The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (27 page)

In these last years his charm was overcast by outbursts of irritability. As his gout grew more and more painful he was often brusque and sometimes offensive. To a man who unfeelingly criticized the character of Squarcialupo, the musician, he said sharply, ‘If you knew how hard it is to obtain perfection in any art, you would overlook such shortcomings.’ To a Sienese who sympathized with him on his failing eyesight and commented that the air of Florence was said to be bad for the eyes, he retorted, ‘And the air of Siena for the brain.’ In reply to one of his cousins, a rather slovenly man, who spoke complacently of the unfailing water supply at his country villa, he replied, ‘Then you could afford to wash your hands more often.’

In February 1492 it became known that he was no longer able to attend to business; he could neither walk nor even hold a pen. A slow fever had eaten away ‘the whole man’, Poliziano wrote, ‘attacking not only the arteries and veins, but the limbs, intestines, nerves, bones and marrow’. At the beginning of the next month, having said goodbye to his younger son, Giovanni, who was going to live in Rome, he had to dispel rumours that he was on his deathbed by appearing at his bedroom window. A fortnight later he was taken to the villa of Careggi never to return to Florence.

He was accompanied to Careggi by Poliziano and some other friends who sat by his bedside talking to him, and, when he was too tired for conversation, taking it in turns to read aloud extracts from the works of the Tuscan poets he loved so well. He would devote the rest of his life to poetry and to study, he told Poliziano, leaving the government of Florence to his son, Piero. But Poliziano replied, ‘The people won’t let you.’

A few days after this Lorenzo heard that on the night of 5 April – following a day upon which two of Florence’s lions were killed in a fight in their cage in the Via di Leone – lightning had struck the Cathedral lantern. One of the marble balls on its summit had crashed down into the piazza. On which side? Lorenzo wanted to know – and, on being told, said, ‘I shall die, for that is the side nearest my house’. There were reports of other dreadful portents: she-wolves howled in the night; strange lights appeared in the sky; a woman in Santa Maria Novella was seized by madness during Mass and ran about, screaming warnings of a raging bull with flaming horns which was pulling the church down about her ears; Marsilio Ficino saw ghostly giants fighting in his garden and emitting fearful cries.

Lorenzo’s own doctor, Piero Leoni, was joined by Lazaro di Pavia, a Lombard physician sent to Careggi by Lodovico Sforza. This man prescribed a concoction of pulverized pearls and precious stones which he noisily prepared himself in a room near Lorenzo’s. ‘Are you there, Angelo?’ Lorenzo called out; and when Poliziano hurried to his bedside he asked him what on earth the doctor was doing. On being told, Lorenzo seemed for a moment to believe that the strange medicine might cure him and, taking both Poliziano’s hands in his
own, he gazed eagerly into his face. Poliziano looked away and, returning to his own room, burst into tears.

Later that day, when Pico della Mirandola came to see him, Lorenzo again acknowledged that he knew himself to be dying. His voice grew weaker as he spoke, but he was heard to say, ‘I only wish that death had spared me so that I could finish helping you collect your library.’

Growing weaker under his doctors’ ministrations, he sent for a priest to hear his confession and give him communion. For this, he insisted on getting out of bed and being dressed; but the effort was too much for him. He had to be carried back to bed where he fell back against the pillows.

From time to time Piero went into his father’s room and whenever he did so Lorenzo ‘put on a brave face’, so Poliziano recorded, ‘and so as not to increase his son’s sadness by his own, held back his tears’.

On 8 April he lapsed into a kind of coma and was given up for dead until a Camaldolensian friar held the lenses of his spectacles to Lorenzo’s mouth. When the story of Christ’s Passion was read to him, though he could frame no words, he moved his lips to show that he understood them. His eyes were fixed on a silver crucifix which was held before his face and which occasionally he kissed, until finally his breathing stopped.

Piero Leoni had always supposed that Lorenzo’s illness would not prove fatal. Disagreeing with the necromantic cures and potions of his colleagues, he had protested that all would be well provided the patient was kept warm and dry and protected from the night air, ate no pears and swallowed no grape pips. So distressed to have been proved wrong, and heartbroken by accusations of witchcraft and poisoning, Leoni left Careggi and threw himself down a well in the grounds of a villa at San Gervasio.

Lorenzo’s body was taken to the monastery of San Marco, then to San Lorenzo where he was buried next to his brother, Giuliano, in the old sacristy.

XIV

‘
Behold! It is the Lord God who is leading
on these armies
’

A
T TWENTY-TWO
Piero had little of his father’s charm. Strong, healthy and athletic, with a mass of light brown hair which lay in a fringe on his forehead and fell to his shoulders, he was not unattractive; but his personality and manner were far from endearing. He had Lorenzo’s ruthlessness without his tact; he was equally unforgiving towards his enemies but did not remain loyal to his friends. His early letters give the impression of an indulged and rather petulant child. ‘Please send me some figs, for I like them,’ he wrote to his grandmother when he was five. ‘I mean those red ones, and some peaches with stones, and other things you know I like, sweets and cakes and little things like that.’ He asked his father to send him ‘the best sporting dog that can be had’; and when that arrived, he wanted a pony and grew impatient waiting for it. ‘I haven’t had that pony you promised me,’ he complained.’ Everybody is laughing at me.’

As he grew older his temper became more violent and his manner more arrogant. And, either to avoid comparison with a father universally admired if often envied, or because he chose to believe that the Medicean regime had now acquired such permanence that he could behave without due regard for its supporters’ opinions,
he shied away from business and public affairs. Much of his time he spent out-of-doors or in writing poems in poor imitation of Lorenzo’s vivid style, leaving the conduct of public affairs to his secretary, Piero Dovizi da Bibbiena, and the supervision of the disintegrating bank to his not very competent great-uncle, Giovanni Tornabuoni. His unpopularity with the Florentines was greatly increased by his wife, Alfonsina, whom he had married when he was seventeen. An Orsini girl, she made it only too plain in her haughty, narrow Orsini manner that she would have preferred to remain in Rome amongst the true
nobilità
, an attitude that the Florentines, provincials for the most part themselves, found peculiarly irritating.

Piero’s reputation in Florence was also much damaged by his continual quarrels with his cousins, Lorenzo and Giovanni, the two sons of Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, both of whom were older, and – despite their guardian’s misappropriation of part of their inheritance – richer than Piero, and neither of whom took any trouble to hide either their animosity towards the senior branch of the family or their intention to abandon it to its enemies in any future struggle for power that might arise. This struggle was not long to be delayed. For years, indeed, it had been predicted by an eloquent, fiery, ascetic Dominican friar from Ferrara whose apocalyptic sermons had filled the congregations in the crowded Cathedral with shame, remorse and fear.

Girolamo Savonarola was born at Ferrara in 1452. His grandfather, who seems to have been responsible for his education, was a physician from Padua, an acknowledged authority on the curative properties of spa waters and an exponent of the beneficial effects of alcohol which he comfortingly maintained would, if taken in generous measure, help to ensure longevity. His views and reputation secured him a profitable appointment at the Ferrarese court as the Duke’s physician; and, on his retirement, his son succeeded him. His grandson, however, had no taste for court life. After one visit to the Duke’s castle he swore that he would never go there again. Girolamo was an introspective boy, gloomy, pale and withdrawn, given to composing melancholy verses, strumming plaintive, dirge-like strains upon the lute and studying the scriptures. It was later said of him that his demeanour became even more despondent after he had fallen in love
with Laodamia Strozzi, the natural daughter of a Florentine exile, who loftily rejected his advances; but he himself maintained that he had never wanted to marry. Certainly his later life was marked by the most rigid austerity. He rarely even spoke to women except to sermonize them; he ate little and forbore to taste those strong liquors by which his grandfather had set such store; his clothes were worn and patched; he slept on a straw mattress laid on a wooden board.

One feast day in 1475, without telling anyone where he was going, he left his father’s house to seek admittance as a novice in the monastery of San Domenico at Bologna, where he was to remain for seven years. ‘You have more reason to thank God than to complain,’ he wrote to his father, explaining his sudden departure.

For God has given you a son and has deemed him worthy to become His militant knight. Do you not think it a great grace to have a son who is a cavalier of Jesus Christ?… I was unable any longer to endure the evil doing of the heedless people of Italy… I too am made of flesh and blood, and as the instincts of the body are repugnant to reason I must fight with all my strength to stop the Devil from jumping onto my shoulders.

To help others fight the Devil, Savonarola was sent out by the Dominicans from Bologna to preach elsewhere in Italy, to Ferrara, to Brescia, to Genoa, and many other towns in Tuscany and Lombardy. In 1481 he came to Florence where he was appointed
lector
at San Marco and asked to give the Lent sermons at San Lorenzo. In 1489 he settled permanently in Florence at the Monastery of San Marco.