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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

This brilliant book is almost as much the biography of a city as of a man; one of its strengths is an ability to convey the cultural, political and sexual ambience of 15th-century Florence with a rare clarity. The author explains how the passion for pagan classical myth of Lorenzo and the brilliant scholars, poets and artists with whom he liked to surround himself did not involve a rejection of Christianity: the search for God was an important part of Lorenzo’s spiritual life, and, like all Florentines, he was a member of the religious confraternities whose utterances and practices (including flagellation) would not have been out of step with the ferocious preaching of Savonarola. Membership of a confraternity was for Florentines like belonging to branches of political parties with all their opportunities for plotting and ‘networking’.

It was not, however, just religion and politics: Florence was notorious throughout Europe for ‘unnatural sexual acts’. Sodomy was common to Florentines of all classes, and although Lorenzo was predominantly and energetically heterosexual, Unger thinks it likely that he had sexual relations with some of his male friends.

Poetry and love were important to Lorenzo in countering his tendency to depression. Power alone could not bring contentment. His ambition was to make ‘himself and his city great’ Machiavelli wrote. There was a sense in which all this magnficence, this patronage of art and architecture, was fuelled by a desire to be seen as the equal of all the dukes, kings and nobles of his age. The Medici had gone from peasants to powerbrokers in just over three generations, but they remained in their own eyes ‘nouveaux’.