Magnifico Page 4

  By the end of the fifteenth century, every neighborhood boasted at least one imposing residence of a proud, domineering family. Benedetto Dei, writing in the 1470s, noted over thirty fine palaces built over the last half-century. The Palace of the Priors was still the largest secular building in the city (surpassed only by the cathedral), but numerous private residences were nearly as impressive, as if to demonstrate their refusal to be overawed by the might of the duly elected government. With their rough-hewn facades and fortresslike appearance, these private residences possessed all the visual authority of civic monuments and suggested a justifiable skepticism in the ability of the elected officials to protect their lives and property. If the Medici led the way, the Pitti, Pazzi, Rucellai, Strozzi, and many others were nipping at their heels.* Nothing so clearly illustrates the weakness of the government of Florence in relation to its principal families as this craggy cityscape bristling with the strongholds of the great and powerful.

  For Cosimo, drawing up his plans before the new building boom had gotten fully underway, the construction of the new palace would put some distance between the Medici and their rivals, and give permanent and prominent form to the Medici presence in the district of the Golden Lion in the northwest corner of the city. Other great clans had long been identified with particular districts: the Albizzi with the gonfalone of the Chiavi (Keys) in the northeast corner of the city; the Bardi concentrated in the Ladder across the river; the Rinuccini in the Ox near Santa Croce; the Strozzi in the gonfalone of Red Lion to the west of the New Market.†

  The first Medici arrived in Florence among the anonymous crowds of rural folk attracted to the city during the commercial boom that followed in the wake of the Crusades. This violent clash between Christian Europe and the Islamic East had the unanticipated effect of stimulating trade between the two civilizations, much of which flowed into the great Italian seaports and along the highways of the peninsula to markets in western and northern Europe. Florence was but one of many Italian cities to grow prosperous from the trade in spices, rare silks, and other exotic luxuries from the fabled Orient. Many a peasant, hearing tales of easy money, abandoned his plow to seek his fortune in the city, the ancestors of Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo among them.*

  The obscurity of the branch of the family to which Lorenzo belonged is indicated by its itinerant nature. Originally they had been associated with the more ancient neighborhood near the Old Market and the parish church of San Tommaso, but in making the move a few blocks to the north, outside the circuit of the old, twelfth-century walls, Giovanni di Bicci was venturing into territory already well populated by his kinsmen. Indeed, by the fourteenth century the Medici were among the most prominent families of their quarter, leaders of the popular faction who were battling the magnates for control of the city. One of the earliest mentions of the Medici comes in the fourteenth-century chronicle of Giovanni Villani. “[T]he popolani of the quarter of San Giovanni,” he records, “having chosen as their leaders the Medici and the Rondinelli and Messer Ugo della Stufa, judge, and the popolani of the borgo of San Lorenzo, along with the butchers and with the other artisans, assembled without the permission of the Commune in numbers totalling 1000 men…saying that the grandi were about to launch an attack.” This contemporary account reveals not only the Medici’s long-standing connection with the parish of San Lorenzo but also their well-earned reputation as populist rabble-rousers.

  Giovanni’s move may have been motivated by a desire to forge closer links with those more prominent branches of the extended Medici clan. Loyalty to family was the bedrock of social life in Florence; in a corrupt and violent world, consanguinity was the best—though by no means a foolproof—guarantee that one’s interests would be looked after. Cosimo’s rise to power, for instance, was aided by the efforts not only of his brother Lorenzo but of his cousin Averardo, while Tommaso Soderini’s support of Piero in the crisis of 1466 was due in part to the fact that he was married to Dianora, sister of Piero’s wife, Lucrezia Tornabuoni.† A distant ancestor of Lorenzo, Filigno di Conte de’ Medici, captured the tenor of Florentine life when he wrote in his Ricordi of 1373: “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.”

  One of the simplest explanations for the Medici ascendance was their fertility. The tax roll of 1427 reveals that the Medici, with thirty-one tax-paying households, were among the most prolific, though falling far short of the Strozzi (fifty-four) and the Bardi (sixty). In short, there was strength in numbers. At home the infant Lorenzo was surrounded by a large and growing family. In addition to his mother and father, Lorenzo had two older sisters, Bianca, born in 1445, and Lucrezia (known as Nannina), born in 1447. But in this profoundly patriarchal society it was the male children who guaranteed the survival of the family. As teenagers the girls would be married off to form alliances with other prominent families—Bianca married into the ancient Pazzi clan and Lucrezia into the Rucellai—while the boys were expected to carry on the family name and fortune. Thus, from the start the Medici invested most of their hopes and dreams in young Lorenzo.

  To his grown sons, Piero and Giovanni, Cosimo was a formidable figure, but, as their correspondence shows, relations were marked by affection and mutual respect. With his family, as with the republic over which he presided, Cosimo eschewed the harsh methods of the tyrant and was repaid with love and devotion. Piero later recorded that on his deathbed Cosimo told him “he would make no will…seeing that we were always united in true love, amity, and esteem.” The success of the Medici can be ascribed in large part to the way each member of the family worked toward a common goal, demonstrating a unity of purpose not always present among ruling dynasties, where jealousy and competition are more common than fraternal affection.

  As paterfamilias Cosimo presided over a large household, which included siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles, all under one roof or within a stone’s throw of the main residence on the Via Larga. In his tax declaration of 1457 he claimed fourteen dependents, including his nephew Pierfrancesco (son of his brother, Lorenzo, who had died in 1440) and his family, and those of his two sons, Piero and Giovanni. In addition he listed four household slaves.* Even if, like most Florentine taxpayers, Cosimo exaggerated the number of his dependents, it is clear that blood relatives were only part of a far larger group that relied on Cosimo’s support. “There are fifty mouths to feed in our family, including the villas and Florence,” Cosimo reported on his tax return of 1458, “and we also employ forty-one retainers, amounting to more than 400 florins a year.”

  Among those on Cosimo’s payroll were not only simple household servants and humble artisans, but also numerous visiting dignitaries, scholars, philosophers, poets, and artists whose names have since become famous. One of the least appreciative of the Medici houseguests was the painter Filippo Lippi. “So much a slave was he to this [amorous] appetite,” wrote Giorgio Vasari of the Carmelite monk turned painter, “that when he was in this humor he gave little or no attention to the works that he had undertaken; wherefore on one occasion Cosimo de’ Medici, having commissioned him to paint a picture, shut him up in his own house, in order that he might not go out and waste his time.” The strategy backfired, however, when Lippi managed to escape from the palace with a rope he fashioned out of his bedsheets. When Cosimo finally tracked down the restless monk, he agreed to give him the run of the house, concluding that “the virtues of rare minds were celestial beings, not slavish hacks.”

  The Medici home, particularly before the completion of the new palace, must have been in a constant uproar, with visiting ambassadors passing in the hallways artists in their paint-covered smocks and scholars of genius as well as common workers and peasants beg
ging favors from Florence’s most powerful citizen. The noted humanist Francesco Filelfo, complaining of Cosimo’s favoritism toward the equally distinguished Carlo Marsuppini and Niccolò Niccoli, declared peevishly, “If I do not frequent your house, as they do daily, that is because I am busy.”

  Much to the chagrin of elected officials, a great deal of the government’s business was conducted around the Medici dinner table, where Cosimo met informally with foreign ambassadors and leading men of the regime. The peculiar combination of public and private space in the Medici palace could prove disconcerting to visiting foreign dignitaries. “Cosimo de’ Medici,” recalled the ambassador from Ferrara,

  was giving an audience to certain ambassadors from the city of Lucca. The audience was taking place at his house, as was customary, and they were deep in conversation when a young boy, his grandson [Lorenzo?], came to him with some reeds and a small knife and begged him to make him a whistle. Cosimo, breaking off the conversation, attended to the boy, fashioning a whistle, and telling him to run off and play. The ambassadors, very indignant, turned to Cosimo saying: “But certainly, misser Cosimo, we cannot help but marvel at your behavior, that having come to you on behalf of our communes to treat of such great affairs, you would leave us to attend to a little boy.” Cosimo, laughing, embraced them, saying; “O my brothers, are you not also fathers? Do you not know the love one has for one’s sons and grandsons. You marveled that I made him the whistle: it is well that he did not ask me to play it, for that I also would have done.”

  This was an enormously stimulating environment for a young boy. Lorenzo’s outlook on life was shaped not only by the luxury of his immediate surroundings but also by the rich, contrasting textures of Florentine life.* Unlike the aristocracy of other eras, the rich in Florence were not cut off from their less fortunate compatriots. Their shops were located on the same blocks as crowded tenements of rubble and brick. Every day they rubbed shoulders on the narrow streets with lowly wool carders in their soiled rags and wooden shoes; they did business in the same shops and prayed in the same churches. Of course Florence was no paradise in which distinctions between rich and poor had magically disappeared. The contempt of the former for the latter was as great in fifteenth-century Florence as in any other age. But the complex mixture of hostility, misunderstanding, and recrimination, as well as mutual dependence, that marked the relations between the classes was enriched by continual intercourse. Even as a young boy Lorenzo was familiar with the striking contrast between the comfort of his own circumstances and the squalid conditions endured by many of his neighbors, something that aroused his pity however little it affected his sense of his own superiority. The common touch he exhibited throughout his life was a product both of his omnivorous tastes and of the easy familiarity with all types he picked up as a child of the city.

  Like many of those city-born and city-bred, the various members of the Medici family all yearned for the tranquillity of the countryside. In this, as in so much else, they were typical Florentines. Every citizen who could afford it owned a farm outside the city walls, and even rich merchants were not too proud to work the land with their own hands. Today in Florence, vineyards and olive groves are still within a few minutes’ walk of the city center. In the fifteenth century the margin between town and country was even narrower, with fields and orchards filling out the more sparsely populated neighborhoods within the city walls and, just beyond, hillsides dotted with elegant villas and modest farms.

  Lorenzo was from his earliest days shuttled back and forth among the many country residences his family possessed. The descriptions of the labor and planning involved will strike a familiar chord with anyone who has had to pack up a house for a summer vacation. “This evening I received your letter saying you have decided that we are to go to Careggi,” Lucrezia wrote to her husband, perhaps betraying some slight irritation with Piero’s sudden change of plans. “I must see how we can clean and scour and do all the needful things, and get in the necessary provisions…. I wanted one of the sheets without hem-stitching from the antechamber, but you have sent me one from the bed in our room. I am sending you this back, together with Cosimo’s squirrel-lined tunic which you asked for…. The sheet you are sending should be put in the bag in which I am sending you various things.”

  Family letters are filled with such homely detail—a missing pair of scissors to be sent to Cosimo or a fur-lined cloak for Piero, who apparently failed to prepare for the cold and damp of Venice. Lucrezia and her mother-in-law, Contessina, are kept busy looking after their husbands and children, sending capons, barrels of oil, wheels of cheese, dried fruit, and special delicacies after them on their various journeys so that one imagines the roads of Tuscany crowded with mules whose only job is to keep the bellies of the Medici men well filled. For all their wealth and power, the Medici women were frugal housekeepers, impatient with waste and anxious to get all they can out of a yard of cloth or barrel of flour. The family’s many farms not only served to stock the larders of the palace in the city but also were businesses that they hoped to turn to profit. A letter from Contessina to Giovanni, for example, reminds him to check up on the manager of their estates at Careggi, who had been commissioned to sell fifty-three pounds of goat cheese to some local pot-makers. While the men hobnobbed with dukes and cardinals and attended to affairs of state, the women continued to display the practical good sense and work ethic of their industrious and more modest forebears.

  Closest to the city was the villa at Careggi, where Cosimo could often be found puttering about the garden or pruning his vines as he sought relief from the cares of politics. A day’s ride to the north brought the family to the villas of Cafaggiolo or Trebbio in the Medici’s ancestral homeland of the Mugello. The estate at Cafaggiolo was so extensive that, according to Lorenzo’s friend the poet Angelo Poliziano there was nothing that Cosimo could see from its high tower that did not belong to him.* Trebbio was favored as a hunting lodge, and young Lorenzo soon became addicted to the excitement of the chase, a sport that inspired some of his best poetry.

  Few of these villas could be described as luxurious. They were referred to in the Medici tax returns simply as “fortified houses,” and the phrase comes closer to the mark than any notion of a villa based on examples like Hadrian’s estate at Tivoli. Contemporary pictures show the high towers and beetling crenellations that reveal their function as refuges in times of unrest, a holdover from the tumultuous Middle Ages.* In one letter, the manager of the estate, Francesco Fronsini, noted that some candles sent from Venice “seem too good for Cafaggiolo,” a clear indication that then, as now, the standards for country living were more relaxed than those for the city. All the Medici men, from Cosimo to Lorenzo, followed the advice of such Roman writers on country life as Cato, Cicero, and Virgil, and worked the land with their own hands.

  Lorenzo spent many of his happiest hours in the fields and forests of Cafaggiolo and Trebbio. His many letters to the managers of his estates show a detailed and firsthand knowledge of animal husbandry, farming, and, especially, the breeding and care of horses, for which he developed a lifelong passion. He enjoyed fishing as a relaxing pastime, but hunting and hawking stimulated his competitive spirit. Sights and sounds absorbed in the fields and forests fill his poetry, whose evocations of country life are every bit as precise as the landscapes of Gozzoli, Ghirlandaio, and Fra Angelico. This description of a rural sunrise comes from his poem “The Partridge Hunt”:

  The wolf retreated to its wilderness.

  The fox retreated to its den,

  For there was now a chance it might be seen,

  Now that the moon had come and gone again.

  The busy peasant woman had already

  Allowed the sheep and pigs to leave their pens.

  Crystalline, clear, and chilly was the air:

  the morning would be fair,

  When I was roused by jingling bells and by

  The calling of the dogs and similar sounds.

  But the a
ttractions of the countryside were, ultimately, merely a respite from more serious work that could be done only in the city. As the Florentine statesman and military leader Gino di Neri Capponi wrote in a poetic homily to his sons, “Honor does not reside in the woods…/Worthy men are made in the city, nor indeed can he be called a man/whose measure is not taken there.”

  It was from the heart of the city that Cosimo and his two sons managed the vast and profitable Medici bank. The Medici firm maintained a table on the Via Porta Rossa in the vicinity of the New Market, where businessmen could deposit their coin or redeem bills of exchange. But this business represented only a small portion of a much larger and more varied operation encompassing both small manufacturing establishments (silk and woolen shops in Florence) and international trading cartels. The Medici bank maintained branches in Rome (usually the most profitable because the pope’s finances were handled largely by the Medici bank there), Naples, Milan, Venice, Bruges, Avignon, Geneva, London, and other centers of trade and finance.

  Management of this vast business empire was conducted largely out of the family home. Four large rooms on the ground floor of the new palace—into which the family moved probably sometime in 1458—served as counting house and office space for scores of secretaries, clerks, and assistants. As in most Florentine palazzi, the ground floor was a semi-public space, but in the Medici palace it also included accommodations for both Cosimo and Piero, who had difficulty negotiating the stairs to the main living quarters above.*