The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (15 page)

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Oh, my lords,’ Cosimo replied, not in the least abashed, throwing his arms round the ambassadors’ shoulders. ‘Are you not also fathers and grandfathers? You must not be surprised that I should have made a whistle. It’s a good thing that the boy didn’t ask me to play it for him; because I would have done that too.’

To his grandfather’s infinite sorrow, this beloved boy died in 1461 shortly before his sixth birthday. And two years later Giovanni himself, having steadfastly refused to diet to lessen his great weight, died of a heart attack. Cosimo never recovered from the shock. As his servants carried him through the big rooms of the Medici Palace, which at the height of his career had contained a household of fifty people, he was heard repeatedly to murmur, ‘Too large a house now for so small a family.’ At his villa at Careggi he spent long hours in silence. Why did he spend so much time alone, without speaking, his wife wanted to know. ‘When we are going away, you spend a fortnight preparing for the move,’ he replied. ‘So, since I have soon to go from this life to another, don’t you understand how much I have to think about.’ On another occasion she asked him why he sat so long with his eyes shut. His reply on this occasion was briefer and even more resigned: ‘To get them used to it.’

In the early summer of 1464, Francesco Sforza’s envoy in Florence,
Nicodemo Tranchedini, went to call upon him. He had been there often in the past, and once had found Cosimo and both his sons in bed together, all suffering from gout and each one as ill-tempered as the other. But Cosimo was weary now rather than irritable, almost despairing. As well as gout and arthritis he was ‘afflicted with suppression of urine which caused frequent fever’. ‘Nicodemo mio,’ he said to his visitor, ‘I can bear no more. I feel myself failing and am ready to go.’ Two months later, on i August, he died. He was in his seventy-sixth year. A few days before, he had insisted on getting out of bed and, fully dressed, making his confession to the Prior of San Lorenzo. ‘After which he caused Mass to be said,’ so his son Piero told his two surviving grandsons,

making the responses as though he were quite well. Afterwards being asked to make profession of his faith, he said the creed word for word, repeated the confession himself, and then received the Holy Sacrament, doing so with the most perfect devotion, having first asked pardon of everyone for any wrongs he had done them.

There
were
those he had wronged, as he well knew. Had he been more lenient, more forebearing he could never have won for himself so much power and wealth. He had never thought it prudent to pardon or to allow back to Florence those rivals whom the
Signoria
had banished in 1434; he had not hesitated to ruin families or businesses that had appeared to threaten his own; he had always been careful to ensure that his own family’s friends were given profitable or honourable appointments which the Medici’s opponents were rigorously denied. Yet to the Florentines as a whole, to those fellow citizens who had due cause to feel grateful for all he had done for them and for their city, he died revered and sincerely lamented, honoured for his generosity, his political acumen and the wide range of his many accomplishments. As his friend, Vespasiano da Bisticci, wrote of him, his knowledge, taste and versatility were truly remarkable.

When giving audience to a scholar he discoursed concerning letters; in the company of theologians he showed his acquaintance with theology, a branch of learning always studied by him with delight. So also with regard to philosophy. Astrologers found him well versed in their science,

for he had a certain faith in astrology, and employed it to guide him on certain private occasions. Musicians in like manner perceived his mastery of music, wherein he took great pleasure. The same was true about sculpture and painting; both of these arts he understood completely, and showed much favour to all worthy craftsmen. In architecture he was a consummate judge; and without his opinion and advice no public building of any importance was begun or carried to completion.

Some years before the
Signoria
, of which he was not at that time even a member, had described him as ‘
Capo delta Repubblica
’; now they passed a public decree conferring upon him the title
Pater Patriae
– a title once accorded to Cicero – and they ordered that the words should be inscribed upon his tomb.

They would have liked to have built a tomb at least as magnificent as that which his family had had made for Pope John XXIII in the Baptistery. But on his deathbed he had requested that he should be buried without ‘any pomp or demonstration’.

His father had made a similar request; but the request had been ignored. Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici’s body had been carried to the church of San Lorenzo in an open coffin followed by his sons, accompanied by twenty-eight other Medici and a long procession of foreign ambassadors and Florentine officials, to be buried in the centre of the old sacristry in a tomb which was later to be far more extravagantly ornamented than he himself would have considered appropriate.
⁷
Cosimo’s funeral was conducted rather more quietly yet it, too, was imposing enough. After a long and solemn ceremony in the basilica of San Lorenzo, which glittered with innumerable candles, his remains were interred below a marble memorial which was surmounted by a circle of serpentine and porphyry decorated with the Medici arms and placed at the foot of the altar. Since San Lorenzo is the basilica of St Ambrose and contains many martyrs’ relics beneath the altar, the Church’s rules did not allow the body to be buried in the nave immediately below the memorial. So it was placed in the vault; but, so as to join the tomb to the porphyry and serpentine memorial, a massive stone pillar, eight feet square, was placed between them. On this pillar are the words ‘Piero has placed this here to the memory of his father.’
⁸

VIII

‘
When it is a matter of acquiring worthy or strange objects
he does not look at the price
’

P
IERO WAS
forty-eight years old when he became head of the family. The perpetual ill health which had afflicted him since early manhood, and which had been responsible for his nickname, ‘
il Gottoso
’ (‘the Gouty’), had prevented him from taking as active a part in either the business of the bank or the affairs of Florence as would otherwise have been expected of the heir to the Medici fortune. He had, however, served as a
Priore
in 1448, had been Florentine ambassador in Milan, Venice and Paris, and in 14.61 had been elected
Gonfaloniere
, the last Medici ever to be elected to that office.

Despite the drooping eyelids which gave his face a rather sleepy appearance and the swollen glands in his neck, he was better looking than his brother Giovanni, while his determined chin and thin, set mouth suggested a character well able to withstand the almost constant pain he suffered from his arthritic joints as well as the irritation of eczema. Indeed, his nature displayed little of the edgy irritability so often associated with prolonged illness. He was considerate, patient and courteous. Though there were many who regretted a certain coldness in his manner and doubted his capacity to rule with his father’s authority, those who knew him well both liked and respected him.

As a banker he did not have his father’s flair, but he was scrupulously methodical. Characteristically he had noted in the most exact detail the amount expended on Cosimo’s funeral, the kinds of
Masses that had been paid for, the amount of black cloth given to the women of the family for veils and kerchiefs, the sums of money given to servants and slaves for mourning clothes, the numbers of candles and weight of wax. This care for detail was combined with qualities that had made him an excellent diplomat. In France, in fact, King Louis XI had been so taken with him that, soon after he became head of the family, he was granted permission to decorate one of the balls of the Medici arms with three of the lilies of the House of Valois.

That most Florentines were prepared for the moment to accord to Piero the privileges and respect enjoyed by his father was due partly at least to the wife he had married and the five attractive, healthy children she had borne him. For Lucrezia Tomabuoni was a remarkable woman, charming and spirited, profoundly religious and highly accomplished. Her family, formerly Tornaquinci, had once been a noble one; but in order to evade the disadvantages attaching to their birth they had changed their name, altered their arms and abandoned their former pretensions. They were still rich; their palace in what is now one of the main streets in Florence was a splendid one; the delightful murals illustrating the lives of St John the Baptist and the Virgin by Domenico Bigordi Ghirlandaio in the choir of Santa Maria Novella – which display the astute and wary features of several members of the family – were paid for with Tornabuoni money.
¹

Lucrezia herself was not content with patronage. She was a poèt of more than moderate ability. Since her interests were largely theological, most of her poems were hymns or translations into verse of Holy Writ. But they displayed a depth of feeling as well as a literary quality rarely to be found in such compositions. Neither her spiritual bent nor her intellectual leanings, however, prevented her from being an admirable wife and mother. Both her husband and her children, as well as her father-in-law, all seem to have adored her.

There were three daughters, Maria, Bianca and Lucrezia, known as Nannina. They were all to be married well, Maria to Leopetto Rossi, Bianca to Guglielmo de’ Pazzi, and Lucrezia to the scholarly Bernardo Rucellai. There were also two sons; Lorenzo, who was fifteen when his grandfather died, and Giuliano who was eleven. Both of them promised to be distinguished men.

Lorenzo, in particular, was precociously gifted. He did not share the good looks which – rare in the Medici – his father and younger brother both enjoyed. But his sallow, irregular features were powerful and arresting; and though his movements were jerky and ungainly, he was tall, strong and athletic. His education, thorough and wide-ranging, had been supervised at first by Gentile Becchi, the Latinist and diplomat, and later by Cristoforo Landino, translator of Aristotle and commentator on Dante, and Marsilio Ficino, his grandfather’s protégé and friend, whose allowance his father continued to pay. By the time Lorenzo was fifteen he was already being entrusted with responsibilities that most boys of his age would have found daunting. He was sent on diplomatic missions to Pisa to meet Federigo, the second son of King Ferrante of Naples; to Milan to represent his father at the marriage of King Ferrante’s elder son to Francesco Sforza’s daughter, Ippolita; to Bologna for conversations with its leading citizen, Giovanni Bentivoglio; to Venice to be received by the Doge; to Ferrara to stay with the Este family; to Naples to see King Ferrante. And in 1466 he went to Rome to congratulate the new Pope, Paul II, on his accession, to discuss the contract for the alum mines at Tolfa, and to try to make up for the neglect of business studies in his humanistic education by discussing the activities of the Roman branch of the bank with his uncle, Giovanni Tornabuoni, its manager. While in Rome he received a letter from his father which might well have been addressed to a diplomat of the most varied experience.