For intellectuals, particularly for those of a speculative and daring cast of mind, Lorenzo’s favor guaranteed more than just room and board. In 1486 Pico composed his famous 900 Theses, a set of philosophical and theological propositions that were a young man’s challenge to the received wisdom of the day. When a committee appointed by Pope Innocent declared seven of them to be unorthodox and a further six questionable, Pico was forced to flee to France. It was only after Lorenzo guaranteed his good behavior and placed him under his protection that Pico was allowed to return to Italy. Even then he was not free from the accusations of heresy, accusations that Lorenzo, always inclined to take the side of freethinkers rather than the clergy, vehemently denied. “The Count della Mirandola is here leading a most saintly life, like a monk,” Lorenzo wrote to his ambassador in Rome. “He has been and is now occupied in writing other admirable theological works…. He is anxious to be absolved from what little contumacy is still attributed to him by the Holy Father and to have a Brief by which His Holiness accepts him as a son and a good Christian…. I greatly desire that this satisfaction should be given to him, for there are few men I love better or esteem more.”
Not all of Lorenzo’s companions of these years were as high-minded or as erudite as Pico. Lorenzo always had a soft spot for buffoonish types whose pranks and verbal barbs could shake him from his natural tendency to melancholy. As he recast himself as a sober statesman many of the favorites from the days of his wild youth were shunted aside—including Braccio Martelli and Luigi Pulci—but he kept about him at least a couple of men who shared his taste for coarse jokes and ribald tales. When, at the urging of Ficino, Lorenzo distanced himself from Pulci—whom the philosopher regarded as an atheist and sodomite—the role of court jester was taken up by Matteo Franco. Lorenzo described him as “among the first and best-loved creatures of my house,” and his presence ensured that Lorenzo’s entourage remained lively. A typical example of this impious priest’s humor is his witticism at the expense of his disgraced rival as a “louse clinging to the Medici balls” (Pulci in Italian meaning “fleas”). So bold was Franco that not even Lorenzo’s wife escaped his sharp wit. “I should be glad not to be turned into ridicule by Franco,” Clarice wrote to her husband, “as was Luigi Pulci,” a request the not always chivalrous Lorenzo ignored. Despite his coarse humor, Clarice came to love and trust the man. “I will not allow any man to have the spending of my money but Franco,” she declared, “and I will eat nothing but what has passed through his hands.” Even the prissy Ficino enjoyed Franco’s high jinks, admitting that “were it not for Matteo Franco seasoning my dullness with his wit,” he would “lose the taste for my own company.”
For as long as he could remember, Lorenzo had struggled to emerge from beneath his grandfather’s shadow. One acute observer noted that he was driven by a desire “to achieve even more than Cosimo and Piero had ever done,” though it was less his own father than Cosimo, Pater Patriae, whose example he hoped to emulate and whose place in the hearts of his countrymen he hoped to supplant. Nowhere did Cosimo’s achievement loom larger than in his contributions to the urban fabric of Florence. He himself acknowledged that long after his political legacy had crumbled, monuments in brick and stone would be all that was left to remind his compatriots of what he had given to his homeland. In the ecclesiastical realm Cosimo had bettered his prospects in Purgatory by spending lavishly on the reconstruction of San Lorenzo and San Marco; the Franciscan church Santa Croce was provided with a new chapel at his expense, and both San Miniato and Santissima Annunziata received elaborate tabernacles paid for by the profits of his bank.* Nor did he stint when it came to spending on himself; the most notable private building of the era was his palace on the Via Larga. Not only was it a handsome, imposing presence on the street, but through the elegance of its richly appointed interior that he filled with priceless works of art it set a model of gracious living for generations of Florentine patricians.
Lorenzo knew that if he were to rival the achievements of his grandfather he would have to challenge him on this ground, for it was as a builder that a great man’s legacy would be measured. As Giovanni Rucellai, no mean builder himself, explained it, “There are two principal things that men do in this world. The first is to procreate, the second is to build.” Lorenzo’s desire to build on the scale of Cosimo was initially hampered by two factors: the first was that he was simply not as wealthy as his grandfather had been; the second was that after decades of intensive building on the part of public institutions and private citizens there were fewer opportunities to make a mark.
And then there was the perennial problem: how to avoid making grandiose gestures that smacked of princely ambition? After the Pazzi war, however, such considerations were less important and Lorenzo was free to pursue his schemes without fear of offending his fellow citizens. As for coming up with the funds to pursue a very expensive hobby, Lorenzo’s murky finances were such that he could simultaneously complain to the tax collector that he was near bankruptcy while investing in real estate and pursuing an extensive building program.*
It was a moment for which he had long been planning. Lorenzo was every bit as ambitious as Cosimo and, in addition, he possessed a far wider and more profound understanding of the art, both technically and aesthetically. Indeed the study of architecture had been one of his longstanding passions, pursued with diligence even when he had little prospect of bringing his dreams to fruition. The highlight of his 1471 journey to Rome had been the time he spent in the company of Leon Battista Alberti wandering about the ruins of the ancient city, and the lessons he learned from the master were later put to good use. Among Lorenzo’s most prized possessions were three different versions of the Ten Books on Architecture by the ancient Roman architectural theorist Vitruvius and a manuscript copy of Alberti’s On Architecture. When Ercole d’Este wished to borrow Alberti’s text from Lorenzo, he agreed only with great reluctance because he “prized it so much and often read it.” When Alberti’s book was finally put out in printed form, Lorenzo had a servant fetch him the latest chapter straight from the presses so he could have it read aloud to him while he was taking the waters.
Even before the Pazzi conspiracy, Lorenzo had begun to lay the groundwork for his project of urban renewal, purchasing considerable property along the Via dei Servi, a tract that reached from the Medici palace to the Porta San Gallo, which he hoped to turn into rental property. Though little came of the plan during Lorenzo’s lifetime, the development of this neighborhood just inside the northern walls that took place in the early sixteenth century seems to have followed the program first contemplated by Lorenzo.
But it was not until the late 1480s that the stars aligned, allowing Lorenzo to begin an ambitious program of public and private building. By then his position both domestically and abroad was secure, his finances largely recovered from the disaster of the Pazzi war, and Florence itself prospering during a welcome interlude of peace, for which Lorenzo could claim much of the credit. Indeed Lorenzo seemed merely to be riding the crest of a wave that saw an explosion of new building in Florence, spurred on in part by a lenient tax policy that he himself had promoted. His purpose in revising the tax code in 1489, which provided an exemption to those who improved their land in the city, was, “in the manner of his ancestors…to make the city larger and more beautiful.”
Evidence suggests that had Lorenzo lived even a few years longer his imprint on the city would have surpassed that left by Cosimo. The impression one has of Lorenzo as a less dedicated builder that his grandfather is due in part to the accidents of history and to his own premature death. Many of the structures completed under his supervision—including his villa at Spedaletto and the monastery of San Gallo—have not survived, while plans have been discovered for large-scale projects that he never had time to implement. In the late 1480s, for instance, he began a second major building program near the church of the SS. Annunziata; the so-called Via Laura project was to include a vast palace and garden
s for his personal use, the encircling of the Annunziata piazza with colonnades that would complement the famous loggia of the foundling hospital by Brunelleschi, and the construction of two new roads lined with new housing. This “embellishment to the city,” as one contemporary called it, was brought to a sudden halt by his death. A drawing for the palace by his favorite architect, Giuliano da San Gallo, gives some idea of Lorenzo’s ambitions at this time and reveals the extent to which he now seemed to have felt himself liberated from the restraints of the city’s republican traditions. Dwarfing even the Pitti palace, Lorenzo’s new home would have been of truly princely dimensions, though it is not certain that it was ever more than a fanciful dream.
At the Porta San Gallo that opened out onto the road that led to Careggi, this same architect was put to work constructing a monastery for the Augustinian friars. “Lorenzo de’ Medici [is] paying the lion’s share of the expense,” wrote Bartolomeo Dei, “and is the inspiration behind the building.” It was, in fact, from working on this building that Giuliano Giamberti received the name by which he is known to history:
For this convent models were made by many architects, and in the end that of Giuliano was put into execution, [wrote Vasari] which was the reason that Lorenzo, from this work, gave him the name of Giuliano da San Gallo. Wherefore Giuliano, who heard himself called by everyone “da San Gallo,” said one day in jest to the Magnificent Lorenzo, “By giving me this new name of ‘da San Gallo,’ you are making me lose the ancient name of my house, so that, in place of going forward in the matter of lineage, as I thought to do, I am going backward.” Whereupon Lorenzo answered that he would rather have him become the founder of a new house through his own worth, than depend on others; at which Giuliano was content.
Like most of Lorenzo’s urban schemes, the Augustinian convent did not withstand the ravages of time, having been destroyed by anti-Medici forces during a siege early in the following century. Fate has been kinder to those building projects Lorenzo initiated at a distance from the urban center, particularly the villa Ambra at Poggio a Caiano. On no project did he devote more time, money, and energy than to the building of this country retreat on land ten miles to the west of the city center he had earlier purchased from Giovanni Rucellai. On this pleasant hilltop site with a view of his vast estates and of the swiftly flowing river Ombrone, Lorenzo created a model of the ideal country villa, setting a pattern for country living just as Cosimo had earlier set the pattern for the urban palace. It anticipated the future not only in the grace of its architectural forms but by embodying a new ethic, one that emphasized reason over the raw display of power and that celebrated a life dedicated to the cultivation of the muses.
So enamored was Lorenzo of this spot that it inspired one of his most lovely evocations of the Tuscan countryside. The poem “Ambra,” the name of both the villa and the nymph who is the object of the river god Ombrone’s unwanted attentions, begins with a description of the autumn landscape that is typically Lorenzan in the precision of its observations:
Fled is the time of year that turned the flowers
Into ripe apples, long since gathered in.
The leaves, no longer cleaving to the boughs,
Lie strewn throughout the woods, now much less dense,
And rustle should a hunter pass that way,
A few of whom will sound like many more.
Though the wild beast conceals her wandering tracks,
She cannot cross those brittle leaves unheard.
The stately retreat he worked on almost obsessively in the last years of his life, in close collaboration with Giuliano da San Gallo, would generate a host of imitations through the ages, from the villas of Palladio to the Palladio-inspired country estates of England, and from there to the New World, where at Mount Vernon and Monticello the Founding Fathers would construct their homes very much in the spirit of the First Citizen of Florence.
At Poggio a Caiano, Lorenzo put into practice the ideas he had absorbed from his close study of ancient architecture and his close reading of Alberti’s treatise. The villas Lorenzo had grown up in, particularly Trebbio and Cafaggiolo, were medieval fortresses whose bristling battlements bespoke a certain insecurity, if not paranoia. This was hardly the image that Lorenzo wished to project. “I do not approve of turrets and crenellations on the houses of private citizens and the well-ordered state,” Alberti had written: “they belong rather to the tyrant, in that they imply the presence of fear or of malicious intent.” The man at the head of a well-ordered state should strive to achieve the same qualities of measure and serenity in his own residence. At Poggio a Caiano, Lorenzo was determined that there be no visible means of protection other than the love the people bore him. (His own bodyguards were apparently less sanguine, and remained nervous about the lack of adequate means of defense.) Standing serene and white upon its lofty perch, the villa’s elegant classical forms are a monument to reason and harmonious proportion that seem to defy even the possibility of violent passion. As if to emphasize this irenic theme, on the frieze beneath the classical pediment Lorenzo had Bertoldo sculpt a painted terra-cotta frieze evoking Virgil’s Golden Age. Depicting scenes of peace and plenty, Bertoldo’s relief conveys the message writ large in the neatly arranged landscape as a whole, that under the wise stewardship of Lorenzo Florence had become an earthly paradise.
But for all its sophistication, Ambra was never simply a pleasure palace. It was very much a working farm, and Lorenzo, far from being one of those gentlemen who prefer the idea of rustic life to its grubby reality, took an active role in its management. Lorenzo, in fact, proved himself a much better manager of his estates than he was a banker, no doubt one of the reasons he reinvested so much of his wealth in land. It was also true that Lorenzo shared the prejudices of the age that regarded wealth tied up in land as more aristocratic than wealth acquired through trade or finance. But when it came to real estate Lorenzo exhibited the bottom-line mentality of his mercantile ancestors rather than the feudal sensibilities of the knightly class. Instead of viewing his acreage as primarily a sign of status or as land to be set aside for such princely pursuits as hunting and hawking, Lorenzo actively worked at improving his property, trying to squeeze the maximum amount of profit and efficiency. In 1489, for instance, he told Gentile Becchi that he had planted numerous mulberry trees at Poggio in order to produce silk for Florence’s busy looms. In this same letter he also showed off his practical knowledge by declaring, “I have learned that when [the saplings] are tender and young only a stout and thick stake can defend them from the wind.”
No doubt Lorenzo put up many of those stakes himself. Like Cosimo, he found physical labor therapeutic and, to the extent his crippled body allowed, worked on his estates alongside the hired hands, sweating in the summer sun and braving the December chill. But for all the time he spent on his favorite project, Poggio a Caiano was but the most prominent of the many building projects Lorenzo was involved in during the last decade of his life. From Spedaletto near Volterra and Agnano near Pisa, Lorenzo showed an insatiable appetite for acquiring new properties and building on them. In real estate, as in politics, he did not necessarily play by the rules. He was not above using his political authority to intimidate those who held property he wanted to add to his own holdings. One cleric whose land abutted Lorenzo’s villa at Agnano admitted, “I don’t dare contradict him,” certain that “one way or another” the Lord of Florence would get his way.
Fra Bartolomeo, Portrait of Girolamo Savonarola, c. 1498 (Art Resource)
XX. THE CARDINAL AND THE PREACHER
“Here is a stranger come into my house who will not even deign to visit me.”
—LORENZO ON SAVONAROLA
Who from perennial streams shall bring
Of gushing floods a ceaseless spring?
That through the day, in hopeless woe
And through the night my tears may flow…. As the sad nightingale complains,
I pour my anguish and my strains.
&
nbsp; Ah, wretched, wretched, past relief;
Oh, grief beyond all other grief!
—ANGELO POLIZIANO ON
LORENZO’S DEATH
“THIS IS AN AGE OF GOLD,” WROTE LORENZO’S FRIEND Marsilio Ficino with pride, “which has brought back to life the almost extinguished liberal disciplines of poetry, eloquence, painting, architecture, sculpture, music…. And all this at Florence!” Most of his compatriots shared this optimistic vision. Florence in the 1480s was at peace with its neighbors and prosperous at home. The humming silk looms near the Porta San Gallo and the exotic goods piled high in the Mercato Vecchio testified to the revitalized economy and, adorned on every street corner and in every parish church by works of genius, the city on the Arno continued to cast its spell on lovers of art and learning
For the man at the center of all this activity, however, these years brought more than their share of troubles and sorrow. Lorenzo would not turn forty until almost the end of the decade, but already he seemed to possess the body of a much older man; his once powerful frame was bent as gout and arthritis spread through his limbs. He knew he would not achieve the ripe old age of Cosimo, who had died at seventy-five; now even his father’s fifty-three years seemed out of reach. The death of his uncle Giovanni at forty-two seemed a premonition of his own fate.
Adding to these burdens was the grim spectacle of Clarice’s slow wasting from consumption. It is an indication of how much his own ill health had come to dominate his life that when she finally succumbed on July 29, 1487, Lorenzo was away from Florence, attending to his own ailments at the mineral baths at Filetta. He was still in too much pain to return to Florence for her funeral, which took place a few days later in San Lorenzo. Even in this era when men were not expected to treat their wives as equals, many reproached Lorenzo for his apparent callousness. The criticism was so widespread that at least one friend felt the need to defend him against these slanders. “If you should hear Lorenzo blamed for not being at his wife’s death, make excuses for him,” he wrote to the Florentine ambassador in Rome. “Leoni his physician considered it imperative for his health to go to the baths and no one had any idea that Madonna Clarice’s death was so near.”
Magnifico Page 44