Magnifico (51 page)

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:

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 Lorenzo, no stranger to the cruder forms of the emotion, it was a philosophy that validated his own appetites; if lust was not the highest form of love, at least it deserved respect as the first step of a journey that ultimately led to God.

Ficino’s doctrines had wide-ranging and long-term influence. His philosophy of Platonic love helped reconcile pagan art and literature with Christianity, speeding up the assimilation of ancient texts from which modern philosophy and science sprang. The doctrine of divine love also had profound implications for the visual arts by conceding to physical beauty an element of the spiritual. In the short term, however, the greatest impact of Ficino’s ideas may have been on the way Florentines thought of relations between the citizen and the state. Indeed some scholars have detected in these rather esoteric concepts the core of an official ideology intended to excuse a creeping despotism. In this scenario, Ficino and Lorenzo worked hand in glove to craft an intellectual framework for a regime bent on undermining the republican traditions of the city.

In the realm of philosophy, as in art, Lorenzo’s critics often find themselves caught between two contradictory theories. There are those who insist that Lorenzo’s contribution to the intellectual climate was negligible, his patronage inconsistent, and his own writings derivative. A second line of attack is that he was the guiding light of an intellectual movement that led Florentines away from the civic-minded pragmatism that had characterized the writings of Leonardo Bruni and Coluccio Salutati at the beginning of the century. To these critics, Lorenzo’s taste for Platonic allegory appears to be part of a cynical ploy to lead citizens away from politics and into a maze of harmless metaphysics. It is true that Ficino’s mysticism was a far cry from Bruni’s overtly political writing—and even more out of step with Machiavelli’s hardheaded realism in the following generation—but it is implausible to view Lorenzo’s philosophical tastes as part of any such consciously “Machiavellian” scheme. Rather, Lorenzo seems to have been genuinely attracted to Ficino’s brand of speculative philosophy. Recasting Plato’s thought in a form that made it seem the natural precursor of Christian theology, it fulfilled a deep, if rather amorphous, spiritual yearning. The most moving fragment of religious poetry Lorenzo wrote infuses Neoplatonic philosophy with an urgency born of metaphysical anxiety:

Like many statesmen before and since, Lorenzo found Plato’s thought deeply compelling. Plato’s vision of the perfect society, elaborated most fully in
The Republic,
furnishes the would-be ruler with a model of good government unequaled in the history of philosophy not only for its idealism but also its impracticality. There is an indication, particularly during the 1470s when Ficino and Lorenzo were in almost daily contact, that Lorenzo saw himself as something akin to a Platonic philosopher-king, a benign despot who ruled selflessly on behalf of his people. During the early years of Lorenzo’s reign the two exchanged frequent letters in which the older Ficino played the role of spiritual advisor to the younger man. “[The ruler] will not, indeed, consider himself a master of the law,” Ficino wrote to his eager pupil, “but its faithful interpreter and devoted servant. In administering it he should punish offenses impartially and with even temper. Without envy he should reward virtuous actions according to their worth. He should not give thought to his own interests but rather to those of the community.” No doubt the temperamental Lorenzo had difficulty living up to this ideal, but it was a model he strived to emulate. His mentor’s words find an echo in his play
The Martyrdom of Saints John and Paul,
where the Emperor Julian sketches an idealized portrait of the enlightened despot that Lorenzo, in his more introspective moments, must have known was a far cry from the realities that confronted him every day:

There does seem to be an implicit recognition in Ficino’s letters to Lorenzo that his correspondent was more than merely the first citizen of the state. He is treated as something resembling a constitutional monarch who through his privileged position incurs certain obligations. But the political implications of Ficino’s philosophy went beyond the lessons contained in these overtly political passages. Some have seen his idealism as a key to the political apathy that was a notable element of the Lorenzan age. In the debate between proponents of the active life of the citizen and the contemplative life of the philosopher, explored at length in Cristoforo Landino’s
Disputationes Camaldulenses,
*
Ficino’s ethereal flights of fancy seem to support the latter course. Lorenzo’s friend Donato Acciaiuoli stated the dilemma of the Florentine intellectual succinctly. “I have gone over in my mind many times the problem of which sort of life is better and more worthy of praise,” he wrote to Marco Parenti, “to serve the republic and to fulfill the duties of a good and wise man by taking part actively in it, or to choose a life removed from all public and private activity, a life yet laborious in the diligent pursuit and investigation of the highest things.” How Acciaiuoli himself resolved this issue is clear in the long and distinguished career he had as a roving ambassador for the republic, but this was a choice that many Florentines of the intellectual and governing class (peculiarly, the two were one and the same in the Renaissance) felt obligated to make. Judging by Acciaiuoli’s own experience, choosing the active life was not always the best option: on his mission to Rome during the Pazzi conspiracy he was roughed up by Girolamo Riario’s soldiers, and long after he was entitled to retire he was sent on a mission by the republic, during which he died.

The debate between the merits of the active and the contemplative life were not original to Renaissance Florentines. The same dilemmas had been explored by ancient writers like Cicero, for whom a life of quiet reflection was the consolation for political defeat.
†
A similar dynamic was at work in Renaissance Florence; the more disengaged philosophy that characterized the period of Lorenzo’s ascendance reflected a narrowing of political horizons. Clearly a philosophy whose main purpose was to exhort men to participate actively as citizens was inappropriate to an age when power was concentrated in only a few hands. But external events, too, played a role in this philosophical evolution. Salutati and Bruni wrote in a euphoric time, when Florence’s ultimately successful contest against the Visconti of Milan, viewed as a biblical contest of David vs. Goliath, encouraged men to reflect on the unique qualities that allowed a small republic to face down a giant and despotic power. Emphasizing the vital democracy of their own city allowed them to draw a more effective contrast with the tyranny they were fighting. A century later, Machiavelli and Guicciardini were both motivated to write about politics out of despair following the trauma of the foreign invasions in the years after Lorenzo’s death; as the city-states of their youth crumbled before the nation states of the future, it was only natural to examine the political institutions that had led them down the path to ruin. By contrast, Lorenzo presided over an age of political lethargy. For the most part citizens were willing to give up at least a portion of their ancient rights in return for the stability and peace that Medici rule brought them. It is telling that the greatest crisis of Lorenzo’s reign—the Pazzi conspiracy—was overcome not through military might but because the ancient cry of
“Popolo e Liberta!”
no longer stirred the hearts of the citizens.

Even opponents of Lorenzo’s regime seemed content for the most part to till their own little plots. One of the most coherent critiques of Medici rule—Alamanno Rinuccini’s “Dialogue on Liberty”—was written in secret by someone whose own career was a model of apathy and ineffectualness. Though in private he boldly chastised Lorenzo and his regime, Rinuccini was always happy to pick up whatever political plums were tossed his way.
*
In fact while Rinuccini and Lorenzo stood on opposite sides of the political fence, the two are not as dissimilar as they might at first appear. Rinuccini’s imaginary dialogue concludes with his alter ego, Eleutherius (lover of liberty), issuing something less than a ringing call to arms: “[T]he truth is that I cannot peacefully tolerate our ungrateful citizenry and the usurpers of our liberty. I live, therefore, as you see, content with this little house and farm. I am free from all anxiety. I don’t inquire what goes on in the city, and I lead a quiet and free life.” Is it any wonder that with friends like Rinuccini the Pazzi revolution never got off the ground?