Magnifico (53 page)

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.
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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 gardens 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:

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:

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.

“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.”

Even granting extenuating circumstances, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Clarice was not, and never had been, the center of his life. In truth, their relationship ended very much as it had begun—with Lorenzo wrapped up in his own affairs and Clarice forced to endure her husband’s inattentiveness. In his own way he was devoted to his wife and to his family, but the domestic realm over which she presided could not hold the attention of this restless and ambitious man. Nonetheless her death was a severe blow. Two days later he vented his feelings in a letter to Pope Innocent:

There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of these words. For almost two decades she had shared his bed, if not exclusively, then at least with sufficient regularity that she bore him seven healthy children. The children bound them together in common purpose and the well-being of their children was the main object of Lorenzo and Clarice’s collaborative effort. Indeed, securing the future of their children was the one goal to which they both contributed equally and the one thing that could unite two minds that otherwise shared few interests.

Clarice’s death had the effect of drawing Lorenzo closer to his children, particularly his daughters. Their mutual affection comes through clearly in a letter Lorenzo wrote to the eleven-year-old Contessina: “My Contessina. I hear that you ask about me every hour, how I am and when I shall return, so I write to tell you that, by the grace of God, I am very well, and I hope, if it pleases God, to return as well as ever I was. I shall come back soon, and in a few days I shall be there to see you. Take care that I find you well and cheerful.”

Like many a firstborn son, Lorenzo had grown accustomed to the doting attention of the female members of his family, and now that Clarice was gone this role was taken over by his sister Bianca and by his daughters, particularly Maddalena. Even after Maddalena had been espoused to the pope’s bastard son, Lorenzo wished to have her by his side: “I should be glad if you could mention the matter to his Holiness and get it arranged that Maddalena should remain here for the rest of the summer and autumn [1487]. I have not so far had time to see my daughter comfortably, so I earnestly beg His Holiness that of his kindness he will let me have her a few months more.”

As his health worsened, Lorenzo was consumed with providing for his children’s future. Though his own position in Florence seemed unassailable, the deliberate ambiguity of the Medici role in government made the transition from one generation to the next a perilous undertaking. Lorenzo expected that, initially at least, his oldest son would be accepted by the
reggimento,
but doubts about Piero’s character and about the loyalty of the Florentine people continued to haunt him. Of utmost importance was finding a bride for Piero, who turned sixteen at the beginning of 1487. Ready or not, Piero would soon be forced to step into a role of greater responsibility.

Like his father, Lorenzo was determined to look outside the circle of eligible Florentine families. There is no doubt that the selection of Clarice Orsini contributed to the ill will that eventually culminated in the Pazzi conspiracy, but now the Medici were simply too exalted to consider marrying their oldest son to one of the local girls. Piero’s bride would come from a powerful foreign family whose aristocratic pedigree could further the Medici’s dynastic ambitions.
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Lorenzo ultimately settled on Alfonsina Orsini, daughter of the grand constable of Naples, a man whose martial feats of arms earned him the nickname, “The Knight Without Fear.”

At first glance the thirteen-year-old seems a curious choice. It was certainly not Alfonsina’s personal charms that recommended her (Bernardo Rucellai reported, “She does not seem particularly good or bad”). Nor did strengthening their ties to the Orsini initially appear to offer great advantages. Lorenzo once complained of his in-laws, “The brains of these Orsini citizens are of a strange and peculiar nature…they are greedy and ambitious, and if not kept in order by necessity, they are unstable.”

Given this track record, why did he seek to bind himself more closely to this great but lawless clan? In part, Lorenzo seems to have believed that the best way to ensure future Medici greatness was through the inclusion of his descendants among the feudal nobility.
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Critically, Alfonsina belonged to the Neapolitan branch of the clan, and this connection could prove to be a great help at a time when Lorenzo was seeking to increase his influence in the southern kingdom. Though the Medici could not hope to marry into the royal house itself, they had achieved the next best thing. The wedding, carried out by proxy, was held in the royal palace of Naples in February of 1488, with the king and queen and all their court in attendance, gratifying recognition once again of how far this family of bankers had come from their humble origins.

Piero’s marriage also confirmed the slant of Lorenzo’s foreign policy in the aftermath of the Pazzi war. In 1486 when war broke out between the pope and the kingdom of Naples, Lorenzo remained committed to the Neapolitan side despite the misgivings of his compatriots, who remembered that not so long ago Ferrante’s armies had marched almost to the gates of Florence itself. “To me,” wrote Giovanni Lanfredini, conveying the mood of mistrust, “it seems the King is arrogant and vile to those he cannot ride.” Lorenzo’s pro-Aragonese policy in the so-called Barons War
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was motivated less by the merits of his cause—no one was as aware of Ferrante’s capacity for treachery than Lorenzo himself—but because he knew he could not afford to offend the leader of one of the peninsula’s two great military powers, particularly at a time when his relations with Lodovico Sforza were strained. The papacy, by contrast, would always be an unreliable friend, more capable of causing mischief than building constructive, long-term alliances. “[T]his ecclesiastical state has always been the ruin of Italy,” Lorenzo grumbled, “because they are ignoramuses and they know nothing of governing states, and so they endanger the entire world.”

The wisdom of Lorenzo’s pro-Naples policy was quickly demonstrated as Ferrante marched his armies within sight of St. Peter’s. Though they were turned back at the last minute by the redoubtable Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, it was clear that the pope was in no position to challenge the Neapolitan army on the battlefield. In August of 1486 peace was concluded between Ferrante and the pope that narrowly averted a wider European conflagration.

Though Lorenzo appeared to be firmly on the side of Naples, he realized that the security of both the city and of his family could not be achieved without the goodwill of the man who sat on St. Peter’s throne. Innocent’s incessant squabbling with his southern neighbor made such a rapprochement difficult, but after his recent thumping at the hands of Ferrante’s armies he seemed more amenable to a policy of detente. It was, in fact, Innocent who made the first move. In November 1486, Pierfilippo Pandolfini relayed a message from Innocent to Lorenzo. “Lorenzo will know that there was never a pope who so loved his house as I do,” he quoted Innocent. “And having seen from experience his faith, integrity, and wisdom, I will govern myself according to his thoughts and wishes.” Lorenzo, despite some initial skepticism, was soon convinced that the pope’s desire for peace was genuine. He explained his change of course in a letter to his brother-in-law Bernardo Rucellai: “We have been for twelve or perhaps thirteen years always in contumacy with the church, and most of the time in open war. And you know very well how much of a burden I, in particular, have shouldered, because this city inclines naturally towards the church. I believe that had I refused this union, I would have suffered greatly with the people.”

Pursuing a policy of rapprochement with the pope, while at the same time keeping the mercurial Ferrante on board, was the kind of diplomatic juggling act Lorenzo had now grown accustomed to and that was well worth the trouble if it kept Italy from plunging once again into war. Never far from Lorenzo’s mind, however, were the profits his own family might reap if he could restore the Medici to their old standing in the Vatican. The explanation for the success of this policy, when similar attempts to find a modus vivendi with Sixtus had failed so miserably, can be attributed largely to the character of Innocent himself. Unlike Sixtus, Innocent was a man of fundamentally peaceful instincts. Devoted to his own comfort, Innocent preferred whenever possible to avoid anything that would detract from his enjoyment of the perquisites of his office. Another factor was that, again in stark contrast to Sixtus, he was indecisive and in need of a guide to lead him through a geopolitical landscape whose treacherous terrain he could barely discern. “The Pope seems rather a man in need of advice than one capable of giving it to others,” explained one of Lorenzo’s agents in Rome. Lorenzo, now acclaimed as the unsurpassed statesman of Italy, seemed just the man to take him by the hand and show him the way.

In his handling of Innocent, Lorenzo demonstrated once again his knack for tailoring his diplomacy to the goal at hand and to the people involved. It helped that Innocent had a taste for the kinds of things that Medici money and connections could easily supply; learning of the pope’s fondness for ortolans (small birds prized by epicurean palates), Lorenzo made sure that every courier to Rome was supplied with some for the pope’s table, as well as a barrel or two of the local
vernaccia
to wash them down. For Innocent the benefits of friendship with Lorenzo came not only in the form of tasty treats carried in Medici saddlebags, but in access to ready credit. Sixtus’s extravagant building projects and even more wasteful foreign adventures had practically bankrupted the Holy See, and the Medici bank, while still not fully recovered from the disasters of recent years, remained among the largest financial concerns in Europe.

Lorenzo was anticipating equally tangible benefits. The Medici bank profited from the restoration of good relations with the pope almost immediately as Innocent ordered the repayment of the papal debts reneged on by Sixtus. Much more was to follow. Perhaps most gratifying was Innocent’s restoration in 1488 of the valuable alum concession withdrawn by Sixtus after the Imola affair, a move that returned the Medici bank to the dominant position in Rome it had enjoyed in the reign of Paul II. Giovanni Tornabuoni exulted, “our affairs here, as I have told you, succeed better and better every day because of the love and affection Our Lord feels towards you.”
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The pope’s new attitude also paid dividends on the military front. Innocent raised no objection when in the spring of 1487 Lorenzo reopened the campaign against the Genoese-held fortress of Sarzana. In fact the pope was now so anxious to retain Lorenzo’s good opinion that he put pressure on his compatriots to cede the strategic stronghold to the Florentines. Lorenzo took an active personal interest in the progress of the Florentine troops, riding out to camp when it appeared the siege had stalled. Shortly after his arrival the Genoese capitulated, adding one more feather to Lorenzo’s still rather sparse military headdress. “The Magnificent Lorenzo arrived here [Florence] on the vigil of S. Giovanni [June 23],” recorded the Ferrarese ambassador, “and was received with more joy and caresses by the people than I can describe, as they say they owe the taking of Sarzana to him more than to others.”