_The Medici and the Quattrocento_
"Tiranno e nome di uomo di mala vita, e pessimo fra tutti gli
altri uomini, che per forza sopra tutti vuol regnare, massime
quello che di cittadino e fatto tiranno."--_Savonarola._
"The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was in many things
great, rather by what it designed or aspired to do, than by what
it actually achieved."--_Walter Pater._
_Non gia Salvestro ma Salvator mundi_, "thou that with noble wisdom
hast saved thy country." Thus in a sonnet does Franco Sacchetti hail
Salvestro dei Medici, the originator of the greatness of his house. In
1378, while the hatred between the Parte Guelfa and the adherents of
the Otto della Guerra--the rivalry between the Palace of the Party and
the Palace of the Signory--was at its height, the Captains of the
Party conspired to seize upon the Palace of the Priors and take
possession of the State. Their plans were frustrated by Salvestro dei
Medici, a rich merchant and head of his ambitious and rising family,
who was then Gonfaloniere of Justice. He proposed to restore the
Ordinances against the magnates, and, when this petition was rejected
by the Signoria and the Colleges,[16] he appealed to the Council of
the People. The result was a riot, followed by a long series of
tumults throughout the city; the _Arti Minori_ came to the front in
arms; and, finally, the bloody revolution known as the Tumult of the
Ciompi burst over Florence. These Ciompi, the lowest class of artizans
and all those who were not represented in the Arts, headed by those
who were subject to the great Arte della Lana, had been much favoured
by the Duke of Athens, and had been given consuls and a standard with
an angel painted upon it. On the fall of the Duke, these Ciompi, or
_popolo minuto_, had lost these privileges, and were probably much
oppressed by the consuls of the Arte della Lana. Secretly instigated
by Salvestro--who thus initiated the Medicean policy of undermining
the Republic by means of the populace--they rose _en masse_ on July
20th, captured the Palace of the Podesta, burnt the houses of their
enemies and the Bottega of the Arte della Lana, seized the standard of
the people, and, with it and the banners of the Guilds displayed, came
into the Piazza to demand a share in the government. On July 22nd they
burst into the Palace of the Priors, headed by a wool-comber, Michele
di Lando, carrying in his hands the great Gonfalon; him they acclaimed
Gonfaloniere and lord of the city.
[16] The "Colleges" were the twelve Buonuomini and the sixteen
Gonfaloniers of the Companies. Measures proposed by the Signoria had
to be carried in the Colleges before being submitted to the Council of
the People, and afterwards to the Council of the Commune.
This rough and half-naked wool-comber, whose mother made pots and pans
and whose wife sold greens, is one of the heroes of Florentine
history; and his noble simplicity throughout the whole affair is in
striking contrast with the self-seeking and intrigues of the rich
aristocratic merchants whose tool, to some extent, he appears to have
been. The pious historian, Jacopo Nardi, likens him to the heroes of
ancient Rome, Curius and Fabricius, and ranks him as a patriot and
deliverer of the city, far above even Farinata degli Uberti. The next
day the Parliament was duly summoned in the Piazza, Michele confirmed
in his office, and a Balia (or commission) given to him, together with
the Eight and the Syndics of the Arts, to reform the State and elect
the new Signoria--in which the newly constituted Guilds of the
populace were to have a third with those of the greater and minor
Arts. But, before Michele's term of office was over, the Ciompi were
in arms again, fiercer than ever and with more outrageous demands,
following the standards of the Angel and some of the minor Arts (who
appear to have in part joined them). From Santa Maria Novella, their
chosen head-quarters, on the last day of August they sent two
representatives to overawe the Signoria. But Michele di Lando,
answering their insolence with violence, rode through the city with
the standard of Justice floating before him, while the great bell of
the Priors' tower called the Guilds to arms; and by evening the
populace had melted away, and the government of the people was
re-established. The new Signoria was greeted in a canzone by
Sacchetti, in which he declares that Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and
Temperance are once more reinstated in the city.
For the next few years the Minor Arts predominated in the government.
Salvestro dei Medici kept in the background, but was presently
banished. Michele di Lando seemed contented to have saved the State,
and took little further share in the politics of the city. He appears
later on to have been put under bounds at Chioggia; but to have
returned to Florence before his death in 1401, when he was buried in
Santa Croce. There were still tumults and conspiracies, resulting in
frequent executions and banishments; while, without, inglorious wars
were carried on by the companies of mercenary soldiers. This is the
epoch in which the great English captain, Hawkwood, entered the
service of the Florentine State. In 1382, after the execution of
Giorgio Scali and the banishment of Tommaso Strozzi (noble burghers
who headed the populace), the newly constituted Guilds were abolished,
and the government returned to the greater Arts, who now held
two-thirds of the offices--a proportion which was later increased to
three-quarters.
The period which follows, from 1382 to 1434, sees the close of the
democratic government of Florence. The Republic, nominally still ruled
by the greater Guilds, is in reality sustained and swayed by the
_nobili popolani_ or _Ottimati_, members of wealthy families risen by
riches or talent out of these greater Guilds into a new kind of
burgher aristocracy. The struggle is now no longer between the Palace
of the Signory and the Palace of the Party--for the days of the power
of the Parte Guelfa are at an end--but between the Palace and the
Piazza. The party of the Minor Arts and the Populace is repressed and
ground down with war taxes; but behind them the Medici lurk and
wait--first Vieri, then Giovanni di Averardo, then Cosimo di
Giovanni--ever on the watch to put themselves at their head, and
through them overturn the State. The party of the Ottimati is first
led by Maso degli Albizzi, then by Niccolo da Uzzano, and lastly by
Rinaldo degli Albizzi and his adherents--illustrious citizens not
altogether unworthy of the great Republic that they swayed--the sort
of dignified civic patricians whose figures, a little later, were to
throng the frescoes of Masaccio and Ghirlandaio. But they were divided
among themselves, persecuted their adversaries with proscription and
banishment, thus making the exiles a perpetual source of danger to the
State, and they were hated by the populace because of the war taxes.
These wars were mainly carried on by mercenaries--who were now more
usually Italians than foreigners--and, in spite of frequent defeats,
generally ended well for Florence. Arezzo was purchased in 1384. A
fierce struggle was carried on a few years later (1390-1402) with the
"great serpent," Giovanni Galeazzo Visconti, who hoped to make himself
King of Italy by violence as he had made himself Duke of Milan by
treachery, and intended to be crowned in Florence. Pisa was finally
and cruelly conquered in 1406; Cortona was obtained as the result of a
prolonged war with King Ladislaus of Naples in 1414, in which the
Republic had seemed once more in danger of falling into the hands of a
foreign tyrant; and in 1421 Leghorn was sold to the Florentines by the
Genoese, thus opening the sea to their merchandise.
The deaths of Giovanni Galeazzo and Ladislaus freed the city from her
most formidable external foes; and for a while she became the seat of
the Papacy, the centre of Christendom. In 1419, after the schism, Pope
Martin V. took up his abode in Florence; the great condottiere,
Braccio, came with his victorious troops to do him honour; and the
deposed John XXIII. humbled himself before the new Pontiff, and was at
last laid to rest among the shadows of the Baptistery. In his _Storia
Florentina_ Guicciardini declares that the government at this epoch
was the wisest, the most glorious and the happiest that the city had
ever had. It was the dawn of the Renaissance, and Florence was already
full of artists and scholars, to whom these _nobili popolani_ were as
generous and as enlightened patrons as their successors, the Medici,
were to be. Even Cosimo's fervent admirer, the librarian Vespasiano
Bisticci, endorses Guicciardini's verdict: "In that time," he says,
"from 1422 to 1433, the city of Florence was in a most blissful state,
abounding with excellent men in every faculty, and it was full of
admirable citizens."
Maso degli Albizzi died in 1417; and his successors in the
oligarchy--the aged Niccolo da Uzzano, who stood throughout for
moderation, and the fiery but less competent Rinaldo degli
Albizzi--were no match for the rising and unscrupulous Medici. With
the Albizzi was associated the noblest and most generous Florentine of
the century, Palla Strozzi. The war with Filippo Visconti, resulting
in the disastrous rout of Zagonara, and an unjust campaign against
Lucca, in which horrible atrocities were committed by the Florentine
commissioner, Astorre Gianni, shook their government. Giovanni dei
Medici, the richest banker in Italy, was now the acknowledged head of
the opposition; he had been Gonfaloniere in 1421, but would not put
himself actively forward, although urged on by his sons, Cosimo and
Lorenzo. He died in 1429; Niccolo da Uzzano followed him to the grave
in 1432; and the final struggle between the fiercer spirits, Rinaldo
and Cosimo, was at hand. "All these citizens," said Niccolo, shortly
before his death, "some through ignorance, some through malice, are
ready to sell this republic; and, thanks to their good fortune, they
have found the purchaser."
Shortly before this date, Masaccio painted all the leading spirits of
the time in a fresco in the cloisters of the Carmine. This has been
destroyed, but you may see a fine contemporary portrait of Giovanni in
the Uffizi. The much admired and famous coloured bust in the Bargello,
called the portrait of Niccolo da Uzzano by Donatello, has probably
nothing to do either with Niccolo or with Donatello. Giovanni has the
air of a prosperous and unpretending Florentine tradesman, but with a
certain obvious parade of his lack of pushfulness.
In 1433 the storm broke. A Signory hostile to Cosimo being elected, he
was summoned to the Palace and imprisoned in an apartment high up in
the Tower, a place known as the Alberghettino. Rinaldo degli Albizzi
held the Piazza with his soldiery, and Cosimo heard the great bell
ringing to call the people to Parliament, to grant a Balia to reform
the government and decide upon his fate. But he was too powerful at
home and abroad; his popularity with those whom he had raised from low
estate, and those whom he had relieved by his wealth, his influence
with the foreign powers, such as Venice and Ferrara, were so great
that his foes dared not take his life; and, indeed, they were hardly
the men to have attempted such a crime. Banished to Padua (his brother
Lorenzo and other members of his family being put under bounds at
different cities), he was received everywhere, not as a fugitive, but
as a prince; and the library of the Benedictines, built by Michelozzo
at his expense, once bore witness to his stay in Venice. Hardly a year
had passed when a new Signory was chosen, favourable to the Medici;
Rinaldo degli Albizzi, after a vain show of resistance, laid down his
arms on the intervention of Pope Eugenius, who was then at Santa Maria
Novella, and was banished for ever from the city with his principal
adherents. And finally, in a triumphant progress from Venice, "carried
back to his country upon the shoulders of all Italy," as he said,
Cosimo and his brother Lorenzo entered Florence on October 6th, 1434,
rode past the deserted palaces of the Albizzi to the Palace of the
Priors, and next day returned in triumph to their own house in the Via
Larga.
The Republic had practically fallen; the head of the Medici was
virtually prince of the city and of her fair dominion. But Florence
was not Milan or Naples, and Cosimo's part as tyrant was a peculiar
one. The forms of the government were, with modifications, preserved;
but by means of a Balia empowered to elect the chief magistrates for
a period of five years, and then renewed every five years, he secured
that the Signoria should always be in his hands, or in those of his
adherents. The grand Palace of the Priors was still ostensibly the
seat of government; but, in reality, the State was in the firm grasp
of the thin, dark-faced merchant in the Palace in the Via Larga, which
we now know as the Palazzo Riccardi. Although in the earlier part of
his reign he was occasionally elected Gonfaloniere, he otherwise held
no office ostensibly, and affected the republican manner of a mere
wealthy citizen. His personality, combined with the widely ramifying
banking relations of the Medici, gave him an almost European
influence. His popularity among the mountaineers and in the country
districts, from which armed soldiery were ever ready to pour down into
the city in his defence, made him the fitting man for the ever
increasing external sway of Florence. The forms of the Republic were
preserved, but he consolidated his power by a general levelling and
disintegration, by severing the nerves of the State and breaking the
power of the Guilds. He had certain hard and cynical maxims for
guidance: "Better a city ruined than a city lost," "States are not
ruled by Pater-Nosters," "New and worthy citizens can be made by a few
ells of crimson cloth." So he elevated to wealth and power men of low
kind, devoted to and dependent on himself; crushed the families
opposed to him, or citizens who seemed too powerful, by wholesale
banishments, or by ruining them with fines and taxation, although
there was comparatively little blood shed. He was utterly ruthless in
all this, and many of the noblest Florentine citizens fell victims.
One murder must be laid to his charge, and it is one of peculiar, for
him, unusual atrocity. Baldaccio d'Anghiari, a young captain of
infantry, who promised fair to take a high place among the
condottieri of the day, was treacherously invited to speak with the
Gonfaloniere in the Palace of the Priors, and there stabbed to death
by hireling assassins from the hills, and his body flung ignominiously
into the Piazza. Cosimo's motive is said to have been partly jealousy
of a possible rival, Neri Capponi, who had won popularity by his
conquest of the Casentino for Florence in 1440, and who was intimate
with Baldaccio; and partly desire to gratify Francesco Sforza, whose
treacherous designs upon Milan he was furthering by the gold wrung
from his over-taxed Florentines, and to whose plans Baldaccio was
prepared to offer an obstacle.
Florence was still for a time the seat of the Papacy. In January 1439,
the Patriarch Joseph of Constantinople, and the Emperor of the East,
John Paleologus, came to meet Pope Eugenius for the Council of
Florence, which was intended to unite the Churches of Christendom. The
Patriarch died here, and is buried in Santa Maria Novella. In the
Riccardi Palace you may see him and the Emperor, forced, as it were,
to take part in the triumph of the Medici in Benozzo Gozzoli's
fresco--riding with them in the gorgeous train, that sets out
ostensibly to seek the Babe of Bethlehem, and evidently has no
intention of finding Him. Pope Eugenius returned to Rome in 1444; and
in 1453 Mahomet II. stormed Constantinople, and Greek exiles thronged
to Rome and Florence. In 1459, marvellous pageants greeted Pius II. in
the city, on his way to stir up the Crusade that never went.
In his foreign policy Cosimo inaugurated a totally new departure for
Florence; he commenced a line of action which was of the utmost
importance in Italian politics, and which his son and grandson carried
still further. The long wars with which the last of the Visconti,
Filippo Maria, harassed Italy and pressed Florence hard (in the last
of these Rinaldo degli Albizzi and the exiles approached near enough
to catch a distant glimpse of the city from which they were
relentlessly shut out), ended with his death in 1447. Cosimo dei
Medici now allied himself with the great condottiere, Francesco
Sforza, and aided him with money to make good his claims upon the
Duchy of Milan. Henceforth this new alliance between Florence and
Milan, between the Medici and the Sforza, although most odious in the
eyes of the Florentine people, became one of the chief factors in the
balance of power in Italy. Soon afterwards Alfonso, the Aragonese
ruler of Naples, entered into this triple alliance; Venice and Rome to
some extent being regarded as a double alliance to counterbalance
this. To these foreign princes Cosimo was almost as much prince of
Florence as they of their dominions; and by what was practically a
_coup d'etat_ in 1459, Cosimo and his son Piero forcibly overthrew the
last attempt of their opponents to get the Signoria out of their
hands, and, by means of the creation of a new and permanent Council of
a hundred of their chief adherents, more firmly than ever secured
their hold upon the State.
[Illustration: FLORENCE IN THE DAYS OF LORENZO THE MAGNIFICENT
(_From an engraving, of about 1490, in the Berlin Museum_)]
In his private life Cosimo was the simplest and most unpretentious of
tyrants, and lived the life of a wealthy merchant-burgher of the day
in its nobler aspects. He was an ideal father, a perfect man of
business, an apparently kindly fellow-citizen to all. Above all things
he loved the society of artists and men of letters; Brunelleschi and
Michelozzo, Donatello and Fra Lippo Lippi--to name only a few more
intimately connected with him--found in him the most generous and
discerning of patrons; many of the noblest Early Renaissance churches
and convents in Florence and its neighbourhood are due to his
munificence--San Lorenzo and San Marco and the Badia of Fiesole are
the most typical--and he even founded a hospital in Jerusalem. To a
certain extent this was what we should now call "conscience money."
His friend and biographer, Vespasiano Bisticci, writes: "He did these
things because it appeared to him that he held money, not over well
acquired; and he was wont to say that to God he had never given so
much as to find Him on his books a debtor. And likewise he said: I
know the humours of this city; fifty years will not pass before we are
driven out; but the buildings will remain." The Greeks, who came to
the Council of Florence or fled from the in-coming Turk, stimulated
the study of their language and philosophy--though this had really
commenced in the days of the Republic, before the deaths of Petrarch
and Boccaccio--and found in Cosimo an ardent supporter. He founded
great libraries in San Marco and in the Badia of Fiesole, the former
with part of the codices collected by the scholar Niccolo Niccoli;
although he had banished the old Palla Strozzi, the true renovator of
the Florentine University, into hopeless exile. Into the Neo-Platonism
of the Renaissance Cosimo threw himself heart and soul. "To Cosimo,"
writes Burckhardt, "belongs the special glory of recognising in the
Platonic philosophy the fairest flower of the ancient world of
thought, of inspiring his friends with the same belief, and thus of
fostering within humanistic circles themselves another and a higher
resuscitation of antiquity." In a youth of Figline, Marsilio Ficino,
the son of a doctor, Cosimo found a future high priest of this new
religion of love and beauty; and bidding him minister to the minds of
men rather than to their bodies, brought him into his palace, and gave
him a house in the city and a beautiful farm near Careggi. Thus was
founded the famous Platonic Academy, the centre of the richest
Italian thought of the century. As his end drew near, Cosimo turned to
the consolations of religion, and would pass long hours in his chosen
cell in San Marco, communing with the Dominican Archbishop, Antonino,
and Fra Angelico, the painter of mediaeval Paradise. And with these
thoughts, mingled with the readings of Marsilio's growing translation
of Plato, he passed away at his villa at Careggi in 1464, on the first
of August. Shortly before his death he had lost his favourite son,
Giovanni; and had been carried through his palace, in the Via Larga,
sighing that it was now too large a house for so small a family.
Entitled by public decree _Pater Patriae_, he was buried at his own
request without any pompous funeral, beneath a simple marble in front
of the high altar of San Lorenzo.
[Illustration: THE BADIA OF FIESOLE]
Cosimo was succeeded, not without some opposition from rivals to the
Medici within their own party, by his son Piero. Piero's health was in
a shattered condition--il Gottoso, he was called--and for the most
part he lived in retirement at Careggi, occasionally carried into
Florence in his litter, leaving his brilliant young son Lorenzo to act
as a more ornamental figure-head for the State. The personal
appearance of Piero is very different to that of his father or son; in
his portrait bust by Mino da Fiesole in the Bargello, and in the
picture by Bronzino in the National Gallery, there is less craft and a
certain air of frank and manly resolution. In his daring move in
support of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, when, on the death of Francesco, it
seemed for a moment that the Milanese dynasty was tottering, and his
promptness in crushing the formidable conspiracy of the "mountain"
against himself, Piero showed that sickness had not destroyed his
faculty of energetic action at the critical moment. He completely
followed out his father's policy, drawing still tighter the bonds
which united Florence with Milan and Naples, lavishing money on the
decoration of the city and the corruption of the people. The
opposition was headed by Luca Pitti, Agnolo Acciaiuoli, Dietisalvi
Neroni and others, who had been reckoned as Cosimo's friends, but who
were now intriguing with Venice and Ferrara to overthrow his son.
Hoping to eclipse the Medici in their own special field of artistic
display and wholesale corruption, Luca Pitti commenced that enormous
palace which still bears the name of his family, filled it with bravos
and refugees, resorted to all means fair or foul to get money to build
and corrupt. It seemed for a moment that the adherents of the Mountain
(as the opponents of the Medici were called, from this highly situated
Pitti Palace) and the adherents of the Plain (where the comparatively
modest Medicean palace--now the Palazzo Riccardi--stood in the Via
Larga) might renew the old factions of Blacks and Whites. But in the
late summer of 1466 the party of the Mountain was finally crushed;
they were punished with more mercy than the Medici generally showed,
and Luca Pitti was practically pardoned and left to a dishonourable
old age in the unfinished palace, which was in after years to become
the residence of the successors of his foes. About the same time
Filippo Strozzi and other exiles were allowed to return, and another
great palace began to rear its walls in the Via Tornabuoni, in after
years to be a centre of anti-Medicean intrigue.
The brilliancy and splendour of Lorenzo's youth--he who was hereafter
to be known in history as the Magnificent--sheds a rich glow of colour
round the closing months of Piero's pain-haunted life. Piero himself
had been content with a Florentine wife, Lucrezia dei Tornabuoni, and
he had married his daughters to Florentine citizens, Guglielmo Pazzi
and Bernardo Rucellai; but Lorenzo must make a great foreign match,
and was therefore given Clarice Orsini, the daughter of a great Roman
noble. The splendid pageant in the Piazza Santa Croce, and the even
more gorgeous marriage festivities in the palace in the Via Larga,
were followed by a triumphal progress of the young bridegroom through
Tuscany and the Riviera to Milan, to the court of that faithful ally
of his house, but most abominable monster, Giovanni Maria Sforza.
Piero died on December 3rd, 1469, and, like Cosimo, desired the simple
burial which his sons piously gave him. His plain but beautiful
monument designed by Verrocchio is in the older sacristy of San
Lorenzo, where he lies with his brother Giovanni.
"The second day after his death," writes Lorenzo in his diary,
"although I, Lorenzo, was very young, in fact only in my twenty-first
year, the leading men of the city and of the ruling party came to our
house to express their sorrow for our misfortune, and to persuade me
to take upon myself the charge of the government of the city, as my
grandfather and father had already done. This proposal being contrary
to the instincts of my age, and entailing great labour and danger, I
accepted against my will, and only for the sake of protecting my
friends, and our own fortunes, for in Florence one can ill live in the
possession of wealth without control of the government."[17]
[17] From Mr Armstrong's _Lorenzo de' Medici_.
These two youths, Lorenzo and Giuliano, were now, to all intents and
purposes, lords and masters of Florence. Lorenzo was the ruling
spirit; outwardly, in spite of his singularly harsh and
unprepossessing appearance, devoted to the cult of love and beauty,
delighting in sport and every kind of luxury, he was inwardly as hard
and cruel as tempered steel, and firmly fixed from the outset upon
developing the hardly defined prepotency of his house into a complete
personal despotism. You may see him as a gallant boy in Benozzo
Gozzoli's fresco in the palace of his father and grandfather, riding
under a bay tree, and crowned with roses; and then, in early manhood,
in Botticelli's famous Adoration of the Magi; and lastly, as a fully
developed, omniscient and all-embracing tyrant, in that truly terrible
picture by Vasari in the Uffizi, constructed out of contemporary
materials--surely as eloquent a sermon against the iniquity of tyranny
as the pages of Savonarola's _Reggimento di Firenze_. Giuliano was a
kindlier and gentler soul, completely given up to pleasure and
athletics; he lives for us still in many a picture from the hand of
Sandro Botticelli, sometimes directly portrayed, as in the painting
which Morelli bequeathed to Bergamo, more often idealised as Mars or
as Hermes; his love for the fair Simonetta inspired Botticellian
allegories and the most finished and courtly stanzas of Poliziano. The
sons of both these brothers were destined to sit upon the throne of
the Fisherman.
A long step in despotism was gained in 1470, when the two great
Councils of the People and the Commune were deprived of all their
functions, which were now invested in the thoroughly Medicean Council
of the Hundred. The next year Lorenzo's friend and ally, Galeazzo
Maria Sforza, with his Duchess and courtiers, came to Florence. They
were sumptuously received in the Medicean palace. The licence and
wantonness of these Milanese scandalised even the lax Florentines, and
largely added to the growing corruption of the city. The accidental
burning of Santo Spirito during the performance of a miracle play was
regarded as a certain sign of divine wrath. During his stay in
Florence the Duke, in contrast with whom the worst of the Medici seems
almost a saint, sat to one of the Pollaiuoli for the portrait still
seen in the Uffizi; by comparison with him even Lorenzo looks
charming; at the back of the picture there is a figure of Charity--but
the Duke has very appropriately driven it to the wall. Unpopular
though this Medicean-Sforza alliance was in Florence, it was
undoubtedly one of the safe-guards of the harmony which,
superficially, still existed between the five great powers of Italy.
When Galeazzo Maria met the fate he so richly deserved, and was
stabbed to death in the Church of San Stefano at Milan on December
20th, 1476, Pope Sixtus gave solemn utterance to the general dismay:
_Oggi e morta la pace d'Italia._
But Sixtus and his nephews did not in their hearts desire peace in
Italy, and were plotting against Lorenzo with the Pazzi, who, although
united to the Medici by marriage, had secret and growing grievances
against them. On the morning of Sunday April 26th, 1478, the
conspirators set upon the two brothers at Mass in the Duomo; Giuliano
perished beneath nineteen dagger-stabs; Lorenzo escaped with a slight
wound in the neck. The Archbishop Salviati of Pisa in the meantime
attempted to seize the Palace of the Priors, but was arrested by the
Gonfaloniere, and promptly hung out of the window for his trouble.
Jacopo Pazzi rode madly through the streets with an armed force,
calling the people to arms, with the old shout of _Popolo e Liberta_,
but was only answered by the ringing cries of _Palle, Palle_.[18] The
vengeance taken by the people upon the conspirators was so prompt and
terrible that Lorenzo had little left him to do (though that little he
did to excess, punishing the innocent with the guilty); and the result
of the plot simply was to leave him alone in the government, securely
enthroned above the splash of blood. The Pope appears not to have
been actually privy to the murder, but he promptly took up the cause
of the murderers. It was followed by a general break-up of the Italian
peace and a disastrous war, carried on mainly by mercenary soldiers,
in which all the powers of Italy were more or less engaged; and
Florence was terribly hard pressed by the allied forces of Naples and
Rome. The plague broke out in the city; Lorenzo was practically
deserted by his allies, and on the brink of financial ruin. Then was
it that he did one of the most noteworthy, perhaps the noblest, of the
actions of his life, and saved himself and the State by voluntarily
going to Naples and putting himself in the power of King Ferrante, an
infamous tyrant, who would readily have murdered his guest, if it had
seemed to his advantage to do so. But, like all the Italians of the
Renaissance, Ferrante was open to reason, and the eloquence of the
Magnifico won him over to grant an honourable peace, with which
Lorenzo returned to Florence in March 1480. "If Lorenzo was great when
he left Florence," writes Machiavelli, "he returned much greater than
ever; and he was received with such joy by the city as his great
qualities and his fresh merits deserved, seeing that he had exposed
his own life to restore peace to his country." Botticelli's noble
allegory of the olive-decked Medicean Pallas, taming the Centaur of
war and disorder, appears to have been painted in commemoration of
this event. In the following August the Turks landed in Italy and
stormed Otranto, and the need of union, in the face of "the common
enemy Ottoman," reconciled the Pope to Florence, and secured for the
time an uneasy peace among the powers of Italy.
[18] The _Palle_, it will be remembered, were the golden balls on the
Medicean arms, and hence the rallying cry of their adherents.
Lorenzo's power in Florence and influence throughout Italy was now
secure. By the institution in 1480 of a Council of Seventy, a
permanent council to manage and control the election of the Signoria
(with two special committees drawn from the Seventy every six months,
the _Otto di pratica_ for foreign affairs and the _Dodici Procuratori_
for internal), the State was firmly established in his hands--the
older councils still remaining, as was usual in every Florentine
reformation of government. Ten years later, in 1490, this council
showed signs of independence; and Lorenzo therefore reduced the
authority of electing the Signoria to a small committee with a
reforming Balia of seventeen, of which he was one. Had he lived
longer, he would undoubtedly have crowned his policy either by being
made Gonfaloniere for life, or by obtaining some similar
constitutional confirmation of his position as head of the State.
Externally his influence was thrown into the scale for peace, and, on
the death of Sixtus IV. in 1484, he established friendly relations and
a family alliance with the new Pontiff, Innocent VIII. Sarzana with
Pietrasanta were won back for Florence, and portions of the Sienese
territory which had been lost during the war with Naples and the
Church; a virtual protectorate was established over portions of Umbria
and Romagna, where the daggers of assassins daily emptied the thrones
of minor tyrants. Two attempts on his life failed. In the last years
of his foreign policy and diplomacy he showed himself truly the
magnificent. East and West united to do him honour; the Sultan of the
Turks and the Soldan of Egypt sent ambassadors and presents; the
rulers of France and Germany treated him as an equal. Soon the torrent
of foreign invasion was to sweep over the Alps and inundate all the
"Ausonian" land; Milan and Naples were ready to rend each other;
Ludovico Sforza was plotting his own rise upon the ruin of Italy, and
already intriguing with France; but, for the present, Lorenzo
succeeded in maintaining the balance of power between the five great
Italian states, which seemed as though they might present a united
front for mutual defence against the coming of the barbarians.
_Sarebbe impossibile avesse avuto un tiranno migliore e piu
piacevole_, writes Guicciardini: "Florence could not have had a better
or more delightful tyrant." The externals of life were splendid and
gorgeous indeed in the city where Lorenzo ruled, but everything was in
his hands and had virtually to proceed from him. His spies were
everywhere; marriages might only be arranged and celebrated according
to his good pleasure; the least sign of independence was promptly and
severely repressed. By perpetual festivities and splendid shows, he
strove to keep the minds of the citizens contented and occupied;
tournaments, pageants, masques and triumphs filled the streets; and
the strains of licentious songs, of which many were Lorenzo's own
composition, helped to sap the morality of that people which Dante had
once dreamed of as _sobria e pudica_. But around the Magnifico were
grouped the greatest artists and scholars of the age, who found in him
an enlightened Maecenas and most charming companion. _Amava
maravigliosamente qualunque era in una arte eccellente_, writes
Machiavelli of him; and that word--_maravigliosamente_--so entirely
characteristic of Lorenzo and his ways, occurs again and again,
repeated with studied persistence, in the chapter which closes
Machiavelli's History. He was said to have sounded the depths of
Platonic philosophy; he was a true poet, within certain limitations;
few men have been more keenly alive to beauty in all its
manifestations, physical and spiritual alike. Though profoundly
immoral, _nelle cose veneree maravigliosamente involto_, he was a
tolerable husband, and the fondest of fathers with his children, whom
he adored. The delight of his closing days was the elevation of his
favourite son, Giovanni, to the Cardinalate at the age of fourteen; it
gave the Medici a voice in the Curia like the other princes of Europe,
and pleased all Florence; but more than half Lorenzo's joy proceeded
from paternal pride and love, and the letter of advice which he wrote
for his son on the occasion shows both father and boy in a very
amiable, even edifying light. And yet this same man had ruined the
happiness of countless homes, and had even seized upon the doweries of
Florentine maidens to fill his own coffers and pay his mercenaries.
But the _bel viver italiano_ of the Quattrocento, with all its
loveliness and all its immorality--more lovely and far less immoral in
Florence than anywhere else--was drawing to an end. A new prophet had
arisen, and, from the pulpits of San Marco and Santa Maria del Fiore,
the stern Dominican, Fra Girolamo Savonarola, denounced the corruption
of the day and announced that speedy judgment was at hand; the Church
should be chastised, and that speedily, and renovation should follow.
Prodigies were seen. The lions tore and rent each other in their
cages; lightning struck the cupola of the Duomo on the side towards
the Medicean palace; while in his villa at Careggi the Magnifico lay
dying, watched over by his sister Bianca and the poet Poliziano. A
visit from the young Pico della Mirandola cheered his last hours. He
received the Last Sacraments, with every sign of contrition and
humility. Then Savonarola came to his bedside. There are two accounts
of what happened between these two terrible men, the corruptor of
Florence and the prophet of renovation, and they are altogether
inconsistent. The ultimate source of the one is apparently
Savonarola's fellow-martyr, Fra Silvestro, an utterly untrustworthy
witness; that of the other, Lorenzo's intimate, Poliziano. According
to Savonarola's biographers and adherents, Lorenzo, overwhelmed with
remorse and terror, had sent for the Frate to give him the absolution
which his courtly confessor dared not refuse (_io non ho mai trovato
uno che sia vero frate, se non lui_); and when the Dominican, seeming
to soar above his natural height, bade him restore liberty to
Florence, the Magnifico sullenly turned his back upon him and shortly
afterwards died in despair.[19] According to Poliziano, an eyewitness
and an absolutely whole-hearted adherent of the Medici, Fra Girolamo
simply spoke a few words of priestly exhortation to the dying man;
then, as he turned away, Lorenzo cried, "Your blessing, father, before
you depart" (_Heus, benedictionem, Pater, priusquam a nobis
proficisceris_) and the two together repeated word for word the
Church's prayers for the departing; then Savonarola returned to his
convent, and Lorenzo passed away in peace and consolation. Reverently
and solemnly the body was brought from Careggi to Florence, rested for
a while in San Marco, and was then buried, with all external
simplicity, with his murdered brother in San Lorenzo. It was the
beginning of April 1492, and the Magnifico was only in his
forty-fourth year. The words of old Sixtus must have risen to the lips
of many: _Oggi e morta la pace d'Italia_. "This man," said Ferrante of
Naples, "lived long enough to make good his own title to immortality,
but not long enough for Italy."
[19] The familiar legend that Lorenzo told Savonarola that the three
sins which lay heaviest on his conscience were the sack of Volterra,
the robbery of the Monte delle Doti, and the vengeance he had taken
for the Pazzi conspiracy, is only valuable as showing what were
popularly supposed by the Florentines to be his greatest crimes.
Lorenzo left three sons--Piero, who virtually succeeded him in the
same rather undefined princedom; the young Cardinal Giovanni; and
Giuliano. Their father was wont to call Piero the "mad," Giovanni the
"wise," Giuliano the "good"; and to a certain extent their after-lives
corresponded with his characterisation. There was also a boy Giulio,
Lorenzo's nephew, an illegitimate child of Giuliano the elder by a
girl of the lower class; him Lorenzo left to the charge of Cardinal
Giovanni--the future Pope Clement to the future Pope Leo. Piero had
none of his father's abilities, and was not the man to guide the ship
of State through the storm that was rising; he was a wild licentious
young fellow, devoted to sport and athletics, with a great shock of
dark hair; he was practically the only handsome member of his family,
as you may see in a peculiarly fascinating Botticellian portrait in
the Uffizi, where he is holding a medallion of his great grandfather
Cosimo, and gazing out of the picture with a rather pathetic
expression, as if the Florentines who set a price upon his head had
misunderstood him.
Piero's folly at once began to undo his father's work. A part of
Lorenzo's policy had been to keep his family united, including those
not belonging to the reigning branch. There were two young Medici then
in the city, about Piero's own age; Lorenzo and Giovanni di Pier
Francesco, the grandsons of Cosimo's brother Lorenzo (you may see
Giovanni with his father in a picture by Filippino Lippi in the
Uffizi). Lorenzo the Magnificent had made a point of keeping on good
terms with them, for they were beloved of the people. Giovanni was
destined, in a way, to play the part of Banquo to the Magnificent's
Macbeth, had there been a Florentine prophet to tell him, "Thou shalt
get kings though thou be none." But Piero disliked the two; at a dance
he struck Giovanni, and then, when the brothers showed resentment, he
arrested both and, not daring to take their lives, confined them to
their villas. And these were times when a stronger head than Piero's
might well have reeled. Italy's day had ended, and she was now to be
the battle-ground for the gigantic forces of the monarchies of Europe.
That same year in which Lorenzo died, Alexander VI. was elected to the
Papacy he had so shamelessly bought. A mysterious terror fell upon the
people; an agony of apprehension consumed their rulers throughout the
length and breadth of the land. In 1494 the crash came. The old King
Ferrante of Naples died, and his successor Alfonso prepared to meet
the torrent of French arms which Ludovico Sforza, the usurping Duke of
Milan, had invited into Italy.
* * * * *
In art and in letters, as well as in life and general conduct, this
epoch of the Quattrocento is one of the most marvellous chapters in
the history of human thought; the Renaissance as a wave broke over
Italy, and from Italy surged on to the bounds of Europe. And of this
"discovery by man of himself and of the world," Florence was the
centre; in its hothouse of learning and culture the rarest
personalities flourished, and its strangest and most brilliant flower,
in whose hard brilliancy a suggestion of poison lurked, was Lorenzo
the Magnificent himself.
In both art and letters, the Renaissance had fully commenced before
the accession of the Medici to power. Ghiberti's first bronze gates of
the Baptistery and Masaccio's frescoes in the Carmine were executed
under the regime of the _nobili popolani_, the Albizzi and their
allies. Many of the men whom the Medici swept relentlessly from their
path were in the fore-front of the movement, such as the noble and
generous Palla Strozzi, one of the reformers of the Florentine Studio,
who brought the Greek, Emanuel Chrysolaras, at the close of the
fourteenth century, to make Florence the centre of Italian Hellenism.
Palla lavished his wealth in the hunting of codices, and at last, when
banished on Cosimo's return, died in harness at Padua at the venerable
age of ninety-two. His house had always been full of learned men, and
his reform of the university had brought throngs of students to
Florence. Put under bounds for ten years at Padua, he lived the life
of an ancient philosopher and of exemplary Christian virtue.
Persecuted at the end of every ten years with a new sentence, the
last--of ten more years--when he was eighty-two; robbed by death of
his wife and sons; he bore all with the utmost patience and fortitude,
until, in Vespasiano's words, "arrived at the age of ninety-two years,
in perfect health of body and of mind, he gave up his soul to his
Redeemer like a most faithful and good Christian."
In 1401, the first year of the fifteenth century, the competition was
announced for the second gates of the Baptistery, which marks the
beginning of Renaissance sculpture; and the same year witnessed the
birth of Masaccio, who, in the words of Leonardo da Vinci, "showed
with his perfect work how those painters who follow aught but Nature,
the mistress of the masters, laboured in vain," Morelli calls this
Quattrocento the epoch of "character"; "that is, the period when it
was the principal aim of art to seize and represent the outward
appearances of persons and things, determined by inward and moral
conditions." The intimate connection of arts and crafts is
characteristic of the Quattrocento, as also the mutual interaction of
art with art. Sculpture was in advance of painting in the opening
stage of the century, and, indeed, influenced it profoundly
throughout; about the middle of the century they met, and ran
henceforth hand in hand. Many of the painters and sculptors, as,
notably, Ghiberti and Botticelli, had been apprentices in the
workshops of the goldsmiths; nor would the greatest painters disdain
to undertake the adornment of a _cassone_, or chest for wedding
presents, nor the most illustrious sculptor decline a commission for
the button of a prelate's cope or some mere trifle of household
furniture. The medals in the National Museum and the metal work on the
exterior of the Strozzi Palace are as typical of the art of
Renaissance Florence as the grandest statues and most elaborate
altar-pieces.
[Illustration: IN THE SCULPTORS' WORKSHOP
BY NANNI DI BANCO
(For the Guild of Masters in Stone and Timber)]
With the work of the individual artists we shall become better
acquainted in subsequent chapters. Here we can merely name their
leaders. In architecture and sculpture respectively, Filippo
Brunelleschi (1377-1446) and Donatello (1386-1466) are the ruling
spirits of the age. Their mutual friendship and brotherly rivalry
almost recall the loves of Dante and Cavalcanti in an earlier day.
Although Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455) justly won the competition for
the second gates of the Baptistery, it is now thought that Filippo ran
his successful rival much more closely than the critics of an earlier
day supposed. Mr Perkins remarks that "indirectly Brunelleschi was the
master of all the great painters and sculptors of his time, for he
taught them how to apply science to art, and so far both Ghiberti and
Donatello were his pupils, but the last was almost literally so, since
the great architect was not only his friend, but also his counsellor
and guide." Contemporaneous with these three _spiriti magni_ in their
earlier works, and even to some extent anticipating them, is Nanni di
Banco (died in 1421), a most excellent master, both in large
monumental statues and in bas-reliefs, whose works are to be seen and
loved outside and inside the Duomo, and in the niches round San
Michele in Orto. A pleasant friendship united him with Donatello,
although to regard him as that supreme master's pupil and follower,
as Vasari does, is an anachronism. To this same earlier portion of the
Quattrocento belong Leo Battista Alberti (1405-1472), a rare genius,
but a wandering stone who, as an architect, accomplished comparatively
little; Michelozzo Michelozzi (1396-1472), who worked as a sculptor
with Ghiberti and Donatello, but is best known as the favoured
architect of the Medici, for whom he built the palace so often
mentioned in these pages, and now known as the Palazzo Riccardi, and
the convent of San Marco; and Luca della Robbia (1399-1482), that
beloved master of marble music, whose enamelled terra-cotta Madonnas
are a perpetual fund of the purest delight. To Michelozzo and Luca in
collaboration we owe the bronze gates of the Duomo sacristy, a work
only inferior to Ghiberti's "Gates of Paradise."
Slightly later come Donatello's great pupils, Desiderio da Settignano
(1428-1464), Andrea Verrocchio (1435-1488), and Antonio Pollaiuolo
(1429-1498). The two latter are almost equally famous as painters.
Contemporaneous with them are Mino da Fiesole, Bernardo and Antonio
Rossellino, Giuliano da San Gallo, Giuliano and Benedetto da Maiano,
of whom the last-named was the first architect of the Strozzi Palace.
The last great architect of the Quattrocento is Simone del Pollaiuolo,
known as Cronaca (1457-1508); and its last great sculptor is Andrea
della Robbia, Luca's nephew, who was born in 1435, and lived on until
1525. Andrea's best works--and they are very numerous indeed, in the
same enamelled terra-cotta--hardly yield in charm and fascination to
those of Luca himself; in some of them, devotional art seems to reach
its last perfection in sculpture. Giovanni, Andrea's son, and others
of the family carried on the tradition--with cruder colours and less
delicate feeling.
Masaccio (1401-1428), one of "the inheritors of unfulfilled renown,"
is the first great painter of the Renaissance, and bears much the same
relation to the fifteenth as Giotto to the fourteenth century.
Vasari's statement that Masaccio's master, Masolino, was Ghiberti's
assistant appears to be incorrect; but it illustrates the dependence
of the painting of this epoch upon sculpture. Masaccio's frescoes in
the Carmine, which became the school of all Italian painting, were
entirely executed before the Medicean regime. The Dominican, Fra
Angelico da Fiesole (1387-1455), seems in his San Marco frescoes to
bring the denizens of the Empyrean, of which the mediaeval mystics
dreamed, down to earth to dwell among the black and white robed
children of St Dominic. The Carmelite, Fra Lippo Lippi (1406-1469),
the favourite of Cosimo, inferior to the angelical painter in
spiritual insight, had a keener eye for the beauty of the external
world and a surer touch upon reality. His buoyant humour and excellent
colouring make "the glad monk's gift" one of the most acceptable that
the Quattrocento has to offer us. Andrea del Castagno (died in 1457)
and Domenico Veneziano (died in 1461), together with Paolo Uccello
(died in 1475), were all absorbed in scientific researches with an eye
to the extension of the resources of their art; but the two former
found time to paint a few masterpieces in their kind--especially a
Cenacolo by Andrea in Santa Appollonia, which is the grandest
representation of its sublime theme, until the time that Leonardo da
Vinci painted on the walls of the Dominican convent at Milan. Problems
of the anatomical construction of the human frame and the rendering of
movement occupied Antonio Pollaiuolo (1429-1498) and Andrea Verrocchio
(1435-1488); their work was taken up and completed a little later by
two greater men, Luca Signorelli of Cortona and Leonardo da Vinci.
The Florentine painting of this epoch culminates in the work of two
men--Sandro di Mariano Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli
(1447-1510), and Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494). If the greatest
pictures were painted poems, as some have held, then Sandro
Botticelli's masterpieces would be among the greatest of all time. In
his rendering of religious themes, in his intensely poetic and
strangely wistful attitude towards the fair myths of antiquity, and in
his Neo-Platonic mingling of the two, he is the most complete and
typical exponent of the finest spirit of the Quattrocento, to which,
in spite of the date of his death, his art entirely belongs.
Domenico's function, on the other hand, is to translate the external
pomp and circumstance of his times into the most uninspired of painted
prose, but with enormous technical skill and with considerable power
of portraiture; this he effected above all in his ostensibly religious
frescoes in Santa Maria Novella and Santa Trinita. Elsewhere he shows
a certain pathetic sympathy with humbler life, as in his Santa Fina
frescoes at San Gemignano, and in the admirable Adoration of the
Shepherds in the Accademia; but this is a less characteristic vein.
Filippino Lippi (1457-1504), the son of the Carmelite and the pupil of
Botticelli, has a certain wayward charm, especially in his earlier
works, but as a rule falls much below his master. He may be regarded
as the last direct inheritor of the traditions of Masaccio. Associated
with these are two lesser men, who lived considerably beyond the
limits of the fifteenth century, but whose artistic methods never went
past it; Piero di Cosimo (1462-1521) and Lorenzo di Credi (1459-1537).
The former (called after Cosimo Rosselli, his master) was one of the
most piquant personalities in the art world of Florence, as all
readers of _Romola_ know. As a painter, he has been very much
overestimated; at his best, he is a sort of Botticelli, with the
Botticellian grace and the Botticellian poetry almost all left out. He
was magnificent at designing pageants; and of one of his exploits in
this kind, we shall hear more presently. Lorenzo di Credi,
Verrocchio's favourite pupil, was later, like Botticelli and others,
to fall under the spell of Fra Girolamo; his pictures breathe a true
religious sentiment and are very carefully finished; but for the most
part, though there are exceptions, they lack virility.
Before this epoch closed, the two greatest heroes of Florentine art
had appeared upon the scenes, but their great work lay still in the
future. Leonardo da Vinci (born in 1452) had learned to paint in the
school of Verrocchio; but painting was to occupy but a small portion
of his time and labour. His mind roamed freely over every field of
human activity, and plunged deeply into every sphere of human thought;
nor is he adequately represented even by the greatest of the pictures
that he has left. There is nothing of him now in Florence, save a few
drawings in the Uffizi and an unfinished picture of the Epiphany.
Leonardo finished little, and, with that little, time and man have
dealt hardly. Michelangelo Buonarroti was born in the Casentino in
1475, and nurtured among the stone quarries of Settignano. At the age
of thirteen, his father apprenticed him to the Ghirlandaii, Domenico
and his brother David; and, with his friend and fellow-student,
Francesco Granacci, the boy began to frequent the gardens of the
Medici, near San Marco, where in the midst of a rich collection of
antiquities Donatello's pupil and successor, Bertoldo, directed a kind
of Academy. Here Michelangelo attracted the attention of Lorenzo
himself, by the head of an old satyr which he had hammered out of a
piece of marble that fell to his hand; and the Magnifico took him into
his household. This youthful period in the great master's career was
occupied in drinking in culture from the Medicean circle, in studying
the antique and, of the moderns, especially the works of Donatello and
Masaccio. But, with the exception of a few early fragments from his
hand, Michelangelo's work commenced with his first visit to Rome, in
1496, and belongs to the following epoch.
Turning from art to letters, the Quattrocento is an intermediate
period between the mainly Tuscan literary movement of the fourteenth
century and the general Italian literature of the sixteenth. The first
part of this century is the time of the discovery of the old authors,
of the copying of manuscripts (printing was not introduced into
Florence until 1471), of the eager search for classical relics and
antiquities, the comparative neglect of Italian when Latinity became
the test of all. Florence was the centre of the Humanism of the
Renaissance, the revival of Grecian culture, the blending of
Christianity and Paganism, the aping of antiquity in theory and in
practice. In the pages of Vespasiano we are given a series of lifelike
portraits of the scholars of this epoch, who thronged to Florence,
served the State as Secretary of the Republic or occupied chairs in
her newly reorganised university, or basked in the sun of Strozzian or
Medicean patronage. Niccolo Niccoli, who died in 1437, is one of the
most typical of these scholars; an ardent collector of ancient
manuscripts, his library, purchased after his death by Cosimo dei
Medici, forms the nucleus of the Biblioteca Laurenziana. His house was
adorned with all that was held most choice and precious; he always
wore long sweeping red robes, and had his table covered with ancient
vases and precious Greek cups and the like. In fact he played the
ancient sage to such perfection that simply to watch him eat his
dinner was a liberal education in itself! _A vederlo in tavola, cosi
antico come era, era una gentilezza._
Vespasiano tells a delightful yarn of how one fine day this Niccolo
Niccoli, "who was another Socrates or another Cato for continence and
virtue," was taking a constitutional round the Palazzo del Podesta,
when he chanced to espy a youth of most comely aspect, one who was
entirely devoted to worldly pleasures and delights, young Piero Pazzi.
Calling him and learning his name, Niccolo proceeded to question him
as to his profession. "Having a high old time," answered the ingenuous
youth: _attendo a darmi buon tempo_. "Being thy father's son and so
handsome," said the Sage severely, "it is a shame that thou dost not
set thyself to learn the Latin language, which would be a great
ornament to thee; and if thou dost not learn it, thou wilt be esteemed
of no account; yea, when the flower of thy youth is past, thou shalt
find thyself without any _virtu_." Messer Piero was converted on the
spot; Niccolo straightway found him a master and provided him with
books; and the pleasure-loving youth became a scholar and a patron of
scholars. Vespasiano assures us that, if he had lived, _lo
inconveniente che seguito_--so he euphoniously terms the Pazzi
conspiracy--would never have happened.
Leonardo Bruni is the nearest approach to a really great figure in the
Florentine literary world of the first half of the century. His
translations of Plato and Aristotle, especially the former, mark an
epoch. His Latin history of Florence shows genuine critical insight;
but he is, perhaps, best known at the present day by his little Life
of Dante in Italian, a charming and valuable sketch, which has
preserved for us some fragments of Dantesque letters and several bits
of really precious information about the divine poet, which seem to
be authentic and which we do not find elsewhere. Leonardo appears to
have undertaken it as a kind of holiday task, for recreation after the
work of composing his more ponderous history. As Secretary of the
Republic he exercised considerable political influence; his fame was
so great that people came to Florence only to look at him; on his
death in 1444, he was solemnly crowned on the bier as poet laureate,
and buried in Santa Croce with stately pomp and applauded funeral
orations. Leonardo's successors, Carlo Marsuppini (like him, an
Aretine by birth) and Poggio Bracciolini--the one noted for his frank
paganism, the other for the foulness of his literary invective--are
less attractive figures; though the latter was no less famous and
influential in his day. Giannozzo Manetti, who pronounced Bruni's
funeral oration, was noted for his eloquence and incorruptibility, and
stands out prominently amidst the scholars and humanists by virtue of
his nobleness of character; like that other hero of the new learning,
Palla Strozzi, he was driven into exile and persecuted by the
Mediceans.
Far more interesting are the men of light and learning who gathered
round Lorenzo dei Medici in the latter half of the century. This is
the epoch of the Platonic Academy, which Marsilio Ficino had founded
under the auspices of Cosimo. The discussions held in the convent
retreat among the forests of Camaldoli, the meetings in the Badia at
the foot of Fiesole, the mystical banquets celebrated in Lorenzo's
villa at Careggi in honour of the anniversary of Plato's birth and
death, may have added little to the sum of man's philosophic thought;
but the Neo-Platonic religion of love and beauty, which was there
proclaimed to the modern world, has left eternal traces in the poetic
literature both of Italy and of England. Spenser and Shelley might
have sat with the nine guests, whose number honoured the nine Muses,
at the famous Platonic banquet at Careggi, of which Marsilio Ficino
himself has left us an account in his commentary on the _Symposium_.
You may read a later Italian echo of it, when Marsilio Ficino had
passed away and his academy was a thing of the past, in the
impassioned and rapturous discourse on love and beauty poured forth by
Pietro Bembo, at that wonderful daybreak which ends the discussions of
Urbino's courtiers in Castiglione's treatise. In a creed that could
find one formula to cover both the reception of the Stigmata by St
Francis and the mystical flights of the Platonic Socrates and
Plotinus; that could unite the Sibyls and Diotima with the Magdalene
and the Virgin Martyrs; many a perplexed Italian of that epoch might
find more than temporary rest for his soul.
Simultaneously with this new Platonic movement there came a great
revival of Italian literature, alike in poetry and in prose; what
Carducci calls _il rinascimento della vita italiana nella forma
classica_. The earlier humanists had scorned, or at least neglected
the language of Dante; and the circle that surrounded Lorenzo was
undoubtedly instrumental in this Italian reaction. Cristoforo Landini,
one of the principal members of the Platonic Academy, now wrote the
first Renaissance commentary upon the _Divina Commedia_; Leo Battista
Alberti, also a leader in these Platonic disputations, defended the
dignity of the Italian language, as Dante himself had done in an
earlier day. Lorenzo himself compiled the so-called _Raccolta
Aragonese_ of early Italian lyrics, and sent them to Frederick of
Aragon, together with a letter full of enthusiasm for the Tuscan
tongue, and with critical remarks on the individual poets of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Upon the popular poetry of
Tuscany Lorenzo himself, and his favourite Angelo Ambrogini of
Montepulciano, better known as Poliziano, founded a new school of
Italian song. Luigi Pulci, the gay scoffer and cynical sceptic,
entertained the festive gatherings in the Medicean palace with his
wild tales, and, in his _Morgante Maggiore_, was practically the first
to work up the popular legends of Orlando and the Paladins into a
noteworthy poem--a poem of which Savonarola and his followers were
afterwards to burn every copy that fell into their hands.
Poliziano is at once the truest classical scholar, and, with the
possible exception of Boiardo (who belongs to Ferrara, and does not
come within the scope of the present volume), the greatest Italian
poet of the fifteenth century. He is, indeed, the last and most
perfect fruit of Florentine Humanism. His father, Benedetto Ambrogini,
had been murdered in Montepulciano by the faction hostile to the
Medici; and the boy Angelo, coming to Florence, and studying under
Ficino and his colleagues, was received into Lorenzo's household as
tutor to the younger Piero. His lectures at the Studio attracted
students from all Europe, and his labours in the field of textual
criticism won a fame that has lasted to the present day. In Italian he
wrote the _Orfeo_ in two days for performance at Mantua, when he was
eighteen, a lyrical tragedy which stamps him as the father of Italian
dramatic opera; the scene of the descent of Orpheus into Hades
contains lyrical passages of great melodiousness. Shortly before the
Pazzi conspiracy, he composed his famous _Stanze_ in celebration of a
tournament given by Giuliano dei Medici, and in honour of the _bella
Simonetta_. There is absolutely no "fundamental brain work" about
these exquisitely finished stanzas; but they are full of dainty
mythological pictures quite in the Botticellian style, overladen,
perhaps, with adulation of the reigning house and its _ben nato
Lauro_. In his lyrics he gave artistic form to the _rispetti_ and
_strambotti_ of the people, and wrote exceedingly musical _ballate_,
or _canzoni a ballo_, which are the best of their kind in the whole
range of Italian poetry. There is, however, little genuine passion in
his love poems for his lady, Madonna Ippolita Leoncina of Prato;
though in all that he wrote there is, as Villari puts it, "a fineness
of taste that was almost Greek."
Lorenzo dei Medici stands second to his friend as a poet; but he is a
good second. His early affection for the fair Lucrezia Donati, with
its inevitable sonnets and a commentary somewhat in the manner of
Dante's _Vita Nuova_, is more fanciful than earnest, although
Poliziano assures us of
"La lunga fedelta del franco Lauro."
But Lorenzo's intense love of external nature, his power of close
observation and graphic description, are more clearly shown in such
poems as the _Caccia col Falcone_ and the _Ambra_, written among the
woods and hills in the country round his new villa of Poggio a Caiano.
Elsewhere he gives free scope to the animal side of his sensual
nature, and in his famous _Canti carnascialeschi_, songs to be sung at
carnival and in masquerades, he at times revelled in pruriency, less
for its own sake than for the deliberate corruption of the
Florentines. And, for a time, their music drowned the impassioned
voice of Savonarola, whose stern cry of warning and exhortation to
repentance had for the nonce passed unheeded.
There is extant a miracle play from Lorenzo's hand, the acts of the
martyrs Giovanni and Paolo, who suffered in the days of the emperor
Julian. Two sides of Lorenzo's nature are ever in conflict--the
Lorenzo of the ballate and the carnival songs--the Lorenzo of the
_laude_ and spiritual poems, many of which have the unmistakable ring
of sincerity. And, in the story of his last days and the summoning of
Savonarola to his bed-side, the triumph of the man's spiritual side is
seen at the end; he is, indeed, in the position of the dying Julian of
his own play:--
"Fallace vita! O nostra vana cura!
Lo spirto e gia fuor del mio petto spinto:
O Cristo Galileo, tu hai vinto."
Such was likewise the attitude of several members of the Medicean
circle, when the crash came. Poliziano followed his friend and patron
to the grave, in September 1494; his last hours received the
consolations of religion from Savonarola's most devoted follower, Fra
Domenico da Pescia (of whom more anon); after death, he was robed in
the habit of St Dominic and buried in San Marco. Pico della Mirandola,
too, had been present at the Magnifico's death-bed, though not there
when the end actually came; he too, in 1494, received the Dominican
habit in death, and was buried by Savonarola's friars in San Marco.
Marsilio Ficino outlived his friends and denied Fra Girolamo; he died
in 1499, and lies at rest in the Duomo.
Of all these Medicean Platonists, Pico della Mirandola is the most
fascinating. A young Lombard noble of almost feminine beauty, full of
the pride of having mastered all the knowledge of his day, he first
came to Florence in 1480 or 1482, almost at the very moment in which
Marsilio Ficino finished his translation of Plato. He became at once
the chosen friend of all the choicest spirits of Lorenzo's circle. Not
only classical learning, but the mysterious East and the sacred lore
of the Jews had rendered up their treasures for his intellectual
feast; his mysticism shot far beyond even Ficino; all knowledge and
all religions were to him a revelation of the Deity. Not only to
Lorenzo and his associates did young Pico seem a phoenix of earthly
and celestial wisdom, _uomo quasi divino_ as Machiavelli puts it; but
even Savonarola in his _Triumphus Crucis_, written after Pico's death,
declares that, by reason of his loftiness of intellect and the
sublimity of his doctrine, he should be numbered amongst the miracles
of God and Nature. Pico had been much beloved of many women, and not
always a Platonic lover, but, towards the close of his short
flower-like life, he burnt "fyve bokes that in his youthe of wanton
versis of love with other lyke fantasies he had made," and all else
seemed absorbed in the vision of love Divine. "The substance that I
have left," he told his nephew, "I intend to give out to poor people,
and, fencing myself with the crucifix, barefoot walking about the
world, in every town and castle I purpose to preach of Christ."
Savonarola, to whom he had confided all the secrets of his heart, was
not the only martyr who revered the memory of the man whom Lorenzo the
Magnificent had loved. Thomas More translated his life and letters,
and reckoned him a saint. He would die at the time of the lilies, so a
lady had told Pico; and he died indeed on the very day that the golden
lilies on the royal standard of France were borne into Florence
through the Porta San Frediano--consoled with wondrous visions of the
Queen of Heaven, and speaking as though he beheld the heavens opened.
A month or two earlier, the pen had dropped from the hand of Matteo
Maria Boiardo, as he watched the French army descending the Alps; and
he brought his unfinished _Orlando Innamorato_ to an abrupt close, too
sick at heart to sing of the vain love of Fiordespina for
Brandiamante:--
"Mentre che io canto, o Dio Redentore,
Vedo l'Italia tutta a fiamma e foco,
Per questi Galli, che con gran valore
Vengon, per disertar non so che loco."
"Whilst I sing, Oh my God, I see all Italy in flame and fire, through
these Gauls, who with great valour come, to lay waste I know not what
place." On this note of vague terror, in the onrush of the barbarian
hosts, the Quattrocento closes.
[Illustration: ARMS OF THE PAZZI]