The quarrel was due to mutual jealousy, but there were larger issues at stake that reflected wider rifts within Renaissance culture between traditional Christian values and the new vogue for ancient learning of which Florence under Lorenzo was the leading center. When Poliziano declares that Clarice “has taken [Giovanni] away from us,” he knows he can count on Lorenzo as his ally in a struggle pitting an enlightened humanism against a narrow-minded piety. While most historians have sympathized with Poliziano, history has oddly vindicated Clarice’s more conservative views. The young Giovanni would grow up to become Pope Leo X, a cleric more noted for his cultivation than for his piety. It was this learned aesthete who sat on the throne of St. Peter when Martin Luther, railing against the corrupt, pagan idolaters in Rome, split Christendom in two. Had Clarice convinced her husband to let Giovanni spend more time studying scripture and less time on the profane delights of Ovid, might he have been more sympathetic, or at least more sensitive, to the concerns of the German reformer?
For the moment, however, the stakes seemed rather smaller, though in the context of Lorenzo’s family the contest of wills was fierce enough. Asserting her authority as mistress of the house, Clarice banished the offending poet. A few days later Poliziano wrote to Lorenzo defending his position: “I am here at Careggi, having left Cafaggiuolo by order of Madonna Clarice. I beg you allow me to tell you the reason and the way of my departure by word of mouth, for it is a long story. I think that when you have heard my tale you will agree that I was not wholly in the wrong.” But though Lorenzo sympathized with Angelo’s aims, he had no desire to antagonize his wife. In the end he tried to defuse the situation by installing his exiled friend in his villa in Fiesole, a far more congenial spot for the worldly poet than the wilds of Cafaggiolo, while he made other arrangements for the education of his sons.
But Clarice was not so easily mollified. Instead of being disgraced, Angelo appeared to have been rewarded by Lorenzo for his insults to her. This only increased her sense that she was becoming a stranger in her own home. She already felt out of place among the brilliant and witty circle of men around Lorenzo and knew how vicious they could be when jockeying for position. Their cruel wit spared no one, and she feared she would now become the butt of their jokes. “I should be glad not to be turned into ridicule by [Matteo] Franco* in the same way as Luigi Pulci,” she wrote to her husband, “nor to hear that Messer Angelo can say that he will stay in your house against my will, and that you have given him your own room at Fiesole. You know that I said that if you wished him to remain I would be content, and though he has called me a thousand names, if it is with your approval, I will endure it, but I cannot believe that it is true.”
Lorenzo hurried to Cafaggiolo to try to smooth things over with his wife, but apparently Clarice continued to wage a long-distance battle, for some days later he scolded her for her petty attempts to get back at her rival: “Monna Clarice. I have been much annoyed that the books have not been handed to Messer Agnolo, as I requested you through Ser Niccolò, and that Messer Bernardo has not come here to bring them.”
With this final jab the feud between Lorenzo’s wife and best friend came to an end. While Lorenzo bowed to Clarice’s wishes and relieved Angelo as tutor to their children, he made it clear that he would not banish his dear friend from his presence. Angelo himself was no doubt happier with the current state of affairs, which left him free to pursue his own interests in between his stints on important diplomatic missions for Lorenzo. Clarice, having technically won the battle, felt humiliated, realizing she had lost the war. Her children would grow into true Florentines, steeped in the liberal classical culture that fundamentalists like Savonarola would conceive as their life’s mission to destroy.
The longest of Lorenzo’s extended absences from Florence during these years was occasioned by a project close to his heart—the reopening of the University of Pisa, an institution that, much to the chagrin of many of his fellow citizens, would soon rival and even surpass that of his own hometown.* For months at a time between 1471 and 1473, Lorenzo and Giuliano—sometimes accompanied by Lorenzo’s family, sometimes by their mother—lived at one of their many properties in or around the ancient seaport, meeting with learned men and principali of the city to discuss the plans to turn Pisa into a center of scholarship. Here Lorenzo was able to exercise his authority in an area where he was truly passionate. But even while conversing with philosophers, scientists, and scholars, Lorenzo was always sensitive to political nuance. In order to minimize competition with the Florentine university he proposed a division of the curriculum: to the Studio in Florence went the faculty of philosophy and philology; to Pisa the more practical studies of law, medicine, and theology.
One of the earliest and most prominent students at the reinvigorated university was Lorenzo’s brother. A letter of May 1474 reveals that, like many a student before and since, Giuliano did not let his books get in the way of more obvious delights. “We have arrived safely and are all well,” he reported to his mother. “Today we dance, and tomorrow we joust, which, as is the custom of this country, should be very fine.”
Though Giuliano gracefully fulfilled the role of Prince of Youth that Medici propaganda had assigned to him, he was no empty-headed playboy. Like his older brother he had a passion not only for sport but for philosophy and letters, as his correspondence with the philosopher Marsilio Ficino reveals. Lorenzo helped direct Giuliano’s studies, employing the ever helpful Poliziano, a year younger but more studious than his pupil, for the task. “I rejoice most heartily to find our Giuliano so devoted himself to letters,” Lorenzo wrote to Angelo. “I congratulate him thereupon, and thank you for the zeal you have shown in guiding him the right way.” The best description of the young man in the prime of his life, one confirmed in the many contemporary portraits, comes from the pen of his friend and teacher:
He was tall and sturdy, with a large chest. His arms were rounded and muscular, his joints strong and big, his stomach flat, his thighs powerful, his calves rather full. He had bright lively eyes, with excellent vision, and his face was rather dark, with thick, rich black hair worn long and combed straight back from the forehead. He was skilled at riding and at throwing, jumping and wrestling, and prodigiously fond of hunting. Of great courage and steadfastness, he fostered piety and good morals. He was accomplished in painting and music and every sort of refinement. He had some talent for poetry, and wrote some Tuscan verses which were wonderfully serious and edifying. And he always enjoyed reading amatory verse. He was both eloquent and prudent, but not at all showy; he loved wit and was himself witty. He hated liars and men who hold grudges. Moderate in his grooming, he was nonetheless amazingly elegant and attractive.
The project to restore a functioning institution of higher learning in Pisa devoured large portions of Lorenzo’s personal fortune. More was involved than Lorenzo’s love of learning, though this was certainly a major factor in his willingness to sacrifice both time and treasure. Pisa was once a proudly independent state whose mercantile empire, like that of her rivals, Genoa and Venice, spread throughout the Mediterranean. She still resented her subservience to the upstart inland community, and Lorenzo’s generosity was in part meant to assuage her wounded vanity. It was the opposite tactic he had employed in Volterra, the two approaches combining to demonstrate the advantages of being a friend to the Medici and the tribulations that awaited their enemies.
These were happy times for Lorenzo and his growing family, and for the city over which he ruled. Italy was enjoying a rare interlude of peace, something noted by the ambassador of Ercole d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, though not without a twinge of regret:
There is nothing new here, except that in the neighborhood of Pisa, where the illustrious Lorenzo is hawking with King Ferrante’s men, two of the ten falcons sent by His Majesty, and those the best, are lost. Your excellence must not wonder that I speak of such things, for I only follow the example of others. Idleness has so gained the upper hand in Italy that, if
nothing new happens, we shall have more to say about the slaughter of fowls and dogs than about armies and deeds of war. For the rest, I am of the opinion that those who have to govern Italy in peace will not reap less fame than those who kept her at war. For the object of war is, after all, peace, and the only consideration is that it should be a permanent peace.
One can almost here him yawn as he tracks Lorenzo’s court from Florence to Pisa and out to one of his many villas. Peace abroad and prosperity at home left little for the ambassador to do but pass along the latest gossip. On the domestic front opposition to Lorenzo’s rule had turned strangely silent, though no one presumed it had vanished entirely. The reasons for this rare quiescence were twofold. On the one hand there was no doubt of Lorenzo’s personal popularity after his recent chastisement of the upstart Volterrans. But it is also true that under the watchful eyes of the Otto, the security police whose informers kept them abreast of any seditious talk, Florentines, while not exactly living under a reign of terror, knew the peril of loose tongues. Vocal opponents could expect to see their tax burdens mysteriously rise, while those found guilty of plotting against the government could expect no mercy from the courts. An incident recorded by the diarist Luca Landucci vividly illustrates the dangers awaiting those who threatened bodily harm to the leading citizens of the regime:
27th September [1481]. A certain hermit came to the house of Lorenzo de’ Medici at the Poggio a Caiano; and the servants declared that he intended to murder Lorenzo, so they took him and sent him to the Bargello, and he was put to the rack.
15th October. This hermit died at Santa Maria Novella, having been tortured in various ways. It was said that they skinned the soles of his feet, and then burnt them by holding them in the fire till the fat dripped off them; after which they set him upright and made him walk across the hall; and these things caused his death. Opinions were divided as to whether he were guilty or innocent.
Even the staunch Medici partisan Benedetto Dei acknowledges that the regime’s methods for ensuring loyalty could be heavy-handed: “He who doesn’t turn to the cross cannot be saved, and likewise, I say, I have said, and I will say: He who doesn’t throw in his lot with the palle, will have both his head and his shoulders broken.”
Under the circumstances it is not surprising that people were reluctant to express their views in public. It was only in a private letter that the Florentine merchant Francesco Bandini felt free to describe the mood of his compatriots in 1476: “if one considers how life in this one place is rendered difficult from the unheard of vexations, the ruin of fortunes, the incessant extortions, the favors of corruption, the instability of the state, the rancor, the cruelties, the hatreds, the pilagings, the continual disquiet and the uncertainty each has of his own goods, one would assuredly estimate that it is a paradise inhabited by perverse and horrible spirits.”
Though Bandini did not speak for a majority of Florentines, his complaints dispel the propagandists’ claims that the current regime enjoyed universal support. Newly streamlined by Lorenzo’s reforms, the reggimento was accepted by the majority as long as its policies seemed to be successful, but an influential minority continued to nurse a persistent and increasingly bitter hatred.
One factor working in Lorenzo’s favor was the vibrant cultural life of the city that made Florence a magnet for men and women of taste and refinement. This cultural flowering, comparable to Athens in the age of Pericles, rested on a solid economic foundation. In 1472, Benedetto Dei wrote a description of his native city meant to put a boastful Venetian in his place. With a merchant’s eye for the bottom line, his tour of the city gives equal time to butchers’ shops and artists’ studios. “Our beautiful Florence,” he wrote to the “envious” Venetian,
contains…two hundred seventy shops belonging to the wool merchants’ guild, from whence their wares are sent to Rome and the Marches, Naples and Sicily, Constantinople and Pera, Adrianople, Broussa, and the whole of Turkey. It contains also eighty-three rich and splendid warehouses of the silk merchants’ guild, and furnishes gold and silver stuffs, velvet, brocade, damask, taffeta, and satin to Rome, Naples, Catalonia, and the whole of Spain, especially Seville, and to Turkey and Barbary…. The number of banks amounts to thirty-three; the shops of the cabinet-makers, whose business is carving and inlaid work, to eighty-four; and the workshops of the stonecutters and marble workers in the city and its immediate neighborhood, to fifty-four. There are forty-four goldsmiths’ and jewelers’ shops, thirty goldbeaters, silver-wire-drawers, and a wax-figure maker…. Go through all the cities of the world, nowhere will you ever be able to find artists in wax equal to those we now have in Florence, and to whom the figures in the Nunziata [Santissima Annunziata] can bear witness. Another flourishing industry is the making of light and elegant gold and silver wreaths and garlands, which are worn by young maidens of high degree, and which have given their names to the artist family of Ghirlandajo.
It was during these years that a young apprentice in Verrocchio’s studio first enrolled in the Fraternity of St. Luke, signaling his matriculation as an independent master in painting. Leonardo, the illegitimate son of a notary from the Tuscan village of Vinci, was already his master’s most important assistant. He was also currently hard at work for Lorenzo, contributing to the elaborate tomb he and Giuliano had commissioned to receive their father’s remains in San Lorenzo.
At one time or another Lorenzo employed most of the finest painters in the city to decorate his villas. Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, Perugino, and Domenico Ghirlandaio were all engaged in painting frescoes at his villa at Spedaleto, unfortunately now destroyed. But unlike a royal court, which, through its monopoly on prestige, tends to suck all the oxygen out of the cultural atmosphere, Lorenzo’s “court” encouraged imitation and competition. It was not in his interest to monopolize all the best artists, if only because this would create the impression that he believed himself superior to his fellow magnates. To be the first citizen of the land, rather than its king, meant that he had to exemplify those civic virtues of patronage without depriving others of their opportunities. Whether or not Lorenzo commissioned a particular work, it is clear that he strived to foster a climate in which architecture, painting, sculpture, literature, scholarship, and music all flourished. It was not only his friend Poliziano who saw Florence under Lorenzo as a second Athens. “Men of intellect and ability were contented [wrote Guicciardini], for all letters, all arts, all talents were welcomed and recognized.”
Nor was it only the richest citizens and the most famous artists who participated in the cultural ferment. While artists like Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio, and Botticelli commanded the highest prices, there were dozens of more modest shops in the narrow streets behind the Duomo churning out small devotional Madonnas and bust-length portraits. In these latter works, especially, one can see the pride and individuality of the humble Florentine tradesman who thought enough of himself to have his features, warts and all, recorded for posterity. In fact large shops like Verrocchio’s or Ghirlandaio’s, with their dozens of apprentices and assistants, were something like art factories, turning out works of varying quality. Only the most important and most finicky clients would insert into the contract the phrase “all from his own [the master’s] hand, and particularly the figures,” as the Strozzi demanded of Filippino Lippi for their family chapel in Santa Maria Novella.
It was part of Lorenzo’s conscious strategy to foster the development of the arts in his native city and his compatriots responded to his call with enthusiasm. They took pride in the beauty of the city, which raised their status in the eyes of their rivals. Even states with larger armies and populations were compelled to acknowledge the preeminence of the City of the Baptist when it came to cultural matters. Art had far greater propaganda value in the fifteenth century than it does today, and Lorenzo was always willing to lend his favorite artists as a peace offering or when he wished to strengthen diplomatic ties. Following his conflict with Pope Sixtus IV, for instance, he signaled h
is newfound devotion to the Holy Father by sending along Botticelli, Perugino, and Ghirlandaio to help decorate the just constructed Sistine Chapel.
But it was not simply for reasons of state that Lorenzo encouraged artists and writers to come and work in the city. As a poet and well-known authority on all matters artistic, he fostered a climate of intellectual ferment and artistic creativity almost unparalleled in the history of civilization. Of course Lorenzo did not initiate the great age of artistic achievement that has come to be known as the Renaissance—Florence had been a leading center of art and literature since the age of Dante and Giotto a century and a half earlier—but he stamped his personality and his taste on the art of his own times.
One of the artists whose work most directly reflects Lorenzo’s influence—whether or not he actually commissioned a given painting—is Sandro Botticelli, who was painting some of his greatest masterpieces during these years, including the Primavera which is said to include a portrait of Giuliano’s mistress Simonetta Vespucci as the goddess Flora. Lorenzo employed Botticelli directly on many occasions, and the artist’s debt to the Medici family is indisputable. In return for paying the artist’s wages, the Medici men are often depicted in his work: Lorenzo’s portrait, along with that of his father and grandfather, is contained within the famous Adoration of the Magi, while the athletic Giuliano is likely the model for the war god who slumbers next to the goddess of love in the allegorical Venus and Mars.* More important, Botticelli’s Primavera and Birth of Venus, while no longer ascribed to Lorenzo’s direct agency, drew inspiration from the circle of poets and philosophers who gathered at his villas to sup at his table and engage in arcane metaphysical discussions. Among the most immediate sources for Botticelli’s mysterious allegories are the poems of Angelo Poliziano. The following passage from his “Rusticus,” a poem of springtime composed while he was staying at Lorenzo’s villa in Fiesole, finds its visual equivalent in Botticelli’s masterpiece:
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