The Lorenzo we see from his voluminous letters is a man who had a short temper and bouts of depression, but was also capable of tremendous compassion and generosity. Unfortunately, his relationships with his own wife and sons were perhaps less than ideal.
Transcript
So you may have noticed I focused on Lorenzo’s activities as a politician, and not as a patron. This is despite the fact that Lorenzo is the rare historically celebrated leader who is actually better known for his activities in the cultural sphere than his political career. Now that we hit a point in our story where Lorenzo is basking in his victories over Pope Sixtus and is for the first time in a long time secure, I want to hit pause and look at Lorenzo as a family man and then as the head of a vast patronage network that made Florence one of the cultural capitals of Europe.
As we’ve seen, Lorenzo was a natural diplomat, who had an excellent poker face. But we can also tell from the record that he was nonetheless an emotional man. In 1470, an ambassador from Milan wrote back to the Duke that when he hesitated to ratify a new treaty between Milan and Florence Lorenzo was “in a greater fury than I ever saw a man of his social condition.” Maybe this was just a performance to get the treaty signed, but there are other hints in the personal letters that Lorenzo did have a short fuse, at least when it came to certain situations. Lorenzo would become furious if he felt he had been outwitted, if his pride was wounded, or if he felt betrayed. If the letters of his friends are any indication, even winning a game against Lorenzo could be risky.
Lorenzo also showed periods of what we might today call depression and which his contemporaries definitely identified as melancholia. We saw how when he was in Naples, his mood would turn dark once he was away from the public. I’ll talk more about Lorenzo’s writings later, but he does show a melancholic streak. In one poem, he writes: “How vain, indeed, is every hope of ours, / How falsely-based each plan, / How full the world of ignorance, / Death, master of us all, shows us.” In another: “O God, O Highest God, now what do you do? / That I search only for you and never find you.”
While he might have been gloomy on occasion, Lorenzo did have a sense of humor, albeit one that might get a person cancelled nowadays, as the kids say. Some of the poems and songs he wrote are definitely on the lewd side. One song we still have, “Song of the Pancakes”, was written in the style of the carnivale, and like a lot of carnivale songs, it has a frank erotic dimension. “You do hold on, dear ladies, in we’ll push, / If we should push too hard or too soft be / Do take the ladle in your own two hands / And you can put it in, so good it’ll be.” Even when he got older, he enjoyed a good practical joke. Apparently there was an obnoxious doctor he and his friends had to travel with, even though supposedly no one liked the man.. One day, Lorenzo and his friends locked the doctor up in an isolated farmhouse and spread a rumor that he had died. The doctor escaped and made it home to his wife, who thought she was seeing a ghost. I mean, who hasn’t caused people to think a person you didn’t like dropped dead?
On the brighter side, by modern standards, Lorenzo was an animal lover, who especially adored his horses. He would insist on personally feeding one horse he was especially fond of, Morello, rather than entrusting it to the stable workers. It was probably because he knew of Lorenzo’s passion for animals that in 1487 Sultan of the Ottoman Empire gifted Lorenzo with a small menagerie of exotic animals, including a lion, some mountain goats, and a giraffe that Lorenzo became especially fond of. Along with this, Lorenzo yearned for the countryside. Whether or not this love of the rural came out of a deeply rooted resentment at the role thrust upon him, throughout his life Lorenzo would flee to his family’s country villas whenever he got a chance.
Also Lorenzo was known for being especially kind to the Jewish population of Tuscany, at least by the standards of the time. He would intervene to protect individual Jews and Jewish communities from anti-Semitic officials around northern and central Italy. Sometimes he would even get into a squabble with the papal authorities on behalf of the Jews. I’ll likely revisit the topic of Jewish communities, at least in Tuscany and around Italy, in a tangent episode.
For now, let’s zoom out a bit and look at Lorenzo’s family. As I discussed before, Lorenzo’s marriage to Clarice was mainly intended to give the Medici a boost in social status on the Italian scene. His wife Clarice was a daughter of the Orsini, an old aristocratic Roman clan. This meant that, unlike Lorenzo’s own mother Lucrezia or his friend Ippolita Sforza, Clarice had an old-fashioned upbringing more like that of a typical medieval matron rather than a daughter of the Renaissance. No Sophocles or Cicero for her, but lessons on the traditional Latin translation of the Psalms and how to manage a household. This is probably one reason, if not the reason, Lorenzo and Clarice never had the partnership that his grandparents and his parents had enjoyed.
Nor was Lorenzo faithful. The letters of Braccio Martelli, who was part of Lorenzo’s inner circle, do suggest that while Lorenzo tampered down his carousing after he got married, he kept seeing other women. One of his mistresses whose name we know was Bartolomea de’ Nasi, the wife of Donato Benci. There’s been some modern speculation that Lorenzo might have also been intimate with Braccio Martelli himself or another of his close friends, Luigi Pulci. Admittedly the evidence is scarce and almost entirely speculative. All I’ll say is I don’t think the argument goes that far, since it is built just around some interpretations of Martelli and Pulci’s letters to Lorenzo and the fact that both men were at some point investigated by Florence’s literal morality police, the Officers of the Night, for sodomy. At the same time we have to admit that it wouldn’t have been good at the time for even a powerful man to leave a paper trail when it came to relationships between men. However, we can say there is much more evidence that Lorenzo was at least very much a Lothoario with the ladies, and dalliances with women other than his wife was normal, even somewhat expected, at the time. But unlike his brother, father, and grandfather, he did not leave behind any illegitimate children, at least none that made it into the records.
Still, the personal letters of Clarice and Lorenzo do reveal a personal fondness on both sides. During the long weeks when Lorenzo was away either on routine business or away in Naples trying to win over the King of Naples, Clarice sincerely complained about his absences and wished for his safety. And when Lorenzo did return, the letters paint scenes like Lorenzo riding up to the Medici Palace on horseback and greeted by his entire family. In one letter Clarice wrote to her mother-in-law Lucrezia: “On account of the bad roads and the much rain we have not sent the carrier for three days. Now either he or another will go to you with this : because I wish to know how you and Lorenzo are, and the others. I beg of you to write and tell me. We, by God’s grace, are all quite well but for the water above our heads. We remain all day in the house, and nothing gladdens us so much as letters and news from you all. I commend myself to you.”
That said, there were some nasty bumps in their relationship. It’s clear from the letters we have that Clarice was painfully aware that her husband’s educated friends looked down on her and mocked her. This finally came to a head over the issue of her children’s education. Lorenzo had made his and his brother’s friend the scholar and poet Poliziano their tutor. By the way, this was the same Poliziano who placed a sheet over the corpse of Giuliano after he was assassinated. Poliziano was fiercely loyal to Lorenzo. Poliziano, whose real name was Angelo Ambrogini, had first come to Lorenzo’s attention in 1470 as a 16-year-old orphaned and impoverished university student, who boldly introduced himself to Lorenzo with one extravagant cover letter: “Magnificent Lorenzo, to whom heaven has given charge of the city and the State, first citizen of Florence, doubly crowned with bays lately for war in Saint Croce amid the acclamations of the people and for poetry on account of the sweetness of your verses, give ear to me who drinking at Greek sources am striving to set Homer into Latin meter. This second book which I have translated comes to you and timidly crosses your threshold. If you welcome it I propose to offer to you all the Iliad. It rests with you, who can, to help the poet. I desire no other muse or other Gods but only you; but your help I can do that of which the ancients would not have been ashamed.” I really should try something like this the next time I put in a job application.
Anyway, Poliziano’s devotion to Lorenzo did not extend to his wife. The two apparently already squabbled on at least several occasions over how Poliziano had been managing the children’s education before. However, by 1479, things were especially tense. Out of fear over the political situation following the aftermath of the Pazzi conspiracy and outbreaks of the plague, Clarice and her children had been moving from villa to villa around Tuscany. It was during this period of stress and migration that Clarice finally got into a real fight with Poliziano. She learned that Poliziano was teaching the children Latin using the great pagan orators and writers of antiquity, instead of just using the traditional Vulgate translation of the Bible to provide translation exercises The argument escalated to the point that Clarice essentially fired Poliziano.
Even though he was facing the greatest political crisis of his life, Lorenzo had to step in. And it’s telling that, even though as an upper-class man at the time he had every right according to society to veto his wife’s wishes on their children’s education, he actually caved, just a little. Poliziano wasn’t reinstated as tutor, but Lorenzo did set him up in one of the family’s villas. It was in response to this that we get a glimpse, just beneath the usual deference and submission demanded of a wife by the culture, of how hurt Clarice was by some of her husband’s friends, She writes, “You know that I said that if you wished him to remain I would be content, and though he has called me a thousand names, if it is with your approval, I will endure it, but I cannot believe it is true.”
Clarice got rid of Poliziano, but that was as far as her victory went. Lorenzo continued to financially support Poliziano, and while he gave the children new tutors they were still to receive the type of humanist education Lorenzo and his own siblings had. We don’t know for sure, but I suspect at least one person pitied her: Lorenzo’s sister Lucrezia or Nannina as the family called her. Without any input from her, her husband Bernardo Rucellai had fired their children’s tutor and kicked him out of their home. In a letter to her mother about the situation, Lucrezia bitterly remarked, “Whoso wants to do as they wish should not be born a woman.”
However, one woman who Lorenzo did treat like a partner was his mother Lucrezia. To not just Lorenzo but all her children, she was a vital source of advice on business and household management and spiritual matters. Also until the end of the life she was involved in helping manage the family’s network of clients and even traveled to see the Pope on her son’s behalf. And Lorenzo may have felt closer to her than he ever felt to his distant, judgmental father. When she died on March 25, 1482, Lorenzo was heartbroken. Writing to the Duke of Ferrara, Lorenzo said, “I am more full of sorrow than I can say, as besides losing a mother, at the mere thought of whom my heart breaks, I have lost the counsellor who took many a burden from off me.”
Lorenzo became a father himself. Clarice gave birth to a daughter Lucrezia in 1470. Then she had twin boys in 1471, but both only lived long enough to be baptized. However, on February 15, 1472, she had a son, named Piero after Lorenzo’s father, who would grow into adulthood. These were followed by Maddelena, Contessina Beatrice who sadly died very young, Giovanni, Luisa, and Contessina Antonia. The cycle of Medici father-son relations repeated, as Lorenzo’s sons had to live with their father’s stifling expectations for them and their contributions to the family. It was decided very early on that Piero as the eldest son would someday take his father’s place on the Medici’s invisible throne while Giovanni would become a cardinal. Since Giovanni was a born academic and an eager student, he was practically meant for a career in the church. As for Piero, well…. It was said that Lorenzo had remarked on his own sons, “I have three sons: one dumb, one smart, one sweet.” This referred to Piero, Giovanni, and Giulliano respectively. If Lorenzo actually did say this, it was a prophetic observation, just a little mean, at least by modern standards.
Since by being born female they did not have the shoulder expectations, Lorenzo was closer to his daughters and vice versa. Of course, even then Lorenzo did not hesitate to marry them off to benefit the family’s political and business interests. Lucrezia was married to Jacopo Salviati, a member of another of Florence’s banking dynasties. Also, for you fans of royal genealogy, it’s through Lucrezia that Lorenzo the Magnificent can brag about being the ancestor of both the British royal family and the descendants of the kings of France, but we’ll get to that. Maddalena, who happened to be her mother’s unabashed favorite, wed Franceschetto Cybo, the illegitimate son of Pope Innocent VIII. It was not a particularly happy marriage, since Franceschetto was a bit of a notorious gambling addict who would also do rather impulsive things like stealing most of the papal treasury after hearing a false rumor that his father had suddenly died. Contessina Antonia married another rich Florentine, Piero Ridolfi. Luisa was meant to marry Giovanni de’ Medici, the son of Lorenzo’s cousin Pierfrancesco, in an attempt to heal the rift between the two branches of the family. Tragically, she died soon before the wedding took place.
Thanks to the massive amount of letters, we get a little insight into the family. Here’s one portrait of the Medici kids’ experiences: “Giovanni is able to spell. You can see for yourself how my writing is getting on. As for Greek, I work at it but do not get very far. Lucrezia sews, sings, and reads. Maddalena knocks her head against the wall but does not hurt herself. Luisa can talk quite a lot. Contessina makes a great noise all over the house. Nothing is wanting to us but to have you here.” And we know little tidbits like the fact that as a child Giovanni de’ Medici, the future Pope Leo X who would be the Antichrist in the eyes of Martin Luther, really liked plums and wanted his father to bring him more. In fact, missing their father and asking him to bring them gifts is a pretty constant theme in the children’s letters to their father. In 1477, little Lucrezia wrote to him, “It seems a thousand years until the time of your return, and, every day, I say a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria so that you may return happy and well to us. And send me the basket of roses you promised.” We also see a competitive, humanist spirit between Lorenzo’s kids. Here’s one letter Piero wrote to his father: “Lucrezia and I are trying who can write best. She writes to grandmother Lucrezia, I, my father, to you. The one who obtains what he asks for will win. Till now Lucrezia has had all she wished for. I, who have always written in Latin in order to give a more literary tone to letters, have not yet had that pony you promised me ; so that I am laughed at by all. See to it therefore, Your Magnificence, that she should not always be the winner.” In case you’re in suspense about whether or not Piero got his pony, well, here’s a follow-up letter: “I owe you and I send you many thanks for such a fine gift, and I shall try and repay you by becoming what you wish. Of this be sure. I promise you that I shall try with all my heart.” Now in his biography of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Miles Unger sees this as proof that Piero was something of a spoiled brat and even a sign that he would…well, spoilers. I’m not sure if I agree. I mean, I think no matter what time period you’re in, if you dig through enough letters written by a child or social media posts or transcripts of that child’s conversations with their parents, you would find something you could use to show that child was a greedy brat with the potential to destroy that family’s future. No, what’s interesting to me is the tone of how eager Piero is to not only please his father, but to become what he expects. As much as Lorenzo chaffed at the pressure his own father put on him, he found it necessary to do the same to his own son. We have another letter from Piero to his father showing that Piero was not just learning Latin, but the family business of patronage. “I commend Martino to you, who aids me not to forget my Greek and to improve my Latin.1 He would have been named chaplain of S. Lorenzo by his patrons, Antonio and Lorenzo Tornabuoni, had not Your Magnificence recommended another. It is but just that they should bestow their patronage on their own people, and not be prevented in so doing by you, who in general give to others what is yours. I hope therefore to have letters recommending my Martino to those to whom he has already recommended himself. God save you.”
Patronage was definitely a large part of Lorenzo’s job. It was Lorenzo who single-handedly revived the University of Pisa, which had sharply declined into being an all but completely defunct institution since the Florentines invaded the city in 1405. Lorenzo spent much of his own personal fortune improving the university grounds and attracting an all-sstar faculty. For example, Lorenzo lured Bartolomeo Sozzini, a distinguished professor of law, away from the University of Bologna to Pisa. Of course, as with most patronage decisions, this wasn’t done out of the goodness of his heart. It allowed him to increase his prestige while creating opportunities to give scholarships to poor young men who would become his clients and had bright futures in administration, the law, the church, or the arts. Still, though, the practical benefits of patronage and the cultural valorization of the generous patron were so intertwined it wouldn’t be accurate or fair to try to boil down Lorenzo’s motives to either just charity or self-interest.
When it came to artistic and scholarly patronage, Lorenzo was more like an intermediary who connected clients to patrons than anything else. This was one of the ways he helped make Florence a cultural capital of Europe and helped win valuable foreign allies for the city. Lorenzo sent Florentine artists, architects, and scholars to like the architect Andrea Sansovino and the sculptor Giuliano da Sangallo to various foreign monarchs including King Ferrante of Naples, King Joao II of Portugal, King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary and Bohemia, and King Louis XI of France. Also one of the ways Lorenzo tried to smooth things over with Pope Sixtus IV was by sending the artists Botticelli, Perugino, and Domenico Ghirlandaio to paint frescos for the Pope’s new passion project, a new chapel taking his papal name, the Sistine Chapel.
But this isn’t to say that Lorenzo was just a middle man. He helped fund the workshop of Andrea del Verocchio, which was famous for being a school of sorts for many famous artists and sculptors, including Michelangelo. Lorenzo commissioned Botticelli, Perugino, Ghirlandaio, and Filippino Lippi to paint frescoes at his country villa in Spedaleto, although sadly this villa was destroyed. Also lost was the famous Medici garden adjacent to the monastery at San Marco, which Lorenzo populated with statues and bronzes by the top new artists, including a young Leonardo da Vinci. It was said that as an adolescent Michelangelo loved to visit the garden and declared that he could learn more about sculpture there than anywhere else in the world. Incidentally, there is a story that once Lorenzo personally oversaw the work of a bunch of young sculptors learning the trade, possibly in his own garden, and Michelangelo was one of them. When Lorenzo praised the bust Michelangelo was working on but pointed out some small flaw, Michelangelo immediately smashed the bust to pieces and started anew. This tale is probably apocryphal, although it does fit with the temperamental artist Michelangelo would prove to be. At any rate, sadly future events would spell the doom of this garden, and even from our relatively plentiful sources we know very little about it except that it existed and was something of a tourist hotspot.
If it did happen, Lorenzo was unfazed by Michelangelo’s outburst and proved to be an important early patron in his life. Michelangelo even lived with Lorenzo and his family for a period. Of course, not everyone Lorenzo commissioned would prove to be a great, era-defining celebrity. For instance, we have the rather mysterious “Francesco the goldsmith”, who is frequently mentioned in Lorenzo’s papers but we know almost nothing about him. He did work in Lorenzo’s famous garden and was allowed to live in one of Lorenzo’s properties. Likewise the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni, a student of Donatello’s, was given his own apartment in the Palazzo Medici. But I do have to agree with Mary Hollingsworth that people today do tend to overestimate the number of individual famous works that Lorenzo had commissioned. After all, it wasn’t Lorenzo, but his estranged cousins Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco and Giovanni di Pierfrancesco who commissioned Botticelli’s famous painting Primavera and his illustrated copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy along with a marble statue of John the Baptist sculpted by Michelangelo himself.
Still, Lorenzo knew what he was doing, at least when it came to architecture. In 1474, his brother-in-law Bernardo Rucellai asked for his personal insights for a building project, a villa for Bernardo and his family. And, of course, Lorenzo dabbled in writing. He wrote at least two short stories, “The Story of Giacoppo” and “The Story of Ginevra”, and religious plays about Saint Paul and John the Baptist. But mostly his output was in the form of songs and poems. Here’s one love song he wrote: “So cruel and inhumane the first wound was, / So savage was the arrow and so fierce / That had my heart not been by hope sustained / So sweet would death itself have seemed to me, / The young of tender age do not refuse / To follow Love with ever-growing need: / This joyful willingly they follow, / For destiny has this allotted them.”
And a sonnet with a mythological theme, with the rather clunky title “Sonnot Composed in Reggio On Returning From Milan Where I had News That a Woman Was Ill”: “The goddess of the woods, the chaste Diana, / So envy did the beauty great and new. And Pallas could not stand that mortal woman / More beautiful and chaste on earth could be. / The sacred limbs they made both weak and feeble. / Honored they should have been, not made to suffer. / In heaven, too. O envy, you hold sway!”
What Lorenzo was not good at was managing a bank. But we’ll talk more about his misadventures as owner of the Medici bank next time.
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