His morals were not as exemplary as his mind. Like many of his contemporaries he did not allow his religious faith to hamper his enjoyment of life. He wrote devout hymns with apparent sincerity, but turned from them, without evident qualm, to poems celebrating licentious love. He seems rarely to have known remorse except for pleasures missed. Having reluctantly accepted, for political reasons, a wife whom he respected rather than loved, he amused himself with adultery after the fashion of the time. But it was accounted one of his distinctions that he had no illegitimate children. Debate is still warm as to his commercial morality. No one questions his liberality; it was as lavish as Cosimo’s. He never rested till he had repaid every gift with a greater gift; he financed a dozen religious undertakings, supported countless artists, scholars, and poets, and lent great sums to the state. After the Pazzi conspiracy he found that his public and private disbursements had left his firm unable to meet its obligations; whereupon a complaisant Council voted to pay his debts out of the state treasury (1480). It is not clear whether this was a fair return for services rendered and private funds spent for public purposes,5 or a plain embezzlement;6 the fact that the measure, though openly known, did no harm to Lorenzo’s popularity, suggests the more lenient interpretation. It was his liberality, as well as his wealth and his luxurious menage, that men had in mind when they called him Il Magnifico.
His cultural activities involved some neglect of the far-flung business of his firm. His agents took advantage of his preoccupation, and indulged in extravagance and chicanery. He rescued the family fortune by gradually withdrawing it from commerce and investing it in city realty and largescale agriculture; he took pleasure in personally supervising his farms and orchards, and was as familiar with fertilizer as with philosophy. Scientifically irrigated and manured, the lands near his villas at Careggi and Póggio a Caiano became models of agricultural economy.
The economic life of Florence prospered under his government.7 The rate of interest fell as low as five per cent, and commercial enterprise, readily financed, flourished until, toward the close of Lorenzo’s career, England became a troublesome competitor in the textile export trade. Even more conducive to prosperity was his policy of peace, and the balance of power that he maintained in Italy during the second decade of his rule. Florence joined with other Italian states in ejecting the Turks from Italy; this accomplished, Lorenzo induced Ferrante of Naples and Galeazzo Sforza of Milan to sign with Florence an alliance for mutual defense; when Pope Innocent VIII joined this league most of the minor states adhered to it too; Venice held aloof, but was persuaded to good behavior by fear of the allies; in this way, with some minor interruptions, the peace of Italy was maintained until Lorenzo’s death. Meanwhile he exerted all his tact and influence to protect weak states against the strong, to adjudicate and reconcile interstate interests and disputes, and to nip every casus belli in the bud.8 In that happy decade (1480–90) Florence reached the apogee of her glory in politics, literature, and art.
Domestically Lorenzo ruled through the Consiglio di Settanta. By the constitution of 1480 this Council of Seventy was composed of thirty members chosen by the Signory of that year, and forty others chosen by these thirty. Membership was for life, and vacancies were filled by co-optation. Under this arrangement the Signory and the gonfalonier had authority only as executive agents of the Council. Popular parlamenti and elections were dispensed with. Opposition was difficult, for Lorenzo employed spies to detect it, and had means of troubling his opponents financially. The old factions slept; crime hid its head; order prospered while liberty declined. “We have here,” wrote a contemporary, “no robberies, no nocturnal commotions, no assassinations. By night or by day every person may transact his affairs in perfect safety.”9 “If Florence was to have a tyrant,” said Guicciardini, “she could never have found a better or more delightful one.”10 The merchants preferred economic prosperity to political freedom; the proletariat was kept busy with extensive public works, and forgave dictatorship so long as Lorenzo supplied it with bread and games. Tournaments allured the rich, horse races thrilled the bourgeoisie, and pageants amused the populace.
It was the custom of the Florentines, in carnival days, to promenade the streets in gay or frightful masks, singing satiric or erotic songs, and to organize trionfi—parades of painted and garlanded floats representing mythological or historical characters or events. Lorenzo relished the custom, but distrusted its tendency to disorder; he resolved to bring it under control by lending it the approval and order of government; under his rule the pageants became the most popular feature of Florentine life. He engaged leading artists to design and paint the chariots, banners, and costumes; he and his friends composed lyrics to be sung from the carri; and these songs reflected the moral relaxation of carnival. The most famous of Lorenzo’s pageants was the “Triumph of Bacchus,” wherein a procession of floats carrying lovely maidens, and a cavalcade of richly garbed youths on prancing steeds, came over the Ponte Vecchio to the spacious square before the cathedral, while voices in polyphonic harmony, to the accompaniment of cymbals and lutes, sang a poem composed by Lorenzo himself, and hardly becoming a cathedral:
1. Quanto è bella giovinezza,
Che si fuge tutta via!
Chi vuol esser lieto sia!
Di doman non c’è certezza.
1. Fair is youth and void of sorrow,
But it hourly flies away.
Youths and maids, enjoy today;
Nought ye know about tomorrow.
2. This is Bacchus and the bright
Ariadne, lovers true!
They, in flying time’s despite,
Each with each finds pleasures new;
3. These, their nymphs, and all their
crew
Keep perpetual holiday.
Youths and maids, enjoy today;
Nought ye know about tomorrow……
14. Ladies and gay lovers young!
Long live Bacchus, live Desire!
Dance and play, let songs be sung;
Let sweet love your bosoms
fire.
15. In the future come what may
Youths and maids enjoy today;
Nought ye know about tomorrow.11
Such poems and pageants lend some pale color to the charge that Lorenzo corrupted Florentine youth. Probably it would have been “corrupt” without him; morals in Venice, Ferrara, and Milan were no better than in Florence; they were better in Florence under the Medici bankers than later in Rome under the Medici popes.
Lorenzo’s esthetic sensibilities were too keen for his morals. Poetry was one of his prime devotions, and his compositions rivaled the best of his time. While his only superior, Politian, still hesitated between Latin and Italian, Lorenzo’s verses restored to the vernacular the literary primacy that Dante had established and the humanists had overthrown. He preferred Petrarch’s sonnets to the love poetry of the Latin classics, though he could read these easily in the original; and more than once he himself composed a sonnet that might have graced Petrarch’s Canzoniere. But he did not take poetic love too seriously. He wrote with finer sincerity about the rural scenes that gave exercise to his limbs and peace to his mind; his best poems celebrate the woods and streams, trees and flowers, flocks and shepherds, of the countryside. Sometimes he wrote humorous pieces in terza rima that lifted the simple language of the peasantry into sprightly verse; sometimes he composed satirical farces Rabelaisianly free; then, again, a religious play for his children, and some hymns that catch here and there a note of honest piety. But his most characteristic poems were the Canti carnascialeschi— Carnival Songs—written to be sung in festival time and mood, and expressing the legitimacy of pleasure and the discourtesy of maidenly prudence. Nothing could better illustrate the morals and manners, the complexity and diversity of the Italian Renaissance than the picture of its most central character ruling a state, managing a fortune, jousting in tournament, writing excellent poetry, supporting artists and authors with discri
minating patronage, mingling at ease with scholars and philosophers, peasants and buffoons, marching in pageants, singing bawdy songs, composing tender hymns, playing with mistresses, begetting a pope, and honored throughout Europe as the greatest and noblest Italian of his time.
IV. LITERATURE: THE AGE OF POLITIAN
Encouraged by his aid and example, Florentine men of leters now wrote more and more of their works in Italian. Slowly they formed that literary Tuscan which became the model and standard of the whole peninsula—“the sweetest, richest, and most cultured, not only of all the languages of Italy,” said the patriotic Varchi, “but of all the tongues that are known today.”12
But while reviving Italian literature, Lorenzo carried on zealously his grandfather’s enterprise of gathering for the use of scholars in Florence all the classics of Greece and Rome. He sent Politian and John Lascaris to various cities in Italy and abroad to buy manuscripts; from one monastery at Mt. Athos Lascaris brought two hundred, of which eighty were as yet unknown to Western Europe. According to Politian, Lorenzo wished that he might be allowed to spend his entire fortune, even to pledge his furniture, in the purchase of books. He paid scribes to make copies for him of manuscripts that could not be purchased, and in return he allowed other collectors, like King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary and Duke Federigo of Urbino, to send their copyists to transcribe manuscripts in the Medicean Library. After Lorenzo’s death this collection was united with that which Cosimo had placed in the convent of San Marco; together, in 1495, they included 1039 volumes, of which 460 were Greek. Michelangelo later designed a lordly home for these books, and posterity gave it Lorenzo’s name—Bibliotheca Laurentiana, the Laurentian Library. When Bernardo Cennini set up a printing press in Florence (1471) Lorenzo did not, like his friend Politian or Federigo of Urbino, turn up his nose at the new art; he seems to have recognized at once the revolutionary possibilities of movable type; and he engaged scholars to collate diverse texts in order that the classics might be printed with the greatest accuracy possible at that time. So encouraged, Bartolommeo di Libri printed the editio princeps of Homer (1488) under the careful scholarship of Demetrius Chalcondyles; John Lascaris issued the editiones principes of Euripides (1494), the Greek Anthology (1494), and Lucian (1496); and Cristoforo Landino edited Horace (1482), Virgil, Pliny the Elder, and Dante, whose language and allusions already required elucidation. We catch the spirit of the time when we learn that Florence rewarded Cristoforo, for these labors of scholarship, with the gift of a splendid home.
Lured by the reputation of the Medici and other Florentines for generous patronage, scholars flocked to Florence and made it the capital of literary learning. Vespasiano da Bisticci, after serving as bookseller and librarian at Florence, Urbino, and Rome, composed an eloquent but judicious series of Lives of Illustrious Men, commemorating the writers and patrons of the age. To develop and transmit the intellectual legacy of the race Lorenzo restored and enlarged the old University of Pisa, and the Platonic Academy at Florence. The latter was no formal college but an association of men interested in Plato, meeting at irregular intervals in Lorenzo’s city palace or in Ficino’s villa at Careggi, dining together, reading aloud part or all of a Platonic dialogue, and discussing its philosophy. November 7, the supposed anniversary of Plato’s birth and death, was celebrated by the Academy with almost religious solemnity; a bust believed to be of Plato was crowned with flowers, and a lamp was burned before it as before the image of a deity. Cristoforo Landino used these meetings as the basis for the imaginary conversations that he wrote as Disputationes Camaldulenses (1468). He told how he and his brother, visiting the monastery of the Camaldulese monks, met the young Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici, Leon Battista Alberti, and six other Florentine gentlemen; how they reclined on the grass near a flowing fountain, compared the worried hurry of the city with the healing quiet of the countryside, and debated the active versus the contemplative career, and how Alberti praised a life of rural meditation, while Lorenzo urged that the mature mind finds its fullest functioning and satisfaction in the service of the state and the commerce of the world.13
Among those who attended the discussions of the Platonic Academy were Politian, Pico della Mirandola, Michelangelo, and Marsilio Ficino. Marsilio had been so faithful to Cosimo’s commission as to devote almost all his life to translating Plato into Latin and to studying, teaching, and writing about Platonism. In youth he was so handsome that the maidens of Florence eyed him possessively, but he cared less for them than for his books. For a time he lost his religious faith; Platonism seemed superior; he addressed his students as “beloved in Plato” rather than “beloved in Christ”;14 he burned candles before a bust of Plato, and adored him as a saint.15 Christianity appeared to him, in this mood, as but one of the many religions that hid elements of truth behind their allegorical dogmas and symbolic rites. St. Augustine’s writings, and gratitude for recovery from a critical illness, won him back to the Christian faith. At forty he became a priest, but he remained an enthusiastic Platonist. Socrates and Plato, he argued, had expounded a monotheism as noble as that of the Prophets; they, too, in their minor way, had received a divine revelation; so, indeed, had all men in whom reason ruled. Following his lead, Lorenzo and most of the humanists sought not to replace Christianity with another faith, but to reinterpret it in terms that a philosopher could accept. For a generation or two (1447–1534) the Church smiled tolerantly on the enterprise. Savonarola denounced it as humbug.
Next to Lorenzo himself, Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was the most fascinating personality in the Platonic Academy. Born in the town (near Modena) made famous by his name, he studied at Bologna and Paris, and was received with honor at almost every court in Europe; finally Lorenzo persuaded him to make Florence his home. His eager mind took up one study after another—poetry, philosophy, architecture, music—and achieved in each some outstanding excellence. Politian described him as a paragon in whom Nature had united all her gifts: “tall and finely molded, with something of divinity shining in his face”; a man of penetrating glance, indefatigable study, miraculous memory, and ecumenical erudition, eloquent in several languages, a favorite with women and philosophers, and as lovable in character as he was handsome in person and eminent in all qualities of intellect. His mind was open to every philosophy and every faith; he could not find it in him to reject any system, any man; and though in his final years he spurned astrology, he welcomed mysticism and magic as readily as he accepted Plato and Christ. He had a good word to say for the Scholastic philosophers, whom most other humanists repudiated as having barbarously expressed absurdities. He found much to admire in Arabic and Jewish thought, and numbered several Jews among his teachers and honored friends.16 He studied the Hebrew Cabala, innocently accepted its alleged antiquity, and announced that he had found in it full proofs for the divinity of Christ. As one of his feudal titles was Count of Concordia, he assumed the high duty of reconciling all the great religions of the West—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and these with Plato, and Plato with Aristotle. Though flattered by all, he retained to the end of his brief life a charming modesty that was impaired only by his ingenuous trust in the accuracy of his learning and the power of human reason.
Going to Rome at the age of twenty-four (1486), he startled priests and pundits by publishing a list of nine hundred propositions, covering logic, metaphysics, theology, ethics, mathematics, physics, magic, and the Cabala, and including the generous heresy that even the greatest mortal sin, being finite, could not merit eternal punishment. Pico proclaimed his readiness to defend any or all of these propositions in public debate against any person, and offered to pay the traveling expenses of any challenger from whatever land he might come. As a preface to this proposed tournament of philosophy he prepared a famous oration, later entitled De hominis dignitate (On the Dignity of Man), which expressed with youthful ardor the high opinion that the humanists—contradicting most medieval views—held of the human species. “It is a commonplace o
f the schools,” wrote Pico, “that man is a little world, in which we may discern a body mingled of earthly elements, and a heavenly spirit, and the vegetable soul of plants, and the senses of the lower animals, and reason, and the mind of angels, and the likeness of God.”17 And then Pico put into the mouth of God Himself, as words spoken to Adam, a divine testimony to the limitless potentialities of man: “I created thee as being neither heavenly nor earthly… that thou mightest be free to shape and to overcome thyself. Thou mayest sink into a beast, or be born anew to the divine likeness.” To which Pico added, in the high spirit of the young Renaissance:
This is the culminating gift of God, this is the supreme and marvelous felicity of man… that he can be that which he wills to be. Animals, from the moment of their birth, carry with them, from their mothers’ bodies, all that they are destined to have or be; the highest spirits [angels] are from the beginning… what they will be forever. But God the Father endowed man, from birth, with the seeds of every possibility and every life.18