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Magnifico

A true Renaissance man

Miles J. Unger
Simon & Schuster, 449pp, £18.99,

Sarah Bradford

Wednesday, 25th June 2008

Sarah Bradford reviews Miles J. Unger's life of Lorenzo de' Medici

Lorenzo de’ Medici was proverbially ugly. Machiavelli, describing an encounter with a particularly hideous prostitute, compared her looks to his. He was tall, well-made and physically imposing but contemporaries dubbed his features ‘homely’, his face was bony and irregular with a long crooked nose, a jutting pugilistic jaw and dark piercing eyes. In compensation, ‘his intellect and taste’ were outstanding. He wrote poetry in the Tuscan language, read Plato and other classical authors, whom he discussed with his circle of poets and philosophers, discovered the young Michelangelo and patronised Botticelli. It would not be an exaggeration — although it is fashionable to dispute it — to say that he was the central figure of the golden age of the Florentine renaissance.

He stamped his image on his city and his time to an extent unequalled in European history since Caesar and Augustus. And he did so, unlike the Romans, without armies at his back. With charm and bold diplomacy he succeeded in maintaining his own position and that of his city against far more powerful rivals like the Papacy, Naples and Venice, keeping a balance of power between the warring city states. When he died aged only 41 in 1492 even the King of Naples, his former enemy, mourned his death as a tragedy for Italy. ‘That man’s life has been long enough for his own deathless fame, but too short for Italy. God grant that now he is dead that may not be attempted which was not ventured in his lifetime’.

He was as skilled and ruthless as any Mafia boss in keeping his dominant position in Florence and seducing or sidelining potential rivals. The 15th-century city was a violent place, given to plotting, uprising and bloody reprisals. It was proud of its democratic history while in fact being an oligarchy dominated for the past three generations by the Medici. The chief threat to the Medici came not from the people but from leading Florentine families jealous of their power and pre-eminence. Lorenzo’s method of staying in charge was to keep the Florentine populace happy with magnificent displays, patronage and distribution of money and offices. Medici power was originally based on the wealth of their banking system with offices in the main commercial centres of Europe. They were the Pope’s bankers (one of the advantages of this being that they could deploy the threat of excommunication to force their clients to pay their debts). Lorenzo, although a brilliant businessman, was a hopeless banker and employed some notable incompetents as managers of his branches. For him, political considerations came before financial ones and, like other autocrats before and since, he was not above embezzling his relatives’ money to support his magnificence. He survived several attempts on his life, notably during the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478, which involved the Pope, the King of Naples and the Duke of Urbino, when his brother Giuliano was murdered beside him as they attended mass in the Duomo. Unger’s lurid description of the horrible vengeance exacted on the conspirators makes for gripping reading.

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