THERE IS A moment, a written statement, in the history of the Medici that all the history books quote. On the evening after Piero’s death, December 2, 1469, some seven hundred citizens met in the Convent of Sant’Antonio and agreed that the “reputation and greatness” of the Medici family must be preserved. “By which they mean,” explained the ambassador of Ferrara to his lord, “that the secret things of this government will pass through Lorenzo’s hands as before through his father’s.” The following day, a group of leading citizens went to the Palazzo Medici to give Lorenzo, who was about to turn twenty-one, the news. And we come to the famous quotation, from Lorenzo’s brief ricordi, or memoirs:
Though I, Lorenzo, was very young, being twenty years of age, the principal men of the city and of the regime came to us in our house to mourn our loss and to encourage me to take charge of the city and the regime as my grandfather and my father had done. The which being contrary to my age and involving great responsibilities and perils, I accepted with reluctance, and only to preserve our friends and possessions, for in Florence things can go badly for the rich if they don’t run the state.
The history books then take sides. Fifteenth-century Florentine factionalism has proved a remarkably resilient disease. Five hundred years on, hardly a scholar escapes infection. So the detractors point out that only two days before Piero’s death, Lorenzo had written to Galeazzo Sforza, duke of Milan, to ask for military help to guarantee his succession. This hardly looks like reluctance. The supporters, on the other hand, note that as an accomplished poet, Lorenzo did indeed have other interests. In the future, various poems would speak eloquently of the desire to abandon power and responsibility, which are seen as a prison rather than a privilege.
In the heat of this debate, the most intriguing aspect of the statement passes without comment: the words in the quotation sound as though written decades after the event from the vantage point of middle age and maturity; in fact, Lorenzo wrote them when he was only twenty-four. Still at the beginning of his rule, that is, he was already imagining how it would be seen later; he was inventing his persona, preparing material for the historians. “He behaves like an old man,” remarked the ambassador to Milan approvingly in 1469 when Lorenzo was only twenty. But then, as Piero’s son, the boy had been sent on his first diplomatic missions when still in his early teens. Power, together with a humanist education that concentrated on the great political leaders of antiquity, had created something Cosimo could not have foreseen: an extraordinary self-consciousness. Aware of his special situation, equipped with an abundance of role models, Lorenzo was playing a part. Not a real prince, he must act the prince. There were so many adults to impress.
“WITHOUT PLATONISM MAN can be neither a good citizen, nor a good Christian,” Lorenzo de’ Medici would one day claim. What on earth did he mean by that? And why, though his grandfather would never have made such a claim, did the old Cosimo become so interested in Plato in the last years of his life?
Greek philosophy was recovered and revived somewhat later than Roman. One simple reason was language. Greek was hardly taught until the middle of the fifteenth century. But even when Plato had been read, in Latin translation, by the great humanist (and Cosimo’s friend) Leonardo Bruni, for example, the old Greek wasn’t taken seriously. These self-regarding fantasies about philosopher kings, Bruni thought, were completely impractical. Plato’s notions of a hierarchical stairway of realities, with inanimate material at the bottom and a world of ideal forms at the top, had already been widely appropriated and interminably elaborated by early Christian theologians in one form or another. It was theoretical nonsense. Stepping outside of medieval scholasticism and Christian mysticism for a breath of fresh air, the early humanists were looking for clear-sighted, secular wisdom, the lucidity of historians and political commentators: Cicero, Livy.
Under Cosimo’s protection — a house and a salary — Marsilio Ficino translated the entire works of Plato into Latin in the 1460s. It was the first time they had all appeared in a form Western Christendom could read. Later to become a priest, Ficino added his own personal but crucial twist to Christian Platonism: The human soul, he decided, was “the center of nature,” the connecting link between the hierarchies of Platonic reality. Through love and intellect, the human soul naturally strives upward, away from what is base and earthly, through the hierarchy, to the pure light of perfect eternity, God.
Discussed by Florence’s best minds, while celebrating Plato’s birthday, for example, every November 7 at the Medici villa at Careggi, such ideas came at exactly the right moment for the process of upward social transformation in which the Medici were involved. Apart from giving a new sense to courtly love poetry (the mind moving from profane to divine love), all education, refinement, and intellectual achievement could now be understood as essentially moral, involved in a process of striving toward the Divine. Certain secular activities, that is, could be described as partaking of the sacred, or at least as turned toward the sacred. Nothing good (and the dangerous implication is that we know instinctively what is good) was outside the Christian framework. At which point art and poetry need no longer turn so constantly to strictly Christian subject matter, because beauty itself is close to divinity and the human soul naturally leans toward it. Creativity, which is of God, is not, in this new and optimistic version of Platonism, denied to man, though few achieve it. But when achieved, it is essentially good. Even today, there are many who believe that art is necessarily on the right side, and do not ask which bank sponsored it. Sponsored by Medici money, Botticelli can use the same pretty model for a Madonna, or for Venus. He can leave the lady’s clothes on or he can lift them off. Either way, the mind is being lifted spiritually. At this point, the gesture of penance implicit in almost all Cosimo’s patronage of the arts can be safely and happily forgotten. Art is always sacred.
But to dig a little deeper, at what wasn’t explicitly stated or perhaps even consciously meant, yet nevertheless seeps through: the process of raising yourself up, of becoming this refined, educated, artistic aristocrat, was now no longer an evil thrusting above and beyond your proper medieval station (as the treason charge against Cosimo in 1433 implied). On the contrary, it was a sign of your upward aspiration toward the Divine. This was an attractive and soothing thought. It would galvanize Lorenzo into sponsoring, and himself engaging in, a range of lavish, public artistic projects, mainly secular, which were at once beautiful and politically convenient, in that they enhanced his and the city’s image. A leader who sponsors and, as a poet, actually creates beautiful art cannot be a bad leader. A leader who employs the likes of Botticelli to make festival banners and carnival floats will not get a bad press from posterity. And the good citizen, the good Christian, must be a Platonist because only the Platonist appreciates and participates in this striving for the beautiful and better, this aestheticizing of public life. If he wasn’t a Platonist, that is, our philistine citizen might merely start counting the florins and piccioli and making dry remarks about political self-interest.