The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (26 page)

As soon as Lorenzo had gone away, Michelangelo broke off one of the faun’s teeth

and dug into the gum so mat it looked as if the tooth had fallen out; and he waited anxiously for Lorenzo to come back. And after he had seen the result of Michelangelo’s simplicity and skill, Lorenzo laughed at the incident more than once and used to tell it for a marvel to his friends. He resolved that he would help and favour the young Michelangelo; and first he sent for his father, Lodovico, and asked whether he could have the boy, adding that he wanted to keep him as one of his own sons. Lodovico willingly agreed, and then Lorenzo arranged to have Michelangelo given a room of his own at the Palazzo Medici and looked after him as one of the Medici household. Michelangelo always ate at Lorenzo’s table with the sons of the family and other distinguished and noble persons, and Lorenzo always treated him with great respect… As salary and so that he could help his father, Michelangelo was paid five ducats a month; and to make him happy Lorenzo gave him a violet cloak and appointed his father to a post in the customs. As a matter of fact all the boys in the San Marco garden were paid salaries varying in amount through the generosity of the noble and magnificent Lorenzo who supported them as long as he lived.

Michelangelo remained at the Medici Palace for four years and during that time ‘he showed the results of his labours to Lorenzo everyday’.
³

Far less rich than his father or grandfather, Lorenzo did not commission nearly as many sculptures or paintings; and many of those for which he was responsible have been destroyed, like the frescoes at Spedaletto, or lost. Several others, until recently supposed to have been commissioned by Lorenzo – such as Botticelli’s two most famous works,
Primavera
⁴
and the
Birth of Venus
,
⁵
are now known to
have been painted for his namesake, his rich young cousin, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, and to have been hung on the walls of the villa of Castello which the younger branch of the Medici family bought in 1477.
⁶
Botticelli’s
Pallas and the Centaur
was also hung at Castello and was probably commissioned by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, although it seems to celebrate the elder Lorenzo’s triumph over the Pazzi conspirators and the ending of the Florentine wars.
⁷

But if Lorenzo did not himself commission much work from Botticelli, he went out of his way to ensure that he was well supplied with orders from other Florentine patrons and seems to have been responsible for his going to work in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Lorenzo was equally active on behalf of Filippino Lippi whom he also sent to Rome, Antonio Pollaiuolo whom he sent to Milan, and Giuliano da Maiano whom he recommended to the Duke of Calabria. For Ghirlandaio he obtained work in Santa Maria Novella and in Santa Trinità,
⁸
and afterwards recommended him for employment in the Sistine Chapel. For Verrocchio, who, according to Vasari, ‘never gave himself a moment’s rest from painting or sculpture’, Lorenzo obtained work all over Tuscany. He also commissioned – though the sculptor’s brother claimed he never paid for – a bronze
David
⁹
and a terracotta
Resurrection
for his own villa of Careggi.
¹⁰
And for the garden of his school he had Verrocchio restore and complete a badly broken red stone statue of the flayed body of Marsyas as a companion piece to a white marble
Marsyas
which Cosimo had bought in Rome. Verrocchio, so Vasari recorded,

made the missing legs, thighs and arms out of pieces of red marble so skilfully that Lorenzo was more than satisfied and was able to place it opposite the other statue, on the other side of the door. This antique torso, showing the flayed body of Marsyas, was made with such care and judgement that some slender white veins in the red stone were brought out by skilful carving in exactly the right places, appearing like the tiny sinews that are revealed when a human body is flayed.

When Verrocchio left Florence for Venice to work on his last masterpiece, the monument to the
condottiere
, Bartolommeo Colleoni, which stands in the Piazza di Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Lorenzo let
him go with his blessing. He was equally amiable when Leonardo da Vinci decided to move to Milan. It is possible that Leonardo, like Michelangelo, had lived in Lorenzo’s household for a time. It is certain that when, at the age of about twelve, this illegitimate boy from the Tuscan village of Vinci came to work in Verrocchio’s workshop in Florence, Lorenzo took the greatest interest in his precocious genius; and that when Leonardo decided to spread the wings of his astonishing versatility in Milan, where Duke Lodovico Sforza was looking for an artist to make an equestrian statue of his father, Lorenzo, always alive to the political advantages of such generosity, recommended him to Lodovico by sending the Duke a silver lyre, made in the shape of a horse’s head, which Leonardo had made.

Lorenzo certainly liked it to be known that he was a connoisseur of such things, just as he set great store by his reputation as an expert judge of architecture. It had, indeed, become common practice to consult him when important works were to be undertaken. His advice was sought, for instance, over a disputed design for the facade of Santo Spirito;
¹¹
and Filippo Strozzi consulted him about the proportions of the Palazzo Strozzi.
¹²
Lorenzo was also asked to select the better of two models for the Forteguerri tomb at San Jacopo in Pistoia, the one submitted by Verrocchio, the other by Piero del Pollaiuolo, as he had ‘full understanding of such and all other things’. And when a new altar panel for the church of Santo Spirito was commissioned from Ghirlandaio, one of the conditions was that it should be done ‘according to the manner, standards and form’ as would please Lorenzo.

Lorenzo himself submitted a design for the facade of the Cathedral which, in 14.91, still remained without one. Since Verrocchio, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Filippino Lippi also took part in the competition, together with several other masters, the judges were naturally somewhat embarrassed. To escape their dilemma they asked Lorenzo to choose the design himself. But, having praised all the designs, Lorenzo told them that he could not make up his mind and advised that the matter should be adjourned.
¹³

If Lorenzo spent far less on paintings and sculpture than his grandfather and left unfinished various buildings which Cosimo had begun
– such as the church of the Badia at Fiesole – he continued throughout his life to add to his magnificent collection of bronzes, medals, coins, ancient pottery, antique gems and Roman, Byzantine, Persian and Venetian vases, many of them carved in semi-precious stones and most of them inscribed with his name picked out in capitals: ‘LAUR. MED’. He would, in fact, pay far more for a fine engraved gem, no doubt believing it to be a sounder investment, than he was prepared to pay for a big picture. Many of the gems in his collection were valued at over a thousand florins, while a Botticelli or a Pollaiuolo did not cost more than a hundred.

Lorenzo also continued to lavish money upon the patronage of writers and scholars and upon the purchase of books and manuscripts for the continually expanding Medici library. His agents were instructed to be perpetually on the watch for likely sources. Giovanni Lascaris – who was twice dispatched to the East at Lorenzo’s expense to seek out manuscripts that might otherwise be lost – brought back to Florence from his second voyage over two hundred Greek works, the existence of almost half of which had not previously been known.

Although the art of printing from movable type had been invented in the middle of the century at Mainz, it had not at first made much headway in Italy where many scholars considered it a rather vulgar process, practised ‘among the Barbarians in some German city’, and many collectors refused to have printed books in their collections. Printing presses had been set up in Naples in 1465, in Rome in 1467, in Venice and Milan in 1469, in Verona, as well as in Paris and Nuremberg, in 1470. In 1476 William Caxton had set up his press at the Sign of the Red Pale in the shadow of Westminster Abbey. But it was not until 1477 that Bernardo Cennini had established his press in Florence. Before that – and, indeed for many years after, so strong was the tradition in the city – whole schools of scribes, illustrators and scriveners were employed by Lorenzo to make copies of his manuscripts so that their contents could be as widely diffused as possible and replicas presented to other libraries and institutions both within and beyond the frontiers of Tuscany, in particular to the libraries of Pisa.

Well aware that Pisa resented her subjection to Florence almost as
much as Volterra, Lorenzo had taken great pains to improve relations between the two cities and to gain credit for the Medici as benefactors of them both. He had developed the port of Pisa, bought land outside the city and a riverside house within the walls where he often took his family to stay, particularly in the colder winter months when the climate there was relatively mild and the wooded Apennines afforded shelter from the bitter east wind that, now unimpeded, blows down from the Romagna. Above all, Lorenzo had sought to reconcile the Pisans to Florence and the Medici by reviving Pisa’s once renowned but now decayed university. In 1472 he had established it as the principal university in Tuscany, and he personally contributed more than twice the amount of the grant of six thousand florins a year that the foundation received from the State.

He also contributed handsomely to the funds of the University of Florence, which now had the reputation of being the only one in Europe where the Greek language was adequately taught. It employed as teachers and lecturers such scholars as Johannes Argyropoulos, Theodorus Gaza, and Demetrius Chalcondylas who, with Demetrius Cretensis, issued from Florence in 1488 the first printed edition of the works of Homer. Students from all over Europe came here to learn Greek. Thomas Linacre, who was to become physician to King Henry VIII and one of the founders of the Royal College of Physicians, spent about three years in Florence from 1487 and was allowed to share the lessons given by Chalcondylas to Lorenzo’s sons. Linacre’s friend, William Grocyn, who was later one of the earliest scholars to teach Greek at Oxford, arrived in 1488. In 1489 there came another friend, William Latimer, who helped Grocyn and Linacre to translate Aristotle into Latin.

Lorenzo shared these scholars’ enthusiasm for Greek philosophers and Latin poets, but he had no patience with those humanists who regarded the Italian language with disdain and caustically belittled the achievements of the Tuscan poets of the immediate past. When Lorenzo wrote poetry as a relaxation from the cares of business and private life, it was not so much the Latin poets whom he chose as his exemplars but Dante and Boccaccio. It was not in Latin that he wanted to write but in that simple, beautiful language which he had
learned to speak as a child. Passionate in his devotion to Tuscan, he insisted – as Leon Battista Alberti had insisted – that it could be made far more subtle and pliable if only poets would endeavour to perfect their use of it, if only they could dismiss from their minds Niccolò Niccoli’s absurd contention that Dante was a poet to be read only by common wool workers and bakers. Lorenzo himself wrote in Tuscan with a depth of feeling that might have transformed the mannered poetry of the
cinquecento
had he had more leisure to develop his remarkable gifts. As it was, he was a worthy successor to the accomplished poets of the late thirteenth century, the precursors of Petrarch.

Lorenzo’s poetry was of a marvellous verve and diversity, sad and spirited, sometimes hopeful, more often disillusioned, moved by religious sentiment as well as by the desires of the flesh. He wrote devotional poems, as his mother had done, and blasphemous parodies which would have distressed her; he wrote hunting songs and love songs, exuberant
canzoni a hallo
, carefree burlesques and libidinous
canti carnascialeschi
, like the’ Song of the Fir Cone Sellers’, celebrating the delights of sexual passion and physical love. Above all, his feeling for the beauty of the Tuscan landscape, and for the pleasures and hardships of the life of country people, is expressed with an extraordinarily vivid intensity. He writes of flocks of bleating sheep migrating to upland pastures, the lambs trotting in their mothers’ steps, the shepherds carrying lambs just born and lame sheep on their shoulders; and of these flocks at night, enclosed by lines of poles and nets, with the shepherds snoring in the darkness after their meal of bread and milk; of cranes flying towards the setting sun, and falcons swooping down upon their prey; of olive groves beside the sea, their leaves turning now grey now green as the breeze blows across the shore; of the sparks from a flint in dry autumn leaves lighting brushwood, of flames spreading to the forest trees, burning bushes and lairs from which terrified birds and animals flee in a clatter of wings and pounding hooves; of winter scenes of tall firs, black against the snow, frozen leaves crackling underfoot; of the hunted deer making its last desperate leap; the patient ox struggling with its burden of stones; and the exhausted bird falling into the sea, frightened to
settle on the mast of a ship; of the river Ombrone in flood, its yellow waters cascading down the mountainside, carrying trunks and boughs of old ilex trees and the planks of a peasant’s shed across the wide plain; and of the peasant’s wife, her baby crying on her back, running with their cattle from the rising floods.

By the beginning of 1492 it was clear that Lorenzo, although only forty-three, was already a dying man. For years his intermittent attacks of gout had been increasingly painful and incapacitating; and now his general health was failing fast. He had made it a habit to take the waters each year, at Spedaletto or Porretta, at Vigone where St Catherine had scalded herself in the hot springs to prepare herself for Purgatory, or at Bagno a Morba, south of Volterra, an attractive spa which had been established by his mother. From each visit he returned protesting that he was now quite well again, but within a few months he had relapsed into his former debilitated state. He had to be carried in a litter to his favourite villa at Poggio a Caiano where he could do little but read, admire the frescoes which he had commissioned Andrea del Sarto to paint on the walls, supervise the farming of the surrounding land, or visit the menagerie where, with other exotic animals, was kept the beautiful giraffe – ‘so gentle that it [would] take an apple from a child’s hand’ – which had been presented to him by the Sultan of Babylon.