorenzo’s own reticence, the ambush at Sant’Antonio del Vescovo must forever retain an element of mystery. Even Valori’s account contains many puzzling features. Why did those who confronted Lorenzo fail to take him into custody? Why did they accept Lorenzo’s assertion that his father was just around the corner, without at least holding him as a hostage? From Lorenzo’s few remarks it is clear that he felt his life had been in danger along the road from Careggi to Florence, but Valori’s narrative does not end in a violent clash. Instead, according to his friend’s retelling, Lorenzo manages to confound his enemies not through martial valor but through quick thinking and his powers of persuasion.

  One might be tempted to dismiss the tale were it not for the fact that it conforms perfectly with what we know of Lorenzo’s character. The confrontation at Sant’Antonio may provide the first instance when Lorenzo was able to deflect the knives of his enemies using only his native wit, but it will not be the last. Time and again he showed a remarkable ability to talk his way out of tight situations. With his back to the wall, and his life hanging in the balance, Lorenzo was at his most convincing. A gift he was to display throughout his life—and one that would be crucial to his statecraft, allowing him to appeal to people from all walks of life—was to suit his language to the moment, effortlessly trading Latin epigrams with scholars or obscenities with laborers in a tavern. This earthier vocabulary would have served him well on this occasion, but his powers of persuasion would have done little good without the confusion and missteps that tend to unravel even the best-laid plans.

  From the perspective provided by centuries in which scholars have been able to sift the evidence at leisure, the fact that Lorenzo was allowed to proceed unmolested seems an improbable bit of good fortune. But this view distorts the true situation. Lorenzo’s native wit no doubt played a part, but so did the natural perplexity of those who had been instructed to seize his father, the lord of Florence, and now had to make a snap decision with no instructions from their commanders. After a brief conversation, in which Lorenzo no doubt adopted a tone of light banter meant to put them at their ease, they let him go, having been convinced that soon enough the main prize would fall into their laps.

  While they waited in vain for Piero to arrive, Lorenzo and the rest of his party made a dash for the city walls. As soon as he passed through the wide arch of the Porta Faenza, Lorenzo could breathe a little easier.* This was Medici country—the neighborhoods in the northwest corner of the city that in earlier centuries had mustered for war under the ancient banner of the Golden Lion. Familiar faces greeted him at every turn, local wine merchants, grocers, fishmongers, and stonemasons, with a fierce attachment to the few blocks where they were born and an equally fierce loyalty to the powerful family that lived among them. In his poem, “Il Simposio,” Lorenzo left a description of this neighborhood and its people that reflects an easy familiarity between the humble folks and the lord of the city:

  I was approaching town along the road

  that leads into the portal of Faenza,

  when I observed such throngs proceeding through

  the streets, that I won’t even dare to guess

  how many men made up the retinue.

  The names of many I could easily say:

  I knew a number of them personally…

  There’s one I saw among those myriads,

  with whom I’d been close friends for many years,

  as I had known him since we’d both been lads…

  “Above all else stick together with your neighbors and kinsmen,” advised the Florentine patrician Gino Capponi, “assist your friends both within and without the city.” For decades Lorenzo’s forebears had acted upon this Florentine wisdom, knowing that men not masonry form the strongest bulwark in times of civic unrest. From the moment of his birth, seventeen years earlier, Lorenzo’s father had been preparing his son for just such a crisis, weaving around him an intricate web of mutual obligation, nurturing those relationships of benefactor and supplicant, patron and client, through which power was wielded in Florentine politics. In moments of upheaval, Lorenzo’s ability to draw on those relationships, to command the loyalty of his fellow citizens—above all of neighbors, friends, and kinsmen, bound together both by interest and by affection—would be vital to his family’s survival.

  The Baptistery of San Giovanni, Florence (Miles Unger)

  II. FAMILY PORTRAIT

  “Such was our greatness that it used to be said, ‘Thou art like one of the Medici,’ and every man feared us; even now when a citizen does an injury to another or abuses him, they say, ‘If he did thus to a Medici what would happen?’ Our family is still powerful in the State by reason of many friends and much riches, please God preserve it all to us. And to-day, thank God, we number about fifty men.”

  —FILIGNO DI CONTE DE’ MEDICI, 1373

  LORENZO WAS BORN ON JANUARY 1, 1449,* AT A TIME when the Medici, led by his grandfather Cosimo, stood securely at the summit of Florentine politics. The birth of a male heir to Cosimo’s elder son, Piero, the first such birth to the family since their seizure of power fifteen years earlier, opened the prospect, comforting to some and troubling to others, of a true dynastic succession.

  His entrance onto the public stage took place on the fifth day following his birth with his baptism in the shrine of San Giovanni. Here in the most ancient and sacred building in the city, into which generations of Florentines had poured their wealth and lavished their artistic talent, Lorenzo made what was, in effect, his political debut. From this moment on he would be in the public eye, a member of the community of Florentine citizens and the wider community of Christian believers, but also set apart, bound to a singular destiny.

  Accompanying the proud father from the family home to the Baptistery of San Giovanni on
that cold January morning were some of the most distinguished men in Florence. The archbishop of Florence himself, the saintly Antoninus—a close friend of Cosimo’s—would stand godfather to the child and preside over the ceremony, aided in his sacred duties by Benedetto Schiattesi, prior of the Medicean church of San Lorenzo. This arrangement echoed in ecclesiastical terms the family’s political stature in the city; the archbishop represented the entire Christian community of the republic, while the prior of San Lorenzo embodied the Medici’s special relationship with the neighborhood in which they resided and that formed the most reliable base of their support.

  The attendance of the distinguished clerics honored the family, but it also reminded the citizens how completely Medici money had penetrated the fabric of the city. Both men were Medici clients. Even Antoninus, a man widely revered for his holiness (he was later canonized by the pope), was on the Medici payroll; for many years as the prior of the monastery of San Marco he was the beneficiary of Cosimo’s largesse. When he complained that men “are mean in giving alms and prefer to spend on chapels, superfluous ornaments and ecclesiastical pomp rather than on support of the poor,” was it a subtle dig at his friend who was filling the city with buildings emblazoned with the Medici arms? As for Schiattesi, his debt to the Medici was even more overt. The church of San Lorenzo, located a block to the west of the Medici palace on the Via Larga, was so dependent on Medici patronage that it often seemed to be little more than an annex of the family residence. Families allied with the Medici—the Martelli, the Ginori, the della Stufa, and, until their disgrace, the Dietisalvi Neroni—all built chapels in San Lorenzo in a typically Florentine synergy of politics and religion. Also typically Florentine was the way the Medici used the church to enhance their own prestige through artistic patronage. By hiring Brunelleschi to design the old sacristy (where Cosimo’s father, Giovanni di Bicci, was buried) and Donatello to provide the sculptural decoration, they were transforming their local church into a monument to rival the cathedral itself.

  Representing the secular authority on this happy occasion was the entire outgoing Signoria (on which Piero had just served) and the Accoppiatori, the members of a special commission whose behind-the-scenes meddling with the electoral rolls was vital to maintaining the reggimento. Agnolo Acciaiuoli, the outgoing Gonfaloniere di Giustizia and still very much one of Cosimo’s men, was there to pay his respects, and with him were many leading figures in the regime.

  Also standing godfather (by proxy) to young Lorenzo was Federico da Montefeltro, ruler of Urbino. Years later Federico would play a far more sinister part in Lorenzo’s life, but on this occasion the prominence of his representatives at the ceremony was a signal to the Medici’s compatriots that the family could boast powerful friends abroad. The prestige gained by the Medici through their association with kings, popes, counts, and other members of the feudal nobility was crucial to enhancing their standing with their own citizens. As an astute political observer later remarked about Lorenzo, “the reputation of the said Mag.co Lorenzo and the esteem that is accorded him from the powers of Italy and the Lords from abroad; not having this, he would not have a reputation in his own land.”

  Lorenzo’s baptism was the first public presentation of the Medici heir to the people of Florence. That there was political calculation involved even in this most sacred rite is indicated by its careful timing: Piero had extended the customary three days between birth and baptism to await a more propitious alignment of the stars, taking advantage of the calendar to associate Lorenzo’s baptism with the Feast of the Epiphany. In a clever if fortuitous bit of stagecraft, he managed to tie the ritual to the day on the sacred calendar most closely identified with the family’s power and prestige. For generations the Medici had been associated with the celebrations dedicated to the Magi. Every few years magnificent processions, paid for largely from Medici funds, paraded through the city, concluding at the Medicean convent of San Marco, where a holy crèche was housed. Even the usually unostentatious Cosimo felt obliged to participate, marching through the city dressed up in a magnificent cloak of fur or gold brocade.*

  It is easy to understand why the Medici were attracted to this particular scriptural tale. The Magi are among the few figures of wealth and power in the Bible who have no difficulty in attaining the heavenly kingdom. No doubt Cosimo and his sons, whose fortune was built on the still suspect business of money-lending, hoped that some of their sanctity would rub off on them. Depictions of the Magi were a staple of Medici iconography. A modest version of the scene by Benozzo Gozzoli adorned Cosimo’s private cell in the monastery of San Marco, and a more magnificent version would soon cover the walls of the family’s private chapel in the new palace on the Via Larga. Lorenzo in particular came to be associated with the glamour of the Magi; many of his earliest portraits are found in paintings of the subject, including masterpieces not only by Gozzoli but by Sandro Botticelli.* As a young man Lorenzo was enrolled in the Confraternity of the Magi, the religious brotherhood that staged the processions that attracted admiring crowds from around Europe and helped give Florence its well-earned reputation for splendid pageantry.

  Lorenzo was born to rule. This fact alone set him apart from his grandfather and father, both of whom entered the world at a time when the Medici were a somewhat obscure clan on the margins of Florence’s governing oligarchy. Lorenzo’s first biographer, Niccolò Valori, wrote of his friend, “Thus, while still only a youth, he merited not only his title of Magnifico but Magnanimous also.” From the beginning Lorenzo possessed the kind of glamour the jealous merchants of Florence were reluctant to concede to any fellow citizen. By contrast, at the time of Cosimo’s birth in 1389 his father, Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, had yet to amass the fortune upon which the future greatness of his family would rest. Piero was raised to manhood as merely the elder son of a prosperous banker, and one, moreover, whose family name still carried the stigma of past indiscretions.† Lorenzo was the first of the Medici born, so to speak, to the purple, and this awareness of an almost imperial destiny shaped his sense of himself and the attitudes of those around him.

  The house to which the swaddled infant was brought following the baptism was an unremarkable building on the Via Larga known as the casa vecchia, or old house. To such unpretentious city dwellings Florentines attached the term palazzo (palace), but few possessed the grandeur we associate with the word. A century earlier even immensely wealthy banking clans like the Bardi or Peruzzi had been content to live in modest houses, often knit together haphazardly from pre-existing structures. Then wealth was still suspect (particularly wealth associated with usury) and humility was regarded as the cardinal Christian virtue. The casa vecchia was a relic of those earlier times, a sensible burgher’s home with few pretensions. It reflected the self-effacing character of its original owner, Giovanni di Bicci, a man who shunned the spotlight and whose reluctance to become embroiled in politics was such that on his deathbed he advised his sons, “Be chary of frequenting the Palace [of the Signoria]; rather wait to be summoned, and then be obedient, and not puffed up with pride at receiving many votes”—advice the politically ambitious Cosimo was not inclined to heed.

  Cosimo was a far different man. He possessed a much more expansive view of the world and of his place in it, participating as both a patron and gifted amateur scholar in the humanist revival that was making Florence the intellectual capital of Europe, pursuits his father would no doubt have considered a waste of time.

  Nowhere was this generational change more evident than in his own home. At the time of Lorenzo’s birth, Cosimo was in the midst of building a grand new edifice to accommodate his growing family. Begun five years earlier, it was, according to Giorgio Vasari, “the first palace which was built in [Florence] on modern lines,” that is, incorporating the classical architectural forms championed by Brunelleschi. One indication of its ambitious scale is that more than twenty buildings were razed to make room for the new structure, an inconvenience to neighbors justified, a
s was usual in similar circumstances, on the grounds that the new structure would be an improvement over the squalid tenements it replaced.

  As the residence of Florence’s most prominent citizen, the new palace rising next door to the casa vecchia at the corner of the Via Gori and the Via Larga would set a model for those that followed.* In Cosimo’s palazzo one can sense the driving ambition that characterized men of the Renaissance. The magnificence that has come to be associated with Florence in the age of Lorenzo is attributable largely to a moral transformation in which ostentatious display went from being condemned as a vice to being praised as a virtue. A century earlier an anonymous Florentine merchant, more afraid of drawing the unwanted attentions of the tax collector than with living well, had declared, “Spending a lot and making a big impression are in themselves…dangerous.” Writing a few decades later, the humanist Leonardo Bruni demonstrated how much attitudes had changed. Wealth, he declared, was not to be despised, for it “affords an opportunity for the exercise of virtue.” Money, if honestly come by, was nothing to be ashamed of. Wisely expended for the common good it could even be a creative force and the source of justifiable pride.

  Contemporaries used the word magnificienza to denote the brilliance and generosity expected of a great man. Nowhere in the world was the thirst for wealth and honor as intense and as productive as in Florence, where families were driven to ever greater displays of wealth and taste by a competitive political and cultural climate. The Florentine expatriate Leon Battista Alberti observed in his book On the Family, “everyone [in Florence] seems bred to the cultivation of profit. Every discussion seems to concern economic wisdom, every thought turns to acquisition, and every art is expended to obtain great riches.” In contrast to much of the rest of Europe, where feudal hierarchies were fixed by law and hallowed by custom, in Florence social and political status were as fluid as the ups and downs of the business cycle. Nothing did more to secure a precarious perch atop the social heap than building a sumptuous palace on a major thoroughfare.*