To try to stop a war Florence is badly losing and take some steam out of the Pope’s vendetta against him, Lorenzo does something few politicians had done before or since: put himself directly in enemy territory.
King Ferrante of Naples as one of the Magi who visit the infant Jesus Christ in Marco Cardisco’s Adoration of the Magi. Date unknown. Source: Civic Museum of Castel Nuovo, Naples.
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Lorenzo resorts to unsavory methods in order to keep the Medici bank afloat. In the meantime, his path crosses with the man who would prove to be his most relentless enemy: Christ’s representative on Earth himself.
A fresco depicting Sixtus IV and some of the della Rovere-Riario family by Melozzo da Forli (c. 1477). Source: Vatican Museum.
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Not long after coming to power, Lorenzo de’ Medici has to fend off enemies at home and abroad. Unfortunately, in the course of protecting Florence from a crisis that could spiral out of control, Lorenzo sets the stage for a humanitarian disaster. But how much was he really to blame?
A contemporaneous portrait of Lorenzo’s brother, Giuliano de’ Medici, by Sandro Botticelli. Circa 1478. Source: Gemäldegalerie Berlin.
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Even as a small child, Lorenzo had been thrust into the role of the public face of the Medici regime. Now an adult, Lorenzo’s own marriage to a Roman noblewoman from a clan claiming the Emperor Augustus and Julius Caesar as ancestors is a chance for the Medici to ascend even higher. Meanwhile, Piero is finally succumbing to his gout, just when both the domestic and foreign situations are starting to fall apart.
“The Counterattack of Michelotto di Cotignola” (c. 1455), one of Paolo di Dono’s three paintings commemorating the Florentine victory over Siena at the Battle of San Romano in 1423, commissioned by Piero de’ Medici. Source: The Louvre, Paris. Boticelli’s Adoration of the Magi (1475 or 1476), which includes a depiction of the 16-year-old Lorenzo de’ Medici on the far left. Source: Uffizi Gallery, Florence. A posthumous terracotta bust of Lorenzo de’ Medici, which was likely based on a 1478 wax sculpture by Andrea del Verrocchio and Orsino Benintendi. Date unknown. Source: National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Girolamo Machietti’s posthumous portrait of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Date unknown. Source: Palazzo Pitti, Florence. A portrait likely of Clarice Orsini by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1490s). Source: National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.
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Piero de’ Medici narrowly escaped death or abduction. But did everything happen as Piero and his son Lorenzo said? And just how will the Party of the Hill survive when they apparently bet everything on one scheme?
At the height of his political power, Cosimo de’ Medici is being overwhelmed with illness and personal tragedy. Who will succeed him to his invisible, nameless throne? His son Piero, who unfortunately is a middle-aged man so sick no one thinks he will live for much longer.
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Cosimo de’ Medici quickly established a regime that operated within Florence’s constitution but gave Cosimo an almost unchallenged power over the state. Unfortunately, Cosimo’s government was a delicate structure, and the pandemonium of Italian Renaissance politics threatened to bring it all tumbling down.
The exterior of the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi. Source: Yair Haklai, Wikicommons. The interior of the Chapel of the Magi within the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi. Source: theflorentine.net. A portrait of Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, former condottieri, and a key ally of Cosimo de’ Medici, by Bonifacio Bembo (c. 1460). He insisted on being painted wearing his battered and worn old campaigning hat.
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With a combination of patience and political maneuvering, Cosimo turns the tables on his enemies and returns to Florence in triumph. His first major act is to host an attempt to reunify the long-divided Greek and Latin churches. It has rather mixed results, but it does make something clear to the rulers of Europe: Cosimo is no longer just a banker.
An image believed to be the Byzantine Emperor John VIII, taken from a cycle of frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli depicting the Magi’s visit to the infant Jesus Christ but with the likenesses of various participants in the Council of Florence (c. 1459). Source: Magi Chapel, Palazzo Medici Riccardi. Pisanello’s sketches of the Byzantine delegation at the Council of Florence (c. 1439-1449).
Raphael, The School of Athens, ca. 1510. It is a fresco that lies in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace. A representation of the standard medieval western European representation of Perseus, from an astrological and occult guidebook, the Heidelberger Schicksalsbuch (1491), currently kept in the rare books collection of the University of Heidelberg. Note how Perseus is wielding an Arabic-style scimitar.Altichiero de Zevio’s sketch portrait of Petrarch, c. 1375. Anonymous portrait of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.
Let’s talk about the Renaissance. Because the Renaissance was a truly international movement, and not at all the exclusively Italian movement we tend to think of it as, to talk about it it’s almost impossible not to jump around in space and time. So, for the sake of trying (possibly in vain) to keep things tidy I split my discussion of the Renaissance in two. First, we’ll talk about the old, how the Renaissance looked back into the past. Second, we’ll get into the new, meaning how the Renaissance looked forward.
Portrait of Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici (c. 1563) by Cristofano dell’Altissimo. Source: Palazzo-medici.it.
We close out Season 1, “The Early Medici”, with a look at the life and death of Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, whose descendants would become the branch of the family we usually mean when we talk about the Medici. Not only is he the first prominent member of the family, however, he also founded the dynasty in the sense that he started the tradition of sponsoring forward-thinking artists, writers, and architects and in how his apparent reluctance to be a public figure actually inspired a formula for political success that would carry his descendants to greater heights than even his more ambitious forebears could have imagined.
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While I talked about how Giovanni de Bicci dei Medici reaped the benefits from his relationship with the sketchy soldier turned rival pope John XXIII, the rest of the Medici family was not doing so well. The family remained committed to the populist cause. Unfortunately, the conservatives also remained firmly in power since the fall of Salvestro de’ Medici. As a result, various Medici along with members of other populist families were persecuted by the government, either barred from political office or exiled from the city. So, while we can’t know what his true political beliefs were, by making himself a low-key ally of the conservatives, Vieri de’ Medici was truly and literally saving himself and his family. Giovanni de Bicci would not follow in his cousin and fairy godfather’s footsteps. However, he would find his own savvy way of surviving the political whirlwind.
The Medici Podcast 