The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (18 page)

Yet while Lorenzo understood the importance of marriage alliances between Florentine families, he recognized that there were good reasons for breaking the traditional rule and marrying an Orsini. Not only would he thus avoid arousing any jealousy in Florentine houses where there were marriageable daughters whom he had rejected, but he would be contriving an alliance with a family of far-ranging influence. The Orsini, soldiers and ecclesiastics by profession for
countless generations, had huge estates within the Kingdom of Naples as well as north of Rome; they could raise soldiers as well as money; and in Clarice’s maternal uncle, Cardinal Latino, they had a firm foothold in the Curia. Lorenzo would naturally have preferred a better-looking and more intellectual bride from a less feudal and enclosed background. But, having succeeded in catching sight of her one day at Mass, he agreed that she was acceptable; and, once a dowry of 6,000 florins was settled, he married her by proxy in Rome, represented by a distant cousin, Filippo de’ Medici, Archbishop of Pisa.

To reconcile the Florentines to this unwelcome event, a splendid tournament was held on 7 February 1469, a tournament which was to cost 10,000 ducats and was to be one of the finest spectacles which they had ever seen, a worthy subject for that charming fifteenth-century Italian poem, Luigi Pulci’s
La Giostra di Lorenzo de Medici
.

The scene was the Piazza Santa Croce, where in the February sunshine the spectators, crowded onto roofs and balconies, peered down from windows and parapets to catch a glimpse of the beautiful Lucrezia Donati as she was escorted to the panoplied throne reserved for the ‘Queen of the Tournament’, and to admire the eighteen representatives of the
jeunesse dorée
of Florentine society who were to play the part of the knights. Preceded by heralds, standard-bearers, fifers, trumpeters, and accompanied by pages and men-at-arms, the knights paraded through the Piazza to the enthusiastic cheers of their thousands of supporters. All of them were magnificently clothed and most had elaborate armour and helmets specially made for the occasion, displays of beauty being more highly regarded on these occasions than demonstrations of reckless courage and strength: although Federigo da Montefeltro lost his eye in one, Italian tournaments were not the savage, bloody spectacle enjoyed in Germany.

None of the knights looked finer than Lorenzo de’ Medici, who wore a cape of white silk, bordered in scarlet, under a velvet surcoat, and a silk scarf embroidered with roses, some withered, others blooming, and emblazoned with the spirited motto, worked in pearls:
LE TEMPS REVIENT.
There were pearls also in his black velvet cap as
well as rubies and a big diamond framed by a plume of gold thread. His white charger, which was draped in red and white pearl-encrusted velvet, was a gift from the King of Naples; another charger, which he rode for the jousting, was presented to him by Duke Borso d’Este of Ferrara; his suit of armour came from the Duke of Milan. There was a large diamond in the middle of his shield; his helmet was surmounted by three tall blue feathers; his standard bore a device of a bay tree, one half withered, the other a brilliant green with the same motto, written in pearls, that appeared on his scarf. By way of compliment to him as heir to their host rather than in true recognition of unparalleled prowess, the judges, who included the famous
condottiere
, Roberto da Sanseverino, awarded Lorenzo the first prize and presented him with a helmet inlaid with silver and surmounted by a figure of Mars.

Four months later, in June 1469, Clarice Orsini, whom this great tournament had been designed to honour, arrived in Florence for the wedding celebrations. There were to be no less than five huge banquets at the Medici Palace where for weeks past presents of game and poultry, wine and wax, cakes and jellies, sweetmeats, marzipan and sugared almonds had been arriving from all over Tuscany, and where row upon row of tables were set out along the loggia and in the courtyard and gardens of the palace. The celebrations began on the Sunday morning when the bride, who had been escorted from Rome by Giuliano, emerged from the Palazzo Alessandri in the Borgo San Piero riding the white horse that the bridegroom had been given by the King of Naples.
³
Followed by a long procession of maids-of-honour and attendants, she rode in her white-and-gold brocade dress to the Medici Palace. Here, as she entered through the archway, an olive branch – traditionally displayed as a sign that there was to be a wedding in the family – was lowered over her head to the strains of festive music from an orchestra in the courtyard. As was customary at Florentine weddings, the guests were separated according to their age and sex. At Clarice’s table in the loggia overlooking the garden were young married women; at Lorenzo’s table in the hall were young men; on the balcony above the loggia, Lucrezia presided over the banquet for the older women; while the men of
Piero’s generation and their elders dined in the courtyard in the middle of which were big copper coolers full of Tuscan wine. Each dish was heralded by a flourish of trumpets, and, though the ‘food and drink were as modest and simple as befitted a marriage’, it was estimated that by the time the last banquet was over five thousand pounds of sweetmeats had been consumed and more than three hundred barrels of wine – mosdy
trebbiano
and
vernaccia
– had been drunk. After the banquets the guests were entertained by music and dancing on a stage hung with tapestries and enclosed by curtains embroidered with the Medici and Orsini arms.

For three days the feasting and dancing, the displays and theatricals continued, until, on the Tuesday morning, the bride went to the basilica of San Lorenzo to hear Mass, carrying ‘a little book of Our Lady, a wonderful book written in letters of gold on dark blue paper and covered with crystal and graven silver’.

How beautiful is youth – as Lorenzo wrote in one of his poems – youth which is so soon over and gone; let him who would be happy, seize the moment; for tomorrow may never come:

Quant’è bella giovinezza

Che si fugge tuttavia!

Chi vuol esser lieto, sia;

Di doman turn c’è certezza
.

Lorenzo’s young contemporaries eagerly followed his advice. There were dances by day and firework parties at night Lorenzo himself would be up at dawn, riding out into the forest, his long-bow slung on his back. After dark, he would join groups of his friends, roaming the streets by moonlight and serenading with songs and verses the girls at the palace windows. Once, at two o’clock on a cold winter morning (Lorenzo himself was on a visit to Pisa at the time, and was told this by his friend Filippo Corsini), a great crowd of them gadiered in the snow outside the palace of Marietta, the delightful, wayward, orphaned daughter of Lorenzo di Palla Strozzi. By the light of flaming torches, and with much singing, shouting,
blowing of trumpets and piping of flutes, they began hurling snowballs at her window. Marietta threw it open;

and what a triumph when one of the besiegers succeeded in flinging snow upon the maiden’s face, as white as the snow itself… Moreover, Marietta herself, so graceful and so skilled in this game, and beautiful, as everyone knows, acquitted herself with very great honour.

The early years of Lorenzo’s inheritance were notable in Florence for a succession of entertainments: pageants, tournaments, masques, spectacles and parades; musical festivals, revels, dances and amusements of every kind. For generations, indeed, Florence had been famous all over Europe for such festivities. No city had more spectacular nor more numerous public entertainments. Thanks to the statutes of the various trade guilds there were no more than about 275 working-days in a year, so that the people had plenty of opportunity to enjoy themselves. There were carnivals, horse races and football games, dances in the Mercato Vecchio, mock battles in the Piazza Santa Croce and water displays beneath the bridges of the Arno. Sometimes the Piazza della Signoria would be turned into a circus or a hunting-field; wild animals would be let loose; boars would be goaded by lances; and the Commune’s lions would be brought out of their cage behind the Palazzo and incited – rarely successfully – to set upon dogs. On one occasion at least these escapades got out of hand: three men were killed by a rampaging buffalo, and afterwards a mare was set loose among stallions, a sight which one citizen thought the ‘most marvellous entertainment for girls to behold’, but which in the opinion of another, more respectable diarist, ‘much displeased decent and well-behaved people’.

One of the most popular of all Florentine festivals was that of
Calendimaggio
, May Day. For this, the young men got up early to hang branches of flowering shrubs, decorated with ribbons and sugared nuts, on the doors of their sweethearts’ houses; and the girls, wearing pretty frocks and carrying flowers and leaves, danced to the music of lutes in the Piazza Santa Trinità. Then there was the festival of St John the Baptist, patron of the city, when all the shops were decorated with streamers and banners; when riderless horses, with
spiked iron balls hanging at their sides, raced from Porta al Prato down the Via della Vigna through the Mercato Vecchio and the Corso to Porta alla Croce; when processions of canons and choristers, of citizens dressed as angels and saints, and of huge decorated chariots passed through the streets bearing the Cathedral’s sacred relics, which included a thorn of the Holy Crown, a nail of the Holy Cross, and the thumb of St John; when the Piazza del Duomo was covered with blue canopies emblazoned with silver stars beneath which votive offerings of painted wax were taken to the Baptistery; and when, in the Piazza della Signoria, the most elaborate gilded castles, symbolizing the towns which were subject to Florence, were carried on wagons past the banners fluttering on the balcony of the Palazzo.

The Lenten festivals were naturally more sombre. On the Wednesday of Passion Week, the Matins of Darkness was held in the Cathedral. All the lights, save a single candle on the altar, were snuffed out; and in the gloom the clergy and congregation ritually beat on the floor with willow rods. On Maundy Thursday, the Archbishop washed the feet of the poor. And on Good Friday, at three o’clock in the afternoon, the vergers of all the churches and convents went out into the streets with wooden clappers summoning the people to kneel and pray wherever they were and whatever they were doing. Afterwards Christ’s funeral was enacted, through streets hung with black. A long procession of monks carried a cross and a scourging post, a crown of thorns, a spear and a sponge, together with every object mentioned in the stories of the Passion, from hammers and nails to purple robe and dice. Behind them was borne the figure of the dead Christ beneath a canopy of black velvet and gold; then came the Virgin Mary, clothed in black, a white handkerchief in her hand. The next day, Holy Saturday, all was bright once more. The black cloth was stripped from the altar of the Cathedral and replaced with gold. The Archbishop sang
Gloria in Excelsis;
and as doves released from the Cathedral fluttered to the rooftops of the Piazza del Duomo, the bells in the campanile and all over Florence rang out triumphantly.

Lorenzo and Giuliano delighted in all these festivities, in helping to design the tableaux, the backcloths and trappings, the sculptures and armour, the costumes of the performers and the elaborate harnesses
and disguises of the scented animals. They delighted, too, in composing dramas and pageants into which were introduced those classical allusions so treasured by their contemporaries; and in discussing with scholars and poets the speeches which were to be delivered, the songs which were to be sung, the extravagant verse expositions of the allegorical masques.

Every distinguished visitor to the city was sure to be entertained extravagantly during his stay. Thus, when a great procession of noblemen from the south rode into Florence on 22 June 1473 as escort to the King of Naples’s daughter, Eleonora, who was on her way to be married to Duke Ercole of Ferrara, the Florentines eagerly seized the opportunity to welcome them in their customary style. They cheered and clapped as the Princess, dressed in black velvet and adorned with’ numberless pearls and jewels’, rode through the Porta Romana, across the Ponte Vecchio and up to the Palazzo della Signoria where she received an address from the assembled
Priori
before proceeding to the Medici Palace to have dinner with Lorenzo, Giuliano and their numerous guests. The next day a masque and brilliant procession were followed by a firework display; and on 24 June there was
fête champêtre
on the Prato, the meadow which stretched down to the banks of the Arno, where the guests ate strawberries, walked in the green grass by the water’s edge, and danced in the sunlight, jumping and leaping about in the energetic Florentine manner.

These festivities, splendid and exciting as they were, were not exceptional. But it was everywhere agreed that the tournament held in Florence in 1475 was unique. An even more impressive spectacle than the
giostra
of 1469, this tournament was held in honour of Giuliano, by then twenty-two years old, tall, dark-haired, athletic and universally admired. Giuliano’s
giostra
took place in the Piazza Santa Croce where once again the lovely Lucrezia Donati was crowned ‘Queen of the Tournament’, as she had been in 1469, and where the even more strikingly beautiful Simonetta Cattaneo, the consumptive, dying young wife of Marco Vespucci, a woman with whom Giuliano himself was said to be deeply in love, was led to the throne of the ‘Queen of Beauty’. Giuliano appeared before her
wearing her favour on one of a series of specially designed costumes which were believed to have cost in all no less than 8000 florins. His standard, designed by Botticelli, depicted Pallas, goddess of wisdom and war, in a golden tunic and armed with spear and shield, looking upon Cupid who stood bound to the bole of an olive tree with his bow and broken arrow at his feet. Like his brother in the previous contest, Giuliano was awarded the first prize which he accepted in a helmet, designed in anticipation of his victory, by Verrocchio.