Magnifico

by Miles J. Unger

  Lorenzo and Giuliano were both avid sportsmen. Giuliano in particular was a fine athlete, compensating for an intellect that could not match his brother’s. With his easy grace, winning personality, and natural athleticism, Giuliano soon won the nickname “The Prince of Youth,” a title that Lorenzo, with his growing responsibilities and wide-ranging interests, was all too happy to cede to his younger brother.

  Lorenzo’s passion for, and knowledge of, all things equestrian was legendary. A number of letters from him survive whose main purpose is to procure for him the finest horses for his stable: “Our Lord the King has ordered two fine horses to be sent to your Magnificent Lorenzo,” reported a Neapolitan count, “and says if he wishes for others he is to say so, for finding that he takes pleasure in them, the King intends to keep him supplied.” As the lord of Florence, his stable of racehorses became famous, but his affinity for these animals began early. He preferred when he could to care for them himself, though a full-time staff was also always on hand. His chief groom, Apollonio Baldovini, has left a vivid description of Lorenzo exercising his four horses in the cold morning air. It was later said of his most famous racehorse, il Morello, that it would refuse food from any hand but his.

  During these years, Lorenzo’s rangy frame began to take on muscle, his physical presence to take on a new authority. “Lorenzo was of above average height,” Valori records, “broad in the shoulders, his body solid and robust, and so agile that he was never second to anyone.” He was not without flaws, which included not only his homely face but his weak eyesight and an almost complete lack of the sense of smell. The latter defect Lorenzo dismissed with a jest, declaring that “for this he was much obliged to nature, since among those odors she offered there were far more that offended than delighted the senses.”

  His homeliness, however, did not make him less attractive to those of both sexes. His charisma was, perhaps, only enhanced by his famous temper. As generous as he was to his friends, those who opposed him could expect to face the withering blast of his rage. One such storm was witnessed by the Milanese ambassador when, following a diplomatic setback, the young leader of Florence “showed himself in a temper, such as I have never seen in one of his high standing.” His was a personality of lights and darks, of fiercely passionate friendships and equally passionate hatreds. He could be loyal to a fault, protecting those who had done little to earn it, while pursuing those who had turned against him with vindictive thoroughness.

  Many of the more conservative elements in the city complained that Lorenzo and his circle of friends strutted about the city as if they ruled the roost, raising a ruckus and paying little respect to their elders. Not all of this was the spontaneous exuberance of youth. Indeed there was a conscious attempt by Cosimo and Piero to build around the young Medici heir and his brother something of a cult of youth. Allowing these adolescents a greater role in the affairs of state was one way to counteract the influence of more entrenched elites by creating a class of men loyal to and dependent on Medici favor.

  But it is clear that the circles in which Lorenzo traveled were not necessarily of the sort to bring credit to his family. Two of his closest friends, his traveling companions on his trip to Pistoia and fellow members of his brigata, were Braccio Martelli (seven years his senior) and Sigismondo della Stufa, sons of Medici neighbors in the gonfalone of the Golden Lion. Martelli in particular seems to have been his companion in many a disreputable escapade. “My dear Lorenzo,” Braccio wrote to his young friend, who was away in Rome to meet with the pope, “I recommend myself to you, and I encourage you to receive with devotion all those pardons, and beg that you send along a small portion, however much you think would be sufficient penance for the sins we have committed together.”

  Though Martelli does not elaborate, it is likely that among those sins were those “unnatural” sexual acts for which Florence was notorious throughout Europe. Humanist schools and religious confraternities were often rife with sin, and homosexual encounters, even assaults, were common in the back alleys of Florence.* Lecherous older men arranged trysts with boys who sold their bodies to the highest bidders in the Via tra’ Pellicciai (where the furriers had their stalls). Then these youths, with money in their pockets, headed to the taverns and brothels near the Old Market, where they whored and gambled through the night, stumbling home to bed as the sun rose above the Arno. St. Bernardino of Siena paints a portrait of the Florentine upper classes in which parents turned a blind eye to, if they didn’t actually encourage, their children’s misdeeds: “You don’t make your sons work in a shop, nor do they go to school to learn any virtues. Instead you send them out in a giornea [a richly appointed tunic] with their long hair and revealing hosiery, and they go around polishing the benches with their falcons and their dogs on leash; they’re good for nothing but lusting with sodomites, shameful acts, indecent talk.” This effeminate caricature does not exactly fit the young Lorenzo, a robust, athletic and rough-and-tumble boy not likely to be found posing coyly on a bench, but it is also improbable that he remained immune to habits that were common among Florentines of all classes. In fact the names of both Martelli and Luigi Pulci turn up in court records of the Officers of the Night, the officials who attempted, without much success, to curb this “abominable vice.” Some of their letters to Lorenzo hint at feelings that were more than platonic.

  To conclude from this suggestive evidence, however, that Lorenzo was a covert homosexual who concealed his true nature beneath a more conventional lifestyle would be a mistake.* There is ample evidence for Lorenzo’s sexual relations with women, both in and out of marriage, including some lurid testimony from Martelli’s own letters. But the larger issue is that the term “homosexual” is an anachronism when applied to men of Renaissance Florence. Florentines occasionally celebrated relations between those of the same sex, though more often such acts were condemned as contrary to God and nature, and those apprehended could be brutally dealt with. Antonio Beccadelli’s obscene book of verses, Hermaphroditus—dedicated, interestingly enough, to Cosimo, who was said to have read it with pleasure—praised in impeccable Latin meters the joys of both heterosexual and homosexual lust. Often homosexuality was considered little more than a youthful indiscretion, a rite of passage like visiting a prostitute or getting drunk and learning moderation from the ensuing hangover. Sodomy—which included homosexual as well as other illicit sexual activity—was a vice produced by unbridled sensuousness, a shameful indulgence like gambling or keeping a mistress. It reflected poorly on the character of those incapable of controlling their sexual impulses, but it did not distinguish the practitioner in any fundamental way, save that of virtue, from his more conventional peers. It was acknowledged that some men became so attached to this particular vice that they refused to take a wife or, if they did, failed to do their duty by her, but these were the exceptions and their sin was not so much that they were of a different, perverse nature but that they failed to avail themselves of the sole licit means society provided to satisfy their appetites.

  The probability that at one time or another Braccio Martelli, Luigi Pulci, or Angelo Poliziano was Lorenzo’s lover should take its place alongside the better documented liaisons he had throughout his life with women, which included consuming passions and numerous casual encounters. A rounded picture of Lorenzo as a young man reveals that alongside his precocious sociability he pursued his pleasures with almost reckless abandon. Like most males of his class and time, Lorenzo saw no need to confine his sexual activity to the approved bounds of holy matrimony. Nor, indeed, was Lorenzo very different in this respect from either his father or grandfather, both men of sterling reputation in their private lives who nonetheless each fathered an illegitimate child with a slave girl. In Lorenzo’s story “Giacoppo,” he declares, showing a certain familiarity with the subject, that mature women often make the best lovers “because when they are younger they are most often filled with shame and of little spirit; when they are past this age…they have cooled to the p
oint that they have no need of lovers.”

  As both Gentile Becchi and Braccio Martelli attest, Lorenzo was not above frequenting the seedier locales where sex of all variety was for sale, and the names of at least some of his various mistresses seem to have been common knowledge among Florentines. Even when he was older his reputation for licentious behavior sometimes cost him the respect of important men. At one point, when Lorenzo was already a married man and ruler of Florence, Gentile Becchi felt it necessary to reprimand him for “going out at night wenching and engaging in buffoonery that shames those who must have dealings with you the following day.”

  Emotional if not overtly sexual bonds played a role in the formation of the tight-knit circle of poets, artists, and scholars that grew up around Lorenzo. “If you were with me,” Luigi Pulci wrote to Lorenzo while he was away in Venice, “I should produce heaps of sonnets as big as the clubs they make of the cherry-blossoms for May-day. I would recite such things that the sun and the moon would stop in their orbits to hear them, as they did for Joshua…. Then I say to myself: ‘My Lorenzo is not here—he who is my only hope and refuge.’ Only this holds me back.” As in ancient Athens, whose combination of democratic institutions and creativity served as a model for many Florentine intellectuals, male bonding was encouraged by educational inequalities between the sexes. Even in progressive Florence there was a pervasive misogyny—shared by Lorenzo himself, despite his evident admiration for his mother and lasting friendships with women of real intellectual attainment—that encouraged friendships among men that were often richer than those they forged with the opposite sex.*

  But no matter how intimate, most friendships were marked by the same attention to status and power as all other relationships. There was no one in Florence who could afford to consider himself Lorenzo’s equal. Letters from friends like Luigi Pulci and Braccio Martelli express a deep attachment on their part that Lorenzo rarely returned. Lorenzo, glamorous, charming, brilliant, and, above all, powerful, was never the seeker but always the sought.

  Sinning together with his friends offered Lorenzo some release from the rigors of his life as the Medici heir. His sense of duty was constantly at war with his natural zest for life, his desire to live up to the expectations of those whose approbation he craved in conflict with his taste for sensual pleasures. In the end he pursued all things to the point of near exhaustion. Machiavelli sensed in him a man divided against himself. “Thus,” he concluded in his summation of Lorenzo’s life, “considering both his voluptuous life and his grave life, one might see in him two different persons, joined in an almost impossible conjunction.” More psychologically perceptive than the political theorists who remained perplexed by Lorenzo’s irresponsible side is the playwright William Shakespeare, whose portrait of the young Prince Hal wasting his days in the tavern with Falstaff and Bardolph uncannily resembles Lorenzo and his friends at the baths of Macerato or Bagno a Morba.

  Burdened by high expectations and struggling to emerge from the shadow of his famous forebears, Lorenzo’s urge to lash out and behave irresponsibly is understandable. Exploring the more sordid neighborhoods of town—the brothel district between the Mercato Vecchio and the archbishop’s palace, or the Chiasso de’ Buoi near the public baths—allowed Lorenzo to escape the formality of palace life and the false flattery of courtiers. But could any friend of Lorenzo ever entirely escape the suspicion of ulterior motives? To be known as a “friend of Lorenzo” was automatically to wield great influence in the city, and much of his time was consumed seeking sinecures for those whose attachment to him was as much a product of ambition as affection. In his poem “On the Supreme Good,” Lorenzo despairs of life in the city where “he who lies the best is happiest” and “friendship’s measured by expediency.”

  One of the main constraints on the free play of emotion was that friendship blurred uneasily into clientage, a relationship of unequal partners that could get in the way of genuine affection. Even as a teenager, Lorenzo was a magnet for hungry literati and talented young artists who knew they would get a sympathetic reception. “Our Maeceneas,” he was called, referring to the advisor of Augustus and patron of Virgil and Horace. The ambiguities were particularly pronounced in his relations with poets like Angelo Poliziano and Luigi Pulci, who were both literary mentors to Lorenzo and clients of the Medici family. The poet ranked higher on the social scale than those who worked with their hands (a group that included painters and sculptors); literature was even considered a fit avocation for a gentleman. Lorenzo, after all, was a fine poet but one cannot imagine him picking up a brush or chisel, no matter how much he appreciated such skill in others. But for Lorenzo poetry was a passion, not a means of earning a living. The orphaned Poliziano, by contrast, had been rescued from poverty by Cosimo, and the often impecunious Pulci (though a Bardi on his mother’s side) was dependent on crumbs from the Medici table. “As I have not had money to spend for some time here [at Pisa] I have spent your reputation,” the poet wrote, only half in jest. “Here, as I pass, I am pointed at: ‘There goes Lorenzo’s great friend,’ they say.” Pulci’s self-deprecating humor cannot conceal the fact, ruefully acknowledged, that he was merely an insignificant satellite in the great man’s orbit. In short, no friendship for the Medici heir was free from economic calculation or political consideration.

  One client who largely escaped from the bonds of dependence was the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, a man whom Lorenzo revered as a spiritual and intellectual father. As Cosimo’s great friend and intellectual mentor he continued to offer guidance to Lorenzo after Cosimo’s death. This kindly, mild-mannered man was the foremost philosopher of the age, leader of a movement that sought to reconcile Plato’s idealism with Christian notions of the immortality of the soul. “Short in stature, slim, and slightly hunched in both shoulders,” of ruddy complexion and his head covered in blond curls, he was a physically unprepossessing figure. In conversation he was little more impressive, hampered as he was by a stammer. Nonetheless he was one of those people whose conviviality makes them the natural center of things.* Lorenzo himself was completely at ease with him, and when they were separated for long periods their letters were frequent and intimate. Chiding the philosopher for his failure to write, Lorenzo teased, “Now if you are not sorry for this—and I seek no other sign of repentance than your letters—know that you will undergo judgment at the court of our mutual love, for it is right that the case should be tried by such a judge. We shall find nobody fairer or more just, or anyone who could be a truer witness to our own soul. This judge gives you only the space of three days to write to me, and if these go by without doing so, he promises you will be condemned.” Here we catch a glimpse of the humor that charmed Lorenzo’s contemporaries but that is largely absent from the remainder of his extant correspondence. “Who would have believed it?” Lorenzo wrote Ficino in mock despair. “Indeed, I can scarcely believe my own eyes. I sent two letters to you; you sent scarcely one to me, and it was so sparing in words that if you leave out the greetings at the start, the farewell at the end, the date and address, there is almost nothing left. Should a philosopher be talkative, or should he be mute?”

  With this man who had been an intimate of his family’s household from before his birth, Lorenzo could shed the formalities necessary to maintaining his dignity and authority. Ficino was one of the few people from whom Lorenzo would accept criticism because he was confident in Ficino’s love for him. “I was indeed delighted with your letter which reproved me for the waste of past time,” Lorenzo wrote, “in such a way that my idleness does not appear to have been entirely useless. For the result of my waste of this brief time is that directions have come from you which are not only for my benefit but for the benefit of all those who suffer from the same disease.”

  As Lorenzo entered his adolescence he had every reason to believe that his future was secure. The Medici continued to prosper as Cosimo, in the age-old Florentine way, used his considerable political influence to steer business to the family
bank. The civil strife that had brought Cosimo to power lay two decades in the past and the republic thrived under his steady leadership.* True, his cavalier disregard for democratic institutions provoked grumbling that occasionally became serious enough to disrupt the normal functioning of the government (as in 1458 when Girolamo Machiavelli and his followers were arrested and sent into exile for fomenting discontent with the regime), but Cosimo was shrewd enough to use such moments of crisis to strengthen the hand of the reggimento.* Medici prospects were also enhanced by a growing family. Giovanni had married late, but his young bride, Ginevra degli Alessandri, had already produced a male heir, named Cosimino (Little Cosimo), after his grandfather. Giovanni, more robust and outgoing than his older brother, was viewed by many as the likely candidate to inherit his father’s position. Were Giovanni to outlive Piero by a number of years, as seemed more than likely given Piero’s ill health, Cosimino might well have at least shared the leadership role in the family with his older cousin.