Christopher - The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici

As in the case of other pictures which he commissioned, Piero took great interest in the painting of this picture, instructing Gozzoli to use the brightest colours and to make the clothes as rich and brilliant as possible. Gozzoli agreed to do so, adding that he would need a great deal of gold and ultramarine paint, so would Piero advance him the money? When the painting was nearly finished, Piero objected that the angels were too obtrusive. Gozzoli did no think so:

I have put in only two seraphim, one is in a corner among the clouds; nothing but the tips of his wings is visible, and he is so well hidden and so well covered by clouds that he does not spoil the picture at all, but on the contrary adds beauty to it… The other seraph is on the far side of the altar, also hidden in a similar way. Ruberto Martegli has seen them and said there is no cause to make a fuss about them. However, I will do as you ask. Two small clouds will obliterate them both.

It is probable that Piero did not live to see this fresco finished. He had been ill since the beginning of 1469, and his last months were troubled ones. Groups of citizens, claiming to be acting on his authority, took to marauding through streets by day and night, ill-treating and threatening passers-by whom they accused of being opponents of the Medici and extorting money from them. Piero acted with that forceful determination which so often surprised those who supposed his ill-health had wasted his spirit, and who mistook for weakness his respect for the constitution of the state. He ordered the ringleaders to be brought to his room and, from his bed, upbraided them for their misdeeds; he warned them that, should their excesses continue, he would have members of various exiled families recalled to Florence to help control them. The violence immediately subsided and the marauding ceased; but before the end of the year Piero was dead. He was buried next to his brother, Giovanni, in the old sacristry of San Lorenzo. Over his body and that of their uncle his sons placed a porphyry sarcophagus, ornamented with acanthus leaves, designed for the Medici by Donatello’s most brilliant pupil, Andrea del Verrocchio. 15

LORENZO WAS now twenty, strong, virile, clever and inexhaustibly energetic, the brilliant paladin of the Medici house, the first such heir it had ever had. His straight, thick, dark hair, parted in the middle, fell almost to his shoulders; his long flattened nose, which had no sense of smell, looked as though it had been broken and badly set; his heavy jaw jutted forward so that his lower lip almost enclosed the upper; the eyebrows above his big, dark, penetrating eyes were irregular and bumpy; he was quite strikingly ugly. His voice was cracked, nasal and high-pitched. Yet when he talked his face was so animated, his manner so arresting, his long slender hands so expressive that few noticed his defects.

To his every activity he brought a marvellously infectious zest. As Marsilio Ficino, said, he had a ‘naturally joyful nature’. With equal enthusiasm he played calcio , a fast game like football with twenty-seven players on each side, and palloni , a ball-game played in a court with gloved hands. He went out hunting and hawking. In a voice not very tuneful, he sang at table and he sang in the saddle; once, so one of his friends recorded, he kept singing and telling jokes throughout a journey of thirty miles, keeping the rest of the company in spirits as high as his own. He composed many of his songs himself, and some of them were outrageously lewd. He had a strong taste for bawdy, for sexual innuendo and ribald stories. He also shared his contemporaries’ taste for those boisterous practical jokes which later generations were to find so heartless, even cruel. The story is told that one night when a tiresome, bibulous doctor was drunker than usual, Lorenzo suggested that two friends should bundle him off to the country, lock him up in a remote farmhouse and spread the rumour that he was dead. The rumour was accepted as the truth; and when the doctor escaped and returned home, pale and bedraggled, his wife believed him to be a ghost and refused to let him in.

Yet Lorenzo was renowned amongst his friends for his kindness and consideration. Responsive, affectionate and simpatico , he had a rare gift for friendship and a deep love of animals, particularly of horses. He generally fed his own horse, Morello, himself; and when he did not, the animal, who greeted his master’s arrival by neighing and stamping his feet, would fret so much that he became ill. But although he spent so much time riding and hunting in the country, in gardening at Careggi, in supervising his farms in the Mugello, in raising herds of cows, breeding racehorses for the palio , rearing Calabrian pigs at Careggi and Sicilian pheasants at Poggio a Caiano, breeding rabbits and experimenting in the manufacture of cheeses, he derived quite as much pleasure from the activities he pursued in Florence, reading, writing, talking, studying Plato, playing the lyre, making architectural drawings and making love. He was astonishingly versatile; and he liked it to be known that he was. It had to be admitted that he was vain and intensely competitive. He could be very angry when beaten at a game or outwitted in some intellectual exercise.

When he was nineteen, it was decided that it was time for him to marry. The bride selected for him was Clarice Orsini, the daughter of Jacopo Orsini of Monterotondo, a sixteen-year-old heiress from Rome. Lorenzo’s mother travelled to Rome to inspect the girl on the pretext of visiting her brothers, Giovanni and Francesco Tornabuoni, who looked after the Medici bank in Rome. Lucrezia caught her first glimpse of Clarice as she and her mother were on their way to St Peter’s. The girl was wearing a lenzuolo in the Roman fashion so Lucrezia could not see her properly, but ‘she seemed to be handsome, fair and tall’. The next time Lucrezia saw her she was still unable to inspect her figure as she would have liked, ‘since Roman women [were] always entirely covered up’; but, so far as she could judge it in its tight bodice, her bosom seemed to be well-shaped; and her hands were ‘long and delicate’. Her face was ‘rather round but not unattractive, her throat fairly elegant but rather too thin’. She certainly had a ‘nice complexion’. Her hair, Lucrezia noticed now, was not really fair – no women in Rome were so blessed – but reddish.

‘She does not carry her head well, as our girls do, but pokes it forward,’ Lucrezia concluded her report. ‘I think she is shy… Yet, altogether I think the girl is a good deal above the average.’ Of course, she added, she could not be compared with her own three daughters who were, indeed, not only better-looking but, as Florentines, far better-educated than any Roman girl could expect to be. Nevertheless, Lucrezia hoped that with her evident modesty and good manners Clarice would soon learn Florentine customs.

The Florentines themselves did not entirely approve of the match. It had never before been the custom for even the richest merchant families of the city to look outside Tuscany for brides and bridegrooms for their children; and the Medici had previously been content to ally themselves with families of their own sort. Lorenzo was well aware of the advantages of this himself. All his sisters married rich and influential Florentines; and two of his daughters were subsequently required to follow their example, one by marrying a Ridolfi, 1the other a Salviati. 2A third daughter, Luigia, was to be betrothed as a little girl to Giovanni, the younger son of his uncle, Pierfrancesco, with whose branch of the family Lorenzo and his father had quarrelled over the proper division of Cosimo’s fortune. The dispute had been settled by the time of the betrothal; but Lorenzo was determined to strengthen the renewed ties by a marriage within the family. And, although the marriage never took place, as Luigia died before she was twelve, the friendship between the two branches was not broken again so long as Lorenzo lived.