Magnifico Read online

  Not least of the attractions of travel was the opportunity to escape the watchful eyes of his parents, though Piero and Lucrezia were careful to surround him with older men—like his brother-in-law Guglielmo de’ Pazzi or his tutor, Gentile Becchi—who acted as both companions and chaperones. Unlike many of those born to privilege, Lorenzo did not surround himself with mediocrities whose dim light would allow him to shine more brightly, but preferred the company of those who could stimulate his appetite for knowledge and against whom he could test his own intellect. Topics were varied, ranging from the typically adolescent subjects of women and sport to religion and the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. Trading barbs with the likes of Luigi Pulci or Angelo Poliziano was not a pastime for the intellectually bashful, but in such elevated company Lorenzo more than held his own.

  Lorenzo’s formal education was entrusted to his tutor, Gentile Becchi, a priest as well as an amateur poet of more erudition than talent. His holy orders did not prevent Becchi from covering the entire range of classical literature, much of it deemed indecent by more conservative colleagues.

  With Piero’s encouragement and Becchi’s persistence, Lorenzo was provided with a firm grounding in the classics of ancient literature, as well as in the triumvirate of great “modern” masters, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Lorenzo, like most well-born Florentines, was so steeped in the world of the ancients that he would not have felt out of place attending a debate in the Roman Senate or a lecture in Aristotle’s Lyceum. “I have the feeling that the days of Cicero and Demosthenes are much closer to me than the sixty years just past,” wrote the humanist Leonardo Bruni, sentiments many of his compatriots, Lorenzo included, would have shared. Latin was still the language of scholarship and of the Church, while knowledge of Greek was rapidly taking its place as an essential accomplishment for an educated man. Cosimo’s friend, the bookseller Vespesiano da Bisticci, recounts a charming story of the discovery by another young aristocrat, the dandy Piero de’ Pazzi, of the joys and practical benefits to be found by thrusting one’s nose in musty old tomes:

  One day it happened that Nicolao Nicoli [Niccolò Niccoli], who was as Socrates combined with Cato in temperance and virtue, met Messer Piero to whom he had never spoken, and in passing him close to the palace of the Podestà [now the museum of the Bargello], he spoke to him, seeing that he was a very attractive youth. Nicolao was a very distinguished man and Piero at once came to him, whereupon Nicolao asked whose son he was. The youth answered that he was the son of Messer Andrea de’ Pazzi, and when Nicolao asked him his occupation he answered after the fashion of young men, “I am giving myself a good time.” Nicolao said to him, “As you are the son of such a father, and of such good presence, it is a shame that you should not take to the study of Latin, which would make a polished man of you. If you neglect learning you will win little esteem, and when the flower of your youth has passed you will find yourself a good-for-nothing.” Messer Piero, when he heard these words, at once understood their meaning, and knew that Nicolao spoke the truth, so he answered that he would set to work as soon as he had found a teacher.

  The sudden transformation of the dissolute youth into the diligent scholar after a chance encounter with a wise older man smacks too much of a religious epiphany to be entirely plausible, but Bisticci’s narrative captures the climate of an age in which intellectual attainments were as important as social pedigree.

  At eleven, Lorenzo was already deep in his studies of Ovid and Justin, Becchi reported to his parents. According to his tutor the future patron of such luminaries as Angelo Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola, guiding light of the Platonic academy, at first found it tough going. “Do not ask how he enjoys his present studies,” Becchi reported to Piero. “In all other matters he is obedient, and since you are not here the fear of transgressing makes him more diligent.” Lorenzo, for all the praise of his scholarship lavished on him by later biographers, was apparently no prodigy when it came to his studies. Like most active boys he found poring over his books tedious business. Becchi’s assertion that he persevered in order not to disappoint his father sheds an interesting light on the psychological roots of his need to excel.

  For the men and women of the Renaissance the greatest virtue of classical literature was that it drew on a range of human experience far broader than anything to be found in the writings of the Church Fathers. In the histories of Plutarch or Tacitus or in the sensuous verses of Ovid, Lorenzo could discover a world that mirrored his own experience. Those who populated the histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, and Plutarch were much like contemporary Florentines, urbane, politically sophisticated people who wrestled with the same questions they faced on a daily basis. The lessons to be learned from the careers of Pisistratus and Pericles, Caesar and Brutus seemed much more relevant than the lives of the holy martyrs.

  Small wonder that statesmen like Cosimo de’ Medici—no less than his archrival Palla Strozzi—spent a large part of their fortunes on recovering lost manuscripts from the monasteries of Europe. What their agents were disinterring was not simply a vanished body of knowledge but an attitude toward life that embraced the world and man’s glorious destiny. “Wonders are many on earth, and the greatest of these is man,” wrote Sophocles in Antigone…

  He is master of the ageless earth, to his own will bending

  The immortal mother of gods…

  He is lord of all living things…

  There is nothing beyond his power…

  Lorenzo’s friend, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, shared this optimistic creed, writing in his On the Dignity of Man, “O great and wonderful happiness of man! It is given to him to have that which he chooses and to be that which he wills.”

  It is this confident spirit of the ancients, echoed in Hamlet’s famous speech, that was the most precious treasure recovered by the scholars of the Renaissance.* Reading about the heroic deeds of those dead for thousands of years, men of the Renaissance craved a similar kind of immortality. Lorenzo was not shy about admitting his own ambition, writing in defense of his own poetry, “The nutriment of every art is honor, and by the desire of glory alone are men’s minds spurred to produce admirable works. Thus in Rome we see magnificent triumphal entries, in Greece the famous Olympian games, and both are celebrated by poets and orators with infinite mastery.” The electricity of those initial encounters is difficult to recapture and the passion for all things Greek and Roman expressed by fifteenth-century Florentines could often lead to sterile imitation of dead forms. But for those like Lorenzo, driven, ambitious, confident in their own abilities, the ancient texts contained a revelation of man’s potential to shape the world, for good or ill, in his own image.

  If Lorenzo was often too restless to be a first-rate student, his brother, Giuliano, proved to be more compliant, if less naturally gifted. Part of Becchi’s pedagogic method seemed to be to enlist his older pupil to instruct the younger. “Lorenzo is learning the verses his master there gave him and then teaches them to Giuliano,” Lucrezia wrote to Piero from Cafaggiolo in February of 1457, when Lorenzo had just turned eight and Giuliano was still three. From the beginning Lorenzo took the lead and Giuliano struggled to keep pace. The almost five-year age difference and Lorenzo’s dominating, not to say domineering, personality guaranteed that Giuliano would remain in his brother’s shadow. Had Giuliano shared Lorenzo’s own competitive fire it is unlikely the two brothers would have remained on such good terms. Giuliano looked up to his older brother, and Lorenzo rewarded his loyalty by taking him under his protective wing. To Giuliano, Marsilio Ficino wrote, Lorenzo was his “other self, both in nature and in will.” Lorenzo’s companion Braccio Martelli confirmed their intimacy, noting that Lorenzo had no better or closer friend in the world than Giuliano.

  The protective feelings Lorenzo had for his younger brother kept a potential rivalry at bay, but in other settings his competitiveness was legendary. Isabella d’Este later wrote of Lorenzo, “he is always wanting to win, by one means or another,�
� and while in this case she was referring to his passion for racing horses, it was an observation that held true in most arenas. Burdened by high expectations, he strove mightily to live up to them. It was above all the image of his grandfather Cosimo that was held up to Lorenzo as a model for his own conduct. Shortly after his own father’s death the ambassador from Milan remarked of the young man that he was “thinking to achieve more than even Cosimo and Piero had ever done.”

  No one more often reminded Lorenzo of the high standards he was expected to meet than Marsilio Ficino, a man whom Lorenzo revered almost as much as Cosimo himself. “[Cosimo] was just as sharp in discussion as he was wise and strong in government,” Ficino wrote to Lorenzo, perhaps at the very moment when he was called upon to assume the rule of the city. “Certainly I owe much to our Plato, but I confess I owe no less to Cosimo. For Plato put before me the concept of the virtues but once; Cosimo put them into practice every day.”

  Florence in the fifteenth century was the intellectual capital of Europe, center of the new humanism and a magnet for scholars of international renown. Even before the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, many of the finest Greek scholars had left their native land to find security and material comfort in the cities of the Latin West. Some of the most famous, like Manuel Chrysolaras and John Argyropoulos, made their way to Florence. They knew that here their abilities would be appreciated and amply rewarded. These men, heirs to an intellectual tradition that reached back to the golden age of Athens, stimulated the growth of a native Florentine school of philosophy led by Marsilio Ficino and carried into the next generation by Lorenzo’s friends Angelo Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola.

  Lorenzo took advantage of the unparalleled educational resources available to the young men of Florence. In 1458 he attended Cristoforo Landino’s course on poetry and eloquence at the Studio, Florence’s university, important training for the aspiring gentleman as well as practical preparation for a political career, and studied Greek with Argyropoulos, acquiring at least a passing knowledge of a language that opened up new intellectual vistas.* But for Lorenzo learning was to be a lifelong passion, and he often complained that affairs of state had stolen too much time from pursuing intellectual enlightenment. In this he was typical of his age. Fifteenth-century Florentines did not divide their lives neatly into their school years, to be followed by an adulthood in which all book learning ceased. Education was both less structured and more intense than it is today; no strict program was set out for young men to plow their way through, nor was the possession of particular degrees required for most careers. But middle-aged and elderly men still attended lectures and philosophical discussions both out of a love of learning for its own sake and because such erudition was the mark of a gentleman. A career in business or in politics was facilitated by a proficiency in Latin and familiarity with the standard classical texts, without which it was impossible to earn the respect of your colleagues. Education could be a poor boy’s ticket into the ruling class—as it was to be for men like Leon Battista Alberti,† Leonardo Bruni, or Bartolomeo Scala—or it could encourage social mobility in the opposite direction, as it did for Niccolò Niccoli, who pursued his passion for classical literature to the point of bankruptcy. More typical were men like Cosimo, Palla Strozzi, and Giovanni Rucellai, who combined their love of learning with a knack for making money.

  While Piero oversaw Lorenzo’s intellectual development, Lucrezia nurtured his spiritual growth. Lorenzo’s biographers have typically neglected this aspect of his life on the mistaken assumption that Florence in the Renaissance was either indifferent or openly hostile to traditional religious forms and that Lorenzo, as the exemplary figure of his age, was little more than a pagan who concealed his true nature beneath the threadbare cloak of conventional piety. This distorted picture is largely the work of Savonarola, the fanatical Dominican monk who dominated the city in the years following Lorenzo’s death and who portrayed the city over which he presided as a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah. In fact, religion played a profound role in the lives of fifteenth-century Florentines and Lorenzo was typical in his fervent embrace of contradictory worldviews. Despite the new intellectual currents of humanism and a renewed appreciation for the art and literature of the pagan world, Florentines clung to their traditional beliefs, which mixed elevated moral teachings indiscriminately with local legends and pious folk-tales. Miraculous icons and revered shrines crowded the city. Almost every street corner had its image of the Virgin or some other holy figure and the thick crust of wax from devotional candles attested to their continuing hold on the imagination. Primitive superstition flourished, with pagan astrology added to, but not replacing, Christian belief in the healing power of relics.

  Like most Florentines, Lorenzo attended Mass daily and religion always played a vital role in his life, perhaps all the more so because his restless, probing intellect meant that he could never fall back on empty platitudes. Outwardly his observance was diligent and conventional. He was enrolled in many of the religious confraternities, lay brotherhoods in which Florentines came together for worship, pious study, and to devote themselves to charitable work.* Some of them—like that of the Magi—were responsible for organizing the religious processions that punctuated the holy calendar; others, the so-called Companies of the Night, were flagellant societies in which men gathered in secret to scourge themselves for their sins. The duty of one, the Black company of Santa Maria della Croce al Tempio (to which Lorenzo belonged), was to comfort the condemned on their way to execution.

  Acts of charity were not only a pious obligation but a necessity for any family hoping to wield influence in the city; such acts were a major source of the patronage through which party loyalty was built. “[Lorenzo] was so devoted to religion,” wrote Niccolò Valori effusively, “and to the poor and to those in need he was so solicitous, that none seeking help or charity were turned away,” habits, no doubt, that owed as much to policy as to any natural sympathy for those less fortunate. By participating in multiple religious brotherhoods, Lorenzo made his presence felt in what were, in effect, secret political clubs. During the crisis of 1465–66, the confraternity of the Magi was an epicenter of pro-Medici activities, while across the city the lay brothers at La Pietà plotted the overthrow of the regime. Ironically it was the official ban on political parties that drove the city’s leaders to disguise their activities beneath the cover of religious piety, thus transforming what might have been legitimate political activity into conspiracies hatched by hidden cabals. Not that the government was fooled by the subterfuge: one of the first responses of the Signoria to civic unrest was to pass decrees banning their meetings or excluding brothers from holding office. For Florentines, who imbibed both politics and religion along with their mother’s milk, it was a natural combination. In nocturnal meetings at the city’s holy sites, Florence’s leading men met not only to tend to their immortal souls but to plot the destruction of their enemies, apparently finding no discrepancy between the two.

  Lorenzo’s observance was not merely a case of social conformity (and political expedience) but was guided by a deep, if sometimes unconventional, spirituality. A profound religious anxiety comes through in his writing, which reflects not the certainty of conventional piety but the struggle of a man trying to reconcile his spiritual longing with his skeptical intellect. “The soul is only avid for the good that yields the God we cannot know,” he wrote in “The Supreme Good,” revealing the kind of doubt that has always plagued rational men who thirst for communion with the divine.

  Faith in Lorenzo’s case went hand in hand with a streak of anticlericism, something he shared with many Florentines who had learned from bitter experience that the Church, and especially the pope in Rome, could be a formidable and unscrupulous adversary. “Do not meddle with priests, who are the scum of the earth,” wrote the Florentine patrician Gino di Neri Capponi, “in matters either of money or of the Church…. The divided church is good for our commune and for the maintenance of
our liberty but it is contrary to the good of the soul.”

  The fact that the two central Italian powers were neighbors did not make them friends. On the contrary: disarray in the Papal States gave Florence a free hand in central Italy; a united, expansionist papacy, however, meant cramped horizons for the republic, a fact of life that often brought Florentines into conflict with their spiritual father.* Something of this anticlerical attitude can be detected in an anecdote recounted by Angelo Poliziano involving Lorenzo’s brother, Giuliano. Once, so the poet recalled with relish, when Giuliano was informed that the pope and his entourage were passing on the street, the six-year-old, apparently unimpressed, replied, “Let him pass, I’m going to shit.”

  Lorenzo reserved some of his harshest gibes for priests and learned from firsthand experience that those who professed to speak for God were no better, and often a good deal worse, than the run-of-the-mill sinners whose confessions they heard. In his satirical poem “The Symposium,” many of the drunks who populate the city are men of the cloth (up to and including the bishop of Fiesole), and in his lecherous tale “Giacoppo” a young man’s efforts to cuckold an old Sienese merchant are aided and abetted by a Franciscan monk.

  As Lorenzo entered his teenage years he impressed those around him with his talents and driving energy. Described by one family friend as “growing rapidly in all directions at once,” Lorenzo continued to excel in all matters of the mind and body. This was an age that prized the well-rounded man more than the specialist: excellence, honor, and virtue were the attributes that marked the noble spirit, and Lorenzo’s parents had reason to believe that he possessed those qualities so necessary to inspire loyalty in others. He was, however, still too young to take his place among the sober, elderly gentlemen who ran the government of Florence. And given Piero’s health it was unlikely he would attain that age before he was called upon to take up a position of responsibility. His evident abilities and accomplishments would have to compensate for his lack of years, earning him the respect of those who were inclined to doubt the competence of youth. Lorenzo had already made a good start. He was not only conversant with the literary classics—crucial weapons to be deployed in any debate in the Palazzo della Signoria—but also in those other skills the mastery of which were so important to a young nobleman: manly arts like riding, the handling of arms, and archery, as well as such gentler pursuits as dancing and playing the lyre.