The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici

VIII PIERO THE GOUTY

PIERO WAS forty-eight years old when he became head of the family. The perpetual ill health which had afflicted him since early manhood, and which had been responsible for his nickname, ‘il Gottoso’ (‘the Gouty’), had prevented him from taking as active a part in either the business of the bank or the affairs of Florence as would otherwise have been expected of the heir to the Medici fortune. He had, however, served as a Priore in 1448, had been Florentine ambassador in Milan, Venice and Paris, and in 14.61 had been elected Gonfaloniere, the last Medici ever to be elected to that office.

Despite the drooping eyelids which gave his face a rather sleepy appearance and the swollen glands in his neck, he was better looking than his brother Giovanni, while his determined chin and thin, set mouth suggested a character well able to withstand the almost constant pain he suffered from his arthritic joints as well as the irritation of eczema. Indeed, his nature displayed little of the edgy irritability so often associated with prolonged illness. He was considerate, patient and courteous. Though there were many who regretted a certain coldness in his manner and doubted his capacity to rule with his father’s authority, those who knew him well both liked and respected him.

As a banker he did not have his father’s flair, but he was scrupulously methodical. Characteristically he had noted in the most exact detail the amount expended on Cosimo’s funeral, the kinds of Masses that had been paid for, the amount of black cloth given to the women of the family for veils and kerchiefs, the sums of money given to servants and slaves for mourning clothes, the numbers of candles and weight of wax. This care for detail was combined with qualities that had made him an excellent diplomat. In France, in fact, King Louis XI had been so taken with him that, soon after he became head of the family, he was granted permission to decorate one of the balls of the Medici arms with three of the lilies of the House of Valois.

That most Florentines were prepared for the moment to accord to Piero the privileges and respect enjoyed by his father was due partly at least to the wife he had married and the five attractive, healthy children she had borne him. For Lucrezia Tomabuoni was a remarkable woman, charming and spirited, profoundly religious and highly accomplished. Her family, formerly Tornaquinci, had once been a noble one; but in order to evade the disadvantages attaching to their birth they had changed their name, altered their arms and abandoned their former pretensions. They were still rich; their palace in what is now one of the main streets in Florence was a splendid one; the delightful murals illustrating the lives of St John the Baptist and the Virgin by Domenico Bigordi Ghirlandaio in the choir of Santa Maria Novella – which display the astute and wary features of several members of the family – were paid for with Tornabuoni money.¹

Lucrezia herself was not content with patronage. She was a poèt of more than moderate ability. Since her interests were largely theological, most of her poems were hymns or translations into verse of Holy Writ. But they displayed a depth of feeling as well as a literary quality rarely to be found in such compositions. Neither her spiritual bent nor her intellectual leanings, however, prevented her from being an admirable wife and mother. Both her husband and her children, as well as her father-in-law, all seem to have adored her.

There were three daughters, Maria, Bianca and Lucrezia, known as Nannina. They were all to be married well, Maria to Leopetto Rossi, Bianca to Guglielmo de’ Pazzi, and Lucrezia to the scholarly Bernardo Rucellai. There were also two sons; Lorenzo, who was fifteen when his grandfather died, and Giuliano who was eleven. Both of them promised to be distinguished men.

Lorenzo, in particular, was precociously gifted. He did not share the good looks which – rare in the Medici – his father and younger brother both enjoyed. But his sallow, irregular features were powerful and arresting; and though his movements were jerky and ungainly, he was tall, strong and athletic. His education, thorough and wide-ranging, had been supervised at first by Gentile Becchi, the Latinist and diplomat, and later by Cristoforo Landino, translator of Aristotle and commentator on Dante, and Marsilio Ficino, his grandfather’s protégé and friend, whose allowance his father continued to pay. By the time Lorenzo was fifteen he was already being entrusted with responsibilities that most boys of his age would have found daunting. He was sent on diplomatic missions to Pisa to meet Federigo, the second son of King Ferrante of Naples; to Milan to represent his father at the marriage of King Ferrante’s elder son to Francesco Sforza’s daughter, Ippolita; to Bologna for conversations with its leading citizen, Giovanni Bentivoglio; to Venice to be received by the Doge; to Ferrara to stay with the Este family; to Naples to see King Ferrante. And in 1466 he went to Rome to congratulate the new Pope, Paul II, on his accession, to discuss the contract for the alum mines at Tolfa, and to try to make up for the neglect of business studies in his humanistic education by discussing the activities of the Roman branch of the bank with his uncle, Giovanni Tornabuoni, its manager. While in Rome he received a letter from his father which might well have been addressed to a diplomat of the most varied experience.

To the Medici’s supporters in Florence it seemed by then that Piero himself was in need of just as much help and advice as Lorenzo. Ever since Cosimo’s death the ambitious, ingratiating and plausible Luca Pitti had been endeavouring to achieve that power and influence in the city which seemed to him the just deserts of his talents. Piero he considered a wholly unworthy successor to the great Cosimo. So did the distinguished diplomat, Cosimo’s former friend and ambassador to France, Agnolo Acciaiuoli, who had been a persistent critic of the Medici during the last years of Cosimo’s life, maintaining that old age had reduced the father, as illness had reduced the son, ‘to such cowardice that they avoided anything that might cause them trouble or worry’. In their increasingly outspoken attack on the Medici, Luca Pitti and Agnolo Acciaiuoli had recently been joined by the Archbishop of Florence’s brother Diotisalvi Neroni, Florence’s first resident ambassador in Venice and later ambassador in Milan. Between them these three men constituted a formidable opposition to the Medici; and, as the weeks passed, Florence became divided into two opposing camps, the Party of the Hill, comprising the supporters of Luca Pitti – whose huge palace on the high ground of the Oltrarno beyond the Ponte Vecchio was now almost finished – and the Party of the Plain, those who remained faithful to the occupants of the Medici Palace on the lower ground in the Via Larga. The Party of the Hill gained much support from the merchant class when Piero, having ordered a survey of his business assets in order to discover ‘in how many feet of water he was standing’, was so concerned by the subsequent report that he ill-advisedly called in many long outstanding debts to the family bank which Cosimo had left undisturbed. The numerous bankruptcies which almost immediately followed were naturally blamed upon Piero, although he did his best to help several of those who had been hardest hit. It was not, however, until the Party of the Hill was joined by a more energetic and more determined opponent of the Medici that it appeared strong enough to drive Piero out of Florence as his father had been driven out some forty years before.

This forceful recruit to the Party of the Hill was Niccolò Soderini, an expert orator and a member of one of the oldest and proudest families in Florence. Soderini vehemently attacked the device of the Accoppiatori, by which the Medici had so conveniently packed the Signoria with their friends and adherents, and advocated a return to the election by lot as practised in the earlier days of the Republic. His idealism and rhetoric triumphed. The Accoppiatori were abolished, and, amongst the names of the Priori elected to the Signoria in November 1465 was that of Niccolò Soderini who was immediately elected Gonfaloniere. He was accompanied to the Palazzo della Signoria by a crowd of admirers who placed a wreath of olive leaves around his head.

After this triumphant inauguration, Soderini’s term of office was a humiliating anti-climax. The reforms which he had promised and now eagerly proposed were regarded with distaste by the Collegi, who discussed them unenthusiastically and set them aside. At the beginning of January 1466, their short time of office over, he and the other Priori dejectedly left the Palazzo della Signoria on which was posted a placard with the words, ‘Nine Fools are out’. Soderini returned to his own palazzo convinced – as Pitti, Acciaiuoli and Neroni were all now convinced – that the only chance of success against the Medici lay in armed rebellion.

For several weeks nothing was done; and then, on 8 March, the Medici’s great ally, Francesco Sforza, died in Milan, leaving several sons, the eldest of whom, Galeazzo Maria, was an unstable young man of strange tastes and weird behaviour. Piero, nevertheless, argued that the continuance of the Milanese alliance was essential to Florence’s future prosperity. The Party of the Hill, on the other hand, insisted that the city should now return to its old friendship with Venice. Out of this dispute the attempted coup was born.

Pitti, Soderini and their friends secretly approached the Venetians for help in ridding Florence of the Medici. They also made overtures to Borso d’Este, the genial and ostentatious Duke of Ferrara who had recently erected a large statue of himself in the city’s main square. Duke Borso agreed to help them by sending troops across the frontier under command of his brother Ercole. These troops were to advance on Florence, while other forces were to seize Piero, together with his two sons, and to have them all hastily executed on some convenient charge. A good opportunity to carry out this plan presented itself in August when Piero fell ill and was carried in a litter out of Florence to the villa of Careggi.

Scarcely had he arrived at Careggi than a messenger came to the villa with an urgent warning from his friend Giovanni Bentivoglio of Bologna of the approaching danger. Piero immediately ordered his servants to lift him out of bed and to carry him back to Florence, sending Lorenzo on ahead to prepare for his arrival. Galloping back to the city, Lorenzo came upon some of the armed conspirators loitering on the road near the villa of Diotisalvi Neroni’s brother, the Archbishop. Not recognizing him, they let him pass by; but as soon as he was out of sight he sent word back to his father, warning him to make for Florence by a different and little-used road.

The sudden and unexpected return of the Medici to Florence on the afternoon of 27 August so alarmed the leading conspirators that they immediately lost their nerve. Luca Pitti hurried down to the Medici Palace to beg Piero’s forgiveness, and to swear that he would ‘live or die’ with him; the others mustered their armed supporters, but could not decide what orders to give them. Piero, by contrast, appeared wholly in control of the situation and of himself. He summoned his men to arms, sent messages for help to Milan and made arrangements for the accession to power of a firmly pro-Medici Signoria at the next elections due to be held on 2 September.

This Signoria, chosen in compliance with Medicean prompting, called for a Parlamento. A few hundred well-disposed citizens entered the Piazza which was lined with three thousand troops, amongst whom Lorenzo de’ Medici rode up and down on his horse. The Parlamento obediently agreed to a Balìa; and the troubles were suddenly over. The republican reaction was defeated, and the power of the Medici confirmed.

Soderini, Neroni and Acciaiuoli were all banished from Florence. In recognition of his tardy submission Luca Pitti, old and humiliated, was pardoned in the expectation that this erstwhile friend of Cosimo would be reclaimed as an ally, an expectation realized when Luca’s daughter was married to Giovanni Tornabuoni, a close relative of Piero’s wife. Yet, in exile in Venice, Luca Pitti’s two fellow conspirators, Neroni and Soderini, continued to plot against the Medici. They succeeded in persuading the Doge and the Council that feeling against the family was running high in Florence and that, were a Venetian army to attack the city, the enemies of the family within the walls would rise up in arms to support it. Accordingly, in May 1467, Bartolommeo Colleoni, the famous condottiere who, after twice deserting them for the Milanese, had been appointed by the Venetians captain-general of the Serene Republic for life, was paid to march towards the Tuscan frontier. Once again Piero reacted quickly. Summoning help from both Milan and Naples, he mustered a Florentine army to oppose Colleoni’s advance. The Florentine mercenaries came upon the Venetian army in the territory of the tiny state of Imola, and there they decisively defeated it. Piero’s control over the government of Florence was thus firmly secured.

While defending his family from their rivals within the city walls and the city itself from her enemies outside them, Piero continued the family tradition of munificence. He paid for a splendid tabernacle for the miraculous crucifix in the church of San Miniato al Monte,² and commissioned an even more magnificent tabernacle for the church of Santissima Annunziata which bore on its base the vainglorious inscription: ‘Costò fior. 4 mila el marmo solo The marble alone cost 4,000 florins’.³ At the same time he added numerous ancient coins to the collection assembled by his father, bought great numbers of rare manuscript books for the Medici Library, and had many volumes copied out for him and brilliantly illuminated. Antonio Averlino Filarete was told that Piero spent hours looking at these books, turning over the pages ‘as if they were a pile of gold’:

One day he may simply want for his pleasure to let his eye pass along these volumes to while away the time and give recreation to the eye. The next day, then, so I am told, he will take out some of the effigies and images of all the Emperors and Worthies of the past, some made of gold, some of silver, some of bronze, of precious stones or of marble and other materials which are wonderful to behold… The next day he would look at his jewels and precious stones of which he had a marvellous quantity of great value, some engraved, others not. He takes great pleasure and delight in looking at these and in discussing their various excellencies. The next day, perhaps, he will inspect his vases of gold and silver and other precious material and praise their noble worth and the skill of the masters who wrought them. All in all when it is a matter of acquiring worthy or strange objects he does not look at the price.

Like his father, Piero was anxious to be considered the friend as well as the patron of artists. And just as Cosimo, so Antonio Benavieni wrote, ‘bestowed both honours and countless rewards’ on Donatello during his active life, so Piero continued to honour and reward the sculptor in his old age and at his death. It had been one of Donatello’s last requests that he should be buried near Cosimo in the church of San Lorenzo. Piero ensured that this request was fulfilled and undertook to bear the cost of his interment in the crypt next to Cosimo’s tomb. When the coffin was carried there, it was followed by the Medici and thousands of the mourning citizens of Florence.

Many of the artists in this long procession were already at work, or were shortly to embark upon work, for Piero de’ Medici. One of these was Luca della Robbia, soon to be elected president of the sculptors’ guild. Born in Florence in 1400 he had achieved lasting fame with the beautiful singing-gallery in the cathedral which he finished in 1428.⁴ Then, having been commissioned by the Signoria to complete the series of reliefs begun by Giotto and Andrea Pisano on the northern side of the campanile,⁵ he had been asked to make some oval terracotta reliefs for the walls of Piero’s study in the Medici Palace and some tiles for the floor, ‘a new thing and most excellent for summer’.⁶

Another old artist in the funeral procession to San Lorenzo was Paolo di Doni, then aged sixty-nine. He, too, was a Florentine, a shy, withdrawn man with a passion for animals, particularly for birds, pictures of which filled his house and which earned him his nickname – Uccello. Several of his pictures of birds and of other animals, painted in tempera on canvas, were bought by the Medici to hang on the walls of their palace; and, some years before Donatello’s death, Piero asked Uccello to paint a picture in three panels of the rout of San Romano, to commemorate Florence’s victory over the Sienese in 1432 in the days of the Albizzi. This picture, in which the horses seem to dominate the action, was hung in Lorenzo’s bedroom next to two other Uccellos, a scene from the legend of Paris and a picture of lions fighting dragons.⁷

Soon after the Rout of San Romano was finished, Piero bestowed his patronage on yet another Florentine artist who was asked to paint three large pictures for the Medici Palace. This was Antonio di Jacobo Benci, known as Pollaiuolo because his father was a poulterer. A sculptor, engraver, jeweller and enameller as well as a painter, he recommended himself to Piero by his skill in portraying the naked figure, a skill which he had perfected by spending hours in the most meticulous dissection of corpses. Piero ordered from him two of the twelve Labours of Hercules – the slaying of the Nemean lion and the destruction of the Hydra of Lernae – and a portrayal of Hercules’s subsequent conquest of the Libyan giant, Antaeus.⁸ In them Hercules, a symbol of courage on the official seal of the Signoria, was to be shown ‘larger than life’, as a Greek god rather than, in the manner of earlier times, a medieval warrior in shining armour.

In adapting classical mythology to celebrate the virtues and triumphs of Florence and of her rulers, no artist was more in sympathy with Piero’s ideas than Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, known as Botticelli. At the time of Donatello’s death, he was twenty-two years old. The sickly son of a Florentine tanner in a poor way of business in the Via Nuova Borg’ Ognissanti, Botticelli had probably derived his nickname (which means Little Barrel) from an elder brother, a batiloro – a beater of gold leaf used for picture frames – who agreed to relieve their father of responsibility for him. On leaving school Botticelli had been apprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi; but soon afterwards had been invited to live at the Medici Palace where Piero and Lucrezia Tornabuoni treated him as one of their own family. In the Madonna of the Magnificat, which he painted soon after Donatello’s death, he appears to have introduced both sons of the house as angels kneeling before the Madonna, Giuliano with seraphic features and thick, curly hair shaped so that an appealing curl fell down across his brow, the more swarthy Lorenzo, who was only five years younger than the artist, with his idealized features in profile and in shadow.⁹

In the Adoration of the Magi, however, which Botticelli painted as one of those family group pictures with a religious theme so favoured by Renaissance artists, Lorenzo – if the traditional identification can be accepted – appears in a stronger light and more exposed position. This picture was commissioned by Piero’s friend Guaspare di Zanobi del Lama, for the church of Santa Maria Novella, perhaps as a votive offering after the Medici’s escape from the danger of assassination and the threat of exile by the conspirators of 1466.¹⁰ Although other members of his family occupy more prominent positions, the picture certainly seems to have been intended as a tribute to Lorenzo, just as Fortitude, which Botticelli afterwards painted for the Council of the Arte della Mercanzia, appears to have been painted as a tribute to Piero.

Fortitude was one of six panels representing the virtues of Charity, Justice, Faith, Temperance and Fortitude which the commercial tribunal, the Mercanzia, had commissioned for their hall. It was originally intended that all the panels should be done by Antonio Pollaiuolo’s younger brother, Piero, but Piero de’ Medici induced Tommaso Soderini to persuade his colleagues on the Council to give the commission for at least one of the panels to Botticelli. Botticelli responded by producing a Fortitude which was taken to be an allegorical representation of the steadfast character of his friend and patron.¹¹

Shortly before Botticelli completed this painting, another artist began work at the Medici Palace on a series of frescoes for the chapel on the first floor. This was Benozzo Gozzoli, also a native of Florence, who had worked on the Baptistery’s bronze doors under the direction of Ghiberti and who had later acted as assistant to Fra Angelico. In the Medici chapel for months on end Gozzoli worked by lamplight, gradually producing round the walls of the chancel, above an ornamented border of the Medici device of a diamond ring and the motto ‘semper’, two huge pictures depicting groups of angels rejoicing in the birth of Christ and gazing upon Filippo Lippi’s painting of The Virgin Adoring the Child which was placed above the altar.¹²

Around the walls of the main body of the chapel, Gozzoli painted a memorial to the history of the Medici family in what purported to be a representation of the journey of the three Magi to Bethlehem, modelling several of his groups on Gentile da Fabriano’s altarpiece, Adoration of the Magi, which was painted for the altar of the Chapel of Onofrio Strozzi in Santa Trinità.¹³

It used to be confidently asserted that, as a celebration of the great Council of Florence of 1439 which had helped to make Florence a leading centre of European culture, the artist chose as his three Magi John Paleologus, the Emperor of the East, distinguished by his splendid robes, his melancholy bearded face and his unique turbaned crown; the Patriarch of Constantinople, a venerable white-bearded figure, also wearing a distinctive head-dress, and riding a mule; and the ten-year-old heir of the Medici family – whose grandfather was instrumental in bringing these great men from the east to Florence – Lorenzo de’ Medici, gorgeously attired and riding a magnificently caparisoned horse whose trappings are covered with the seven balls of the family’s emblem. It seems more likely, however, that the subject of the painting was suggested to Piero by the great pageants of the Three Kings which traditionally took place in Florence on the feast of Epiphany and in which members of the Medici family habitually took part. In 1446 Cosimo himself had made an appearance in a specially memorable Magi pageant which Michelozzo had helped to design. Certainly many of the men who took part in that spectacular cavalcade are depicted in Gozzoli’s painting, most of them wearing the round, flat-topped cap favoured by scholars of the day and invariably to be seen in portraits of Cosimo Pater Patriae. Mingling with them are the bearded Greek scholars from Constantinople, several of them – like Argyropoulos and Chalcondylas – now settled in Florence at the instigation and expense of the Medici. Between two of these Gozzoli has painted himself, and lest there should be any doubt as to his identity he has boldly inscribed his name upon his hat. Preceding him are other members of his patron’s family – Piero’s younger son, Giuliano, a negro walking in front of him with a bow; Cosimo Pater Patriae, the trappings of his horse decorated with the Medici arms and his own personal emblem of three peacocks’ feathers; Cosimo’s brother, Lorenzo, wearing a conical hat and riding a mule; and his patron, Piero himself, hatless as he is usually depicted. Also there are three handsome girls on horseback, dressed alike with tall plumes in their hats, no doubt intended to represent Piero’s three daughters.¹⁴

As in the case of other pictures which he commissioned, Piero took great interest in the painting of this picture, instructing Gozzoli to use the brightest colours and to make the clothes as rich and brilliant as possible. Gozzoli agreed to do so, adding that he would need a great deal of gold and ultramarine paint, so would Piero advance him the money? When the painting was nearly finished, Piero objected that the angels were too obtrusive. Gozzoli did no think so:

I have put in only two seraphim, one is in a corner among the clouds; nothing but the tips of his wings is visible, and he is so well hidden and so well covered by clouds that he does not spoil the picture at all, but on the contrary adds beauty to it… The other seraph is on the far side of the altar, also hidden in a similar way. Ruberto Martegli has seen them and said there is no cause to make a fuss about them. However, I will do as you ask. Two small clouds will obliterate them both.

It is probable that Piero did not live to see this fresco finished. He had been ill since the beginning of 1469, and his last months were troubled ones. Groups of citizens, claiming to be acting on his authority, took to marauding through streets by day and night, ill-treating and threatening passers-by whom they accused of being opponents of the Medici and extorting money from them. Piero acted with that forceful determination which so often surprised those who supposed his ill-health had wasted his spirit, and who mistook for weakness his respect for the constitution of the state. He ordered the ringleaders to be brought to his room and, from his bed, upbraided them for their misdeeds; he warned them that, should their excesses continue, he would have members of various exiled families recalled to Florence to help control them. The violence immediately subsided and the marauding ceased; but before the end of the year Piero was dead. He was buried next to his brother, Giovanni, in the old sacristry of San Lorenzo. Over his body and that of their uncle his sons placed a porphyry sarcophagus, ornamented with acanthus leaves, designed for the Medici by Donatello’s most brilliant pupil, Andrea del Verrocchio.¹⁵

IX THE YOUNG LORENZO

LORENZO WAS now twenty, strong, virile, clever and inexhaustibly energetic, the brilliant paladin of the Medici house, the first such heir it had ever had. His straight, thick, dark hair, parted in the middle, fell almost to his shoulders; his long flattened nose, which had no sense of smell, looked as though it had been broken and badly set; his heavy jaw jutted forward so that his lower lip almost enclosed the upper; the eyebrows above his big, dark, penetrating eyes were irregular and bumpy; he was quite strikingly ugly. His voice was cracked, nasal and high-pitched. Yet when he talked his face was so animated, his manner so arresting, his long slender hands so expressive that few noticed his defects.

To his every activity he brought a marvellously infectious zest. As Marsilio Ficino, said, he had a ‘naturally joyful nature’. With equal enthusiasm he played calcio, a fast game like football with twenty-seven players on each side, and palloni, a ball-game played in a court with gloved hands. He went out hunting and hawking. In a voice not very tuneful, he sang at table and he sang in the saddle; once, so one of his friends recorded, he kept singing and telling jokes throughout a journey of thirty miles, keeping the rest of the company in spirits as high as his own. He composed many of his songs himself, and some of them were outrageously lewd. He had a strong taste for bawdy, for sexual innuendo and ribald stories. He also shared his contemporaries’ taste for those boisterous practical jokes which later generations were to find so heartless, even cruel. The story is told that one night when a tiresome, bibulous doctor was drunker than usual, Lorenzo suggested that two friends should bundle him off to the country, lock him up in a remote farmhouse and spread the rumour that he was dead. The rumour was accepted as the truth; and when the doctor escaped and returned home, pale and bedraggled, his wife believed him to be a ghost and refused to let him in.

Yet Lorenzo was renowned amongst his friends for his kindness and consideration. Responsive, affectionate and simpatico, he had a rare gift for friendship and a deep love of animals, particularly of horses. He generally fed his own horse, Morello, himself; and when he did not, the animal, who greeted his master’s arrival by neighing and stamping his feet, would fret so much that he became ill. But although he spent so much time riding and hunting in the country, in gardening at Careggi, in supervising his farms in the Mugello, in raising herds of cows, breeding racehorses for the palio, rearing Calabrian pigs at Careggi and Sicilian pheasants at Poggio a Caiano, breeding rabbits and experimenting in the manufacture of cheeses, he derived quite as much pleasure from the activities he pursued in Florence, reading, writing, talking, studying Plato, playing the lyre, making architectural drawings and making love. He was astonishingly versatile; and he liked it to be known that he was. It had to be admitted that he was vain and intensely competitive. He could be very angry when beaten at a game or outwitted in some intellectual exercise.

When he was nineteen, it was decided that it was time for him to marry. The bride selected for him was Clarice Orsini, the daughter of Jacopo Orsini of Monterotondo, a sixteen-year-old heiress from Rome. Lorenzo’s mother travelled to Rome to inspect the girl on the pretext of visiting her brothers, Giovanni and Francesco Tornabuoni, who looked after the Medici bank in Rome. Lucrezia caught her first glimpse of Clarice as she and her mother were on their way to St Peter’s. The girl was wearing a lenzuolo in the Roman fashion so Lucrezia could not see her properly, but ‘she seemed to be handsome, fair and tall’. The next time Lucrezia saw her she was still unable to inspect her figure as she would have liked, ‘since Roman women [were] always entirely covered up’; but, so far as she could judge it in its tight bodice, her bosom seemed to be well-shaped; and her hands were ‘long and delicate’. Her face was ‘rather round but not unattractive, her throat fairly elegant but rather too thin’. She certainly had a ‘nice complexion’. Her hair, Lucrezia noticed now, was not really fair – no women in Rome were so blessed – but reddish.

‘She does not carry her head well, as our girls do, but pokes it forward,’ Lucrezia concluded her report. ‘I think she is shy… Yet, altogether I think the girl is a good deal above the average.’ Of course, she added, she could not be compared with her own three daughters who were, indeed, not only better-looking but, as Florentines, far better-educated than any Roman girl could expect to be. Nevertheless, Lucrezia hoped that with her evident modesty and good manners Clarice would soon learn Florentine customs.

The Florentines themselves did not entirely approve of the match. It had never before been the custom for even the richest merchant families of the city to look outside Tuscany for brides and bridegrooms for their children; and the Medici had previously been content to ally themselves with families of their own sort. Lorenzo was well aware of the advantages of this himself. All his sisters married rich and influential Florentines; and two of his daughters were subsequently required to follow their example, one by marrying a Ridolfi,¹ the other a Salviati.² A third daughter, Luigia, was to be betrothed as a little girl to Giovanni, the younger son of his uncle, Pierfrancesco, with whose branch of the family Lorenzo and his father had quarrelled over the proper division of Cosimo’s fortune. The dispute had been settled by the time of the betrothal; but Lorenzo was determined to strengthen the renewed ties by a marriage within the family. And, although the marriage never took place, as Luigia died before she was twelve, the friendship between the two branches was not broken again so long as Lorenzo lived.

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.

This famous tournament was the inspiration for the earliest literary masterpiece in Italian of Angelo Ambrogini, known from his birthplace as Poliziano, the son of a distinguished Tuscan lawyer who, as a warm supporter of the Medici family, had been murdered by conspirators plotting the death of Piero. Shortly after his father’s murder, Poliziano had been brought to Florence and his education paid for by the Medici: he had studied Latin under Cristoforo Landino, Greek under Argyropoulos and Andronicos Kallistos, and philosophy under Marsilio Ficino. He was invited to stay for as long as he liked at the Medici Palace, and later given a villa by the family. By the time he was eighteen he was a classical scholar of formidable learning and a poet of extraordinarily precocious talent. His Stanze delta Giostra di Giuliano de Medici established him as the finest Italian poet since Boccaccio.

The tributes which Poliziano paid to Giuliano and, more particularly, to Lorenzo were not merely the courtly allusions which every generous patron might well have felt his due. Lorenzo was, indeed, ‘the laurel who sheltered the birds that sang in the Tuscan spring’. To his villas at Fiesole, Cafaggiolo and Careggi he invited artists, writers and scholars to talk with him, to read aloud with him, to listen to music, to discuss classical texts and philosophical mysteries. Sometimes the company met at the Abbey of Camaldoli⁴ where, for four days in 1468, Lorenzo and Giuliano discussed such matters as man’s highest vocation, the nature of the summum bonum and the philosophic doctrines to be found in the Aeneid, with various members of the Platonic Academy including Marsilio Ficino, Cristoforo Landino, Leon Battista Alberti and three merchants of intellectual tastes, Alamanno Rinuccini, and Donato and Piero Acciaiuoli.

‘The second day after my father’s death,’ so Lorenzo recorded in his memoirs, ‘the principal men of the city came to our house to console us and to encourage me to take on myself the care of the State, as my father and grandfather had done.’ Among the leaders of the delegation was Tommaso Soderini, who had opposed his brother Nkcolò’s attempted coup against Piero, and who, as the husband of a Torna-buoni, liked to think of Lorenzo as his nephew. With him were several members of the Pitti family who, at a meeting of about seven hundred supporters of the existing regime held at the convent of Sant’ Antonio the day before, had made amends for Luca Pitti’s part in the coup by strongly supporting Soderini in his call for a unified request to Lorenzo. Lorenzo listened to the delegation with becoming modesty.’ Their proposal was naturally against my youthful instincts,’ he protested,

and, considering that the burden and danger were great, I consented to it unwillingly. But I did so in order to protect our friends and property; since it fares ill in Florence with anyone who is rich but does not have any share in government.

Lorenzo’s evident reluctance was understandable. He was not yet twenty-one, had been married for no more than six months, and would naturally have preferred to have spent more time than his new responsibilities would permit upon those pleasures which he pursued with such vigorous intensity. But he was a conscientious and ambitious young man who had already made up his mind that to decline the challenge of public life would be not merely selfish but unwise. Even without the advice of his dutiful, sensible and gifted mother who still had, and was always to have, great influence over him, he would never have attempted to avoid his family responsibilities. Although he agreed with becoming diffidence to assume his father’s authority, he had already written to the Duke of Milan asking for the continuation of that support which the Sforzas had extended to the Medici since the time of his grandfather.

Duke Francesco’s successor, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, was now firmly established in Milan, a competent ruler with an increasingly sinister reputation for acts of appalling viciousness and cruelty. His enemies said that he had raped the wives and daughters of numerous Milanese nobles; that he took sadistic pleasure in devising tortures for men who had offended him; that he supervised these tortures himself and pulled limbs apart with his own hands; that he delighted in the moans of dying men and in the sight of corpses. Advocates of the Milanese alliance dismissed such stories as malicious inventions but they could not deny that the Duke was both prodigiously extravagant and ineffably vain. When he made a state visit to Florence in 1471, he arrived with an enormous retinue of advisers, attendants, servants and soldiers, including five hundred infantry, a hundred knights and fifty grooms in liveries of cloth of silver, each leading a war-horse saddled in gold brocade and with golden stirrups and bridles embroidered with silk. The Duke also brought with him his trumpeters and drummers, his huntsmen and falconers, his falcons and his hounds. His wife and daughters and their ladies were carried into the city in twelve gold-brocaded litters.

It was all very fine, the Florentines conceded, but they were not unduly impressed. They could have put on a much better show themselves, one of them commented, had they wanted to. And even the Duke himself had to admit that, although the Medici lived in much simpler style than the Sforzas, although Lorenzo chose to wear such plain, dark-coloured clothes, there was little in Milan to compare with the treasures assembled within the walls of the Medici Palace. For, despite all his arrogance and outbursts of psychopathic inhumanity, Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza was a man of some learning and much discernment. He had a genuine regard for the arts and scholarship for which Florence was so justly renowned; he also developed a deep respect for his young host who was already doing so much to foster them.

It was a respect that others were being taught to share. Piero had no sooner died when yet another attempt had been made to destroy the power and influence of the Medici. Thinking to take advantage of the youth and inexperience of the new head of the family, the conspirators who had attempted to overthrow Piero in 1466 and had since been living in exile assembled an army and, under the leadership of Diotisalvi Neroni, seized Prato. But that was the limit of their success. Their hopes of help from clandestine supporters in Florence and from Ferrara dwindled away as Lorenzo, and a Signoria well disposed towards him, acted as quickly and decisively as Piero had done under the earlier threat. A force of Florentine mercenaries was immediately dispatched to retake Prato; the conspirators were dispersed; and the authority of the Medicean regime was once again secure.

Lorenzo’s personal position in that regime was not yet openly acknowledged. When, for instance, Pope Paul II died the next year, a deputation was sent to Rome by the Signoria to offer his successor, Sixtus IV, the city’s congratulations. Lorenzo was invited to be one of the delegates, but he had no greater privileges nor higher status than any other member of the embassy: Florence was still, in name, a republic; and its citizens remained anxious that it should continue to appear to be so. It was recognized nevertheless that Lorenzo, by his birth, merited special treatment. Too young to be a member of the Cento, he was admitted as a member by special decree. He was also admitted to the Balìa and kept busy with important affairs of state as though he were already a highly experienced politician, writing numerous letters to foreign ambassadors and princes and playing a leading part in the deliberations of the councils.

The influential position he had already achieved for himself by 1472 was demonstrated well enough when there was trouble in Volterra, one of the most restless and independent of those Tuscan towns which, while self-governing except as regards foreign policy, still had to render an annual tribute to Florence. The trouble arose over a contract for mining alum in a cave in the neighbourhood of Volterra; the contract had been granted to a consortium comprising three Florentines, three Sienese and two Volterrans. There was strong feeling amongst the people of Volterra that this consortium had gained its profitable contract by fraud. They therefore elected magistrates who seized the mine and dismissed the men who were operating it. Lorenzo was not a member of the consortium nor does he appear to have had any control over it; but when the commune of Volterra asked him to arbitrate in the dispute, he was sufficiently well disposed towards the consortium to decide that control of the mine must be handed back to its members. The two Volterran members, Inghirami and Riccobaldi, delighted and encouraged by his decision, promptly marched back to the mine with an armed escort and declared themselves representatives of the rightful owners. It was an invitation to violence, and violence immediately broke out. There were savage riots in which several people were killed; the dead body of Inghirami was thrown out of a window onto the square below; and the Florentine Capitano of Volterra had cause to feel grateful that he had not been thrown out with him.

Lorenzo was now determined that the uprising must be put down by force. His orders had been disobeyed. Some of those in whose favour he had pronounced had been savagely murdered, and the Volterran rebels had been joined by Florentine exiles who were urging them to join them in an attack on the Medici. A majority of the Signoria were of the opinion that to use force was both provocative and unnecessary. This was also the opinion of the Bishop of Volterra. But Lorenzo would not listen. The Volterrans were notoriously turbulent and should be taught a lesson; if they were not, other Tuscan towns might follow their example. His advice was taken. An army, led by Federigo da Montefeltro, Count of Urbino, and composedofmercenaries in Florentine pay, marched towards Volterra, whose citizens looked frantically about for allies, but in vain. They even went so far as to offer their town to the King of Naples if only he would save them from Florence, but apart from a little help from Siena and Piombino no comforting response was received from anywhere. After a month’s siege the town surrendered. Lorenzo wrote a letter expressing his relief that it had all ended so satisfactorily; but he wrote too soon.

By the time his letter reached Volterra the town was being wildly plundered. No one afterwards discovered how it was that the terms of surrender were so blatantly violated. Some said that the mercenaries employed by the Volterrans had opened the gates to the Count of Urbino’s men in order to help them plunder the town. By whatever means they entered it, the Count’s men were soon pillaging Volterra, breaking into houses and shops, murdering men and raping women. Some reports had it that the Count himself, having found and stolen a rare polyglot Bible, made no efforts to control them; others claimed that he did have several of his soldiers hanged but that this was no deterrent. In any case, it was many hours before the uproar died down and by then hundreds of people were dead or mutilated, and whole streets were ransacked and in ruins. The horror of the scene of devastation was heightened by the effects of a landslip caused by torrential rain.

On learning what had happened Lorenzo immediately rode over to Volterra. He did what he could to reassure the people that his fellow citizens in Florence profoundly regretted the outrages, and he distributed money to those who had suffered loss. His regret was obviously sincere; but it was impossible to overlook the fact that it was he who had advocated the use of force, that it was he who had employed the Count of Urbino, that it was he who had approved the restoration of the mines to the original concessionaires, and that it was he who had pressed for the withdrawal of Volterra’s rights of self-government. And in Volterra these things are not forgotten even to this day.

X THE POPE AND THE PAZZI

FANCESCO DELLA Rovere, to whom Lorenzo had offered Florence’s congratulations on his election in 1471 as pope sixtus IV, was a big, gruff, toothless man with a massive head, a small, squashed nose and an intimidating expression. Born in a poor fishing community near savona, he had entered the franciscan order at a very early age and, thanks to a highly developed gift for preaching, a taste for learning and piety, some charm and much ambition, he was made general of the order before he was fifty and a cardinal three years later. Since then he had been unremitting in granting favours, offices, money, lands and power to innumerable relations of dubious merit of whom his sister’s family were the most demanding. Six of his nephews were made cardinals, and for those who were not in the church he endeavoured to find profitable lordships in the papal states.

One of these nephews, the witty, amiable and ostentatious Piero Riario, was created Patriarch of Constantinople, Abbot of St Ambrose, Bishop of Treviso, Mende, Spalato and Senigallia as well as Archbishop of Florence. Another nephew, Girolamo Riario, whom many believed to be, in fact, his son, was even more importunate. A fat, uncouth, rowdy young man, Girolamo had his eye on Imola as a base from which to build up larger estates in the Romagna. This small town between Bologna and Forll had recently been sold by Taddeo Manfredi to the Duke of Milan whose natural daughter, Caterina Sforza, seemed to the Pope an ideal bride for Girolamo. Negotations were immediately opened and the Medici bank in Rome was asked to raise the 40,000 ducats necessary for the purchase of Imola.

Lorenzo was much disturbed by this request. So far, his relations with the Pope had been perfectly cordial. He had been greeted ‘very honourably’ in Rome where he had been assured that the Medici were to remain bankers to the Curia and agents for the alum mines at Tolfa. He had been presented with two marble heads, one of Augustus, the other of Agrippa; and he had been offered various treasures from the collections of Paul II, including intaglios, cameos, vases and cups in semi-precious stones, which he was able to buy at a most reasonable price. Lorenzo was naturally anxious that this promising start to his association with the new Pope should not be undermined; but he also recognized that the strategically placed town of Imola, which dominated the road from Rimini to Bologna and which he had hoped to buy himself for Florence, must on no account fall into the hands of the Pope. So when the application for a loan was placed before him he made excuses for not granting it. Undeterred, the Pope turned to the Medici’s leading rivals as Florentine bankers in Rome, the Pazzi, who were delighted to be of service and to obtain the coveted Curial account.

Having settled Girolamo comfortably at Imola, the Pope now turned his attention to another nephew, Giovanni della Rovere, who, although Prefect of Rome and Lord of Mondovi in Piedmont, was still anxious to get the same sort of foothold in the Romagna as his cousin had done. Sixtus obligingly fixed this for him by arranging a marriage with the eldest daughter of Duke Federigo of Urbino, which not only brought the territorial influence of the Pope closer than ever to the Florentine frontier, but also detached a highly successful condottiere from Florentine service.

By now, relations between Lorenzo and the Curia were growing excessively strained; and when the Pope endeavoured to dislodge Niccolö Vitelli from Città di Castello, a town near the Florentine outpost of Borgo San Sepolcro – which had been bought in Cosimo’s day with funds confiscated from a Jewish pawnbroker – Florence and the Papacy came close to war. Lorenzo raised 6,000 men to help defend Vitelli, which the Pope considered the grossest effrontery; and after Vitelli, despite this assistance, had been forced to surrender, he was given an honourable welcome in Florence, which antagonized Sixtus even more.

There was yet further trouble in 1474 when Piero Riario died, worn out by his relentless enjoyment of the rich benefices his uncle had bestowed upon him; and the Archbishopric of Florence became vacant once more. Lorenzo succeeded in having his brother-in-law, Rinaldo Orsini, appointed Riario’s successor; but he could not prevent the Pope nominating Francesco Salviati as Archbishop of Pisa, even though an undertaking had been given that no appointments to ecclesiastical benefices within the Republic should be made without the agreement of the Signoria. Since the Pope chose to ignore this undertaking, Lorenzo declined to admit Salviati into Tuscany; and for three years Salviati was kept waiting in Rome, frustrated, embittered and ready to lend his support to any anti-Medicean plot which might be proposed to him.

Lorenzo had other dangerous enemies in Rome. In order to maintain the uncertain peace in north Italy, he had proposed a mutual alliance between Florence, Milan and Venice. But, far from achieving peace, the proposal almost provoked another war, for the Pope angrily condemned the new league as aimed at himself, while King Ferrante of Naples was deeply suspicious of an alliance which had been formed without his being consulted and which seemed to threaten his interests in the Adriatic. The Pope and the King of Naples, whose traditional antagonism to the Papacy had been noticeably softened by the marriage of one of King Ferrante’s illegitimate daughters to Leonardo della Rovere – another nephew from the Pope’s seemingly inexhaustible supply – were now thrown closer than ever together in mutual distrust of the young upstart from Florence.

Lorenzo’s difficulties were made all the more complicated when, on St Stephen’s Day, 1476, his firm ally, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, was stabbed to death by three young assassins on his way to Mass. For Galeazzo Maria’s son was a small boy of seven. His mother declared herself Regent; but a disorderly gaggle of uncles clamoured for their brother’s succession. And until their quarrel was settled, Lorenzo could hope for no help from Milan against the conspirators now gathering to destroy him.

Three of these conspirators met in Rome during the early weeks of the new year, 1477. They were Girolamo Riario, whose ambitions were far from satisfied by the lordship of Imola; Francesco Salviati, the disgruntled Archbishop-designate of Pisa, who hoped to obtain the more distinguished Archbishopric of Florence; and Francesco de’ Pazzi, manager of the Pazzi family bank in Rome, a small, fidgety young man of’great arrogance and pretensions’, who thought that the time had now come for the Pazzi to take over as rulers of Florence from the Medici.

The Pazzi were a much older family than the Medici.¹ One of their forebears, Pazzo de’ Pazzi, had been on the First Crusade and had returned to Florence with some flints from the altar of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem which were deposited in the church of Sant’ Apostoli.² They had loftily scorned trade up till the beginning of the thirteenth century; but in 1342 they had renounced their ancient lineage so as to be declared popolani and thus render themselves qualified for government office. They had subsequently made a fortune in banking. The head of the family in the early fifteenth century was Andrea de’ Pazzi who spent a sizable part of that fortune in commissioning Brunelleschi to build the Pazzi Chapel next to Santa Croce.³ His son, Piero, spent a good deal more of it on a fine library. But Piero’s brother, Jacopo, who succeeded him in 1464, was not so concerned to spend money as to conserve it.

Indeed, Jacopo was a tight-fisted old man, noted throughout Florence for his passion for gambling, and for losing his temper when he did not win. He thought the chances of a successful coup d’état were so slight that he was ‘colder than ice’ when his young relative, Francesco, apprised him of the plot being hatched in Rome. Besides, Guglielmo, one of his ten nephews, was Lorenzo’s brother-in-law, and he himself was on good terms with the Medici, even though Lorenzo’s rule threatened to continue to exclude his family from any real authority in the State. To be sure, like the rest of his family, he had been extremely annoyed when Lorenzo interfered in the matter of Giovanni Borromeo’s fortune. A Pazzi had married a daughter of this Borromeo and had naturally expected to inherit at least a good part of her family’s money; but when the father died a new law was passed – supposedly at the instigation of the Medici – which enabled his estate to pass to his nephews, who were known to be Medici supporters, rather than to his daughter and her husband, who were not. But Jacopo de’ Pazzi did not consider the Borromeo affair sufficient grounds for taking the inordinate risks involved in staging a coup d’état.

Supposing, however, that if he could produce evidence of strong military support the old man might yet be won over, Francesco de’ Pazzi now approached Gian Battista da Montesecco, a condottiere who had done good work in the past in the service of the Curia. Montesecco, a rough soldier not given to intrigue, was not immediately forthcoming. He explained that he was employed by the Pope and his nephew, Girolamo Riario, lord of Imola, and could do nothing without their blessing. Francesco reassured him that it was in the very interests of the Pope that he was acting; as for Girolamo Riario, he was a party to the plot; so was Francesco Salviati, Archbishop of Pisa. Montesecco was still not convinced, neither that day, nor on a later occasion when both Francesco de’ Pazzi and Salviati pressed their arguments upon him again, assuring him that Lorenzo had behaved abominably towards the Pope, that Girolamo Riario’s rule in Imola was ‘not worth a bean’ so long as Lorenzo lived, that the Medici rule was detested by the Florentines who would rise up in arms against their present rulers at the slightest encouragement.

‘My lords,’ said Montesecco dubiously, according to his own account, ‘beware of what you do. Florence is a big affair.’

‘We know the position of affairs in Florence a great deal better than you do,’ the Archbishop objected, evidently growing impatient with the stubborn soldier. ‘There is no more doubt that our plan will succeed than that we are all sitting here now. The first essential is to enlist the support of Messer Jacopo de’ Pazzi… When we have him the thing is done.’

Slowly Montesecco began to give ground, and finally agreed to join the conspirators provided the Pope gave them his blessing. So it was agreed that the Archbishop and Riario should take him to see Pope Sixtus.

At the subsequent audience the Pope confirmed to Montesecco that it was, indeed, his wish that ‘this matter of Florence’ should be taken immediately in hand.

‘But this matter, Holy Father, may turn out ill without the death of Lorenzo and Giuliano, and perhaps of others.’

‘I do not wish the death of anyone on any account since it does not accord with our office to consent to such a thing. Though Lorenzo is a villain, and behaves ill towards us, yet we do not on any account desire his death, but only a change in the government.’

‘All that we can do shall be done to see that Lorenzo does not the,’ Girolamo said. ‘But should he the, will Your Holiness pardon him who did it?’

‘You are an oaf. I tell you I do not want anyone killed, just a change in the government. And I repeat to you, Gian Battista, that I strongly desire this change and that Lorenzo, who is a villain and a furfante [a despicable rascal], does not esteem us. Once he is out of Florence we could do whatever we like with the Republic and that would be very pleasing to us.’

‘Your Holiness speaks true. Be content, therefore, that we shall do everything possible to bring this about.’

‘Go, and do what you wish, provided there be no killing.’

‘Holy Father, are you content that we steer this ship? And that we will steer it well?’ Salviati asked.

‘I am content.’

The Pope rose, assured them of ‘every assistance by way of men-at-arms or otherwise as might be necessary’, then dismissed them.

The three men left the room, as convinced as they were when they entered it that they would have to kill both Lorenzo and Giuliano if their plan were to succeed; and that the Pope, despite all that he had said to the contrary, would condone murder if murder were necessary.

Encouraged by the interview, Montesecco set about enlisting the military forces that would be required and left for the Romagna to discuss the tactics of the coup with various fellow condottieri in Tolentino, Imola and Città di Castello. He then rode across the Appenines to Florence to give Lorenzo assurances of Girolamo Riario’s friendship and good will.

Lorenzo was in mourning for one of Clarice’s relations when Montesecco arrived at Cafaggiolo; but he was amiable, talkative and attractive as ever. He spoke of Riario in the most friendly way; and Montesecco, captivated by his charm, began to regret the unpleasant task he had agreed to perform. Lorenzo accompanied him back to Florence where, in his room at the Albergo della Campagna, Montesecco had a visit from Jacopo de’ Pazzi for whom he had letters from both Riario and the Archbishop.

Jacopo was as gloomy, cross and pessimistic as ever. ‘They are going to break their necks,’ he told Montesecco. ‘I understand what is going on here better than they do. I do not want to listen to you. I do not want to hear any more about it.’

When he learned what Montesecco had to relate about the audience with the Pope, however, his mood gradually changed; and before long he was a whole-hearted, not to say enthusiastic, supporter of the plot, ready to take an active part in its development. He suggested that the best way of carrying out the assassinations would be to find some pretext for separating the two brothers, then to kill them both as far as possible simultaneously. For this purpose it was decided to invite Lorenzo to Rome and to assassinate him there while Giuliano was disposed of in Florence. But Lorenzo declined the invitation to Rome; so the conspirators had to conceive a plan for killing both brothers on their home ground, preferably when they were off their guard enjoying some entertainment.

An inducement for the Medici to give a suitable entertainment at which the murders could be done was to be provided by the arrival in the district of Raffaele Riario, the Pope’s seventeen-year-old great-nephew, who was studying at the University of Pisa and who had just been made a cardinal. He was to be invited to come to stay at Jacopo de’ Pazzi’s villa at Montughi near Florence from where he was to make his presence known by letter to Lorenzo, who was then staying with his brother at the Medici villa at Fiesole. An opportunity to kill both the Medici either by dagger or by poison would surely present itself, if not at Montughi then at Fiesole.

On receipt of the young cardinal’s letter, Lorenzo immediately invited him to Fiesole; and on the appointed day he rode over to Montughi with his son, Piero, and Poliziano, intending to accompany the cardinal and his suite back to Fiesole for a dinner party. Lorenzo apologized for his brother’s being unable to come with them: he had hurt his leg in an accident and had had to stay at home in bed, and would unfortunately not be able to come down to dinner. So the conspirators decided that they must change their plans, and wait until Giuliano was better again.

It was now arranged that the murders should take place in Florence. Cardinal Raffaele Riario had asked if he might see the treasures at the Medici Palace about which he had heard so much, and had suggested that the following Sunday would be a suitable day as he could combine his visit to the Palace with High Mass in the Cathedral. Lorenzo immediately agreed to this suggestion and made preparations for a banquet to be given in honour of his guest, issuing invitations to numerous distinguished Florentines as well as to the ambassadors of Milan, Venice, Naples and Ferrara. Meantime, his enemies laid their plans to kill him and his brother while they were at the banquet. But at the last moment the conspirators’ plans had to be changed once again: it was learned that Giuliano did not expect to be sufficiently recovered to attend the banquet after all. As well as from his injured leg he was now suffering from ‘an inflammation of the eyes’.

So many people had by now been apprised of the intended assassinations that it seemed to the Pazzi too dangerous to delay them any longer lest the secret leak out. Moreover, the troops whom Montesecco had arranged to have concentrated at various strategic points around the city would by dusk have arrived beneath the walls. If the Medici could not be killed together at the banquet, they would have to be dispatched in the Cathedral during Mass, an occasion which other assassins had found ideal. Giuliano could be stabbed by Francesco de’ Pazzi, assisted by Bernardo Bandini Baroncelli, an adventurer anxious to make some money quickly, having dissipated a fortune and being deeply in debt to the Pazzi with whom he had formerly been associated in business. At the same time Lorenzo could be cut down by Montesecco. But this idea was abhorrent to Montesecco. Before he had met Lorenzo he had succeeded in persuading himself that to kill him was all in the way of a soldier’s duty; but since he had first spoken to him, he had been growing increasingly disgusted with his appointed task. Now he saw an opportunity to escape it altogether by protesting that his conscience would not allow him to ‘add sacrilege to murder’; he could not bring himself to kill a man in cold blood in a place where ‘God would see him’. Fortunately for the conspirators less scrupulous assassins immediately presented themselves in the persons of two lean, embittered priests, Antonio Maffei, a Volterran who hated Lorenzo for the part he had played in suppressing the recent uprising in his native town, and Stefano da Bagnone, tutor to Jacopo de’ Pazzi’s illegitimate daughter. Being priests they could not be expected to be as reliable with a dagger as Montesecco, but there were two of them and if they caught Lorenzo unawares they should between them be able to deliver a mortal blow before he could defend himself.

It was settled that the time to strike at both brothers would be at the sounding of the sanctuary bell, presumably when it was rung at the elevation of the Host. This moment would be ideal, not only because the sound of the bell and the celebrant’s gesture would provide unmistakable signals which all the assassins would hear and see, but also because the eyes of the victims, and of the congregation generally, would be downcast in reverence when the first blows were struck. As soon as the murders had been committed, Archbishop Salviati and Jacopo di Poggio Bracciolini, the ambitious, extravagant, impoverished son of the humanist who had been Cosimo’s friend, together with a large party of armed supporters were to march upon the Palazzo della Signoria, seize the government and kill any of the Priori who might attempt to resist them.

Towards eleven o’clock on that Sunday morning, 26 April 1478, young Raffaele Riario rode into Florence from Montughi and dismounted in the cortile of the Medici Palace. He was taken upstairs to the apartments on the first floor which had been set aside for his use and there he changed into his cardinal’s vestments. When he was ready he went downstairs again where, at the foot of the staircase, he was met by Lorenzo who accompanied him to the Cathedral. On their way they were joined by Archbishop Salviati who did not, however, enter the building, excusing himself on the grounds that he had to go and see his mother who, so he said, was seriously ill. Lorenzo took the Cardinal up to the High Altar and left him there, walking across to a group of friends in the ambulatory. There were no chairs in the nave and the large congregation moved about freely.

Giuliano had not yet arrived, so Francesco de’ Pazzi and Baroncelli hurried back to the Medici Palace to fetch him. They discovered that he had decided not to go to Mass after all as his leg was still troubling him; but at length he was persuaded to change his mind, and he limped down the Via Larga towards the Cathedral. In the street Francesco de’ Pazzi threw his arm round him as though in playful affection, remarking that he seemed to have grown quite fat during his illness, squeezing his body to ensure that he wore no armour under his shirt. His fingers felt the unprotected flesh. He noticed also with relief that Giuliano wore no sword.

As they entered the Cathedral, Francesco de’ Pazzi and Baroncelli made for the northern side of the choir. Giuliano politely followed them. They stopped close to the door that leads out into the Via de’ Servi. Lorenzo was still standing in the ambulatory on the other side of the High Altar, beyond Ghiberti’s wooden screen which then separated it from the choir. His friend Poliziano was near him; so were four other friends, Filippo Strozzi, Antonio Ridolfi, Lorenzo Cavalcanti and Francesco Nori, formerly manager of the Medici bank in Lyons. The two priests, Maffei and Stefano, were immediately behind him.

At the sound of the sacristy bell, the priests snatched their daggers from their robes. Inexpertly, Maffei placed his hand on Lorenzo’s shoulder, as though to steady himself or to make sure of his aim. As Lorenzo turned, he felt the dagger’s point against his neck. Maffei lunged forward, and the tip of the dagger cut into the tensed flesh. Lorenzo leapt away, tearing off his cloak as he did so and wrapping it around his arm as a shield. He drew his sword, slashed at the two priests who, unnerved by his fast reaction, were beaten back without difficulty. Then he vaulted over the altar rail and dashed headlong for the new sacristy.

Giuliano’s mutilated body was already on the floor. At the sound of the sacristy bell he had dutifully lowered his head, and Baroncelli, crying out, ‘Take that, traitor!’, had brought his dagger down in a ferocious blow that almost split his skull in two. Francesco de’ Pazzi thereupon stabbed him with such frenzy, plunging the blade time and again into the unresisting body, that he even drove the point of the dagger through his own thigh. Giuliano fell to his knees while his two assailants continued to rain savage blows upon him, slashing and stabbing until the corpse was rent by nineteen wounds.

As Giuliano’s blood poured over the floor, Baroncelli leapt over the body and made for the new sacristy, striking down Francesco Nori whom he killed with a single blow, and wounding Lorenzo Cavalcanti in the arm. But before he could reach the heavy bronze doors of the sacristy Lorenzo had dashed through them, and Poliziano with some other of his friends, had managed to get them shut. ‘Giuliano? Is he safe?’ Lorenzo kept asking; but no one answered him. While Antonio Ridolfi sucked the wound in Lorenzo’s neck, in case the priests’ daggers had been poisoned, another friend, Sigismondo della Stufa, who had escaped with them into the sacristy, clambered up the ladder into della Robbia’s choir loft to look down into the Cathedral.

The congregation was in uproar. People were shouting that the dome had fallen in. Lorenzo’s brother-in-law, Guglielmo de’ Pazzi was loudly proclaiming his innocence. Giuliano still lay where he had fallen. Raffaele Riario stood transfixed, as though in shocked dismay, by the High Altar. The two priests who had attacked Lorenzo, together with Giuliano’s assassins, had all apparently escaped. Lorenzo was bustled away by his friends to the Medici Palace.

Meanwhile Archbishop Salviati and the other conspirators had gone as planned to the Palazzo della Signoria with their armed supporters, most of them villainous-looking mercenaries from Perugia disguised as his suite. Salviati informed the Gonfaloniere, Cesare Petrucci, that he had an urgent message for him from the Pope. Petrucci, who was in the middle of dinner, gave orders for the Archbishop and his attendants to be admitted. Salviati himself was shown into a reception room, while the Perugians were placed in nearby offices, the doors of which were closed behind them. The Archbishop’s other companions, including Jacopo di Poggio Bracciolini, were left outside in the corridor.

Having completed his dinner, Petrucci came out to receive Salviati who by now was so nervous he was trembling. The Archbishop delivered what he claimed to be the Pope’s message in a thick and mumbling voice, almost incoherently, changing colour alarmingly, and glancing round from time to time at the door. Petrucci, having listened to him for a few moments only, called out the guard, whereupon Salviati rushed from the room, shouting to his own men that the moment to strike had come. The response to his cries, however, were muffled shouts and hangings; for, on assuming office as Gonfaloniere, Petrucci had had the rooms of the Palazzo della Signoria fitted with special catches which could not be operated from the inside. The Perugians were, for the moment, effectively imprisoned.

As they hammered on the doors, Jacopo do Poggio Bracciolini rushed at the Gonfaloniere who caught him by the hair and threw him to the ground. Then, shouting for the Priori to follow him and for the Vacca to be tolled, the strong and energetic Gonfaloniere snatched up an iron cooking-spit as the nearest weapon to hand and rushed at the Archbishop and his companions who were quickly beaten to the ground. The notes of the great bell were by then booming through the city as the people poured into the Piazza. Members of the Pazzi family and small groups of their supporters rode up and down through the streets shouting, ‘Libertà Libertà! Popolo e Libertà! Abasso i Medici! Abasso le pallet Libertà! Libertà!’ But although some of the people in the crowd joined in these shouts, most of them responded insistently with,’ Vivano le palle! Vivano le palle! Palle! Palle! Palle!’

A group of about fifty armed Medici supporters burst into the Palazzo della Signoria, and, joined by the palace guard, attacked the Perugians. Having killed them all, they rushed out into the Piazza again, bearing the dripping heads of their victims on the ends of lances and swords. News of Giuliano’s murder had by now reached the Palace where immediately a rope was tied round Jacopo di Poggio’s neck, the other end was fixed to a transom and his body was hurled from a window. Archbishop Salviati was treated in the same way. So, too, was Francesco de’ Pazzi who, still bleeding profusely from the thigh, had been dragged from his hiding place in the family palace and stripped naked. Two of the Archbishop’s companions were strangled, and their bodies also hurled out. All five bodies were left dangling above the heads of the surging mob in the Piazza, twisting and swaying in the shadows beneath the machicolations of the northern wall. Poliziano, who was in the Piazza at the time, recorded the gruesome fact that as the Archbishop rolled and struggled at the end of his rope, his eyes goggling in his head, he fixed his teeth into Francesco de’ Pazzi’s naked body.

Following the fierce lead of the executioners in the Palazzo della Signoria, hundreds of people now ran through the streets, seeking out other conspirators or any unpopular citizen who could conveniently be charged with complicity in the plot. They swarmed beneath the windows of the Medici Palace, demanding to see Lorenzo who appeared before them, his neck in bandages, his brocade waistcoat covered with blood, to assure them that he was only slightly injured and to beg them not to wreak vengeance on those whom they merely suspected of murder. He urged them to save their energy to resist the enemies of the State who had engineered the conspiracy, and who would now undoubtedly attack the city that had thwarted it.

If the people cheered his words, they did not heed them. They attacked the conspirators, and those whom they chose to accuse of conspiracy, killing some, mutilating others, and dragging their remains through the streets. For several days the rioting continued, country people pouring into the city to see what pleasures or rewards were to be had, until some eighty people had been killed.

Few of those involved in the attempted coup escaped punishment. The young cardinal, Raffaele Riario, who had stood as though stunned by the High Altar during the uproar in the Cathedral until led to a safe place inside the old sacristy, was rescued by Lorenzo who sent some of his servants to bring him back to the Medici Palace. After the rioting was over, Lorenzo had him escorted in disguise to Rome where, to the end of his days, so it was said, his face never lost the pallor which the ghastly events he had witnessed had imposed upon it. Raffaele Maffei, a brother of the priest who had tried to murder Lorenzo, and Averardo Salviati, a relative of the Archbishop, were also saved from the mob through Lorenzo’s intervention. But with the one exception of a certain Napoleone Francesi, whose complicity in the plot was in any case by no means clear, not one of the known conspirators escaped either public or private vengeance. Jacopo de’ Pazzi, so overcome by despair at the failure of the plot that he boxed his own ears and threw himself to the floor in despair and rage, managed to escape from the city to the village of Castagno; but the villagers recognized him and brought him back to Florence where, after being tortured, he was stripped naked and strung from a window of the Palazzo della Signoria next to the Archbishop. Later, he was buried in Santa Croce; but the people, blaming the subsequent heavy rains upon his evil spirit, dug up the body and threw it into a ditch in an apple orchard. From here also it was later removed, to be dragged through the streets by a mob shouting, ‘Make way for the great knight!’ It was then propped against the door of the Pazzi Palace where, to the accompaniment of obscene jokes and cries of ‘Open! Your master wishes to enter!’ its decomposing head was used as a knocker. Eventually, the putrid corpse was thrown into the Arno from which it was fished by a gang of children who strung it up on the branch of a willow tree, flogged it and tossed it back into the water again.

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 THE SAVIOUR OF FLORENCE

ON 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.’

Three days later the Ferrarese ambassador in Florence wrote home to tell the Duke that Clarice de’ Medici was dead. He had not bothered to send the news before, he said, because he did not think it of much importance.

As Lorenzo had feared, the failure of the Pazzi conspiracy and the Florentines’ fierce reprisals against those who had been involved in it aroused the utmost fury in Rome. Followed by three hundred halberdiers, Girolamo Riario stormed off to the house of the Florentine ambassador, Donato Acciaiuoli, arrested him and would have thrown him into the dungeons of Sant’ Angelo had not the Venetian and Milanese ambassadors strongly protested against this outrage of diplomatic immunity. Deprived of that chosen victim, Riario vehemently urged his uncle to use all the means at his disposal to avenge himself upon the Florentines in general and upon the Medici family in particular. The Pope, as angry as his nephew, needed little persuasion. He ordered the arrest of all the principal Florentine bankers and merchants in Rome, though he was compelled to release them when reminded that Cardinal Raffaele Riario was still held in Florence. He sequestrated the assets of the Medici bank and all Medici property he could lay his hands on; he repudiated the debts of the Apostolic Chamber to the bank; he dispatched a nuncio from Rome to demand that Lorenzo should be handed over to papal justice, and issued an enormously lengthy Bull of Excommunication against ‘that son of iniquity and foster-child of perdition, Lorenzo dei Medici, and those other citizens of Florence, his accomplices and abettors’. These accomplices were deemed to include the Gonfaloniere and the entire Signoria, all the members of which were ‘pronounced culpable, sacrilegious, excommunicate, anathematised, infamous, unworthy of trust and incapable of making a will’. ‘All their property is to revert to the Church,’ the document continued; ‘their houses are to be levelled to the ground, their habitations made desolate so that none may dwell therein. Let everlasting ruin witness their everlasting disgrace.’ If these sentences and punishments were not carried out within two months, the whole city of Florence was to be laid under interdict together with all its dependencies. Not content with this, the Pope declared war upon Florence and had no difficulty in persuading King Ferrante of Naples to do the same.

Eager to extend the dominion of the House of Aragon over Tuscany, King Ferrante’s son, Alfonso, Duke of Calabria, promptly marched across the frontier and, having taken possession of the territory round Montepulciano, sent an envoy to Florence with grim warnings of the city’s imminent destruction together with another fierce message from the Pope couched in even more virulent terms than the Bull of Excommunication.

To these and subsequent threats the Signoria issued defiant replies:

You say that Lorenzo is a tyrant and command us to expel him. But most Florentines call him their defender… Remember your high office as the Vicar of Christ. Remember that the Keys of St Peter were not given to you to abuse in such a way… Florence will resolutely defend her liberties, trusting in Christ who knows the justice of her cause, and who does not desert those who believe in Him; trusting in her allies who regard her cause as their own; especially trusting in the most Christian King, Louis of France, who has ever been the patron and protector of the Florentine State.

Despite these protestations of trust, the Florentines had little cause to hope for much help from their allies. Admittedly, the French King had written a friendly letter of sympathy to Lorenzo and a protest to the Pope against his treatment of him; he had made vague threats of another General Council and of a renewal of Angevin claims to Naples; he had sent Philippe de Commines as a special envoy to Italy. But as Commines himself said, the citizens were, in fact, offered little more than sympathy: ‘Louis’s favourable inclination towards the Florentines was in some measure useful to them, but not so much as I wished, for I had no army with which to support them beyond my own retinue.’

In earlier years Florence might have expected military help from Milan; but ever since the murder of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, the feud between the widowed Duchess, guardian of their young son, Gian Galeazzo, and her brothers-in-law, his uncles, had prevented Milan from playing any effective part in Italian politics. A Milanese force under Gian Giacomo Trivulzio was eventually sent to Florence’s help, but it was not large enough to be effective. Nor were the mercenary forces dispatched by the Medici’s Orsini relatives in Rome; nor yet was the Bolognese force which was provided by Giovanni Bentivoglio, whom Lorenzo had visited years before as his father’s representative and with whom he had ever since remained on terms of the closest friendship. Indeed, when all these disparate troops were placed under the overall command of Ercole d’Este, the tall, handsome, cunning and cautious Duke of Ferrara, there were few people – and the Duke himself was evidently not one of them – who believed that the Florentines could possibly withstand the onslaught which the Neapolitan army, advancing up the Chiana valley, was threatening to launch against them.

The Duke of Calabria’s troops were not the only threat to Florence. By now, the Pope had induced Siena and Lucca to join forces with him and had entrusted the command of his own army to that formidable soldier, Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino. Philippe de Commines, having seen the troops in the papal camp and compared them with the motley array that their enemies had so far assembled, was forced to conclude that the independence of the Florentine Republic was soon to be ended.

The Florentines themselves, far more optimistic than Commines, continued to reject all the demands the Pope made of them. The Tuscan bishops, reacting defiantly to the Bull of Excommunication, had unanimously decided at a meeting in the Cathedral in Florence that the actions which the Signoria had so far taken were completely justified. And, in accordance with this decision, they issued their own decree excommunicating the Pope. Copies of the excommunication were printed on the press set up in Florence the year before by Bernardo Cennini, and distributed throughout Europe under the imposing title, Contrascommunica del clero Fiorentino fulminate contro il summo Pontifice Sisto IV. Their attitude was wholeheartedly supported by their clergy, by their congregations and by Lorenzo himself.

By this time Lorenzo had established himself as the undisputed leader of the Florentine cause. He had called a meeting of the leading citizens and in his high-pitched, nasal voice had dramatically assured them that as he was himself the cause of the Pope’s campaign against Florence he was willing to sacrifice himself and even his family if they thought that the exile or death of the Medici would prove the salvation of the city. Replying on their behalf, Jacopo dei Alessandri told him that it was their unanimous determination to stand by him to the end. They appointed a guard of twelve men to be responsible for his personal safety and elected him one of the Ten of War, the emergency committee set up to direct the campaign for the city’s defence.

That this campaign did not end in the disaster for Florence which Commines expected was due far more to good fortune and to the peculiar traditions of fifteenth-century Italian warfare than to any notable competence in either the Florentine army or in its commander, the Duke of Ferrara, who appeared unwilling to test his strength against the Duke of Calabria, a skilful soldier who also happened to be his brother-in-law. Always careful to keep a good two days’ march away from the enemy, the Duke of Ferrara took three weeks to cover the fifty miles between Pisa and Sarzana. When urged by the Florentines to move his men more quickly, he ridiculed such exhortation from ‘mere mechanics who [knew] nothing of war’. ‘The system of our Italian soldiers is this,’ commented the Florentine apothecary, Luca Landucci. ‘You turn your attention to plundering in that direction, and we will do the same in this. Getting too near each other is not our game.’ By November 1478, no decisive battle having yet been fought, both armies retreated to their winter quarters.

The next year was less favourable for Florence. First of all, the uncles of the young Duke Gian Galleazo Sforza, worsted in their efforts to gain power in Milan, had gone to Naples where King Ferrante incited them to go back north with an army and seize the Duchy by force. The return of her brothers-in-law to Lombardy so alarmed the Duchess that she recalled the Milanese contingent from the defence of Florence to help defend her own government in Milan.

The Duchess was particularly alarmed by the return of Lodovico Sforza, known as il Moro, the Moor, because one of his Christian names was Mauro and he had a very dark skin. He was a rather effeminate-looking man with an extremely small mouth and neatly curled hair. He was vain, boastful and cowardly; yet he was undoubtedly clever. A bad judge of men, he knew a great deal about art and literature. He was cynical and amoral, but he was courteous and considerate. He had a definite talent for administration and diplomacy, and a remarkable memory. He was a man to be reckoned with.

By September he had come to terms with the Duchess, had established himself in power in Milan, and had made up his mind that the Florentine Republic, on the verge of collapse, was no longer a suitable ally for his Duchy. At the same time the Duke of Calabria’s forces, rampaging about in the Val d’Elsa, captured the fortress of Poggio Imperiale and would have attacked Florence itself had not the small town of Colle, less than thirty miles south of Florence, offered so determined a resistance that he was held up there for two months. When at last Colle fell on 14 November – after the Duke’s mortars, so Luca Landucci recorded in his diary, had been’ fired at it a thousand and twenty four times’ – the winter was too far advanced for the Neapolitan army to continue its operations in the Val d’Elsa and the Duke of Calabria took his men away once more to hibernate in Siena. But though they had been given another breathing-space, the Florentines’ situation was now more desperate than ever. The various condottieri in their service were perpetually quarrelling with each other; the Duke of Ferrara had wandered off in the wake of the Sforzas; gangs of brigands, pretending to be enemy raiding-parties, plundered the Tuscan countryside; plague had broken out in Florence; and its citizens were beginning to grumble about the heavy taxes which the war had forced the emergency committee to introduce. Moreover, the Florentine economy was in decline, partly due to the virtual cessation of imports of wool from England where manufacturers were now making their own cloth; while hundreds of workers were locked out of their factories by merchants with no work for them to do. Well aware that the Republic could not survive another season’s campaigning and that his allies supported the general wish for peace, Lorenzo now took what appeared to the Florentines as an extraordinary and courageous decision: he made up his mind to go to Naples and to present himself at his enemy’s court. Leaving the city in the care of the recently elected Gonfaloniere, Tommaso Soderini, he rode away to the sea. Before embarking he wrote to the Signoria from the town of San Miniato Tedesco on the road to Pisa:

In the dangerous circumstances in which our city is placed, the time for deliberation is past. Action must be taken… I have decided, with your approval, to sail for Naples immediately, believing that as I am the person against whom the activities of our enemies are chiefly directed, I may, perhaps, by delivering myself into their hands, be the means of restoring peace to our fellow-citizens… As I have had more honour and responsibility among you than any private citizen has had in our day, I am more bound than any other person to serve our country, even at the risk of my life. With this intention I now go. Perhaps God wills that this war, which began in the blood of my brother and of myself, should be ended by my means. My desire is that by my life or my death, my misfortune or my prosperity, I may contribute to the welfare of our city… I go full of hope, praying to God to give me grace to perform what every citizen should at all times be ready to perform for his country. I commend myself humbly to your Excellencies of the Signoria. Laurentius de Medici.

When this emotional letter was read out to the Signoria, not a single one of the Priori, according to Filippo Valori, was able to restrain his tears. Profoundly distrusting King Ferrante, who was reported to preserve the bodies of his enemies embalmed in a private museum, they thought that they might never see Lorenzo again. Yet it was recognized that his offer of personal sacrifice was a gesture, perhaps the only gesture, that might save the Republic. The Signoria, therefore, gave Lorenzo their blessing, nominated him ambassador to Naples and wished him every success. The day after he received their reply he sailed from Vada, arriving in Naples just before Christmas 1479. He was twenty-nine years old.

Standing on the quay to meet him was King Ferrante’s second son, Federigo, whom Lorenzo had met and grown to like as a boy. They greeted each other warmly. Lorenzo was welcomed with equal warmth by the Duke of Calabria’s clever wife, Ippolita Sforza, whom he had also known well for years; and by Diomede Carafa, one of King Ferrante’s principal advisers, an elderly author, connoisseur and collector of antiques for whom Lorenzo had done many favours in the past, by helping and entertaining his friends when they visited Florence, and to whom he had presented an exquisite bronze head of a horse which was one of the finest Roman antiquities in Carafa’s collection. Indeed, it soon became clear to Lorenzo’s suite that his mission was far less foolhardy than it had seemed and far less dramatic than he had been astute enough to present it in his letter to the Signoria.

Before writing that letter, he had for long been in secret communication with the Neapolitan court and had assured himself that his arrival there would not be unwelcome. The ship in which he had sailed, in fact, had been sent from Naples to fetch him. He knew that the Duke of Calabria, whose troops now controlled large tracts of land in southern Tuscany, was opposed to any peace settlement that did not recognize his conquests; but Lorenzo also knew that King Ferrante was extremely apprehensive about the King of France’s continued threats of renewing Angevin claims to the throne of Naples and about the intentions of the Turks whose squadrons were sailing threateningly up and down the Italian shores of the southern Adriatic.

King Ferrante was not, however, a man with whom it was easy to come to terms. Shrewd and with much political ability, he was at the same time hard, vindictive and dissimulating. A sallow-faced man inclined to fat and to periods of moody silence, it was impossible to tell, so Commines commented, what he was really like or what he was thinking: ‘no man knew when he was angry or pleased’. But he shared Lorenzo’s love of country life, of falconry and hunting; he shared his taste for poetry, for the new learning and for the distant past. During his long talks with Ferrante, Lorenzo frequently alluded to those rulers in classical times who had achieved greatness by being men of peace, rather than of war, and to the ideal of a united Italy. In more practical terms, he argued that, although the Pope had been cultivating Naples of late, though he had created Ferrante’s son, Giovanni, a cardinal, though his nephew had given a banquet of unparalleled magnificence for Ferrante’s daughter, though he had waived the customary annual tribute due from Naples to the Pope, the Papacy could never prove so useful a friend to Naples as could Florence. Sixtus was merely trying to use Naples for his own selfish purposes.

But Ferrante seemed unconvinced; the talks dragged on; and Lorenzo grew more and more depressed, walking gloomily round the gardens of the Duchess of Calabria’s seaside villa. ‘He seemed to be two men, not one,’ an official in his suite commented.

During the day he appeared perfectly easy, graceful, cheerful and confident, but at night he grieved bitterly about his own ill fortune and that of Florence, saying repeatedly that he did not care a fig for his own life but that it distressed him beyond measure that he could not save his country from the dangers which beset her.

While doing his best to convince Ferrante by his arguments, Lorenzo succeeded in impressing the Neapolitans by his generosity. He had raised sixty thousand florins for his journey by mortgaging Cafaggiolo and his lands in the Mugello; and immediately upon his arrival he had bought the freedom of a hundred galley slaves to each of whom he had presented ten florins and a suit of smart clothes. He followed this up by providing handsome dowries for several poor girls and by donating generous sums to numerous charities. Valori said that he remembered hearing from Paolo Antonio Soderini the total amount that Lorenzo spent during his visit to Naples, but he dared not write so huge a figure down.

Yet still Ferrante declined to come to terms. Eventually, after nearly ten weeks in Naples, Lorenzo was driven to bring matters to a head by declaring that he was unable to wait any longer, that urgent matters required his immediate return to Florence. After hurried farewells, he rode out of the city and headed north. With equal haste, King Ferrante drew up a peace treaty and sent it after him.

The war was finally over. The terms of the peace were not very favourable to Florence. She had to agree to the payment of an indemnity to the Duke of Calabria and, at the Pope’s insistence, to the release of the still imprisoned members of the Pazzi family; she had also to agree to various places in southern Tuscany remaining in alien hands. But at least peace had been secured; the Pope’s ambitions had been thwarted; and Florence and Naples were friends and allies once more.

XII THE NEEDLE OF THE ITALIAN COMPASS

IN MARCH 1480 Lorenzo returned to Florence to be greeted by even greater enthusiasm than had welcomed his grandfather on his return from exile in 1434. During the war repeated efforts had been made to ruin him. The Riario family had continued to plot his destruction, and Girolamo Riario had twice attempted to have him assassinated. Now, though there were complaints about the large indemnity that had to be paid to the Duke of Calabria, his position in Florence was virtually unassailable. And he made the most of his opportunity to strengthen it.

Up till then, as the Milanese ambassador put it, he had been ‘determined to follow his grandfather’s example and use, as much as possible, constitutional methods’ in preserving his ascendancy. Indeed, he was still determined to do nothing that would antagonize the Florentines’ susceptibilities. But his long absence in Naples had placed the Medicean regime under dangerous strain, and he considered it essential to provide it with a firmer base, to carry it to a further stage in its development Less than a month after his return from Naples, the need to overcome the financial problems created by the war was given as an excuse to create a new Balìa. The Balìa immediately created a Council of Seventy whose members were to remain in office for five years. This new Council was to take over from the Accoppiatori the right to elect the Signoria, which was not in future to be permitted to initiate any important bills. The Council of Seventy was also empowered to elect from among its own members two new government agencies, the Otto di Pratica, which was to be responsible for foreign policy, and the Dodici Procuratori which was to have control of home affairs and finance. The authority of both the Signoria and the Cento was thus severely limited; and the Council of Seventy became, in effect, the government of Florence.

It was a government that even now Lorenzo did not fully control. Poliziano referred to him as Florence’s caput; others would have liked to bestow upon him his grandfather’s title of Pater Patriae. But the Council of Seventy, jealously guarding its independent authority, was not always willing to carry out his wishes. As he was to have cause to explain to some foreign envoys who failed to understand why he could not commit the State to a certain policy, he was ‘not Signore of Florence but merely a citizen’. He had more authority than he deserved, he admitted, but even he ‘had to be patient and to conform to the will of the majority’. Of course it often suited him for men to suppose that his influence was far less effective than it was. This enabled him not only to avoid granting inconvenient or expensive favours to friends – as his grandfather had done when asked to contribute to Pope Calixtus III’s crusade – but also to disprove the charges of such enemies of his regime as Alamanno di Filippo Rinuccini that he was a dictator. In fact, his influence was extensive, persuasive and usually decisive. When he made it known to a council or an official what he wanted done, his wishes were normally carried out; when he suggested that a man should be elected to a certain office, the required election generally took place. He may never have held any official title as Capo della Repubblica, but when, after his death, an official document styled him vir primarius nostrae civitatis, no one could deny that he was, indeed, the first citizen of Florence. His enemies, of course, had no hesitation in labelling him a tyrant; but, as Francesco Guicciardini admitted, ‘if Florence was to have a tyrant she could never have found a better or more delightful one’. This was a view which was certainly shared by most people in the city, particularly the poorer people. To them it did not matter whether he was a tyrant or not. Under his rule they had food, they had exciting public holidays and they had justice – or most of them had justice: ‘On the fifteenth day of October 1480,’ wrote Landucci in his diary of one poor fellow to whom justice was denied,

the said hermit [who was alleged to have attempted the assassination of Lorenzo] died in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova because he was quite torn to pieces by various tortures. They said the soles were stripped from his feet, which were then put over the fire, and held over the logs till the fat ran. Then they stood him up and made him walk over coarse-crusted salt, so that he died of this. It was never really established whether he had sinned or not. Some said yes, and some said no.

Yet if Lorenzo’s position in Florence was now secure, the fortunes of the Medici bank were fast declining. Lorenzo had none of his grandfather’s taste or talent for business; he gave far too much scope to his branch managers and relied far too heavily upon the often ill-judged advice of his temporizing, ingratiating general manager, Francesco Sassetti. When other advisers warned him against Sassetti’s policies he would brush their counsel aside while confessing that he ‘did not understand such matters’. Mismanagement and excessive loans to King Edward IV during the Wars of the Roses put an end to the London branch; the Bruges branch also collapsed; so did the branch in Milan, where the premises which Francesco Sforza had given to Cosimo were sold to Lodovico il Moro. The branches in Lyons, Rome and Naples were all in difficulties, the result partly of managerial incompetence, partly of that general collapse in Florentine banking which was within twelve years to lead to its virtual eclipse.

Even before the Pazzi conspiracy, which had aimed not merely at bringing down the Medicean regime but also at destroying the Medici bank, the whole complex organization was tottering on the verge of bankruptcy. Indeed, it was mainly because he felt sure it would soon go bankrupt anyway, and that Lorenzo would tumble with it, that Renato de’ Pazzi had declined to play a part in the plot. Now that the plot had failed, Lorenzo still faced financial ruin. Refusing as always to allow moral scruples to inhibit political or personal ambition, he did not hesitate to delay that ruin by dipping his hands into funds that did not belong to him. He helped himself to over 55,000 florins which was being held in trust for his two young cousins, the sons of Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, whose guardian he had been appointed; and when these boys came of age in 1485 he could not pay them back. He was obliged to make over to them the villa of Cafaggiolo and other property in the Mugello, though they claimed that this did not fully compensate them for their loss. Lorenzo also helped himself to money from the public treasury. After his death his heirs were held responsible for the return of almost 75,000 florins which had been withdrawn ‘without the sanction of any law and without authority, to the damage and prejudice of the Commune’.

Beset by financial worries, he was also troubled on his return to Florence by the continuing insecurity of the frontiers of the Republic. In his absence the Genoese had captured the fortress of Sarzana. Since then, Girolamo Riario had extended his possessions in the Romagna towards the borders of Tuscany; while the Duke of Calabria had taken advantage of an uprising in Siena to establish himself as its ruler. Worst of all, the Pope’s venomous dislike of Lorenzo had been much increased by his having come to terms with Naples, an arrangement which prompted the Pope’s other allies to forsake him. The Pope could not carry on the war by himself, yet he steadfastly refused to remove the interdict or to withdraw the Bull of Excommunication.

But then, in August 1480 – so conveniently for Lorenzo that it was afterwards suggested that it was he who had arranged the timing of the attack – a Turkish army of seven thousand men landed at Otranto and, having established a strong bridgehead in the heel of Italy, threatened to march across to Naples and from there north to Rome. This fearful calamity, dreaded for so long, brought the Duke of Calabria scurrying south from Siena, induced King Ferrante to hand back to Florence the towns that Neapolitan troops were still occupying in Tuscany, and persuaded the Pope that, with all Christendom in peril, this was no time for the Italian states to be quarrelling amongst themselves. So it was agreed that a deputation comprising members of leading Florentine families would go to Rome, make vague apologies for the city’s misbehaviour and, in return, receive His Holiness’s forgiveness. The deputation arrived in Rome on 3 December and in St Peter’s knelt before the Pope, who received them sitting on a canopied throne which had been specially erected in the nave for the occasion. Luigi Guicciardini, as leader of the deputation, mumbled their apology which could not be heard above the chatter of the onlookers. The Pope made a similarly inaudible speech of reproof, tapped them in turn on the shoulder with a penitent’s staff, formally lifted his interdict, then gave them his blessing. The ambassadors, having promised to supply and equip fifteen galleys for service against the Turks, returned to Florence to report to Lorenzo that all had gone as planned. A few months later the Sultan, Mahomet the Conqueror, died suddenly at Gebze. His forces at Otranto were brought home, and peace in Italy seemed assured.

It was a peace that throughout the last ten years of his life Lorenzo did his utmost to maintain, endeavouring to thwart the Pope’s attempts to embroil Italy in petty conflicts that might be turned to the advantage of his greedy family, and to create a united Italy powerful enough not only to keep the Turks at bay but also to frustrate the designs in Italy of France, Spain and the Empire. It was a policy which required patience and the most expert diplomacy, and was made all the more difficult to achieve by Girolamo Riario’s unsatisfied ambitions to extend his dominions beyond the borders of the Romagna. Twice war broke out; and twice Lorenzo’s personal intervention brought peace. On the second occasion, in August 1484, when the Pope’s representative returned to Rome to report that the terms of the peace treaty denied his nephew the towns of Cervia and Ravenna for which the war had been fought, Sixtus, already excessively ill-tempered because of his gout, was at first so angry that he could not speak. Then he burst out furiously that he would never countenance such humiliating terms. The next day he collapsed, and within a few hours was dead.

His successor, Innocent VIII, was a far more easy-going and genial man, willing enough to advance his children, whom he complacently acknowledged as his own, but without that obsessive ambition which had dominated the policies of Sixtus IV. One of Lorenzo’s agents referred to him as ‘a rabbit’, and there was certainly something undeniably rabbity about the slant of his rather doleful eyes and in his unassertive manner. Lorenzo, who had followed the course of the election with the greatest interest, had good cause to hope that in due course he might be able to exercise over him a profitable influence. For the moment, however, Innocent’s chief adviser was a rough and bellicose cardinal, Sixtus IV’s nephew, Giuliano della Rovere, whose influence in the Sacred College had been largely responsible for Pope Innocent’s election. But, having pushed the Papacy into a costly and unrewarding war with Naples, the Cardinal began to lose favour. He was further discredited when a certain freebooter, Boccolino Guzzoni, made himself master of Osimo, a small town in the Papal States south of Ancona. The Cardinal was sent as Legate to drive Guzzoni out of the town. He failed to do so, and Lorenzo astutely took advantage of his discomfiture by buying Guzzoni off for a fraction of the cost of the ill-fated military expedition.

Lorenzo lost no opportunity of increasing the respect which Pope Innocent now felt for him and of gaining his friendship, if possible his affection. He took the trouble to discover the Pope’s tastes and indulged them accordingly. He sent him regular consignments of ortolans; he sent him casks of his favourite wine; he sent him presents of fine Florentine cloth. He sent him courteous, flattering letters in which he assured him, when die Pope was ill, that he felt his sufferings as though they were his own, in which he encouraged him with such fortifying statements as ‘a Pope is what he wills to be’, and in which, as though incidentally, he included his views on the proper course of papal policies. Innocent was gratified by Lorenzo’s attentions and convinced by his arguments; he recognized in Lorenzo a man whom he could trust. So completely, indeed, did he come to share his opinions that, as the disgruntled Ferrarese ambassador put it, ‘the Pope sleeps with the eyes of the Magnificent Lorenzo’. The Florentine ambassador at Naples knew that this was so. ‘It is recognized perfectly well all over Italy,’ he assured Lorenzo,’ what influence you have with the Pope and that the Florentine ambassador quodammodo governs the policies of Rome.’

This influence was much increased after 1488 when Lorenzo’s daughter, Maddalena, was married to one of the several sons which the Pope had had before his entry into the Church, Franceschetto Cibò. The bridegroom was almost forty, a portly, boring man, who drank too much and was reputed never to have made a single interesting remark in his entire life; and Maddalena, a rather plain, sharp-featured, round-shouldered girl of sixteen, did not look forward to the match with relish. Nor did her mother, who was so devoted to her that Lorenzo referred to the girl as her mother’s occhio del capo – the eye within her head. But Maddalena was a dutiful child, and her mother was a dutiful wife: marriages were thus arranged in families such as theirs; besides, dull, sottish and addicted to gambling though he was, Franceschetto was said to be kind; and Lorenzo was generous. Since he was at the time in the midst of one of his recurrent financial crises, he found it difficult to pay Maddalena’s dowry of four thousand ducats, there being, as he admitted to the Florentine ambassador in Rome, so many other ‘holes to fill up’. But he did contrive to raise the money in the end. He also gave Franceschetto the Pazzi palace in Florence as well as the Pazzi villa at Montughi, and a fine estate at Spedaletto near Arezzo.

The Pope was delighted. Lorenzo’s hold on him was confirmed and tightened, and it was now accepted throughout Europe that the policies of the Curia were in future to be directed by Florence, that, as in the time of Cosimo, a Medici was once again to be the virtual arbiter of Italian policy. European rulers sought his advice; Muslim potentates sent him lavish presents. Time and again he intervened to save the peace of Italy, restraining the Pope from venting his obstinate anti-Aragonese prejudices by attacking Naples, maintaining the precarious balance of power in the peninsula by coming forward to preserve the independence of smaller states. It is clear now that Lorenzo’s reputation as a master of diplomacy was largely undeserved, that he was often rash and short-sighted, taking great risks for trivial gains, that Italy was not plunged into a general war rather by good luck than by good management and that foreign intervention would certainly have come earlier than it did had it suited the foreigners themselves. Yet in his own lifetime Lorenzo’s high standing as a statesman was rarely questioned: he was ‘the needle of the Italian compass’. In Florence he won immensely enhanced credit by finding plausible excuses to relieve the Genoese of the city of Pietrasanta and to retake from them the fortress of Sarzana, thus finally atoning for the humiliations suffered during the course of the War of the Pazzi Conspiracy. At both Pietrasanta and at Sarzana, though little-disposed to such activity, he appeared amongst the soldiers on the battlefield, encouraging them in the fight and supervising their entry through the breaches in the shattered walls.

After his triumphant return from Sarzana, the ‘Republic of Florence’, as Scipio Ammirato said, remained free of all troubles, to the great reputation of Lorenzo. The Italian princes also enjoyed peace, so that, with everything quiet beyond her frontiers and with no disturbances at home, Florence altogether gave herself up to the arts and pleasures of peace, seeking to attract thither men of letters, to accumulate books, to adorn the city, to make the countryside fruitful. In short she devoted herself to all those arts and pursuits which caused men to esteem that age so happy.

XIII LORENZO: PATRON, COLLECTOR AND POET

MORE THAN once during these years when he was repeatedly called upon to compose some tiresome quarrel between one Italian state and the next, Lorenzo was heard to observe that he longed for the opportunity of burying himself in some remote part of Tuscany where not even a rumour of the troubled affairs of the outside world could reach him. He longed to be able to spend more time with his friends, with that brilliant circle of scholars, writers and artists who gathered when they could at one or other of his country villas – at Fiesole, or at Careggi where every year on 7 November a banquet was given in honour of Plato’s birth; at Poggio a Caiano, twelve miles north-west of Florence where an old villa was transformed by Giuliano da Sangallo;¹ or at the remote, fortress-like villa of Cafaggiolo in the valley of the Mugello on the road to Pistoia. Though occasionally overcast by petty quarrels and outbursts of jealous pique among the members of his court, life at these villas was usually delightful and informal. At meal times guests sat down wherever they chose. They might find themselves next to Lorenzo himself, or his dearest friend, Angelo Poliziano, or to another poet, the amusing, sardonic Luigi Puld, known to their host as ‘Gigi’, or to Giovanni Pico, Count of Mirandola and Concordia, the clever, earnest aristocrat whose influential works, one of which was dedicated to Lorenzo, had been so strongly condemned by the Church. They might meet the entertaining bookseller, Vespasiano da Bisticci; or Marsilio Ficino, who dedicated his Theologica platonica to Lorenzo; or Gentile Becchi, Lorenzo’s former tutor, now Bishop of Arezzo; or the great musician, Antonio Squarcialupi, the Cathedral organist, whom Lorenzo helped to find singers for his choir; or the artists, Filippino Lippi, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Sandro Botticelli, all of whom were at various times employed by Lorenzo on the decorations of the villa of Spedaletto; or Antonio Pollaiuolo, described by Lorenzo as ‘the greatest master in the city’; or, during the last years of Lorenzo’s life, the young Michelangelo Buonarroti.

The son of a poor Tuscan magistrate of aristocratic stock, Michelangelo had been sent at the age of seven or eight to Francesco Urbino’s school in Florence, and then – much to the distress of his father who lamented his choice of so humble a trade – had been apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio who ran a big painting studio in Florence. Soon after arriving there his precocious gifts had made a deep impression on his master who exclaimed, ‘Why, this boy knows more than I do!’ on seeing a drawing that the thirteen-year-old Michelangelo had done depicting his fellow apprentices at work in the Tornabuoni chapel at Santa Maria Novella. When Lorenzo asked Ghirlandaio to recommend some promising pupils for a new school that he had founded, Ghirlandaio had no hesitation in including Michelangelo among the list of names.

According to Giorgio Vasari, Lorenzo had founded his school with the purpose not only of providing boys with a training in particular crafts but also of giving them a far wider education than would otherwise have been available to them. He furnished a site, a garden between the Palazzo Medici and San Marco, employed a master, his old friend Bertoldo di Giovanni, a former pupil of Donatello, and lent the school numerous paintings, antique busts and statues to be set up in the studio and around the grounds.² It was while making a copy of one of these antiquities – the head of an old faun – that Michelangelo is said to have first come to Lorenzo’s notice. ‘Although this was the first time he had ever touched a chisel or worked in marble,’ so Vasari recorded,

Michelangelo succeeded in copying the faun so well that Lorenzo was amazed. Then, when he saw that Michelangelo had departed a little from the model and followed his own fancy in hollowing out a mouth for the faun and giving it a tongue and all its teeth, Lorenzo laughed in his usual charming way and said, ‘But don’t you know old people never have all their teeth; there are always some missing.’

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, Primavera⁴ 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 David⁹ 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.

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.