—NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI,FLORENTINE HISTORIES
“This is an age of gold, which has brought back to life the almost extinguished liberal disciplines of poetry, eloquence, painting, architecture, sculpture, music, and singing to the Orphic Lyre. And all this at Florence!”
—MARSILIO FICINO
SOMETIME IN THE 1460S OR EARLY 1470S LORENZO PURCHASED a small plot of land adjacent to the monastery of San Marco, a few blocks north of the palace on the Via Larga, for use as a private garden. Though only one of literally hundreds of similar patches of greenery within the encircling walls, Lorenzo’s garden was apparently considered by at least one contemporary, the artist Piero del Massaio, to be one of the notable attractions of the city. The image of the garden is contained in his abbreviated view of the city made to illustrate a manuscript of Ptolemy’s Cosmography. Shown as a walled plot fringed with cypress trees and labeled “Ort[us] L[aurentii] de medicis,”* its prominence demonstrates the importance contemporaries attached to it (which has sometimes eluded modern scholars). It is not, however, the shrubbery that deserves our attention, but the industrious activity of those who spent their time learning their craft behind its high stone walls. Among the regular visitors to this oasis was Leonardo da Vinci, who, according to one contemporary account, “stayed as a young man with the Magnifico Lorenzo de’ Medici, who, giving him a salary, made him work for him in the garden on the piazza of San Marco, Florence.”
While little is known of how Leonardo spent his time in the garden—it may well have been to work alongside his master, Verrocchio, on Piero’s tomb—a decade or so later another young artist was a frequent visitor. His exploits here are better chronicled:
Now that the boy [Michelangelo] was drawing one thing and then another at random [wrote the artist’s friend and biographer, Ascanio Condivi], having no fixed place or course of study, it happened that one day he was taken by [his friend] Granacci to the Medici Garden at S. Marco, which Lorenzo the Magnificent…had adorned with figures and various ancient statues. When Michelangelo saw these works and savored their beauty, he never again went to Domenico [Ghirlandaio]’s workshop or anywhere else, but there he would stay all day, always doing something, as in the best school for such studies.
From this and other similar accounts grew the legend of Lorenzo’s sculpture garden, a veritable school of the arts under the aegis of il Magnifico that served as the nursery of the greatest talents of the Renaissance.* It was here among the cypresses and umbrella pines, under the supervision of Lorenzo’s friend the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni that talented young men came to learn their craft, aided in their studies not only by the fine examples of ancient sculpture the lord of the city had collected but by drawings of more recent masters.
The ancient statues that served as models for aspiring sculptors were later dispersed, but the memory of Lorenzo’s garden has survived in the collective consciousness as one of the high points of civilization. Any site that served as the training ground for both Leonardo and Michelangelo would have a special place in the history of art, but some modern scholars dismiss these stories as largely the figment of Medici propaganda, the fruit of his descendants’ efforts to legitimize their rule by depicting Lorenzo’s reign as a golden age of art and literature. But while Vasari may certainly be accused of a pro-Medici bias—his chief patron was Grand Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, a man whose legitimacy rested largely on the prestige of his family name—there is no reason to doubt the basic narrative, confirmed at key points in other contemporary sources. This scholarly skepticism is part of a larger pattern in which exaggerated claims made for Lorenzo’s role in fostering the Florentine Renaissance have led to exaggerated counterclaims in which Lorenzo’s contributions have been marginalized or eliminated altogether. The idea that Lorenzo single-handedly brought forth this unparalleled flowering of human creativity, popular among some Enlightenment and nineteenth-century authors, is surely off the mark, but denying the obvious fact that Lorenzo dominated this most fruitful moment in cultural history through the force of his character, the generosity of his patronage, as well as his own creative talents, is equally misleading. Lorenzo’s influence in the realm of culture, as in politics, was pervasive and inescapable, and while many of the works once thought to have been directly commissioned by him turn out to have been made for others, his presence was felt everywhere and his spirit is visible in almost every major painting and sculpture to issue from the many workshops of the city in the last two decades of his life.*
Attempts to belittle Lorenzo’s contribution to the culture of the Renaissance Florence are often prompted by uneasiness about his political agenda and by a conviction that he was motivated by selfish, dynastic ambitions rather than by the disinterested pursuit of art for art’s sake. It is certainly true that Lorenzo used art as a tool of propaganda, but an art free from worldly taint didn’t exist in fifteenth-century Florence. Art was not then the exclusive province of an ultra-rarefied elite but was thoroughly entwined in the religious, economic, and civic life of the community. Florentines were all intensely chauvinistic and took understandable pride in their unparalleled cultural genius. Lorenzo saw it as his mission to promote the city’s fame as a center of European culture, knowing that his own prestige was linked to that of Florence. When he fostered such obviously patriotic projects as turning the cathedral into a pantheon of Florentine greats, commissioning a portrait bust of Giotto and seeking to have the remains of Dante returned to his native city, his efforts were applauded by his fellow citizens. Even his own writing can be seen as part of this project. In an age when Latin was the preferred idiom of the cultured man, Lorenzo went out of his way to write in the vernacular in order to show that “this Tuscan tongue” should not be despised but appreciated as “rich and refined.” Florentines as a whole, and Lorenzo in particular, were far more effective as cultural than as military or political imperialists.
Even a brief survey of contemporary documents reveals the extent to which Lorenzo took an interest in what was happening in the studios and workshops of his native city. The countless times he was consulted on aesthetic matters, not only by his fellow citizens but by men of taste and learning across Europe, demonstrates that he was universally regarded as an authority on all matters artistic. When Lodovico Sforza wished to find painters to decorate the great monastery of Certosa in Pavia, he asked his agent in Florence to look only at those artists Lorenzo had employed in his villa at Spedaletto because he knew Lorenzo to be an authority in such matters.* Sforza was not alone in his reliance on Lorenzo’s judgment. Through queries like this from the courts of Europe, Lorenzo’s taste left its imprint far from his native Florence. Lorenzo, for his part, proffered such advice not only because he was genuinely interested in such matters and because it flattered his ego, but because he knew that by these means his influence and fame spread far and wide.
A similar dynamic was at work domestically. Even when Lorenzo was not personally paying for the work, his opinions were usually canvassed on important projects, as in the crucial design of a new facade for the Duomo, where he was asked to pass judgment on the competing proposals because of his “very great architectural expertise.” A contract from May 1483 spelling out the terms under which Ghirlandaio was to paint an altarpiece for the chapel of the Palazzo della Signoria noted that it should be completed in that “quality and that manner and form as should seem good to, and please, the Magnificent Lorenzo di Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici.” Similar instances can be multiplied almost indefinitely. Sometimes Lorenzo is literally present in the work, as in the Sassetti chapel frescoes at Santa Trinità or Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi, commissioned by the obscure Medici follower Guasparre del Lama, where he and his family are prominently featured in the scene. But even when he did not appear in the company of saints his spirit hovered over the creation.
Lorenzo was unrivaled in Florence and Florence was unrivaled in Europe as the supreme arbiter of taste. Whether at home in his palace on the Via Larga or
in one of his many villas, Lorenzo was surrounded by a coterie of talented men. This peripatetic entourage formed a literary and cultural court whose brilliance made it a trendsetter for the rest of society. As the guiding light of this intellectual world, Lorenzo’s interests and obsessions seeped into the artisans’ workshops crowded near the Duomo and into the scattered classrooms of the Florentine university. The result was that the art of the 1470s and 1480s bears the stamp of his personality—cerebral, sensual, and refined. His weakness for esoteric philosophical allegory (expounded at length in poems like The Supreme Good) and love for all things ancient set the prevailing literary and intellectual fashions of the day and influenced artistic practice, not only locally but throughout Europe, where even mediocre Florentine artists were in high demand.
It is not a stretch, then, to speak of an Age of Lorenzo, shaped by the tastes and ambitions of one man. That Lorenzo was well aware of his role in the cultural revival of the age is illustrated by his personal motto, inscribed in pearls on his shield in the joust of 1469—Le temps revient, the time returns. In fact it was just this kind of suffocating presence that families like the Pazzi found so demeaning. This was partly a matter of policy, but it was also a product of Lorenzo’s fiercely competitive nature, which made him insist on having a say in everything and made it difficult for him to accept that he had been bested in any matter, no matter how trivial. His sometimes overbearing personality comes through in accounts from those courageous enough to match their horses against his in the races to which he was passionately attached. Luca Landucci recalls one race in which his brother’s Barbary went head-to-head with Lorenzo’s champion: “And when he went to race at Siena, there was a tie between his horse and one belonging to Lorenzo de’ Medici, called Fire-fly, that of Gostanzo [my brother] being in reality one head’s length in advance of the other. And the people who were present declared that he had won, and told him to go to the magistrate, and they would bear witness. Gostanzo, however, refused to do this, out of respect for Lorenzo, and as it happened, Lorenzo was proclaimed the winner.” It is clear that Florentines were growing ever more accustomed to habits of deference to the lord of the city.
The manner in which Lorenzo left his mark, even when he had no hand in commissioning a particular artwork, can be illustrated in a couple of well-known examples. Two of the most famous works of the period, Botticelli’s Primavera (1482) and Birth of Venus (1485), are no longer believed to have been made for Lorenzo himself but for his cousin Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici. But despite attempts to sever the cord linking these works to the first citizen of Florence, they are undeniably products of the cultural and literary environment that grew up around Lorenzo and that found expression in the refined eroticism of his own verse. Of course Lorenzo’s cousin was in general terms very much within Lorenzo’s orbit but, more significant, the painter seems to have drawn his intricate program from Lorenzo’s protégé Angelo Poliziano.*
Some have even attempted to find passages in Lorenzo’s own poetry that directly inspired these paintings, but it seems more accurate to say that a similar spirit, hedonistic and erudite, flows through both, as in these lines from his carnival song “The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne”:*
Those who love these pretty nymphs
Are little satyrs, free of cares,
Who in the grottoes and the glades
Have laid for them a hundred snares.
By Bacchus warmed and now aroused
They skip and dance the time away.
The Renaissance love affair with ancient literature did not begin with Lorenzo, but through his learning, tastes, and poetic gifts he epitomized the age in which centaurs, nymphs, and dryads were as much a part of the imaginative life of the educated class as holy saints and martyrs. After his death this literary culture, more pagan than Christian in the eyes of its critics, was so closely linked with Lorenzo that reformers like Savonarola waged war with equal fervor on the corrupt political and cultural pillars of his regime.
Lorenzo’s contribution was as much practical as inspirational: through his avid collecting of ancient cameos and statues, which he made available to visiting connoisseurs and talented young artists, he provided a treasure trove of models for them to study, while his greed for ancient texts helped build a library filled with volumes by Ovid, Lucretius, and Horace that were mined by writers like Poliziano. One of the criticisms of Lorenzo was that he was a greater collector than patron, an amasser of ancient manuscripts and cameos—like the famous Farnese Cup, purchased from Sixtus IV—rather than a commissioner of new art. But, as the tale of the sculpture garden illustrates, the two roles were mutually reinforcing. Lorenzo did not squirrel away his prized possessions but proudly showed them off to anyone who wished to see them, thereby providing an invaluable resource to artists and scholars. (It is telling that the Pazzi conspirators counted on Lorenzo’s eagerness to show off his collection to help them plan their ambush.) In May 1490, Lorenzo wrote to his son in Florence: “Piero—Enclosed is a letter from Baccio [Ugolini]; the bearer is the man of whom he writes, who is passing through Florence. He seems to me clever and one who loves to see antique things. I wish you to show him all those in the garden, and also what we have in the study; in short, whatever seems best to you, and thus to give him pleasure.”
Lorenzo’s passion for small objects, particularly if they were ancient and exquisitely wrought, is well known, perhaps because his nearsightedness made it easier to appreciate things he could hold in his hands. “I have received the cameo I have so long coveted,” Lorenzo wrote to one of the many agents he had scouring Europe for antiquities, “which pleases me very much because it is in quite perfect condition.” But it was not only precious and exquisite things that caught Lorenzo’s covetous eye; among his greatest treasures were the busts of Agrippa and Augustus he had received from Sixtus, objects whose association with the golden age of Rome outweighed their artistic merit. Friends on their travels were instructed to be on the lookout for objects of particular historical value. In one of his greatest coups he obtained from Pistoia a bust of the philosopher Plato, which he installed in a special niche and which became the centerpiece of celebrations held in honor of the philosopher’s birthday.
Another attempt to deflate the myth of a Lorenzan golden age involves the so-called Platonic Academy, which in the years after his death grew in the imagination of some propogandists into a school of philosophy founded by Cosimo, directed by Ficino, and coaxed into full bloom by Lorenzo. Recent scholarship has thrown cold water on any notion that there was an institution dedicated to the study of philosophy centered on Ficino’s villa in Careggi. Those who created out of the informal gatherings of Ficino, Poliziano, Pico della Mirandola, Lorenzo, Giuliano, and other lesser lights a formal school whose purpose was to revive the philosophy of the Athenian giant were guilty of reading too much into a scanty record. In fact Ficino’s “academy” was little more than a loose association of scholars and students who shared an interest in Plato’s philosophy and who met from time to time on the occasion of the ancient philosopher’s birthday. Many of the “lessons” Ficino taught were in the form of letters filled equally with philosophical tidbits and paternal advice. Ficino described one particularly memorable occasion in the introduction to his book Plato on Love, dedicated to his patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici:
Plato, the father of philosophers, died at the age of eighty-one, on November 7, which was his birthday, reclining at a banquet, after the feast had been cleared away. This banquet, in which both the birthday and the anniversary of Plato are equally contained, all of the ancient Platonists down to the times of Plotinus and Porphyry used to celebrate every year. But after Porphyry these solemn feasts were neglected for twelve hundred years. At last, in our own times, the famous Lorenzo de’ Medici, wishing to renew the Platonic banquet, appointed Francesco Bandini master of the feast. Therefore, since Bandini had arranged to celebrate the seventh day of November, he received with regal pomp at Careggi, in the countr
y, nine Platonic guests.
There was nothing unusual in this. Casual gatherings of like-minded scholars had been a feature of Florentine intellectual life for centuries—as young men Cosimo and Agnolo Acciaiuoli both attended philosophical discussions in the cell of Ambrogio Traversari—but with the encouragement of Lorenzo, the fatherly Ficino managed to shift the prevailing intellectual mood. Before Ficino, Florentine scholars, building on the medieval Scholastic tradition, had been concerned primarily to elaborate the philosophy of Aristotle, turning it into a system marked by arid intellectualism and logical hair-splitting. Ficino found Plato’s metaphysical flights much more to his taste. As elaborated by Plato’s late classical follower Plotinus, and further refined by Ficino, Neoplatonic philosophy taught that the universe possessed a hierarchical structure in which the material world as apprehended by the senses existed on the lowest rung. The soul, captivated by beauty, ascends through higher and higher spheres of reality until it finally approaches the eternal realm of the Divine. Love is the force that impels the soul upward toward the heavenly realm, starting with sexual attraction and finding ultimate consummation in the love of God. Lorenzo himself expounded this doctrine of the soul’s ascent to heaven in a passage that closely follows Ficino’s writing. Physical love, he wrote, “is the first step on the staircase of love, and, naturally, the most imperfect, since Platonism holds that corporeal beauty is a sort of shadow of true beauty or the idea of true beauty, which, in the body is seen only under a veil.” Lorenzo dwells at length on this theme in his most Platonic, or Plotinian, poem, “The Supreme Good”:
For while the soul is bound in carnal bonds,
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