The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (14 page)

‘
Too large a house now for so small a family
’

O
N PASSING
through the archway in the Via Larga, the visitor to the Medici Palace entered a charming and graceful inner courtyard, a square, arcaded
cortile
with pillars supporting a sweep of arches above which were eight marble medallions, several of them copies of cameos and the reverse side of medals in the Medici collection. Under the arcades were classical busts, statues, columns, inscriptions and Roman sarcophagi including the fourth-century stone coffin used for Cosimo’s great-great-great-great grandfather’s cousin, Guccio de’ Medici, who had been
Gonfaloniere
in 1299. Perhaps there already, and certainly there later, were Donatello’s bronze statue of
David
¹
and
his Judith Slaying Holofemes
.
²

Donatello was born in Florence in 1386, the son of Niccolo di Betto Bardi, a merchant who had been ruined by his support of the Albizzi. Like Ghiberti he had been trained as a goldsmith and had worked for a time in Ghiberti’s studio, but rather than work on the Baptistery doors he had left with Brunelleschi for Rome where he studied classical art while working in a goldsmith’s shop. On his return to Florence he turned his hand to all manner of work, as happy to execute a coat-of-arms for a chimney-piece, or a small bronze panel in low relief, as he was to carve a big marble figure. He received commissions for work in the Cathedral, in Giotto’s campanile, in Orsanmichele and in the Basilica of San Lorenzo where he later designed the bronze pulpits. But although his works were much admired – his marble
St George
at Orsanmichele, in particular, was recognized as a masterpiece – it was not until his bronze
David
was
completed that his genius and originality were fully understood. His other statues, like all statues of his time, had been made to occupy a particular position in a building as an architectural motif or ornamentation, whereas the
David
was not only an astonishingly beautiful and emotive work of art, it was also a remarkable innovation, the first free-standing figure cast in bronze since classical times.

Some of his contemporaries found it shocking. That Donatello was a homosexual was bad enough; that he should have portrayed the young male form so lovingly, realistically and sensually, with so obvious a delight in the flesh, was outrageous. To Cosimo such objections seemed wholly unreasonable, obtusely at variance with those classical Greek ideals which were Donatello’s inspiration. In his own devotion to the humanist spirit, Cosimo had accepted the dedication of Antonio Beccadelli’s
Hermaphroditus
which, in the manner of Catullus, celebrates the pleasures of homosexual love. In the same spirit he honoured the genius of Donatello and the ancient art that had inspired it.

Cosimo grew deeply attached to Donatello, for whom he assumed a kind of paternal responsibility. He saw to it that he was never short of work, either by giving him commissions himself or by recommending him to his friends. With the work that Donatello did for the Medici collection such as a bronze head of Contessina de’ Medici, Cosimo was never disappointed; for, as Giorgio Vasari said, ‘Donatello loved Cosimo so well that he could understand all he wanted, and he never let him down.’ With other patrons, however, Donatello was not so fortunate. One of these, a Genoese merchant who had commissioned a bronze head on Cosimo’s recommendation, complained, when Donatello had finished it, that it was much too expensive. The dispute was referred to Cosimo who, having had the bronze carried up to the roof of the Medici Palace and placed in a good light against the blue of the sky, suggested that the price the merchant was offering was really not enough. The Genoese insisted that, on the contrary, it was more than generous, adding that since Donatello had finished the work in a month, the cost worked out at over half a florin a day. Infuriated by this remark, protesting that the merchant was obviously more accustomed to bargaining for beans
than bronzes, Donatello knocked it off the parapet into the street where it was ‘shattered into a thousand pieces’. The mortified merchant offered Donatello twice as much if he would do the head again, but neither his promises nor Cosimo’s entreaties could persuade him to do so.

Donatello was not really interested in money. In his studio he put what he earned into a wicker basket which hung by a cord from the ceiling; and all his workmen and apprentices and even his friends were allowed to help themselves to what they needed without asking him. Nor was he interested in clothes. Cosimo, distressed by the simple not to say ragged attire in which he walked about the streets, gave him a smart suit with a red cloak and cap as a present one feast day. But Donatello wore them for a few days only, before putting his old clothes back on again. When he was too old to work he was given a small farm on the Medici estates near Cafaggiolo; but he did not like it there. He was muddled by the accounts and irritated by the peasant who worked the land for him and who kept complaining about the wind that had blown the roof off his dovecot, or about the authorities that had confiscated his cattle because the taxes had not been paid, or about the storm that had ruined his fruit and vines. Donatello begged that the farm should be taken back into the family estate. This was done and he was given instead the income that he ought to have received from it. ‘Donatello was more than satisfied with this arrangement,’ so Vasari said,’ and, as a friend and servant of the Medici family, he lived carefree and happy all the rest of his life.’

While Donatello was carving statues and medallions for the Medici Palace, Fra Filippo Lippi was also there painting pictures. Twenty years younger than Donatello, Fra Filippo was born in Florence, the son of a butcher who died when Filippo was a child. His mother also being dead, he was placed at the age of sixteen as a novice in the community of the Carmelite friars of Santa Maria del Carmine.
³
But he had not the least taste for the religious life, and the only benefit he seems to have derived from his time with the Carmelites was a desire to emulate the great Masaccio whom he saw at work in their chapel of the Brancacci. Indeed, his interest in art appeared to the friars to be Fra Filippo’s one virtue. He was a liar, a
drunkard, a lecher and a fraud; and his superiors were profoundly relieved when he left the convent, abandoned his vows and was seized by Barbary pirates off the coast of Ancona while out sailing with some friends. On escaping from his chains he made for Naples, then returned to Florence where his lovely altarpiece for the nuns of Sant’ Ambrogio brought his remarkable gifts to the attention of Cosimo de’ Medici. Disregarding his reputation both as whoremonger and scrounger, Cosimo asked him to work for him and it was at the Medici Palace that several of his earlier masterpieces were produced, including the
Coronation of the Virgin
.
⁴
Later Cosimo obtained work for him at Prato where, in frescoes painted on the walls of the chapel of the high altar in the church of St Stephen, Filippo introduced a portrait of the Rector of the church, Cosimo’s natural son, Carlo.

It was while working on an altarpiece for the nuns of Santa Margherita in Prato that Fra Filippo’s lustful eye fell upon one of the young novices, Lucrezia, the daugher of Francesco Buti of Florence. He made advances to her and, having persuaded the nuns to allow him to use her as a model for the Madonna in his painting, he seduced her and carried her off. She bore him a son, Filippino; and Cosimo, thinking it was high time the father settled down, obtained a dispensation for him to marry from the Pope to whom he had tactfully presented some small examples of Fra Filippo’s work.

Filippo’s lechery had already caused Cosimo a good deal of difficulty in Florence. When seized by feelings of unassuageable lust, Filippo found it quite impossible to concentrate on his work and would repeatedly slip away from his studio in the Medici Palace, hurry through the courtyard and disappear down the Via Larga in search of a woman. Eventually Cosimo, whose methodical practice it was always to obtain an artist’s agreement to finish a commissioned work for a settled price on an agreed date, locked Lippi up in his room, telling him that he would not be let out again until the picture he was engaged upon was finished. Lippi thereupon got hold of a pair of scissors, cut up the coverings of his bed into strips, tied them together, and, using them as rope, climbed down into the street and ran away. Having found him and persuaded him to come
back, Cosimo was so thankful that he ‘resolved in future to try to keep a hold on him by affection and kindness and to allow him to come and go as he pleased’. Cosimo was often heard to say thereafter that artists must always be treated with respect, that they should never be considered mere journeymen as they were by most other patrons of his time.

An artist whom it was difficult not to treat with respect was Giovanni da Fiesole, known as Fra Angelico, a small and saintly friar whom Cosimo evidently commissioned to paint frescoes on the walls of the chapter-house, cloisters and corridors of San Marco. He was born at Vicchio in the Mugello in 1387 and christened Guido. On becoming a novice in the monastery of San Domenico at Fiesole in 1407 he took the name of Giovanni. After a time spent at Cortona, where he painted the frescoes in the Dominican monastery, he returned to Fiesole in 1418; and it was not until 1436, when he was nearly fifty, that he came to Florence and was asked to take up his brushes again by Cosimo. Thereafter Cosimo took a deep interest in his work, giving him’ much help, and advice with regard to the details’ of
The Crucifixion
,
⁵
which was painted for the Chapter House, and choosing as the subject for the frescoes in the Medici cell the Adoration of the Magi, whose example in laying down their crowns at the manger in Bethlehem Cosimo liked to have ‘always before his eyes for his own guidance as a ruler’.
⁶

Every morning before he began work on
The Crucifixion
, as on every other morning before starting to paint one of those religious subjects to which he devoted the rest of his life, Fra Angelico would kneel in prayer. And each day, as on every other day when painting a picture of Christ suffering on the Cross, he would be so overcome by emotion that the tears would pour down his cheeks. He was a man of the utmost simplicity, modesty and holiness; hisfellow friars never once saw him angry. Cosimo once said, ‘Every painter paints himself.’ Looking upon the faces and attitudes of the figures in the painting of Fra Angelico it was impossible not to believe that this was so.

When Fra Angelico died in 1455, Cosimo’s health was failing fast.
Often totally incapacitated by arthritis and gout, he had to be carried about the house and would cry out as though in agony as he approached a doorway. ‘Why do you scream so?’ his wife once asked him, ‘Nothing has happened.’ ‘If anything
had
happened,’ he replied, ‘it wouldn’t be any
use
crying out.’

Over the years he had become increasingly sardonic, ever more terse and caustic. It was said that when his old friend the Archbishop asked him to introduce a measure making it illegal for priests to gamble, he had riposted with curt cynicism, ‘Better to begin by forbidding them loaded dice.’ A visitor to Florence at this time noticed how drawn and ill and unhappy he looked; and his declining years were, indeed, clouded by sadness. His eldest son, Piero, now forty years old, had never been strong and was not expected to survive him long, if at all. Cosimo’s hopes were centred in his second, his favourite son, Giovanni, for whom Michelozzo had been asked to build the Villa Medici on the slopes of Fiesole.

Giovanni was thirty-seven when work began on the villa in 1458. An able, shrewd and cheerful man, he was ill-favoured in appearance with the large Medici nose, a lumpy swelling between his eyebrows and a skin troubled by eczema. Very fond of women, he was also a dedicated trencherman and extremely fat. He was a good judge of painting; he loved music; and was so taken with the ribald wit of the Florentine barber, Burchiello, that even after Burchiello’s talents for burlesque had been turned against the Medici, he invited him to come to entertain him while he was taking a cure at the sulphur baths at Pietrolo. But although so cheerful and carefree, Giovanni was a conscientious citizen and a capable businessman, carefully trained by his father who relied on him more and more after the death of the bank’s general manager, Giovanni d’Amerigo Benci.

Having worked for a time in the Ferrara branch of the family bank, Giovanni became a
Priore
in the
Signoria
in 1454, and in the following year served as ambassador to the Curia, where he seems to have spent a large part of his time eating and drinking with the more worldly cardinals. Like his father he had bought a Circassian slave girl from the market in Venice, a ‘delightfully pretty girl aged about seventeen or eighteen… with black hair, delicate features, vivacious
and intelligent’. Yet he was evidently quite fond of his wife, Ginevra degli Albizzi, and he loved their only child, Cosimino. Cosimo, too, was devoted to this little boy. There is a story related by his contemporary, Lodovico Carbone of Ferrara, that one day, when Cosimo was discussing some matter of state with an embassy from Lucca, the boy walked into the room with a bundle of sticks, interrupting the conference to ask his grandfather to make him a whistle. Much to the annoyance of the Lucchese delegates, the meeting was promptly adjourned while Cosimo set to work; and no further business was discussed until the whistle had been made to the boy’s satisfaction. ‘I must say, Sir,’ the leader of the delegation felt constrained to protest when recalled to Cosimo’s presence, ‘we cannot be other than surprised at your behaviour. We have come to you representing our commune to treat of grave matters, and you desert us to devote your time to a child.’