The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (16 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many of the artists in this long procession were already at work, or were shortly to embark upon work, for Piero de’ Medici. One of these was Luca della Robbia, soon to be elected president of the sculptors’ guild. Born in Florence in 1400 he had achieved lasting fame with the beautiful singing-gallery in the cathedral which he finished in 1428.
⁴
Then, having been commissioned by the
Signoria
to complete the series of reliefs begun by Giotto and Andrea Pisano on the northern side of the campanile,
⁵
he had been asked to make some oval terracotta reliefs for the walls of Piero’s study in the Medici Palace and some tiles for the floor, ‘a new thing and most excellent for summer’.
⁶

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

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

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

In the
Adoration of the Magi
, however, which Botticelli painted as one of those family group pictures with a religious theme so favoured by Renaissance artists, Lorenzo – if the traditional identification can be accepted – appears in a stronger light and more exposed position. This picture was commissioned by Piero’s friend Guaspare di Zanobi del Lama, for the church of Santa Maria Novella, perhaps as a votive offering after the Medici’s escape from the danger of assassination and the threat of exile by the conspirators of 1466.
¹⁰
Although other members of his family occupy more prominent positions, the picture certainly seems to have been intended as a tribute to Lorenzo, just as
Fortitude
, which Botticelli afterwards painted for the Council of the
Arte della Mercanzia
, appears to have been painted as a tribute to Piero.