The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (22 page)

The two priests, Antonio Maffei and Stefano da Bagnone, were also discovered in hiding. Both were castrated, then hanged. Renato de’ Pazzi, Jacopo’s brother, who was found in a house in the Mugello, was also executed, being hanged in a peasant’s grey smock ‘as if to make a masquerade’, though his involvement in the plot was never established. Other members of his family escaped with terms of imprisonment in the dungeons of Volterra, though Lorenzo’s sister’s husband, Guglielmo de’ Pazzi, who seems to have been innocent, was merely confined to his villa.

Montesecco, one of the last of the conspirators to be taken, was discovered on
I
May. He was closely questioned under torture and
gave a detailed account of the origins of the conspiracy and of the Pope’s involvement in it. All the information which he could give having been forced out of him, he was, as a soldier, beheaded by sword on 4 May in the courtyard of the Bargello. Baroncelli, who had helped to murder Giuliano, succeeded in making his escape from Florentine territory and got as far as Constantinople; but there he was recognized and, following Lorenzo’s official request to the Sultan, he was brought back in chains to Florence where he, too, was executed in the Bargello.

The disgrace of the Pazzi family was not permitted to end with their execution. Their names and their coat-of-arms were ordered to be suppressed in perpetuity by a public decree of the
Signoria;
their property was confiscated; their palace was given another name, as were all other places in Florence which formerly had borne it; orders were given for their family symbol – the dolphin – to be cut down or blotted out wherever it was to be found. No man who married a Pazzi was ever to be allowed to hold office in the Republic. All customs associated with the family were abolished, including the ancient ceremony of carrying the sacred flint to their palace on Easter Eve.
⁴
Representations of the Pazzi traitors, together with those of the other conspirators, were painted by Botticelli – for a fee of forty florins for each figure – on the wall of the Bargello as Florentine custom dictated. They were portrayed with ropes round their necks, representing the manner of their death, except in the case of Napoleone Francesi who was painted hanging by his ankle to indicate that he had escaped. Beneath each portrait was inscribed a suitable epitaph in verse composed by Lorenzo.

In contrast to these insulting representations, so Giorgio Vasari recorded,

Lorenzo’s friends and relations ordered that, in thanksgiving to God for his preservation, images of him should be set up throughout the city. So [a skilled craftsman in wax] with the help and advice of Verrocchio, made three life-size wax figures with a wooden framework and a covering of waxed cloth, folded and arranged so well that the result was wonderfully attractive and lifelike. He then made the heads, hands and feet, using a coating of thicker wax, copying the features from life, and painting them
in oils with the hair and other adornments. The results of this skilful work were so natural that the wax figures seemed real and alive, as can be seen today from the three figures themselves. One of them is in the church of the nuns of Chiarito, in Via di San Gallo, in front of the miraculous crucifix. This statue is dressed exactly as Lorenzo was when, bandaged and wounded at the throat, he stood at the windows of his house and showed himself to the people… The second of the statues, dressed in the citizen’s gown worn in Florence, is in the church of Santissima Annunziata above the lower door by the table where the candles are sold. And the third was sent to Santa Maria degli Angeli in Assist and set up in front of the Madonna.

XI

‘
That son of iniquity and foster-child of perdition
’

O
N ASCENSION
Day 1478 Giuliano de’ Medici was buried in I the old sacristy of San Lorenzo in the porphyry sarcophagus which he and his brother had had made in memory of their father and uncle. Twenty-five at the time of his murder, he had never been married; but earlier that year his young mistress, Fioretta Gorini, had borne him a son who was christened Giulio.
¹
This boy, whose mother soon afterwards died, was adopted by Lorenzo who treated him as though he were his own child.

Of his own three sons, Lorenzo once said that the eldest was foolish, the next clever, and the youngest good; but he loved them all as he loved his daughters, and he delighted in playing games with them, a habit upon which Machiavelli afterwards commented with a hint of surprised reproach. Lorenzo wrote a little play for them,
San Giovanni e San Paolo
, giving them each a part and reserving one for himself. And he made it clear to them that however busy he was with affairs of State and however busy they were with their lessons – in which he took the deepest interest – he would always find time to talk to them. ‘If the wild beasts love their young,’ he wrote, ‘how much greater should be our indulgence towards our children.’

When he was parted from them he missed their company as much as diey missed him. ‘When will Lorenzo come?’ they often asked their tutors or their mother. ‘When will Lorenzo come?’ In the uncertain times following the Pazzi conspiracy, all the children were
sent away with their mother – and with Poliziano as tutor for the elder boys – to stay with their friends, the Panciaticchi, at Pistoia. Poliziano clearly did not enjoy his exile from Florence, though his letters to Lorenzo from Pistoia were uncomplaining. He gave him news of the children’s activities, assured him that Andrea Panciaticchi had received them all with ‘much kindness’, that Clarice was very well but took little pleasure in anything except the scraps of good news that came occasionally from Florence. ‘She rarely goes out. We want for nothing. Presents we refuse, save salad, figs, and a few flasks of wine, some
beccafichi
or things of that sort. These citizens would bring us water in their ears… We keep good watch and have begun to put a guard at the gates. When you have time come and see your family who expect you with open arms.’

Lorenzo’s family remained at Pistoia throughout the summer of 1478; but as winter approached they were moved to the greater security of the fortified villa at Cafaggiolo; and here, as the hard, cold weather set in, Poliziano became more and more miserable and unutterably bored. He continued to write to Lorenzo without complaining unduly about his situation; but to Lorenzo’s mother, Lucrezia, he did not disguise his misery. It was so fearfully cold he had to spend most of his time sitting over the fire in his slippers and overcoat; it rained so constantly that the children could not go out and he had to invent games for them to play indoors. To make these games more interesting he had made the losers forfeit a course of their next meal, but this had not proved a good idea since, more often than not, the results were greeted with tears. It was all made far worse by the fact that he did not get on at all well with Clarice.

She, in her unimaginative, old-fashioned Roman way, was appalled to discover that little Giovanni was being taught to read Latin from classical texts instead of from the psalter. He, knowing that Lorenzo would approve his method of instruction, declined to alter it. Quarrels about this led to quarrels about other things until Clarice dismissed Poliziano from the villa. Lorenzo was obliged to condone his friend’s dismissal, but in appointing in his place the less abrasive Martino da Comedia he let his wife know that he did not approve of her conduct. Clarice, in turn, upbraided him for allowing
the objectionable Poliziano to live in Lorenzo’s rooms at Fiesole, for making her a laughing-stock by so publicly displaying his forgiveness of a man she had had to send packing from her house. Lorenzo was then driven to write a sharp letter reproving her conduct. He reminded her that she had not sent on Poliziano’s books as he had asked her to do, and demanded that they should be dispatched that very day.

Heated as it became, it was the one serious quarrel that Lorenzo and Clarice seem ever to have had. She was far from being an ideal wife for him. Despite that shyness and modesty, that willingness to please that his mother had noted in her as a young girl in Rome, Clarice had not been able to adapt herself to Florentine ways. She had remained a Roman at heart, a rather haughty, petulant creature, excessively proud of her ancient lineage, deeply troubled by her husband’s quarrel with the Pope, ill at ease with his clever, witty, sardonic friends whose conversation she found it so difficult to understand.

Lorenzo was almost certainly not faithful to her. She may not have minded that too much, perhaps. After all, husbands were not given to fidelity then; and Lorenzo’s affairs were not indiscreet. His attachment to Lucrezia Donati had been purely romantic. He had known her since she was a little girl; and though he wore her device in tournaments and wrote sonnets praising the beauty of her eyes and hands and the ever-changing expression of her lovely face, Clarice knew enough of Florentine society and of Lorenzo himself to be sure he would never disgrace the Medici by taking for a mistress the treasured daughter of such a family as the Donati. Besides, Clarice liked Lucrezia, who was already married when she met her, and was pleased for her to become godmother to her eldest son. Lorenzo’s affairs with other women seem to have caused Clarice as little concern. Francesco Guicciardini said that when he was forty Lorenzo, who ‘was licentious and very amorous’, fell desperately in love with Bartolommea dei Nasi, the wife of Donato Benci, and spent night after night with her at her villa, returning to Florence just before dawn. But if this were so, the affair was either concealed from Clarice, meant little to her, or, perhaps, it did not begin until after
her death. Certainly Lorenzo’s relations with other women never seem to have disturbed his affection for his wife, nor her affection for him. That they were fond of each other cannot be doubted. She could share few of his interests; she knew little of art or literature, less of politics and philosophy. When she wrote letters to him she could think of nothing to relate other than the recommendation of some preacher whose sermon she had heard in church or an account of the health of the children. But she was affectionate in her way; and so was he. ‘I have arrived safe and well,’ he assured her in one characteristic letter.

This I think will please you better than any other news save that of my return, judging by my own longing for you and for home. Be good company to Piero, Mona Contessina [his ancient grandmother, who in accordance with the custom of the time lived in the family palace until her death in 1473] and Mona Lucrezia [who also lived with the family until she died in 1482]. Pray to God for me, and if you want anything from here [Milan] before I leave, let me know. Your Lorenzo.

To her children, especially to her daughter, Maddalena, Clarice was devoted. She had ten in all, three of whom died in infancy; and it was the death of the eleven-year-old Luigia that hastened her own. She was already ill with tuberculosis and had been so for some time. When she seemed a little better, Lorenzo, ill himself, left her to take a cure of the medicinal waters at Filetta. Nine days after his departure, Clarice died. Her husband heard the news with the utmost grief. ‘The limit is passed,’ he wrote. ‘I can find no comfort or rest for my deep sorrow. I pray the Lord God to give me peace, and trust that in His goodness, He will spare me any more such trials as have visited me lately.’